Analytics of subtle energies: Issues and challenges in what counts as ‘matter’ in transcultural educational research

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Education in the Era of Interconnectedness and Complexities.

Proposal

The recent advent of a materialist turn in ‘Western’ humanities and social sciences including new materialisms, object-oriented ontology, affect theory, speculative realism and more raises questions about the fate of an older ‘Western’ spirit-matter binary that has never been settled. From religious studies, to the ‘hard’ sciences, to what is now called metaphysics and/or mysticism, what earns the title of matter and what of spirit is not universal, opening onto an array of debates over theories of perception, humanism, and belief, as well as the problems of binary logics. In light of this non-universality, this paper focuses on flashpoints of reality-construction in transcultural research when concepts such as ‘matter’ are not agreed upon. The paper considers firstly, some general issues and challenges educational research can face when new materialist approaches (e.g., Barad, 20007; Bennett, 2010; Braidotti, 2019) inscribe ‘matter’ or ‘objects’ as empirical, agentive, and animate via implicit appeal to a human-based sensorium and attribute ‘thingness’ particular essential qualities within an entification process. Springboarding from contemporary critiques (Pederson, 2018; Rekret, 2018; Siddiqui, 2021), the paper then delineates further issues and challenges that arise when working transculturally and qualitatively in domains related to subtle energies. It draws examples from a case study involving interviews with complementary integrative health (CIH) professionals from what are now called the US and different parts of Asia, professionals who describe their work as involving an ‘unseen’ quality, substance, or principle referred to as ‘energy’ and/or ‘subtle energies.’ The paper examines the aporia that arise when second-order normativities are not available, documenting cosmological disagreements over ‘thingness,’ over what constitutes matter-spirit, or whether this is even relevant, over what or where ‘energy’ is and how ‘its’ performance can be narrated, etc. These non-aligned sensibilities of the ‘unseen’ (in the dominant ocularcentric sense) expose the colonial residues and ontological assumptions that still operate within the broadenings and flattenings that new materialist approaches think they achieve. The paper draws theoretically on work within Mahayana Buddhist epistemologies (Duckworth, 2019), Derrida’s (1972) postfoundational questioning/critique of consciousness, the published insights approved of or by indigenous scholars’ of the great plains in what is now called North America (De Leon, 2019; Lewis et al, 2018; Powers, 1987) and Marchesini’s (2017) animalist concept of theriomorphism to identify the aporia that emerge and their implications. In conclusion, the paper will give examples of the complexities that new materialist accounts tend to avoid or sublate on the one hand, and the buried ethnocentrisms they continue to forward and mobilize on the other, raising significant questions that the field of international and comparative education is still left with regarding crosscultural analysis and phenomenon that are cast in the present as unseen and unquantifiable and yet that are still taken to ‘matter.’

Author

• Bernardette Baker