An Onto-Ethical Methodology for Affirmative Critical Literacies

• In Event: 79.029 - Reading, Reviewing, Mentoring, and Writing Differently in Higher Education

Abstract

This theoretical paper explores an onto-ethical methodology for fostering socially and environmentally just reading and writing practices; a praxis of thought and orientation constructed around the inseparability between the knowing subject, the to-be-known or known object, as well as processes of learning and knowing. Such a methodology, I suggest, is immanent rather than transcendent, emphasizing relationality rather than separability, thereby encouraging new and more generative spaces for literary engagement.
Being of the world, we are fully co-constituted with it; a situation of inseparability that Barad (2007) refers to as intra-action. Ethics, knowing and being can therefore be productively entwined, she suggests, in an onto-ethical-epistemological approach to reading, writing and teaching; an approach that requires us to foreground processes of becoming, while remaining attentive to the fact that we as co-constituted beings we are always “becoming with the world” and that “the becoming of the world is a deeply ethical matter” (Barad 2007, p.185). Building on this praxis, critical literacy practices require ontological and epistemological underpinnings that are relational rather than discrete. “Relationality does not imply relativism, but instead practices of responsibility and attentiveness,” explains Shotwell (2016, p.121), claiming that standard critical and reductive methodologies foreclose this by upholding “fictions of separability” that are blind to the “complex bodily entanglements and material assemblages” in which we are co-constituted with multiple others, both human and not.
According to Fisher (2009) the “no long term/no future” situation of late capitalism has turned education into a 'banking model' that molds learning and learners in purely economic terms, whilst circulating deathly affects such as apathy, cynicism and mental agitation amongst teachers and students alike (Fisher 2009, p.25). Deepening social divides, growing precarities and ecological crises are messily entangled with the “systems of [negative] modeling in which we are entangled, and which are in the process of completely polluting us, head and heart,” suggests Guattari (1996, p.132). Pedagogical practices, as Grosz (2017, p.257) writes, therefore need, as a matter of urgency, to become more fully cognizant of “the concepts, affects and sensations they produce and reproduce.” We are thereby called upon to enact new sensorial, affective domains of possibility in our capacities as teachers and learners; to acknowledge that we are “living beings” with a responsibility to perform onto-ethical acts that seek to “liberate and transform [the] material processes” in which we are entangled (2017, p.257). In our research, writing and teaching practices, an onto-ethical methodology requires that we foster critical literacies that “reframe [the] systems of knowledge and representation” with which we conceive of the world and our relations to it (Grosz 2017, p.257). By calling attention to the “generative power that flows across all species” onto-ethical methodologies, as Braidotti (2013, p.103) argues, promote the cultivation of pleasure; a pleasure grounded in “life itself.” We are thereby called upon to cultivate new depths of engagement with the world – a “processual sensualism” that emphasizes “the materiality of thinking [and] material culture” while engaging more sensually with an entanglement of embodied subjects, both human and not (Thrift 2006, p.140).

Author

• Delphi Carstens, University of the Western Cape, South Africa