Re-turning feminist methodologies: from a social to an ecological epistemology

Abstract

This paper proposes an ecological methodology in order to re-think the concept of situatedness in ways that can take into account that we live in relation to, and are of, a more-and-other-than-human world. In doing so, the paper proposes that situatedness should be understood in terms of processes of co-invention that, fractally and recursively, open onto other co-inventions that include the non-human. The paper illustrates this through the concept of patterning. It advances a number of terms – cutting, knotting, contrasting, figuring – as potential practices that can be drawn on to provide analyses of dynamic and multiple relations that cross the boundaries between human and non-human forces.

Keywords:

• social theory
• philosophy
• sociology
• difference and diversity

Introduction

How does accepting that we live in, and are of, a more-and-other-than-human world¹ reconfigure the concept of being ‘situated’ as a core element of feminist epistemology? This paper re-turns to the significance of situated knowledge in respect of debates that are now challenging the lexicon of concepts within which it has been conventionally understood. In setting out the expanded habitats within which situated knowledge must be considered, this paper advances an ecological epistemology that argues for the methodological necessity of articulating dynamic intra-actions between human and non-human forces.

In doing so, the suggestion is that situated knowledge is to be found in the moments of difference between gathering/grasping together and dispersal/letting go that emerge in processes of patterning. We use the term patterning here because it draws attention to the importance of processes of repetition and differentiation that are at issue in the creation of situated knowledge, and to the dynamic and multiple relations between figure and ground that are at the heart of what we describe as an ecological epistemology. As part of such an ecology, the paper advances a set of terms – cutting, knotting, contrasting, figuring – that are designed to illustrate potential practices for developing situated knowledge.

The past 30 years have seen feminist methodology emerge as a recognised field across disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. This has involved the development of a number of core concepts such as ‘standpoint’ ‘situated knowledge’, ‘feminist empiricism’, ‘strong objectivity’, ‘intersectionality’ and ‘reflexivity’ (see, inter alia, Crenshaw 1989; Haraway 1988; Harding 1993; Harstock 1983; Hill-Collins 1986; Hughes 2013; Smith 1997; Stanley and Wise 1993). More recently, other terms have come to prominence such as ‘cut’, ‘intra-action’ and ‘diffraction’ (see, for example, Barad 2007) to the extent that there appears to be a significant shift in methodological thinking. The epistemological and ontological underpinnings of these more recent terms draw on a critical rejection of the unity and linearity of Euclidean models of social life in favour of complex, quantum and ecological thinking. These terms rework the opposition between the social and the natural in feminist debate and push us towards analysing the material world as an actant or as vibrant (Bennett 2010). They presume that phenomena are always in relations of entanglement and that boundaries, while sometimes open and sometimes closed, are always productive. In doing so, they challenge any essentialism of identity while yet providing terms to explore how persons and things may become.

Indeed, in many ways we might consider that feminist methodology is undergoing a turn or paradigmatic shift similar to the significant redirection of methodological development consequent upon theorisations of standpoint epistemologies (Hekman 1997). However, we suggest that this is not so much a turn as a return in the sense that Whatmore (2006) describes. Rather than the currently ubiquitous narratives of ‘turns’ with their endless twists, ruptures and sudden encounters, such returns are products of repetition, of coming back to persistent troublings; they are turnings over. In such re-turnings, there is no singular or unified progressive history or approach to discover. Rather, there is the intensity of multi-dimensional trajectories, as concepts are de- and re-contextualised. Within this intensity the long-standing feminist concerns with positionality, relationality and interdisciplinarity remain, with what can be known and who can be a knower, and with the centrality of ethical, transformative practices within relations of power, as well as a sometimes forgotten but nonetheless sustained acknowledgement that we live in, and are of, a more-and-other-than-human world. Such a re-turning allows us to re-think one of the most significant concepts in feminist epistemology, that of situated knowledge or situatedness in a way that takes account of how ‘“the human” is no less a subject of ongoing co-fabrication than any other socio-material assemblage’ (Whatmore 2006, 603).

