Culture

Voicing the environment: Latour, Peirce and an expanded politics

This paper takes work by Bruno Latour as the starting point from which to critically examine conceptual moves needed to develop a formulation of voice appropriate for an expanded environmental politics which expresses the interests of human and nonhumans alike. Adopting human language and the rational speaking subject as the benchmark for entry into political debate and decision making is a central problem for theorising an expanded politics. Strong arguments suggest that an expanded politics cannot be founded in a model for the right to speak which reproduces and divide between human and nonhuman worlds. The paper draws on this critique to suggest a conception of voice as ‘voicing’. It argues that voicing as an agental socio-material assemblage is sympathetic both to Latour’s more recent AIME project and Dobson’s understanding of political voice grounded in agency.

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Volume 39 Issue 1

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