‘Data found us’: A critique of some new materialist tropes in educational research

Abstract

New materialist and posthuman research methodologies are quickly gaining traction in educational research. According to its proponents, new materialism takes us to radically new places of praxis as it reconfigures central notions such as data, researcher positioning and critique. Here I consider how the notion of ‘data’ is invoked in an example of new materialist research by education scholars. Through this critique, I come to question the extent to which the approach constitutes a reconfiguration or whether, instead, it is continuous with some old and problematic tropes. I wonder if the positioning of data as supremely agentic elides the new materialist insistence on intra-action and discuss some of the implications of that including the depoliticisation it entails.

Keywords

Data new materialism critique

New materialist and posthuman research methodologies are quickly gaining traction in educational research. Sometimes the work is referred to as ‘post-qualitative’, sometimes as ‘new empiricism’, and sometimes as ‘the ontological turn’. Within this turn educational scholars draw on the work of Gilles Deleuze, Karen Barad, Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, Donna Haraway, Brian Massumi, Rosi Braidotti, and others. The turn is materialised in comprehensive readers, such as New materialisms: ontology, agency, politics (Coole and Frost, 2010) and New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies (Van der Tuin and Dolphijn, 2012) and textbooks on new materialist research designs and methods (see e.g. Fox and Alldred, 2016). Philip Payne (2016: 169) briefly recaps some central features of the turn and hints at the question I also wonder about when he writes,

This new movement of thought concerns itself with ontology, and the status of the real and, subsequently, the epistemologies flowing from a ‘new’ material vitalism about the way the world is, and how we are in it. In its various guises, this movement may well reveal the historical complicity of ‘old’ Western Cartesian inert ‘thought’ about what it thought truly and rationally mattered, its presumptions, logics, and methods of reason.

In St. Pierre et al.’s (2016: 99) words, new materialist posthuman scholars are responding to

an ethical imperative to rethink the nature of being to refuse the devastating dividing practices of the dogmatic Cartesian image of thought’, that is, to critique the foundational assumptions of Western thought ‘that enable binary oppositions such as Same/Other, human/nonhuman, mind/matter, culture/nature, conscious/unconscious, transcendence/immanence, idealism/materialism, and so on.

And, they continue

A special focus on the ontological grounds on which those distinctions continue to be made is front and center in this work, as are other age-old distinctions such as those between philosophy and science, those philosophy has made between epistemology and ontology, and those epistemology has made between rationalism and empiricism (St. Pierre et al., 2016).

In these formulations, we clearly hear the trumpet announcing the new; announcing that we are turning over a new leaf with the desire to go beyond old binary thinking, encapsulated in the trope of the ‘dogmatic Cartesian image’. Other scholars have noted the particular heralding of ‘the new’ (and even the fetishization of the new) as a foundational gesture of post-qualitative and new materialist work (Ahmed, 2008; Gerrard et al., 2017). Some proponents argue that in order to do this ‘going beyond’ binary thinking, we need to renounce discourse analysis and deconstruction and take up new tropes and new research practices (Lenz Taguchi, 2012). In particular, we need to rethink the notion ‘data’ (Koro-Ljungberg and MacLure, 2013; St. Pierre and Jackson, 2014).

Being invested in post-foundational research imaginaries, which include a strong and unwavering unease with the notion of data (see for example Petersen, 2015), the sound of this particular trumpet has intrigued me. Are we, indeed, being offered something new? To explore that I turned to one example of educational research that promised to reconfigure the notion of data. Since I recognise that those of us who insist on undertaking empirical research continue to face some serious challenges in terms of what to do (what to actually do) with all the lingering, persistent foundational and positivist tropes, tools and desires, I wanted to explore the reconfiguration in practice, so to speak, in an applied context rather than in a conceptual argument (as in the St. Pierre et al.’s texts referred to above). How are data enacted in this intriguing new turn in educational research?