Such a return keys into other recent concerns for methodological innovation or inventiveness (Lury and Wakeford 2012). Yet while inventiveness certainly calls on creativity, imagination and ingenuity, it too does not necessarily always have to be new. Rather, it provides a way for the origins of very familiar methodologies to be reconfigured within what is a less-customary concern with the performativity of methodologies. Theories and methods are not inconsequential to the what-happens-next but are ‘simultaneously a technology of practice and an intervention in the world’ (Whatmore 2006, 601). What focuses interest here is that methodologies need not only be concerned with how the social world can be investigated, but how they may also be designed for capture and for care, that is, how they may be attentive to how the social world may be engaged.

This paper thus returns to, and re-turns, situated knowledge in respect of debates that are challenging the repertoire within which situatedness has been conventionally understood. These challenges include a re-ordering of the hierarchy of socio-material relationships in ways which dislodge the human from its apex; a refocusing of agency within practices, including methodological practices, rather than discourses; a returning to the politics of knowledge rather than that of identity; and a retooling of understandings of relationality and change. In detailing this return, we propose the value(s) of an ecological epistemology to acknowledge these challenges; by this we mean an epistemology that can acknowledge the methodological necessity of articulating the dynamic inter-relationships between living things and their multiple milieus (Grosz 2008).

We want to stress that an ecological epistemology does not presume neutrality of point of view, nor does it presume the givenness of the nature−culture distinction: it is political and carries with it the imperative for moral and principled judgement; indeed, it does so in specific ways. On the one hand ‘not all “ecological” situations are equal, especially when they include members of the human species among their protagonists’ (Stengers 2010, 32). But equally importantly from the viewpoint of epistemology, an ecological articulation can be recognised as a practice that ‘corresponds to the wager that the difference between the living and the non-living can become an object of practices instead of definitions’ (Stengers 2000, 88). This emphasis on practice is one we will return to later in the paper, but for now we want to suggest that such an approach represents a renewal of vital praxis where the altered grounds of debate create challenges because of their potential for an ongoing multiplication of frames of reference for understanding the difference within and between living and non-living forces. In doing so, they allow us to reconfigure the notion of situatedness in terms of an ecological approach that is inter- maybe even trans-disciplinary and co-evolutionary, in which knowing and being are mutually implicated (Barad 2007). To illustrate how this might be so, let us give an example of the agency of worms in making relations of situatedness.

Border agencies: dreaming with worms

According to Bennett, Darwin spent many hours watching worms (Bennett 2010). He noted how worms bring matter to the surface, as their digestive processes enable refined layers of leaf mould to be deposited on the surface around their burrows as castings. Indeed Bennett suggests that Darwin believed that in these mundane activities worms make history – or we would say, make grounds, because they provide the ecological conditions that ‘make possible “seedlings of all kinds”, which makes possible an earth hospitable to humans, which makes possible the cultural artifacts, rituals, plans, and endeavours of human history’ (Bennett 2010, 95–96). Bennett finds another example of this ground-breaking practice in a study of worms examined by Bruno Latour. What garners Latour's attention, and that of the scientists with whom he is working, is the presence of trees of a type that are typical of the savanna in a rainforest. In asking what caused this apparent incursion across the border between the rainforest and the savanna, Bennett notes that it was eventually concluded that, for some unknown reason, sufficient quantities of worms had gathered at the border of the rainforest and had produced enough aluminum to change the silica of the savanna soil to make it more hospitable to rainforest trees. The soil beneath these trees ‘in’ the rainforest was of the type found in the savanna rather than the rainforest. This problematic phenomenon was, in fact, an extension of the rainforest rather than an incursion of the savanna. In short, for Bennett worms provide an opportunity to think about the work or methodologies of borders and bordering, including the border of human others as well as that of rainforest savanna, and what situatedness might look like in these dynamic, more-and-other-than-human scenarios.

For Bennett and for us, they force us to acknowledge that situatedness should not solely, and should never simply, take account of a range of differences, identities or intersectionalities between human actors whose agency, whilst recognised as unevenly distributed, is often homogenised. Rather, situatedness has to be understood in terms of co-fabrication where different kinds of materialities intra-act (Barad 2007). And this intra-action must be understood in relation to the drawing of lines or borders, the politics of taking sides (inside or outside, this side or that), and the dynamics of partial, asymmetric connections across and between lines, figure and ground. This is the work of bordering that we suggest is what is at issue in an ecological epistemology. The radical potential of such a view comes from the ‘implosion of boundaries between subject and object, or between the material and the semiotic, that puts borders in a constructive and transformative tension’ (Timeto 2011, 161). Such potential is made visible for us in an exploration of the significance of borders in the use of fractals, figures and patterns in understanding situatedness in an ecological epistemology.

