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conventional distinction between thought and action, language and practice’ (Hall 2007,

p.56). Discourse ‘itself is produced by a practice: “discursive practice” – the practice of

producing meaning’ (Hall 2007, p.56). Indeed all practices have a discursive aspect because

all social practices encompass meaning. ‘So discourse enters into and influences all social

practices’ (Hall 2007, p.56). Bringing the work of Foucault closer to a material semiotic

approach of ANT, Bennett and Joyce move beyond the idea of coherent social totality, and:

…towards the erasure of familiar conceptual distinctions between the natural and
the social, the human and the non-human, and the material and the cultural,
divisions that are all in the first place predicated on the immaterial/material divide.
(Bennett & Joyce 2010, p. 4)

A material semiotic approach encourages consideration of continuities among thought and

action, language and practice, social and material, and technical and textual. The idea of actor

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networks can be a useful way to understand how discourse effectively functions . As a set of
material semiotic tools ANT uses ‘sensibilities and methods of analysis’ that suggests

everything in the natural and social world is a ‘continuously generated web of relations

within which they are located’ (Law 2008, p. 141). Like other material semiotic approaches,

ANT:

Describes the enactment of materially and discursive heterogeneous relations that
produce and reshuffle all kinds of actors including objects, subjects, human
beings, machines, animals, “nature”, ideas, organizations, inequalities, scale and
sizes, and geographical arrangements. (Law 2008, p. 141)

Continuing this line of argument Bennett and Joyce suggest that the social is performed by

material things (2010, p. 4). The idea of social context is thus irrelevant, since the ‘distinction

between text and context is dissolved’...‘and “social construction” is equally meaningless

because it presupposes already a distinction between what is and what is not the social’

(Bennett & Joyce 2010, p. 6). This argument links back to the idea of the flat social I raised in

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