Hailing (Posthuman) Subjects: (Re)Thinking Interviews With(in) the Ontological Turn

• In Event: Rescuing? Method in (Post)Qualitative Research

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of our paper is to re-theorize, re-methodologize, and re-method the interview as a form of purposeful entanglement (Authors, 2017). Rather than abandoning our training in ‘traditional’ interviewing (e.g., St. Pierre, 2016), we posit that familiarity with the interview method facilitates renewed understanding of interviews following the ontological turn. We diffractively read Barad’s agential realism (2007) with the ‘traditional’ interview to posit: 1) our familiarity with the interview, and attendant discourses, enables a new materialist analysis of material-discursive subjectivities, 2) Baradian objectivity provides the contingent possibility of anticipated (de)subjectification during interviews, and 3) all interviews inexorably intervene in entanglements of participant and interviewer subjects. Conceptualizing interviews as purposeful entanglements expands possibilities for the interview in new materialist, posthumanist, and post-qualitative theorizing.

Theoretical Framework: To ground our analysis of the interview as purposeful entanglement, we draw upon Barad’s agential realism (2007). We employ Barad’s conceptions of entanglements, objectivity, intra-action, and apparatus to frame a material-discursive analysis of the interview phenomena--that is, we examine the inextricable connections between the material and discursive conditions of the interview process. In addition to agential realism, we engage poststructural (e.g., Foucault, Althusser) understandings of (de)subjectification (Butler, 1993) and critical resistance (Hoy, 2005) to theorize the interview as purposefully entangling to foster the performance of subjects.

Data Source, Methods, and Modes of Inquiry: Drawing on both authors’ interview studies, we think through (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) our interview ‘data’ using agential realist and poststructuralist frameworks previously noted to examine the coming into being of various subjects. We trace these entangled states and analyze the material-discursive figurations and agential cuts (Barad, 2007) that rendered some subjects possible and other impossible with the aim to demonstrate the utility of the interview in a new materialist framework.

Results and Conclusions: Through Baradian notions of objectivity, the first author anticipated participants’ potential identity performances. In one study, the first author ‘hailed’ (Butler, 1993) participants -- they recognized themselves in the call for black-white ‘biracial’ individuals and felt compelled to respond. This performative biraciality carried over into the interview when participants and the first author intra-acted. Yet changing the material conditions of the interview (e.g., using questionnaires, Thematic Apperception Test, varying interview styles) enabled new performative subjects (black, white). These performative, and frequently stereotypical, subjects were brought to the participants’ explicit awareness, complicating future performances. Only through intimate knowledge of the interview process could this tuning (Pickering, 1993) of the material-discursive conditions of subject performativity be possible. Other analyses of our interview studies point to the continued utility of the interview to render new ways of knowing/thinking/being possible.

Scholarly Significance: Rather than viewing the interview as only reinscribing the humanist subject, we suggest the interview method enables an onto-epistemological analysis of subjects (e.g., biracial) not otherwise feasible--that the researchers’ and participants’ familiarities with the interview render a material-discursive analysis possible. In this way, we continue to work the ruins of the interview to ask what the interview can do, rather than ruminate on notions of incommensurability.

Authors

• Travis Marn, University of South Florida

• Jennifer R. Wolgemuth, University of South Florida