Speaking into the ground: deliberation and affect in the Anthropocene

Abstract

The present milieu is characterized most sharply by the threat of environmental catastrophe and the cascading crises precipitated by the climate crisis. Increasingly, this era of environmental catastrophe makes evident the agency and importance of non-human actants and highlights the political relevance of the non-human estate. The thesis follows an insistence that our communicative and political theories must de-center the human and follow materialist and posthuman insights to appropriately craft a politics of the Anthropocene. This thesis forwards the claim that new materialist rhetorics can abet theories and practices of deliberative democracy to develop a politics of the Anthropocene. The author roots the exigence for this work in the environmental and materialist imperative of Communication Studies, arguing that critique must work to help us develop methods of composition—novel ways to assemble and re-assemble the social. The thesis not only establishes the theoretical framework that would necessitate thinking through the non-human when considering democratic practices, but also thinks through the question of how we might make a post-human deliberative democratic model appropriable vis-à-vis an investment in the concept or practice of attunement.