Betraying our best intentions: on the need to interrogate how we relate and what it produces

Abstract

In this paper, I start from a posthumanist understanding of subjectivity to stress how our ways of relating do not follow from previously formed intentions but emerge in assemblages. The fact that we hold certain theoretical ascriptions does not assure that we will relate in ways that are consistent with them. We might intend to embrace diffractive, decentring and performative perspectives, and effectively do so at a content level. However, we might unwittingly reproduce representational, dichotomous, centring and identitarian ways of relating to ourselves, others, our work and so on. These ways of relating are often unacknowledged. I offer my concept of performative meta-reflexivity to interrogate which ways of relating are implicitly operating and to think about what they are producing. I suggest that this practice can be helpful to become response-able for the ways of relating that we find ourselves engaged in and what they generate.

Keywords:

• reflexivity
• subjectivity
• diffraction
• critique
• performativity

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the feedback in a previous version of this article provided by Jonathan Wyatt and Liz Bondi. I also want to acknowledge the helpful comments of the editorial team and reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The use of the label “posthumanist theories” is complex. It can lead to homogenise different bodies of knowledge. This is why it is crucial to clarify and acknowledge the nuances of the term. Barad (2007) thinks of posthumanism as what does not take the distinction of human and nonhuman for granted and recognises nonhumans as relevant for naturalcultural practices. Braidotti (2019), thinks of the posthumanities as the result of the coming together of posthumanism (critique of “Man” as the privileged term) and post-anthropocentrism (critique of the exceptionalism and hierarchy of the human). Braidotti (2006) explicitly associates Deleuze with certain way of understanding the posthuman as reconfiguring the possible becoming of subjectivity with the inhuman: the subject as an assemblage. She considers that Haraway’s non-anthropocentric work resonates with Deleuze’s work.

When I use the expression “posthumanism” or “posthumanist theories”, I am clustering the theories that consider the subject as an ongoing production of human and non-human forces. I consider authors like Deleuze and Guattari, Haraway and Barad are highly influential in this stream. However, the term is certainly a generalisation. Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 1983) do not use it. Haraway in an interview (Gane, 2006) explicates how even if she has used the term for example in the “Manifesto” has stopped using it and goes to companion species instead as she thinks that the human/posthuman lends itself to be used in evolutionary ways as moving towards a “next stage” (however, she acknowledges that many authors do not use it in that way). Later, Haraway (2016) calls herself compostist not posthumanist.

2 According to Colebrook (2002), assemblage refers to how life as a process constantly needs connections. Anything – a body, a city, a group, etc. – is the product of connections and not the other way around. That is, the connections are ontologically prior to any unit.

3 Intra-action (Barad, 2007) is a concept that stresses how relating is ontologically more fundamental than the – always temporary – units that emerge from relating.

4 Deleuze and Guattari (1987) postulate that there are three ways of thinking: one is the tree-like root-thinking, the second is the fascicular-root thinking and the third is the rhizomatic thinking. The first has a central root and grows from hierarchies and dichotomies – like a tree and its branches. The second does not have a central root but a fascicular root system but ends up reproducing a root anyway. The third, the rhizomatic, moves away from roots; it is a flat multiplicity with no hierarchy nor any fixed coding or categories. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) also offer the concepts of maps and traces. Maps are open to connections and experimentation without closing on themselves or reproducing an established explanation and tracings are closing down into a previously established idea that does not bring novelty.

5 Deterritorialisation is an important concept in Deleuze and Guattari’s work. Every kind of unit that we can think about – a concept, a body, a person, a country – needs to have been territorialised to be what it is; deterritorialisation is the possibility of this unit to become differently. “The very connective forces that allow any form of life to become what it is (territorialize) can also allow it to become what it is not (deterritorialize)” (Colebrook, 2002, p. xxii).

Additional information

Funding

An earlier version of this article is part of my PhD thesis that was funded by the Principal’s Career PhD Scholarship and the Edinburgh Global Research Scholarship. Both schemes belong to the University of Edinburgh.

Notes on contributors

Jacqueline Karen Andrea Serra Undurraga

Jacqueline Karen Andrea Serra Undurraga is lecturer in counselling and psychotherapy at the University of Edinburgh. Her research inquiries into re-thinking about how we make sense of ourselves through reconceptualising reflexivity and experience. She also works on re-thinking psychotherapeutic theories and practices from a posthumanist and postcolonial perspective.