Agentieller Realismus und die Performativität digitaler Apparate

Abstract

The ubiquity of digital technologies has long raised the question of the boundaries of the apparatus. This situation requires process-operational concepts of media that assume neither fixed boundaries of media nor subjectivity and instead foreground the performativity of mediality as well as its materiality, linking it to the analysis of social relations of power and inequality. For the development of such a perspective, this paper discusses the productivity of Karen Barad’s Agential Realism in the field of (sociological) media studies and elaborates possibilities for overcoming both humanistic and technicist notions of media. In addition, the article raises the question of how to problematize the ontologisation of the performative in Agential Realism. Finally, the article outlines a posthumanist, operative-processual media/cultural/social research of the digital that combines theories of performativity, media theory and the analysis of social relations of power and inequality.