Re-turning to situatedness

In feminist studies of the gendered politics of knowledge in the fields of education, literature, science and the arts, the concept of ‘the knower’ was put forward to acknowledge that social location is integral to how we know, to who is affirmed and respected as knowing well (and by implication who is not) and, in consequence, to the kind of knowledge that is produced (Hughes 2013). Feminists observed how science was historically largely a sphere of male employment and masculine ways of knowing and pointed out that science produces knowledge that has largely excluded, neglected and disadvantaged women. In doing so, feminists problematised the concept of objectivity by showing that the parade of detachment and disinterestedness at its heart was a form of masculinity that reinforced the male subject as a warrantable and advantaged knower. Objectivity, as it is normatively understood and practiced within science, was re-described as the ‘God Trick’ (Haraway 1988), the occupation and exercise of a position of masculine privilege and omniscient knowing. In the analysis of such a position, feminist Marxist standpoint came to the fore and re-interpreted Marxist theory in gender terms.

As feminist history testifies, standpoint itself was soon attacked as excluding the range of issues of difference that must account for class, race, sexuality, age, ability and so forth. One response was an additive response, ‘adding’ in the dimensions of class, race and so on. More latterly, the notion of intersectionality has been elaborated to address more complex kinds of multiplicity than could be addressed by ‘counting to three’, since as Haraway observes (1990) there are significant limits to ‘adding’ on race or class. However, while the project of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989, 1991) aims to disrupt simple additive or cumulative approaches to identity (i.e. race + gender + sexuality + class = complex identity), and to problematise social processes of categorisation through strategic deployments of marginalised subjects’ experiences, intersectional projects often replicate precisely the approaches that they critique. And as Nash (2008) notes, a clearly defined methodology for intersectionality is still lacking.

So we return to Haraway's (1988) work as a founding moment in which the concept of situatedness was articulated. In this we re-enact, as Barad (2007, 71) has indicated, a diffractive approach that is concerned with ‘reading insights through one another in attending to and responding to the details and specificities of relations of difference and how they matter’. For Haraway, situatedness always had to be a mobile, recursively de- and re-constructive project in which the standpoints of the subjugated offered not the only, or even necessarily the best, but a better vantage point for knowing and for living (Campbell 2004). As she says, ‘We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meanings and bodies but in order to build meanings and bodies that have a chance for life’ (580). The deconstructive elements of Haraway's epistemology recognise that knowledge is always only ever partial (another term to which we will return): ‘There is no single feminist standpoint because our maps require too many dimensions for that metaphor to ground our visions’ (590). Nonetheless, Haraway herself did not reject standpoint, in part because it provided a bulwark against the apparent relativism that seemed to be associated with situatedness. Rather, she proposed that the ‘standpoints of the subjugated … are preferred because in principle they are least likely to allow denial of the critical and interpretive core of all knowledge’ (584). Standpoint in Haraway's view is thus not about coming from a particular place, but of being situated in relations of multiplicity, or perhaps better, standpoint is the being in and of relations of situatedness. It is also about positioning – which is always a dynamic relation, and not a fixed place or identity that can all too easily solidify into an essence rather than persist as a process – and as such is able to provide the grounds of reflexive practice.

As Code (2006, 119) remarks, ‘the mobile positioning that Haraway advocates is neither careless nor antirealist … It is about negotiating empiricism’. Such negotiation recognises how values are integral to science and how it is necessary to develop an ethics of mattering (Barad 2007) and a reflexive-diffractive consciousness of the partial locations of multiplicity. The emphasis on negotiation enables feminism critically to deconstruct long-held notions that the only valid knowledges are those practiced by way of a disengaged transcendence. But equally importantly it also provides a reconstructive element:

In contrast to the god-trick of claiming to see the whole world while remaining distanced from it, subjugated and critical knowledges work from their situatedness to produce partial perspectives on the world. They see the world from specific locations, embodied and particular, and never innocent; siting is intimately involved in sighting. (Rose 1997, 308)

One important element of our return to Haraway is thus to refocus attention on the generative significance of relations for her understanding of situatedness, to the connections as well as the divisions she draws between both the human and non-human, and to the relations between objects and their environments.