The choice of example was pragmatic. The work I will take as my case appeared in the same edition of a journal in which I had a piece published. I flicked through the edition and the title of the piece caught my eye. Therefore, if we consider the following a ‘case’, we shall not think along the usual tropes of ‘representativeness’. I will make no claims that my chosen case represents the entire field of educational research that draws on posthuman new materialist thought. Following Flyvbjerg (2006) rather, I would claim that the case will offer insight into both the specific and the possible. Looking at just one example will allow us to remain specific and focussed on detail, which according to Flyvbjerg is a prerequisite in the development of good knowledge. Further, as Gough (2016) notes, in the presentation and discussion of new turns, there is a tendency to aggregate sources, which may be useful in some ways but which may also overstate homogeneity among disparate works and perspectives. Therefore, rather than thinking of the example under scrutiny here as representative, we can think of it as possible in that the example was written and published and in that way, at the very least, deemed ‘possible enough’ to appear in a special issue of a respectable journal.¹ Being possible means being sufficiently recognisable; being a sufficiently legitimate rendition of historically available discourses to be endorsed by peers. In other words, the example happened and that in itself makes it interesting. The focus of this article is not ‘how it happened’ though. That is, I will not focus on which interests and what enrolment processes (Callon and Law, 1982) that made it possible and stabilised it as a ‘journal article’ – although that would be an interesting study. Here, I will focus on what the example claims, particularly in relation to the claim about offering and doing something new.

‘There is something in the air’

The work I want to look at is an article called ‘There’s something in the air: Becoming-with research practices’, written by Bidisha Banerjee and Mindy Blaise and published in a special issue of the journal ‘Cultural Studies >< Critical Methodologies’ in 2013. The special issue sought to problematise the notion of and the practices around ‘data’ and it was edited by Mirka Koro-Ljungberg and Maggie MacLure, both central proponents of ‘the ontological turn’ in educational research.

As the title suggests, the article is about air, and in particular Hong Kong air. In the abstract, the authors summarise the paper thus:

This article engaged with air from a posthuman performative perspective to prompt new thinking about postcolonial Hong Kong. Drawing from a small experiential study of Hong Kong air, this article shows how three becoming-with research practices: sensing air, tracing childhood memories, and cominglings were enacted to engage with data differently. (p. 240)

Banerjee and Blaise maintain that they did not set out to research air, rather, they write, ‘Hong Kong air found us’ (p. 241). The paper is an exercise in what they call a posthuman performative research practice, which seeks to move away from traditional notions of data. It is an approach which considers

the air’s agency, or the agency of the data, and the ways in which it inter- and intra-acts within human researching bodies. In doing so, the human researcher is not privileged over the nonhuman air and as the human researchers in this small experiential study, we did not set out to find, collect, or handle data. In fact we relinquish control that the traditional researcher has over her data and open ourselves up to new and unknown possibilities. (p. 240)

Were we to deconstruct this passage we would pay attention to the binary oppositions created and the process of othering, also affective othering (Bjerg and Staunæs, 2011) that happens through that process. Although the hierarchical ordering is not universal, binaries are hierarchically ordered so the question becomes what, in this specific text, is constructed as relatively better, relatively more virtuous, in relation to what is constructed as more undesirable, as lesser? The practice to aspire to, according to this passage, is one in which the researcher does not presume privilege over her research object, and it is one in which she relinquishes control and opens herself up. The Other here, it seems, is a researcher who is controlling and closed-minded; who makes data confirm prior belief and how is not open to the new and unknown. We have two figures in play here: one open and enchanted, the other closed and destructive/reductive.

This construct is reminiscent of the arguments found among those who 40–50 years ago made a case against ‘logico-deductive’ research practices, which starts with an abstract theory, deduces some implications, formulates some hypotheses and then develops experiments or tests to verify or falsify the truth of the hypothesis (Ezzy, 2002). In the social sciences, strong opposition to this approach was found among those who, instead, developed the approach that came to be known as ‘grounded theory’. Their concern was that in the experimental approach ‘data are forced to fit a theory’. Central to grounded theory was precisely the desire to ‘allow the data to speak’ (Ezzy, 2002: 9). Strauss and Corbin argued that ‘it makes no sense to start with received theories or variables (categories)’ (cited in Ezzy 2002: 9). They worried that pre-existing theory ‘would hinder progress and stifle creativity’ (Ezzy, 2002). As Douglas Ezzy argues (2002: 10), in line with the anti-deductivist tone of the main methodological texts of grounded theory, the practice of grounded theory also often appeared to proceed on the basis of an assumption that the researcher is a tabula rasa, who will encounter the world, the meanings of participants and, we may assume, non-human or more-than-human actors, unfettered by previous understandings; openly, exposed and accessible. This engagement is what Schulz (2017) calls ‘enchantment’ which ‘encourages a greater sensitivity for numinous, non-secular experiences and ways of being-in-the-world’ (p. 134). Grounded theory became subject to criticism both by phenomenologists and social constructionists but also, and forcefully, by poststructuralists who, informed by Michel Foucault and others, rejected the naïve realist ontology and made the case that world encounters are always already discursively mediated and even that the world itself is discursively constituted. Which is to say, theory was always-already in play: words, orders, experiences, categories and so on could not be bracketed or discounted; they mattered (Butler, 1993).

