A Careful Loosening: Inviting the Aesthetic and Material Into the Phenomenological

• In Event: Unsettling Traditions: Reimagining the Craft of Phenomenological and Hermeneutic Inquiry

Abstract

Objectives:
The objective of this paper is to unsettle the traditions of phenomenology by plugging into posthuman theories and concepts to reconfigure post-intentional phenomenology (Vagle, 2014). We do so by exploring the phenomenon of digression and the ways that it is fabricated both materially and discursively in the human and more-than human worlds. Participants will be invited to engage in thinking about the ways digression is produced and producing commonworlds.

Perspectives:
Historically speaking, qualitative researchers have employed philosophies of phenomenology to open-up and contemplate particular phenomena (i.e. love, death, racialization, etc.) by asking the question “What is_____”. Eager to push the boundaries of phenomenological research, Mark Vagle envisioned post-intentional phenomenology as a hybrid methodology of qualitative inquiry. A rupture in descriptive and interpretive traditions, post-intentional phenomenologies see the phenomenon as always slipping away, not quite an understanding that one can corral, but more like a brief glimpse into the possibility of awareness.

Post-intentional phenomenology embraces the potential of “plugging into” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) different philosophies and theories to see what happens when they are put into dialogue with one another to make sense (albeit briefly) of the phenomena at hand. We are encouraged by the post-intentional call to embrace a theoretical assemblage where we enact Haraway’s notion of string figures or cat’s cradle, “…passing patterns back and forth, giving and receiving patterns, dropping threads mostly failing but sometimes finding something that works, something consequential and maybe even beautiful, that wasn’t there before, of relaying connections that matter…” (Haraway, 2016). By picking up (and dropping) some of the threads of post-intentional phenomenology as well as the threads of feminist new materialism, we are compelled to ask the questions:  

• How is the more-than-human embodied in phenomenological research?
• What does paying attention to the more-than-human produce in phenomenological research practices?
• What does inviting the aesthetic and the material into the phenomenological do for qualitative inquiry and vice versa?   

Modes of inquiry:
Seeing the researcher and the phenomenon as always, already multiplicitous (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) we move away from traditional phenomenological methods by exploring the phenomenon of digression in a research partnership. Additionally, this project seeks what a phenomenon can do rather than exploring the traditional phenomenological question of “What is”? by asking the following research questions:

• What is it to find oneself in digression? What does digression do?

• How is digression working?

• For whom and for what? (social, cultural, political, material implications)

Data sources:
Data sources include curated material-discursive musing from what we are calling an Intensities Archive (writings, notes, postcards, photographs, artifacts, noticing in nature, artwork).

Conclusions and Significance:
Borrowing from both of these qualitative traditions is a generative way to create a new hybrid space of doing phenomenology and feminist new materialisms alike. Like archeologists, we call for a careful loosening of the soil around the traditional, to unsettle traditional phenomenological methods that invites the aesthetic and material into the fold.

Authors

• Jaye Johnson Thiel, University of Georgia - Athens

• Brooke Anne Hofsess, Appalachian State University