Situatedness as ecological practice

Configuration, Suchman (2012, 50) tells us, is ‘at once reiterating the separate existence of the elements assembled, and drawing the boundaries of new artefacts. It alerts us to attend to the histories and encounters through which things are figured into meaningful existence.’ What, then, are the separate elements, histories and encounters of debate that we are separating out and pulling together, and diffractively drawing into conditions of relatedness, to create the emergence of a return? They include scholarship in specific fields, old and new, including anthropology, sociology, education, geography, literature, queer studies, media and communication, computing and information theory. Cross-cutting interdisciplinary vectors include the neo-vitalism of Deleuzian ontology with its attention to the forces of life as multiplicities and becomings (Braidotti 2006; Coleman 2011; Fraser, Kember, and Lury 2006; Grosz 2008, 2011; Manning 2013); the discussion of partial connections, fractals and the dividual offered by Marilyn Strathern (1991); and the critiques of representationalism (Clough and Halley 2007; Whatmore 2006) that have developed from an ‘awareness of representation as a dynamic and generative process where environment, rather than reality, only constrains representation instead of determining its outcomes’ (Timeto 2011, 154).

But this changing landscape also includes a broader engagement within feminism with science and technology studies. Here, of particular importance has been the work of feminist scholars such as Lucy Suchman (1987/2007), who explores the inter-relationship of co-ordinated plans of action and situatedness; Anne-Marie Mol (2003) and her much acclaimed account of the multiplicity of bodies, practicing bodies and health care; Susan Leigh Star (Star and Grieseman 1987), whose work includes the study of travelling objects that acquire coherence across different epistemological communities; and Katie King (2012) who explores the implications of networked entanglements of writing technologies for who can know and what can be known. Their writing inspires us to look anew at what has ‘become naturalised over time’ and how things can be ‘figured together differently’ (Suchman 2012, 49 passim). In all of their work, knowledge is not outside or other than the objects of that knowledge, but is rather one element among others. And it is ecological thinking and practice, so we suggest, that best acknowledges this insight insofar as it ‘co-implicates nature, culture and knowledge into a complex and interdependent whole’ (Robbert 2011, 1). In doing so, it leads to an understanding of knowledge as ‘event’ and contributes to diagnosing ‘the “new immanent modes of existence” our modern practices may be capable of’ (Fraser 2010; Stengers 2010, 10). As Bell (2012, 113) explicates, ‘the ecological perspective reminds us that any entity exists multiply in ways that may not be initially apparent, for entities’ entangled and dependent existences mean that none is fully defined by its entanglement in any one particular assemblage’.

To develop our understanding of what might be involved we draw on the work of Isabelle Stengers (2000, 2010). For Stengers, ecology is ‘the science of multiplicities, disparate causalities, and unintentional creations of meaning’, and

The field of ecological questions is one where the consequences of the meanings we create, the judgments we produce and to which we assign the status of ‘fact’, concerning what is primary and what is secondary, must be addressed immediately, whether those consequences are intentional or unforeseen. (2010, 34–35)

Importantly for an ecological epistemology, Stengers challenges bifurcations in knowledge such as those related to nature−culture, fact−value, object−subject and vitalism−mechanism but simultaneously warns against mistaking moments of relations of coming together as consensus rather than symbiosis. Her work indicates that an ecological epistemology should be concerned with the productive processes of ‘reciprocal capture’ which, though they carry risk, give ‘primacy to heterogeneity, to a “grasping together”, actualizing traits belonging both to the environment and to machinic functions which did not pre-exist as such, independently of the event of their inter-capture’ (Stengers 2000, 89).

For Stengers, these processes of reciprocal capture or grasping together require us to ‘dream along with’ other disciplines in constructive, rather than deconstructive or destructive, practices. The aim of such interdisciplinary practice is for disciplines to ‘propose other ways of dreaming, other ways of addressing themselves to what they do, and therefore other ways of addressing others. Or equally, other ways of presenting themselves, both to themselves and to others’ (Stengers 2000, 86). Importantly though, an ecological epistemology must necessarily be process oriented and focus on how things change rather than how things are. It requires a non-essentialist understanding of the identity of things, in which it is relations between an entity and its environments that are constitutive of what something is and what it can be. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Code (2006, 21) describes ecological thinking as naturalising ‘feminist epistemology's guiding question – ‘whose knowledge are we talking about?’

