Materiality and Subject in Marxism, (Post-)Structuralism, and Material Semiotics

Book excerpt: In recent decades, what is known as 'the subject' has been problematized by various old and new materialisms and today appears as decentered in and by language, split by the unconscious, deformed by social forces, governed by ideology and is either seen to have succumbed to the postmodern condition or to never have existed in the first place. Every materialist theory of the subject depends on a conception of materiality, which can delineate the character of what the material reality, which de-centers or constitutes the subject consists of. Materiality and Subject in Marxism, (Post-)Structuralism, and Material Semiotics investigates the relation between materiality and the subject in the materialist approaches of Marxism, (post-)structuralism, and material semiotics. None of these approaches subscribes to a reductionist materialism; rather, they conceive of materiality as multiple, complex, and not reducible to tangible matter. For each approach, the modalities of materiality of the respective materialism are defined. The relationship between the multiple materialities and the subject constituted and decentered in this relationship are presented as specific to the theoretical approaches discussed.