Chaotic Compositions: Destabilizing the Colonial Eye

• In Event: Seeking New Suns: Murmurations on the Visual, Affective, Geographic, and Sonic Possibilities of Collaborative Liberatory Methodologies

Abstract

Thousands of Starlings speed through the air perpetually shifting direction, proximity to others, and position within the murmuration, an unstable shape also in rapid flux. While it may appear orchestrated, a murmuration follows no leader and has no plan, and yet succeeds in foiling predators. A murmuration has no strict method, and yet there are shared intentions, collective principles and reflexive adaptations enabling a communal defense to take place, a chaotic composition of individuals without individualism.
Condensing and expanding shapes briefly appearing as Starlings fly with/between/around each other, exemplifying the potentially liberatory effects of emergent design. By definition, such approaches to research rupture the what is of terminology and methods under pressure to adopt increasingly positivist, mechanistic, and reductive research practices in a lingering neoliberal academic climate. Thus, the challenge the murmuration exemplifies is “how to be bounded by method even in its transcendence” and avoid the tendency to turn a successful methodology into a dogmatic creed (Whitehead, 1929).
To “seek new suns” (Butler, n.d.) within visual methodologies in qualitative educational research, and to hold space “outside of someone else’s ancestral imagination” (Brown, 2017), this speculative paper intends to provoke some deeper problematizations of taken-for-granted concepts such as “observation” and the need for researchers to have a critical attitude towards visual experience, documentation, and creation as the core of visual methods.
Both notions of observation and of experience in educational research, and in qualitative work more broadly, often rely on the problematic assumption that they are trim, tidy, and/or finite and somehow uniformly illuminated. Terms such as observation and experience imply pure practice and have been normalized to the extent that they are assumed to be self-evident. As such the theory of inquiry behind much qualitative educational research using visual methods remains under-examined and consequently undercuts its liberatory potential.
As a catalyst for moving toward deeper problematizations of assumptions, and to allow researchers to examine how a study might construct its scopic object and thus destabilize their assumptions, this paper will introduce and operationalize the concept of the colonial eye. Invoking the “colonial eye” can help researchers consider their own acts of seeing whereby they question “the supposed solidity of the visible” and understand that “other things can be taking place … than those we think we are witnessing” (Shields, 10). This also opens us to considering that which is felt but not articulated, that which is not seen but creates conditions for visuality. We might consider that we cannot see that which creates the conditions for guiding our vision on affective and aesthetic levels.
As an act of proprioception to participate in a broader chaotic composition, using the colonial eye as a way to take stock of a researcher’s awareness of the conditions of visibility constructing their own seeing, can both highlight the conditions of becoming visible, and make visible the relationship between the viewer and the representation itself that is so often obscured.

Author

• Maria-Carolina Cambre, Concordia University - Montreal