Looking Back-Through: A Posthumanist Proposition

• In Event: 66.021 - New Materialist Education 2: Toward Active Objects in Research Methodologies

Abstract

Recent developments in social science research and particularly in curriculum scholarship have put into question research, data, and knowledge production. These developments are often taken up through posthumanist and/or new materialist theories and methodologies that challenge researchers to re-think the basic unit of reference for the human and ‘our’ species (Braidotti, 2013). Donna Haraway (2003), for example, explores how “an ethics and politics committed to the flourishing of significant otherness [might] be learned from taking dog-human relationships seriously” (p. 3). Through the concept of metaplasm, she argues that the relationship between humans and canine companions reveals the inadequacy of binary distinctions between nature and culture, which in turn offers the potential for a new ethics of communication that remolds the codes of life. This potential is later described by Haraway (2008) as learning to live intersectionally: “to hold in regard, to respond, to look back reciprocally, to notice, to pay attention, to have courteous regard for, to esteem” so that we can “enter the world of becoming with, where who and what are is precisely what is at stake” (p. 19). Following Haraway’s call for a new ethics of communication, I explore the ontological and fleshy choreography between me and my canine companions using mountable cameras and GPS tracking units attached to each of our moving bodies. After selecting, editing and framing the ‘visual findings,’ the ‘end-product’ is a fragmentary multi-framed video that calls attention to new openings that are about response, offering a proposition “to become with those with whom we are not yet” (p. 93). These new openings will be explored in the in-between spaces of the frames where an embodied communication depends on looking back and greeting significant others, again and again. Under this “material-semiotic sign of companion species” (p. 165), I am interested in exploring generative methodologies that respond to the problematization of the different possible ways of communicating findings and insights that posthumanist and new materialist self-questioning has caused. In other words, my paper will address some of the issues presented by posthumanism and new materialism, most notably the paradox of using humanist discourse to communicate posthumanist ethics, by offering important debates in ethnography and anthropology around the crisis of representation (Clifford, 1988; Geertz, 1983; Behar, 1996; Gordon, 1993). Both as a method of data collection as well as a visual representation of being-together-apart, this paper will think through the visual findings of the fragmented video in the hopes of offering an ethics of communication that puts into play the conditions of possibility that make new materialism possible. Key to this thinking through will be the question: what sort of material and symbolic privileges are necessary for engaging in this work?

Author

• Zofia Zaliwska, University of Toronto - OISE