In what follows we pursue the question of what an ecological epistemology might offer to the understanding of situatedness further by suggesting that the practices of reciprocal capture or grasping together can include not only the Baradian notion of ‘cut’, but also ‘contrast’, the ‘knot’ and the ‘figure’, all of which, we propose, are captured in a concern with patterning, or an understanding of situatedness in relations of bordering or boundary-making. For us, attention to pattern provides an important way of locating situatedness within the moments of difference between gathering/grasping together and dispersal/letting go; it draws attention both to repetition and difference, to entanglement and to partial relations between figure and ground, entity and environment. In doing so it provides a way to move from a social to an ecological epistemology.

Patterning: cuts, knots, contrasts, fractals and figures

In what follows we ask: if we are to practice knowing in an expanded universe of becomings, if we are always in the middle – part of what we study, not above or beyond what we observe, if we are not on the way to some kind of synthesis or final conclusion, if knowledge is one practice among others, how are we to make a start or come to an end? If the concept of situatedness within ecological epistemologies is to do more than reinforce fixed locatedness, if it is also to be practised, how will knowledge that makes a difference emerge?

Our answer to this question is to suggest a re-turn to situatedness, not as a position or an identity, but as emergent in the diverse processes of differentiation, the patterns of movement, that constitute the moving surface or ground of figures of knowledge. Haraway has provided one response to this through her suggestion of thinking diffractively; for her, diffraction is a form of patterning through which we can generate alternative ways of thinking. It is what occurs when a wave encounters an obstacle, whether that is waves hitting a rock or through experiments with light through single- and double-split experiments. For Haraway,

Diffraction does not produce “the same” displaced, as reflection and refraction do. Diffraction is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection or reproduction. A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of difference appear. (1992, 300)

Indeed, as Barad (2007, 36) notes diffraction patterns are ‘not merely about differences, and certainly not differences in any absolute sense, but about the entangled nature of differences that matter’.

For us, patterns are a way of recognising such differences. Furthermore, as Araujo (2007, 16 passim) notes, pattern

meanders through the interstices of various disciplines, refusing to be stabilised into a fixed practice or fully grasped by an established field of knowledge … [It] cannot be easily confined into a single discipline … always exceeds the architectural in some capacity … is intrinsically connective, rather than contained, bridging between architecture and fashion, fashion and mathematics, mathematics and textile design, textile design and biology, biology and architecture and so on.

Stenner (2012) provides the example of the patterns that starlings made as he watched them swooping and dispersing amongst the fallen West Pier in Brighton and Hove. He notes ‘The starlings fascinate me because they seem to ‘pulse’ between order and chaos. By playing the difference between gathering and dispersal, pattern can add a little order to chaos and a little chaos to order’ (137, emphasis in original).

Mathematical approaches to pattern point to a dialectic between number and figuration (in the sense in which Suchman and before her Haraway imply); as Araujo (2007, 11–12) notes:

On the one hand, it looks at pattern as a visible indication of a hidden logic. In this case, emphasis is given to the way pattern works, and to how its perceptible processes might prove useful to elucidate natural enigmas. On the other hand, mathematics employs pattern as a neutralizing backdrop that allows for the exceptional to stand out, so that by establishing it as the ordinary, one is also capable of discerning the extraordinary – that which works against it. It is interesting to notice that the visual structure of pattern, invariably constituted of a play between figure and ground, reflects the two models upon which its employment in mathematics is based. In the first instance (as a visible indication of a hidden logic), pattern operates as figure, located as the foreground. In the second instance (when it is employed as a milieu for mapping the exceptional), pattern recedes to the background.

Yet pattern provokes more than the visual senses. Patterns are textured and provide texture; they acknowledge the sensory importance and complex knottings of the semiotic materiality of knowledge practices. Manning (2013, 165 passim), for example, claims that patterns are the ‘ineffable more than of experience’; they are ‘modes of attunement’ that ‘populate expression at the edge of intelligibility’ while Jeffries (2012) describes how one of the strengths of thinking with patterns is their oscillating effect. We can see this where energy creates the harmonic motion of, say, waves on a beach. Patterns of movement can also create oscillations or alternations in mood such that they can provoke ‘our bodies into a visceral response rather than a purely visual grasping of form alone’ (Jeffries 2012, 130).

