Logo image
Back
Is there an outside to relationality in a trickster world of absolute contingency?
Book chapter

Is there an outside to relationality in a trickster world of absolute contingency?

Elizabeth de Freitas, Matthew X. Curinga, Maggie MacLure, David Rousell, Laura Trafí-Prats and Sarah E. Truman
Posthuman Social Science and Computational Culture: Essays on Methodology, Theory and Practice, pp.165-178
Routledge, 1st
2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003538769-11
Appears in  Recent Faculty of Education Publications

Metrics

1 Record Views

Abstract

What is entailed when we pursue metamorphic couplings across conventional divides of matter-meaning, using both empirical and speculative techniques? What kind of theoretical tensions and philosophical dilemmas come with a commitment to new forms of empiricism and speculation? In this chapter, I dwell on the problematic but also productive tensions that arise in attempts to remix the physical and social sciences, attending to somewhat uncomfortable affinities with various kinds of philosophical naturalism and realism. I am interested in how the very notion of relationality is both at work and at risk in various contemporary materialisms (agential, speculative, promiscuous, etc.). Claims to relationality often entail an overreach of some kind, as Claire Colebrook (2019a) suggests, calling out “the implicit moralism of this posthuman relationality” which often seems intent on rescuing a humanity through spreading its relations, finding itself again and again in its monstrous inventions and its alienated others (Colebrook, 2019a, p. 175). Celebrations of relationality can be rather self-serving ways of depoliticizing frictional encounters, and failing to accept limits and incommensurables. Refusing to let being “be” without relation is a way of colonizing the world with Humanist desire, part of the Kantian legacy of correlationism, discussed in more detail in Meillassoux (2008). The fruitful nature of a term like relationality, and in particular the way it directs our attention to plasticity and processes of becoming, often belies the ways in which it is lived in radically disproportionate ways.

Details

Logo image