Ethico-onto-epistem-ological becoming

ABSTRACT

 

KEYWORDS:

• becoming
• Barad
• entanglement
• diffraction
• onto-epistemology
• poetry
• qualitative research
• qualitative methodology

Notes

^1. Here I draw on Karen Barad’s (2007) use of this term, described by her as “an appreciation of the intertwining of ethics, knowing, and being” (p. 185). This poem was generated as a practice of knowing-in-being, reflective of Barad’s claim that “we do not obtain knowledge by standing outside of the world; we know because we are of the world” (p. 185). My knowing cannot be written as though I am separate from the world of which I write about, as though I am looking out on it in order to determine or describe the nature of it, as distinct from me and my descriptions of it. My knowing comes from being in it, with it, and of it, from “a direct material engagement, a practice of intra-acting with the world as part of the world in its dynamic material reconfiguring” (Barad 2007, p. 379). This is not, however, and never has been, an innocent or neutral writing/knowing. Every moment presents itself with questions of responsibility and accountability for the world’s ongoing reconfiguring (Barad 2007) and the point, according to Haraway (1994), is not just to read the webs of knowledge production, but to participate in the processes, “to make a difference—however modestly, however partially,” “in order to foster some forms of life and not others” (p. 62). Thus, my modest and partial retelling here is always already entangled with lively feminist and social justice desires for participating in the material-semiotic practices of making worlds anew.

 I use the poem as an analytic device, as a structure which “cuts things together-apart” to produce a diffractive pattern (Barad 2007). Just as diffraction is a “mapping of interference” (Haraway 2004, p. 70), so, too, the poem offers a structure to map a myriad of interferences, of human and nonhuman encounters and nonlinear figurations of time and space. As a material arrangement, a poem is productive of giving meaning to certain concepts, or concepts can be seen as being materially embodied within the confines of the poem, for example, onto-ethico-epistem-ology.

 A poem also intra-acts with the reader to produce an affective force. Poet David Whyte suggests that “poetry…is not about a subject, not about a quality, or an experience, it is the experience itself” (Whyte 2010). Such personal and evocative texts have come to be seen as potentially powerful, political, and meaningful in qualitative research, with the capacity to “move writers and readers, subjects and objects, tellers and listeners into this space of dialogue, debate and change” (Holman Jones 2005, p. 764). In a relational ontology, “affect refers to the force of intensive relationality—intensities that are felt but are not personal; visceral but not confined to an individuated body” (Whatmore 2006 p. 604). In this sense, the force of poetry, as I intend it here, to move, to affect, is a dynamic relational one, an intra-action between, at least, words and spaces and bodies of writers and readers.

^2. Entanglement is used in this poem to signify the ontological inseparability of “agentially intra-acting components” (Barad 2003, p. 815, italics in original), where “to be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence…individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating” (Barad 2007, p. ix). One could say my brother’s “egg throwing” was an enactment of, at least, a “sport-family-politics-age-time-space-egg” entanglement. Similarly, this poem is an entanglement of times and locations, matter and meaning, where the knowing that emerges is an articulation, and reconfiguring, of these intra-related forces making themselves known through the device of the poem.

^3. I refer to the re-telling, and reconfiguring of other times and spaces, through the work of this poem as a “space-time-mattering.” What has come to matter (materially and meaningfully) here, in the words of the poem, is an ethico-onto-epistemological becoming. Matter and meaning, for Barad, are not separate elements. Drawing on quantum physics and critical social theories, she proposes a new philosophical framework that “entails a rethinking of fundamental concepts…including the notions of matter, discourse, causality, agency, power, identity, embodiment, objectivity, time and space” (Barad 2007, p. 26). Becoming, in a quantum sense, is not a continuous unfolding, a linear process occurring in or through time and space, rather “the ‘past’ and the ‘future’ are iteratively reworked and enfolded through the practices of spacetimemattering…” (p. 315).

^4. The writing of this poem has been an attempt to “return” (Hughs & Lury 2013, p. 787, italics in original), rather than reflect on, some of my own intra-active entanglements with onto-epistemology in order, not to “replay a string of moments” (Barad 2007, pix) to demonstrate “a singular or unified progressive history” (Hughs & Lury 2013, p. 787), but to enliven and reconfigure the past and future in this intra-active writing present. In this way, I suggest this poem is a “queer quantum writing,” drawing again on Barad’s philosophical framework enacting quantum physics in critical conversation with “critical social theories,” including queer theory (Barad 2007). Barad uses the term “quantum queerness” to refer to the un/doing of identity (2010, p. 247, italics in original), the troubling of the nature of causality, where “effect does not simply follow cause end-over-end in an unfolding of existence through time” (p. 248). Thus, this poem as a “queer quantum writing” is an attempt to map multiple affective-material-discursive moments co-constituting an ethico-onto-epistem-ological becoming, not as previous causes of a current state of being, but as an always ongoing, iterative dis/continuous becoming.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shanee Barraclough

Shanee Barraclough is Coordinator of the Master of Counselling programme in the School of Health Sciences, University of Canterbury, New Zealand. She has previously worked as a psychologist and counsellor in both New Zealand and the United Kingdom. She has recently completed doctoral research in the area of counsellor education exploring the entanglements of matter and meaning in the performative enactments of emerging counsellor identities, drawing, in particular, on the thinking of new materialisms and the agential realist framework of Karen Barad.