ABSTRACT
In the summer of 2013, a special issue of Millennium on the 'New Materialist Turn in International Relations' brought together contributions drawing from actor-network theory, sociology, and historical materialism, among others. The impact of the technosocial is such that this 'New Materialist Turn' inevitably engages in contemporary political contentions and resistance movements by producing a new idiom with which to understand the globally distributed and locally diverse calls for democracy, reform, or radical alternatives to globalized neoliberal capitalism. This chapter provides examples of how this new theorization of agency can be applied to contemporary orders dissent. Even for some posthumanist thinkers, the Deleuzo-Guattarian reliance on desire is seen as problematic, because it discounts 'technical autonomy in all forms', subordinating nonhuman technological agency to a 'mathematically and technically embodied semiotics of the social'. The chapter deals with Kenneth Burke's Aristotelian distinction between action and motion.