But given such an abstract understanding of pattern how are we suggesting that such patterns inform our understanding of situatedness – how might we practice the ontological-epistemological-ethical work of patterning? One answer to this question is provided by Barad's influential concept of the ‘cut’. In her use of this term, Barad, like Stengers, is concerned to overcome binary categories, and to emphasise the entanglement of matter (including language as matter) via the notion of intra-action:

A specific intra-action (involving a specific material configuration of the ‘apparatus of observation’) enacts an agential cut (in contrast to the Cartesian cut – an inherent distinction – between subject and object) effecting a separation between ‘subject’ and ‘object’. That is, the agential cut enacts a local resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological indeterminacy. (Barad 2003, 815)

Crucially, Barad (2003, 815 passim) emphasises that ‘relata do not preexist relations; rather, relata-within-phenomena emerge through specific intra-actions’ such that ‘intra-actions enact agential separability – the local condition of exteriority-within-phenomena. The notion of agential separability is of fundamental importance, for in the absence of a classical ontological condition of exteriority between observer and observed it provides the condition for’ the possibility of situated knowing as a practice that can make a difference.

For Barad (2003, 815) ‘the agential cut enacts a local causal structure among “components” of a phenomenon in the marking of the “measuring agencies” (“effect”) by the “measured object” (“cause”)’. In making this argument, Barad does not presume that the cut delineates a part as distinct from a whole or cuts a part out from a whole but rather that the cut makes a connection: as Strathern (1991) observes, there are no parts and wholes, but only partial connections. Indeed for Barad, the act of cutting splices things together as well as apart and cuts are never once and for all but continual and continuing:

Cuts cut ‘things’ together and apart. Cuts are not enacted from the outside, nor are they ever enacted once and for all. (Barad 2007, 179)

Manning (2013) puts forward an alternative, perhaps complementary, term to cut: contrast. In providing a powerful articulation of the importance of pattern, Manning observes that, for Whitehead, a pattern is a field of force, a manner rather than a matter: ‘The manner of a pattern is the individual essence of the pattern. But no individual essence is realizable apart from some of its potentialities of relationship, that is, apart from its relational essence’ (Whitehead 1978, 115, quoted in Manning 2013, 165).

At an analytic level, we regularly seek patterns in data as a way of recognising the becoming of matter. In doing so, we look to understand the manner of pattern in terms of orderliness, consistency and repetition. Intersectionality may provide one such example of patterning though, so we suggest, it suffers a loss of dynamism and intra-action insofar as it presumes the fixity of the relations between figure and ground. Manning's account of contrast in Whitehead is a way of avoiding precisely the fixity of this relation: contrast fields pattern, she says, ‘spurring the actualization of matter through a process of subtraction’. Importantly, however, she also argues that ‘The “realization” of pattern does not replace the pattern: contrast subtracts from the resonant field of patterning even as it holds the resonance of the pattern in quasi-appearance’ (2013, 165). And of course, this is also what is captured in Strathern's (1991) use of the notion of the fractal (as a pattern): in the patterning movements of a fractal, a thing is not so much an intersection of relations as it is a figure of mutually transformative relations, each element/relation of which it is composed being itself a relation.

And alongside cuts, contrasts and fractals we return to figures, as Haraway employs them, and to the patterning of movements, to the borders between figure and ground that do not simply separate but also connect, do not isolate a figure from the ground but put that figure into multiple relationships with a ground that is itself neither fixed nor flat. From a classical sociological perspective, Elias (1982) describes figuration as the networks of interdependencies that individuals form, and argues that lives are lived within social figurations that are dynamic as connections and relationships become more or less important and more or less active. He draws a parallel with dancing: people come together momentarily but dance within structured patterns that are relatively independent in terms of time and space of those who are dancing (Stenner 2012). Yet while Haraway also speaks of an ontological choreography she has a rather different understanding of the epistemological status of the figure.

