Nico Carpentier’s chapter, ‘Enriching discourse theory’, is a welcome contribution to debates in post-structuralist theory regarding the relationship between the discursive and the material. More often than not, these debates have implied a kind of ‘camp thinking’ based on a sharp, and rather unhelpful, divide between the two sides. Carpentier avoids such thinking, and instead he proposes an innovative language, structured around terms such as ‘knot’, ‘affordance’, and ‘invitation’, to show how the discursive and the material are always-already implicated in each other. If we want to resist parts of this innovative move, it is not because we question the motivation behind it; in fact, we wholly agree that a reconceptualisation of the relationship between the discursive and the material is crucial to the development of the post-structuralism that Laclau and Mouffe (together with many others) inaugurated more than 30 years ago. The question, however, is whether the best way to do this is to assume the need for a ‘knot’ in the first place. Should we begin with a split between the discursive and the material or do these categories only become relevant after the event or experience ‘has happened’?

The ‘new materialism’ on which Carpentier draws (as do we) makes a case for the latter. New materialism begins by insisting that material ‘stuff’ is neither passive nor mechanical, but rather embodies degrees of agency that enable it to affect real change across time and space. The name for this capacity, in Jane Bennett’s felicitous vocabulary, is ‘thing-power’ (Bennett, 2004: 375). While thing-power highlights the vibrancy nested in all modes of materiality, the concept does not amount to a rejection of discursive phenomena. According to Bennett, the discursive and the material are indeed two sides of the same coin, a point Bennett repeatedly underscores in her accounts of events such as the 2003 Northeast American blackout where discursive and material forces colluded to the surprise of everyone involved (Bennett, 2005). New materialism’s interest in this collusion is even clearer in Karen Barad’s work, which consistently invokes the ‘material-discursive’ as starting point for any analysis of the world broadly understood (Barad, 2007: 132). Barad substantiates this wager by showing how the so-called ‘discursive’ and ‘material’ share the same mode of becoming, which Barad, with reference to the work of Judith Butler, discusses under the heading of ‘performativity’ (Barad, 2007: 60).