Entanglement

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

Abstract

As Coole & Frost (2010) offer: “as human beings we inhabit an ineluctably material
world. We live our everyday lives surrounded by, immersed in, matter” and further,
our existence depends from one moment to the next on myriad micro-organisms and diverse higher species, on our own hazily understood bodily and cellular reactions and on pitiless cosmic motions, on the material artifacts and natural stuff that populate our environment, as well as on socioeconomic structures that produce and reproduce the conditions of our everyday lives. In light of this massive materiality, how could we be anything other than materialist? How could we ignore the power of matter and ways it materializes in our ordinary experiences or fail to acknowledge the primacy of matter in our theories? (p.1)
The emergent field of New Materialism represents an attempt by a diverse range of theorists to turn the attention back to the material and put subjectivity/positionality under “radical reappraisal” in the hopes of pushing further the conception of self/affect/place in relation. Building from advancements in ecological understanding, quantum physics, and posthumanism—both in its anti-anthropocentric and cyborg subjectivity trajectories—these thinkers suggest a return to “the most fundamental questions about the nature of matter and the place of embodied humans within a material world” (p.3). This rethinking of matter itself—much like redefining space and place—holds profound implications in such central concepts as agency, identity, and the political. This relationality pushes one to consider that “matter becomes” rather than “matter is” (p.10)—a push as quantum physics calls one to think of science as the study of process as opposed to state (see Barad 2007). These “choreographies of becoming” then involve “objects forming and emerging within relational fields, bodies composing their natural environment in ways that are corporeally meaningful for them” (Coole & Frost, 2010, p.10).
This paper takes up the challenge of New Materialism in the attempt to think through an educational theorizing of becoming and, as Barad notes, “an ethics that is not predicated on externality but rather entanglement” (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p.50). As a point of departure, educative spaces are considered in terms “beyond the merely discursive” (Helfenbein, 2012, p.103), material in effect/affect, and both constitutive of and constituted by the bodies that spend time there. Implications for both educational and curriculum theorizing are explored in the hopes of “bringing biopolitics, critical geopolitics, and political economy together with genealogies and phenomenologies of everyday life” (Coole & Frost, 2010, p.28). As a continuation of “the interdisciplinary study of the educational experience” (Pinar, 2004, p.2), the spaces/places in which we find teaching, learning, and curriculum are re-considered as in-relation, as always already entangled in ways that privilege both the material and the ethical.

Author

• Robert James Helfenbein, Loyola University Maryland