Drawing on Karen Barad, Banerjee and Blaise acknowledge that human–non-human relations take the shape of intra-action, that is, objects and subjects are mutually constituted and cannot be meaningfully separated. As Barad herself writes,

Discursive practices and material phenomena do not stand in a relationship of externality to each other; rather, the material and the discursive are mutually implicated in the dynamics of intra-activity. The relationship between the material and the discursive is one of mutual entailment. Neither discursive practices nor material phenomena are ontologically or epistemologically prior. Neither can be explained in terms of the other. Neither is reducible to the other. Neither has privileged status in determining the other. Neither is articulated or articulable in the absence of the other; matter and meaning are mutually articulated. (2003: 822)

Citing Barad’s argument that the material and discursive intra-act, Banerjee and Blaise certainly signal a departure from the naïve realist ontology of grounded theory. Yet, what they do not explain or unfold is how their take on the agency of their data and the stance of ‘openness’ is supposed to be understood in relation to the notion of ‘intra-action’. In other words, when the authors write that they ‘did not go looking for data’, but that data, in the shape of air, ‘found them’, the narrative implies that here they were, the researchers, going about their business and data (the pre-discursive ontological real) came up and poked them. This is a seductive narrative in many ways. But the status of the intra-action, required for both ‘air’ and ‘researcher’ to materialise, remains unaddressed. In the flow of enchantment, and in the slip-stream of the new and emboldened fascination with the non-discursive, the intra-action of matter and meaning is elided.

It is interesting to read how the authors account for the process of how air found them. The researchers write that they attended a workshop introducing a method called ‘walking-to-think-with’ – a concept already pregnant with posthuman thought and interests we might add – where it appears they were asked to undertake an exercise. It is this exercise that formed the start of the article. During the workshop, one of the researchers noticed the cold air from the air condition on her neck. In the text, this is constituted as a moment of, or even as evidence of, air’s agency; it was here air found the researcher. Air found them again later when a small group of workshop participants – including the researcher who had been found by the air conditioned air – assembled outside the room in a warmer and more humid hallway. In that space air became configured as a matter of interest, as data, and, we presume, configured that way in the following process of ‘walking-to-think-with’. But one question becomes, if we wish to mobilise the concept of intra-action, what happened in that workshop apart from the encounter with the air-conditioned air – where the participants likely were asked to meet, encounter, or intra-act with a non-human agent as part of the exercise? Perhaps, participants were on the lookout for some non-human actor to walk and think with, and therefore were under particular conditions of openness to being found in particular ways?

What I want to suggest is that an alternative narrative around the emergence of air-as-data is possible, one that pays more attention to the intra-action of the material and the discursive and which addresses what Barad has called the ‘agential cut’, that is that ‘any determination of a given object is necessarily contingent’ (Rekret, 2016: 229) – and, we must assume, that this determination is a human endeavour. We must ask what is sought achieved by our contingent determinations – what is achieved, for example, by positioning respectively air as agentic and the researchers as relatively less agentic, as enchanted and open to air’s activity? Perhaps with Paul Rekret (2016), we might suggest that the authors seek to disavow the genesis of their objectification of the natural world; that they seek to disavow their ‘determinations’?

Later in the article the authors write,

Becoming-with practices challenge traditional understandings of data by rethinking humanist assumptions about the role of the researcher and data. For example, it was not the role of our human researcher bodies to collect, find, and categorize air in several more-than-human-encounters. Keeping our researching bodies still, while observing and sensing air, allowed for human and nonhuman inter- and intra-actions to occur. (p. 241)

Again, being regrettably occupied with discursification, I wonder what is achieved by using the term ‘human researcher bodies’ and by constructing it as capable of staying still to observe and sense. In other words, what kind of apparatus is assembled here? The claim to be a ‘body’ and not, for instance, a ‘brain’ or a ‘self’ is interesting. A body does not think; it senses, detects, records. The body is not a self – a subject with a history, with perspective, with interest. The valorisation of the still body is interesting too. A still body, like a microscope, or video camera, observes and registers, again, it does not perceive, conceptualise or react; it is constructed as something quite passive. Stillness, as in the popular practice of mindfulness, seems to assume that if we hold thoughts and feelings still and just register, we can ‘let go’ and reach some sort of authentic pure sensation. Is the idea that we with stillness shut off the discursive mediation that, if we follow the script, only serves to interfere with sensation, enchantment and hence with ‘better data’? Is it a tabula rasa this apparatus, without memory or history, perhaps even without feeling or politics? The idea of an agentic body, one that indeed collects, finds and categorises is produced here as Other, as a less-than body, an inferior practice. The ideal practice is one that suspends thought and instead senses, I almost wrote ‘merely senses’, but as it is clear that sensing here is constructed as superior to thought that would be amiss.

