Figures of Entanglement

Book excerpt: Recent and ongoing "new materialisms" scholarship seeks to fundamentally reshape the humanities and their relationship with the sciences. While this work comprises multiple and varied currents, one of the most important, yet whose distinctive merits are arguably often underappreciated, is that influenced by the theoretical physicist and feminist philosopher Karen Barad. The first volume devoted to bringing Barad’s work into conversation with the disciplines of rhetoric and communication studies, this collection organizes that conversation primarily around her notion of "entanglement", which encourages an understanding of meaning as inherently performative, material, and ecological. In doing so, the essays in this collection variously approach rhetoric as a "figure of entanglement" in ways that contribute to and enrich both rhetoric and Barad’s theorizing. Topics range from politics to breast cancer, genealogy, the trope of academic "turns," Marx’s notion of exchange, and the "prehistoric" emergence of human consciousness. With a new foreword by the editors and afterword by Laurie E. Gries, this collection is otherwise reprinted from the 2016 "Figures of Entanglement" special issue of the journal Review of Communication.