“There is no outside text” was the notorious Derrida’s quote dedicated to the central role played by discourse and interpretation in human phenomena.

What if “There is no outside nature”, then? What if the flesh is literate?

In this symposium, I will discuss the perspective of a prominent figure in new materialism debates: Vicki Kirby.

I will pinpoint some issues regarding why subjectivity still plays a crucial role to make sense of human experience, how language and materiality can be critically combined rather than separated, and how the vitality of living/non-living/ objectivity is inseparable from agency. I will offer a glance into the intra-psychic realm through a different view on biology, culture, and nature with a focus on Kirby’s book “What if Culture was Nature All Along?” (2017).

The case of allergy in “What if Culture was Nature All Along?” (Chapter 4, Jamieson) shows how the principle of causality cannot be clearly invoked when it comes to the etiology of allergy in immunology.

The case of post-natal paternal depression in “What if Culture was Nature All Along?” (Chapter 5, Oxley) vividly highlights how paternal post-natal depression - what fathers feel several months after childbirth - is not a mere “mood”, psycho-social suffering; whereas, mothers only are supposed to experience baby blues or strictly biological symptoms.

I will, then, share a new-materialist reading of “The Demon Lover - The Roots of Terrorism” by Robin Morgan (2001) especially discussing the notion of love-death as love for fate, weapon identification and sexual crimes, democratization of violence and the politics of eros.

Contemporary crises—ecological collapse, digital saturation, and pandemic disruption—have unsettled psychology’s assumptions about selfhood and experience. What if subjectivity is not contained within the individual but materializes through fabrics, infrastructures, and atmospheres?

In this symposium, I will explore how performative new materialisms expand psychology by shifting the unit of analysis from individual traits or attitudes to arrangements of bodies, garments, norms, and supply chains. Drawing on the four theses of relationality, indeterminacy, iteration, and the undoing of binaries, I will argue that dressing is not merely a symbolic act but a material practice through which subjectivity is composed.

Based on qualitative research in Chile with consumers and fashion industry professionals, I will show how anchor bodies, size curves, closures, and retail ecologies co-produce agency and belonging, shaping who can appear in public and under what conditions. Dressing, in this sense, makes tangible how crisis becomes embodied and how psychology might attend to affordances rather than only to attitudes.

This new-materialist reading repositions psychology within the entangled worlds it seeks to understand, inviting us to trace not only meanings but also the pipelines and infrastructures through which subjects are made and unmade.

New materialism seeks to decenter human beings and the emphasis on discourse in social science inquiry, and instead emphasizes matter as agentic, as opposed to only having meaning or relevance through the discursive (Canada et al., 2021). Critical race and decolonial scholars (Leong, 2016; Tomkins, 2016) note the possibilities of this move, but also question the historical construction of the human/non-human binary, where specific populations of humans, that is those categorized as Black and Indigenous, have never been granted full humanity, instead being treated throughout history as commodities, specimen etc. (Jackson, 2015). Additionally, wholesale critique of the discursive risks missed opportunities to consider simultaneous workings of the discursive and material forces in negotiations of power (Wetherell et al., 2015).

In the present discussion I draw on critical discursive psychology as well as ethnographic and self-reflective work to consider two possibilities for combined discursive and materialist work in analyses of power. The first draws on my own ethnographic work in schools, where I consider the combined roles of the physical organization of space, and embodiment, in shaping racialized negotiations of power. As a second example I consider how the material impacts of corporate actions reinforced Blackness as “non-human” through the 2020 George Floyd protests and subsequent anti-DEI shift in North America, despite the discursive work of social activists to humanize Blackness.

Our symposium proposes that theorists and concepts associated with new materialism offer fruitful possibilities for psychologists to study aspects of subjectivity—such as affect, sensation, and embodiment—that resist easy articulation. By reconceiving matter not as passive substance but as dynamic, relational, and agentic, new materialism unsettles entrenched psychological binaries such as nature/nurture and body/mind while moving beyond discursive accounts of identity and language. Importantly, this does not just shift the focus in psychological research to new areas of focus; it demands an entirely different orientation towards the research process in general.

In this talk, I outline how such an orientation diverges in several notable ways from mainstream American psychology. Where the latter has prioritized operationalization and measurement of observable variables (behavior, thoughts, physiology) as a way to produce generalizable knowledge across contexts, new materialism resists assumptions of generalizability, emphasizing instead the entanglements between researcher and subject, self and other. Each study is thus a co-constitutive encounter: the researcher is changed through the process while simultaneously shaping public understandings of their topic. Psychological knowledge, in this sense, unavoidably exhibits properties unique to the subjective signatures of the researcher, including their sociomaterial context, as much, if not more, than the recorded outcomes of research procedures. Drawing on new materialist theorists, I describe this process as a fractalization of psychological knowledge.

To facilitate this discussion, I will highlight certain methodological and ethical tensions that have emerged during my attempts to pursue research through a new materialist lens. Drawing specifically on the writings of Karen Barad and Erin Manning, I will demonstrate how new materialism provides a generative framework for rethinking the interplay of knowledge, ethics, identity and lived experience within psychological inquiry.