Epilogue: Performativity and the becoming of sociomaterial assemblages

Introna, Lucas (2013) Epilogue: Performativity and the becoming of sociomaterial assemblages. In: Materiality and Space. Technology, Work and Globalization . Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 330-342. ISBN 9781137304087

Abstract

This book offers many interesting chapters. All focus directly or indirectly on the socio/material relation and there are indeed some very compelling analyses of sociomaterial entanglements presented. Although they all, more or less, attempt to go beyond the socio/material dualism (or duality), there still seems to be a significant element of this dualism (or duality) lurking behind the analyses, some more explicitly than others. Somehow most of them end by positing the human and the non-human as essentially different types of being whose entanglement with each other needs to be explained, as being unusual. I would suggest that when the duality is actually abandoned, this heterogeneous entanglement need not be explained, it simply needs to be described in its actuality. But what would this mean? In this epilogue I want to try to outline what it means to accept fully a process ontology which is not based on such a socio/material bifurcation — that is, an ontology of becoming.