For Haraway, to practice figuration as a knowledge practice is to ‘somehow collect up and give back the sense of the possibility of fulfillment, the possibility of damnation, or the possibility of a collective inclusion in figures larger than that to which they explicitly refer’ (Haraway 2000). Describing herself as ‘a person cursed and blessed with a sacramental consciousness and the indelible mark of having grown up Irish-Catholic in the United States’, Haraway puts forward an understanding of the figure as an image, a sign that is the thing in itself: in her work the figures of the cyborg, or the OncoMouse, are a way of acknowledging an ‘implosion of sign and substance, a literalness of metaphor, the materiality of trope, the tropic quality of materiality’ (Haraway 2000). For Haraway, figures are a way to articulate the patterning of movement insofar as they both connect and communicate: ‘Figurations are performative images that can be inhabited. Verbal or visual figurations can be condensed maps of contestable worlds’ (Haraway 1997, 17).

As part of an ecological epistemology then, cuts, knots, contrasts, fractals and figures are ways to map patterns of movement such that the multiple relations between figure and ground, object and subject become visible as matters of concern. Strathern, once again, provides a powerful way to understand what is at issue here. In her discussion of the figure−ground relationship she suggests that it should not be seen in terms of part−whole – as implied by the notion of a figure being cut out of the ground, but rather as two dimensions or as two perspectives: figure as another ground and ground as another figure: ‘Since each is seen as an invariant in relation to the other, the dimensions are not constituted in any totalizing way’ (1991, 113) – they are partial connections. And it is finally here, in the consideration of the partial connections, the cuts and the contrasts between figure and ground, entity and milieu, text and content, that we re-turn to situatedness, which we now propose, as a co-invention that, fractally, recursively, opens onto other co-inventions. This is an understanding of situatedness, not as a position or an identity, but as emergent in the diverse processes of differentiation, the patterns of movement, that constitute the moving surface or ground of figures of knowledge.

Facts and values

There remains of course one further set of questions. For Barad and for Stengers, as for Haraway, the question of the ethics of how to configure the patterns in such relations is of vital importance. Barad, for example, is at pains to make it clear that the cut is an ethical act in the delineation of how knowledge is bounded and performed of which we are a part:

We are responsible for the cuts that we help enact not because we do the choosing (neither do we escape responsibility because ‘we’ are ‘chosen’ by them) but because we are an agential part of the material becoming of the universe. Cuts are agentially enacted not by willful individuals but by the larger material arrangement of which ‘we’ are a ‘part’. The cuts that we participate in enacting matter. (Barad 2007, 178)

In this regard, as Bell points out, we must cut well; ‘Given the potentially infinite number of relevant elements in an intra-acting materially enacted world, the inexhaustible plethora of “entangled genealogies” (Barad 2007), the event of a new conception, fact or correlation has to be one that, by definition, makes a demonstrable difference. The limit is precisely indifference. In other words, the advice to one who wishes to tell an entangled genealogy is not so much to represent accurately as it is to “cut well”, which is to say provocatively or perhaps “generatively”, inviting the concern of others’ (Bell 2012, 117).

As we have noted, in the re-turn that we are outlining here, there is a common concern with diffraction rather than reflection. Barad, for example, notes,

a diffractive methodology is a critical practice for making a difference in the world. It is a commitment to understanding which differences matter, how they matter and for whom. It is a critical practice of engagement, not a distance-learning practice of reflecting from afar (2007, 90)

while, as Haraway (2008, 83) notes, Stengers argues that to create new knowledges,

Decisions must take place somehow in the presence of those who will take the consequences. To get “in the presence of” demands work, speculative invention and ontological risks. No-one knows how to do that in advance of coming together in composition.

And here too we suggest that an ecological rather than social epistemology has something to offer since it requires us to return to fact−value dichotomies in an expanded set of habitats.

As Stengers notes ‘Only humans on Earth act “in the name of values” and contrast them with “facts”. But, and this holds true for humans as well as non-humans, the creation of value cannot function in this register of opposition’ (37; see also Fraser 2010). In challenging such binaries, Stengers is drawing our attention to the problematic nature of bifurcated epistemological models. Bifurcation as splits, oppositions, divergence, branches and divisions of knowledge lends itself, by way of contra-distinction, to an assumption of understanding as points of consensus, of moments of convergence. Stengers explicitly warns against mistaking such convergence as consensus or synthesis (or facts). She notes: ‘Ecology doesn't provide any examples of such submission. It doesn't understand consensus but, at most, symbiosis, in which every protagonist is interested in the success of the other for its own reasons’ (Stengers 2010, 35). She refers to this process as one of symbiotic agreement that is ‘an event, the production of new, immanent modes of existence and not the recognition of a more powerful interest before which divergent particular interests would have to bow down. Nor is it the consequence of a harmonization that would transcend the egoism of those interests’ (35). Such a description is, we suggest, not inappropriate as a way to describe the workings of, for example, inter- or multi-disciplinarity, a multiple situatedness in which disciplines enter into relations with each other, maybe even co-operating with one another, but are nonetheless neither themselves necessarily transformed nor subsumed within some consensual synthesis.