Foregoing privilege

In extending my critique, I want to return to the earlier point about how this posthuman performative research practice wants to ‘forego the traditional researcher’s privilege’. First, I am not entirely sure what the authors refer to exactly, but I read it to be the privilege to determine what counts as data and to make the data speak. The researcher’s traditional role as the all-powerful signifier and interpreter appears to be what is objectionable. Yet, while we could certainly accept the existence and materiality of what-comes-to-be-known as air, and while we could certainly accept the idea that the material intra-acted with the researchers – people are hurt, interrupted, reconfigured, enhanced, and so on by non-humans every day and possibly vice versa – I do not find answers in this text about the act of writing (understood as performative rather than representational), about the relationship between non-human agency and the writing that is involved in the telling of this story; ultimately, of the writing that denounces privilege while at the same time assuming it in a powerful way.

If we take seriously the claims around Hong Kong air’s agency, I think it pertinent to ponder the following questions: did various composite parts (oxygen, hydrogen, etc.) that the researchers recognise as ‘air’ agree to be constituted that way? Did air agree to being represented as an agent who found the researchers? The verb ‘found’ seems very active and purposeful to me in this context, and how does air feel about that? Did it have will-to-data? Did air agree to be represented as enacting what the researchers in their writing claims it enacts – for example, that it is involved in the production and reproduction of social class in Hong Kong? And, did the researchers ask how this air felt about being co-opted or even made responsible for the authors’ sharing of certain childhood memories? As such, I wonder if all the non-human actors cartographed and sensed in much new materialist work are happy with the ways in which they are being ‘determined’ by human actors in their acts of writing? Do they even want the agency and privilege now bestowed so well-meaningly upon them?

While I realise that these questions border on the polemic, they seek to problematise the figurations of agency and privilege in the moments of ‘doing research’ – including configuring ‘data’ – and ‘performing knowledge dissemination’, the act of giving an account. As long as researchers operate in the realm of the discursive and affective, as the researchers do here, we uphold a significant performative privilege, which cannot and should not be denied through rhetorical denouncements of privilege.

In fact, the positioning of data in this article reminds me of the old discussions of the subaltern within postcolonial theory and the powerful question that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1993) once raised, ‘can the subaltern speak?’ Perhaps, I am reminded of this because the article itself claims to offer practices necessary to rethink postcoloniality? The sentiment in the article is similar, it seems to me, to the one taken up by the modern anthropologist, well-meaning and guilt-ridden by the legacy of the white man’s burden, when they said that our goal as investigators is to listen to the subaltern subjects, really engage with them, genuinely respect them and empower them. We should question our own privilege –share it – even to the point of negating it. Yet, as postcolonial scholars pointed out this, this positioning can easily become another form of oppression, another form of subjugation (hooks, 1990). The power to narrate somebody’s (or in this case something’s) story is rife with peril.

Both Spivak and bell hooks and others have questioned researchers’ engagement with the subaltern and the marginalised. While researchers traditionally have wanted to know about the subaltern’s experiences of colonialism, subjugation or marginalisation, they have not wanted to take up the subaltern’s own accounts and explanations, or only if this subaltern had adopted their discursive repertoire and particular passionate attachments. hooks captures the relationship between the academic and the subaltern in a poignant and powerful way when she writes,

[There is] no need to hear your voice, when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you, I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still [the] colonizer, the speaking subject, and you are now at the centre of my talk. (hooks, 1990: 343)

So, while it is not entirely appropriate to affiliate the subaltern with the non-human actor, it seems to me that Banerjee and Blaise, perhaps against their best intention – and we might even say inevitably – come to speak on behalf of air and come to colonise it in the way hooks describes. Air cannot speak for itself – to be felt and heard air must be registered by the researchers’ bodies and, significantly, their pens. And while the researchers denounce the privilege to do so, they inadvertently come to produce a-i-r, ‘air’, on their own terms.

