Philosophy as a Method: De-Writing "I" in the More-Than-Human World

• In Event: 73.057 - Writing the Posthuman "I": The Problem of the Human Subject in the More-Than-Human World

Abstract

This paper is concerned with re-thinking the human ‘I’ in the more-than-human educational landscape. Its aim is to decenter the subject, to explore the ‘death of the subject’, and to interrogate the ever-present ‘I’. The post-human ‘I’ is no longer embedded, performed or conceptualized in the subject-object binary, but becomes a part of an ‘in-between’. The in-between addresses the ontological, epistemological, ethical and political re-thinking and re-writing of the ‘I’ in the post-human landscape, dwelling in the ruins of the surviving modernist omnipotent ‘self’ and the post-modern troubled discursive ‘I’. The post-human ‘I’ is placed within the entanglements of subject-object, subject-matter, matter-matter, as both discursive and material inter - and intra - actions (Barad, 2007, Braidotti, 2013; Mol, 2002).

Philosophy as a method is the recent turn in post-qualitative thinking. ‘Post’ refers to the different ontological, epistemological, ethical, and political conditions under which qualitative research operates. In this sense, it is the more-than-human landscape and entanglements that have emerged since the linguistic turn. It shifts the post-human ‘I’ out-side of subject–object, or subject-matter relations. In a Deleuzian sense, matter becomes the embodiment of the sensations, affects and aesthetics, and in Bennett’s (2010) political ecology, the powerful cultural forms, the active role of non-human matter and things. The ‘I’ in new materialism shifts the attention to the non-human-centred world of things/matter. Things/matter speak to the ‘I’, and have agency that is both political and ethical in nature. Things/matter have a vitality and a capacity: there is no ontological hierarchy in thinking about matter and subjects, but there is an urge to rethink the subject, the ‘I’ on the eve of the anthropocene (Taylor, 2013), through philosophy as a method. In a Lyotardian (2009) sense, can matter re-write the ‘I’, or de-write the ‘I’? How does it look, feel, if humans are to ‘write themselves’ into matter in the time of the anthropocene? This paper embraces philosophy as a method, removing the subject, performing, living and doing within and without the ‘I’. It traces post-humanist ‘vibrant matter’ and deals with complex onto-epistemological-ethical and political entanglements, of how spatiality and time impacts upon the capacities of matter. The concern of how to speak and write the post-human ‘I’ is a fundamental onto-epistemological, but also a political and ethical one, for qualitative research, that seeks to address human entanglements in the fate of the planet. This presentation argues for the vibrancy of the subject as the post-human ’I’ in the more than human world.

References:
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, UK: Duke.
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter. Durham, UK: Duke.
Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge UK: Polity Press.
Lyotard, J-F. (2009). Postmodern Fables. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Mol, A. (2002). The Body Multiple: ontology in medical practice. Durham, NC: Duke.
Taylor, A. (2013). Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood. London, UK: Routledge.

Author

• Marek Tesar, The University of Auckland