ABSTRACT
This chapter argues for a theoretical and analytical basis to approach how bodies and languages are involved in the material history of interactions. In proposing this focus, several categories are brought together from different fields to highlight the metonymic relation between languages, bodies, and other material conditions. A pragmatic basis for language materiality and a feminist account to bodies constructions are the key fields for this critical endeavour, helping to re-thinking the conditions governing the interaction with alternating patterns in the modern/colonial world-system. These patterns are structured layers of geopolitical and historical dynamics that work on the body, intersubjective and interactional processes that make the body work, and linguistic processes that depend on the body to work. Material resources are the elements of materiality in this permeability between body and language as bundle of signs submitted to the pragmatic and metapragmatic organizations of the processes of covariation between the material resources and the occasions of their semiotic emergences. Interaction therefore is regulated by heterogeneous parameters, which dispute the meaning and legitimacy of language and body uses and establish resources’ hierarchies.