Alongside symbiotic agreement, Stengers also describes, as mentioned above, a process of ‘reciprocal capture’. This can be spoken of ‘whenever a dual process of identity construction is produced: regardless of the manner, and usually in ways that are completely different, identities that coinvent one another each integrate a reference to the other for their own benefit’ (36). Reciprocal capture is a transversal concept that shifts attention away from rights and legitimacy (of, say, methodology, paradigm, concept) and ‘emphasizes the event, an “It works!” that belongs to the register of creation’ (42). And this is where there is a re-turn to practice rather than discourse. As Savransky (2012), drawing on Stengers, argues, the moment of reciprocal capture may be tied to ethical creativity in terms of practices of care, producing ‘new modes of existence and thus adding something to the world in a way that is more democratic, and more ethical, than the modern, all too modern, social scientific knowledge practice’. This is, cannot be other than, a move from ‘“affirming productivity” to “actually producing” – from ideas to practices’, to a process of co-invention.

Conclusion

Our paper is concerned to re-turn the grounds of debate that seek to illuminate what situatedness might mean when we encompass the material-semiotics of a more-and-other-than-human world. We have indicated how, since Haraway's use of situatedness, there has been a growing recognition of the significance of recognising that humans are of, not solely living in relation to, a ‘vibrant’ and textured material world, a world that can be independent of human concern, that may, indeed, have its own concerns.

In responding to this challenge we have articulated the notion of an ecological epistemology and put forward a number of practices, associated with patterning, that seek to de-privilege the weight given to reflexive accounts of identity in the production of situated knowledge. In contrast to such accounts, we think the term ecology is helpful insofar as it enables us to acknowledge the ongoing and dynamic interrelation of processes and objects, beings and things, figures and grounds. Indeed, we think it affords the possibility of opening up a mode of investigation that addresses the potential – of what might be as well as what is – in any situation or relation of situatedness. This is because it focuses attention on the way in which mutually adaptive (but not necessarily symmetrical) bordering relations between elements in the ecology may unfold ‘hidden’ dimensions in processes of contrast and comparison. Whether and how this potential is made visible is what is at stake in processes of figuring out, of configuration, or grasping together that are able to open up the possibility of collective inclusion beyond the representational demands of identity.

Our aim has been to emphasise the co-connections – or articulations – between practices and being in the production of knowledge. Following Haraway, we use articulation in a double sense, that is, as in the sense of articulated vehicles where the focus is on joining up and connecting, as well as in the linguistic sense of enunciation and communication. Articulation is a practice that is concerned with how connections can make an entity of two different elements. Such a linkage is contingent rather than absolute or irrevocably determined. Articulation, then, is a political practice for grasping things together, of overcoming dichotomies and ‘irreconcilable subjects and objects associated in turn with separated social and natural worlds (Stenner 2012, 145 passim) and, we would add, always with the possibilities of reciprocal capture. However, importantly, it is also a device for being demanding about how technologies of knowing/being are deployed in practice and being similarly demanding of raising questions about alternative figurations.

Such an articulated approach requires research in gender and education to more fully ‘dream along with’ other disciplines as a form of respectful engagement and to become more intra-disciplinary in approach. This may well be through greater attention to working with or drawing upon the work of other disciplines. That this is attendant with dangers of co-option has been well noted (McNeil 2010) but engaging in this way enables the ongoing interrogation of how the politics of boundary-making sustains divisions and hierarchies and has the potential to more fully understand which practices matter. More singularly, it requires attention to how the human is of the world in ways that include the materiality of bodies and things and how this extends our accountability and responsibility for developing understandings of the differences that matter (Barad 2007).

Notes

1. We use this cumbersome phrase to acknowledge both the technical and natural heterogeneities of the world so as to acknowledge aspects of what is sometimes called more-than-human and sometimes non-human.