Let 's get social! Enaction and Agential Realism in dialogue about language.
Nara M. De Figueiredo (with Elena Cuffari)
Federal University of Santa Maria
Sept. 4, 2025, 2 p.m. UTC // Sept. 4, 2025, 2 p.m. in UTC
The linguistic enaction view as articulated by Di Paolo, Cuffari, and De Jaegher (2018) seeks to supplant representational explanations of languaging capacity with an account of practice-based agency that emerges from dialectical and dynamic coordinations of situated actors in a social-cultural-material-historical space. Languaging as a special kind of social agency becomes possible via the entanglement of bodily domains and it is based on the sense-making condition of living systems. Such an account ultimately requires a trade not of mechanistic explanations, but of ontologies, which is a complete shift in the understanding of the nature of meaning and reality. Like enaction, agential realism proposes “a fundamental inseparability of epistemological, ontological, and ethical considerations” (Barad 2007, 26), placing agency central to our orientation towards an analysis of phenomena that entangles the material-discursive domains. In this view, “meaning is neither intralinguistically conferred nor simply extralinguistically referenced. Meaning is made possible through specific material practices” (ibid, 148) and intra-actions. In this talk, I will situate some of Barad's (2007, 2015) concepts and ideas into the context of languaging to reflect on its nature. I will resort to the notions of intra-action, diffraction, superposition and interference to suggest that meanings emerge from the entanglement of producer and audience and that our agencies superpose one another.
