Abstract

The chapter engages in a discussion about the knotted relations between the discursive and the material, starting from the discourse-theoretical position developed by Laclau and Mouffe, which emphasizes the importance of the discursive as producing necessary but contingent frameworks of intelligentibility. Even if Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory acknowledges the importance of the material, this chapter also argues for a clearer development of the material’s capacity to intervene in the discursive. Two concepts are proposed to think this through further, namely, the dislocation and the invitation, where the former captures a more disruptive mechanism and the latter a more constructive mechanism. In the last part of the chapter, the workings of both concepts are illustrated in a case study on a Cypriot community media organization, called the Cyprus Community Media Centre. This case study shows how the counter-hegemonic project of the CCMC, with its materials, manages to disrupt the antagonistic-nationalist discourses that circulate on this island and is simultaneously disrupted because the discursive and material components of the CCMC assemblage do not let themselves be harnessed and encapsulated that easily either.