In this colonising move what seems to be at stake also, is what political scientist Paul Rekret in his critique of new materialism (2016), refers to as Locke’s ‘acquisitive gaze’, that is ‘one which takes the world itself as a reservoir of potential values to be extracted and accumulated’ (n.p.). He claims that new materialism, under an unrecognised capitalist logic, takes up and legitimises this ‘acquisitive gaze’. Researchers, against their stated intention, come to take and own the non-human actors, whose agency, existence and integrity they graciously wish to respect and honour. Rekret (2016: 233) argues that new materialists’ affective ethics betray ‘the ongoing objectification and production of nature as a commodity both extensively and intensively’. This is a significant form of privilege and one that which Banerjee and Blaise appear to overlook.

Concluding remarks

Through this reading of a possible rendition of posthuman performative research practice, a reading against the grain of the text’s own conceptual and affective valorisations, I come to question whether we are being offered something new. Of course, ‘new’ is a relative concept. For those who are new to qualitative research and the debates afforded by the post-foundational turn in education research, what is on offer here may well be new. But for those who for some time have been occupied with ‘going beyond’ Cartesian thought in the enactment of research may well be left wanting.

Similar to several other critical readings of new materialism, I develop some questions around the concept of ‘intra-action’, which seems perhaps entirely reasonable in theory, but which rarely is instantiated in practice or, as we saw in our case, the desire to position the non-human as supremely agentic leads to an elision of specification or even consideration of the intra-action between the material and the discursive. What happens in that move, paradoxically, is that the non-human, and in this case Hong Kong air, is positioned as something separate and discrete; indeed, as something one can inter-act with, rather than something that is a product of intra-action. This notion of data as discrete is old; we know it from realist and positivist research methodology. Therefore, rather than come to a new place, in new materialist work such as Banerjee and Blaise’s article, in the very argument that ‘matter’ is missing, we return, as Sara Ahmed (2008) argues, to old binaries between nature/materiality/biology and culture/discourse. In the insistence of the agential realism of matter, the operation of the cut, or the ‘determination’, is elided and as a result the binary nature/culture remains intact. Rekret (2016) reminds us of Theodor Adorno’s critique of Heidegger’s existentialism, in The Jargon of Authenticity (1964/1973) which he claimed becomes ‘an ontology that retreats behind, rather than overcomes, the tradition of transcendental philosophy’ (Schroyer, 1964/1973: xvi). Rekret formulates it this way,

The new materialist ethical invocation of matter is inherently disposed to neglect of the material constraints differentially mediating relations between human and non-human natures. When we define the division of the mental and material in ethical terms, by implication we presume the innocence of thought and so reproduce the very Cartesian binary that we claim to have overcome. (2016: 240)

The tropes of openness and enchantment and the still, sensing researcher body, which I pointed to in Banerjee and Blaise’s article, asks us in various ways to disregard or disavow the historicity of our own speculations and categories, and our part in the materialisation of matter. This new trope of agentic data does not work to remind us that the emergence of materials and accounts of the social (‘data’) is a material-semiotic accomplishment, and therefore I feel doubtful, like others (Bruining, 2016; Sullivan, 2012; Willey, 2016) that we have ‘gone beyond’ our old challenges afforded by the crisis of representation, which was to consider research a performative rather than representational practice. Wouldn’t a post-representational practice foreground the researcher’s ontologising activity rather than retreat from it, or even actively disaffirm it? In other words, I wonder if the positioning of data that we see in this article constitutes what Wendy Brown (2006) calls ‘a buried order of politics’? As the researchers remove themselves as normative agents in the configuration of data and as powerful or at least present in the practice of account-giving, they negate their engagement, much like the ‘objective’ ‘neutral’ scientists under the God Trick did (Haraway, 1988). Those scientists engaged in acts of (attempted) depoliticisation. As Brown explains,

Depoliticization involves removing a political phenomenon from comprehension of its historical emergence and from a recognition of the powers that produce and contour it. No matter its particular form and mechanics, depoliticization always eschews power and history in the representation of its subject. When these two constitute sources of social relations and political conflicts are elided, an ontological naturalness or essentialism almost inevitably takes up residence in out understandings and explanations. (Brown, 2006: 15)

The agential realist data trope presented in the example do not enable us to foreground and acknowledge research as a performative practice, and it does not enable us to signal our historically contingent implication, it rather takes recourse in an ontological naturalness. In contrast, I am looking for a concept of data which ‘marks its own operation as a discourse of power’ (Brown, 2006: 19), which opens up to contestation and signals the epistemic violence of all objectifications and subjectifications, which affirms the continuous and complex entanglement of materiality and signification. This, significantly, does not mean a negation of the material, but neither does it erase or amputate critical interrogation of thought’s conditions and thought’s work.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Note

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