Wandering the Tactical

Enclosures of the Visible

In qualitative inquiry, both the body and material environment are often dismissed or reacted to, rarely an incorporated response within the multiple contexts in which meaning is made. Traditional research processes privilege the simplistic bifurcation of mind from body that is Cartesian duality, as well as the decontextualized process of moving from collected interview data to data analysis, to interpretation, to findings. The systems of logic to which we adhere produce particular renditions of embodiment and emplacement, even as they conceal such formations; we come to believe that bodies and places are not always there, although they exert a palpable pressure on our meaning-making, our identities, and our engagement in social institutions.

When we sit down to facilitate an interview, we make meaning from multiple, overlapping contexts. We may ask a participant to present a narrative of experience and look for categories of meaning within his or her own words. Traditionally, we construct a series of coding techniques to manage this “data,” and, in our focus on finding language and interpreting meanings, we abstract, generalize, categorize. Language itself, neither in its negative function to identify based on exclusion, nor in its assumed transparency, becomes a focus of critique. The interview is represented as a linear process with an unspoken reification of words, the translation of an event to a visual artifact. Of course, even before we begin the interview, we have forgone certain possibilities for expression by enabling the static quality of the traditional seated interview, as well as the affective potential of place. After Gilles Deleuze (1990), we may identify the sedentary character of the traditional interview, the enclosure through language that moves “from the most to the least differentiated, from the singular to the regular, from the remarkable to the ordinary” that “orients the arrow of time from past to future” (p. 76). The linear progression from difference to normalization is all-too-familiar in traditional modes of qualitative research. As a consequence, the traditional structure of the seated interview and the normalized “data” extracted from the interview enclose and flatten the interview event. This kind of regularization prompts theorists such as Barad (2008) to ask, “How did language come to be more trustworthy than matter?” (p. 120). Although Barad speaks here of more general cultural fixations on language, we may ask: How did the transcript come to stand in for the event of the interview? Furthermore, we may ask how sitting encourages us to pay more attention to talk than to the affective relationality of the embodied event.

Part of the simplification involved in the traditional interview is its swift movement toward representationalism. Representationalism derives from a Cartesian view of the world (Barad, 2008), an emphasis on inside and outside, with knowing subjects (insiders who experience) and more objective observers (outsiders who interpret). This belief in the authenticity of experience and the externality of language and social identity is a pervasive cultural assumption, promoted by an individualizing, consumerist society that hides its mechanisms of interpellation. How then, might we conceive of the interview beyond the arc of representationalism? How might representationalism be reinforced through the production of the humanist subject, an enclosed subject that is historically the object of the interview?

Subjects, Visible to Relational

As Brinkmann (2011) notes, the “modern consumer society is an interview society” (p. 57). Brinkman goes on to assert that the interview enjoys such legitimacy and privilege in our consumer society because of its “softer seductive forms of power through dialogue, narrative, empathy, and intimacy” (p. 57). The interview, then, holds a doubly seductive sway in our contemporary world: existing as a technology aimed at seducing truths from participants—the inner narratives of their lives—even as it seduces the inquirer to take up its cause in the name of the whole or unified humanist subject. In this sense, both the interviewer and interviewee are caught up in the dance of humanism, each adhering to conceptions of the interview as a “central technology of the self in a postmodern consumerist culture, where nothing is or must remain hidden, and where selves are commodified conversational products” (Brinkmann, 2011, p. 57). The enclosed, containable self is created through the interview technology so that it might then be consumed.

In addition, the mystification of embodiment in our qualitative inquiries allows for a distancing of the researcher, a (mis)recognition that researcher and participant bodies no longer matter. Thus, the use of the interview in qualitative research, for example, abstracts language-as-data from the material and embodied contexts in which such utterances were spoken, and of which they are expressions. This leads Brinkmann (2011) to assert, “too many interviews today are conducted based on . . . a spectator’s stance—a voyeur’s epistemology or an epistemology of the eye” (p. 59). Although the logic that drives such abstraction (of language from bodies, for example) hides the embodiments it enacts, with a view to the becoming of the “spectator stance,” we may begin to inquire into the material manifestations of its logic.

The privilege of the researcher to remain a spectator (and a disembodied spectator at that) reinscribes the very inequitable power formations in which critical qualitative inquiry seeks to intervene. It should be noted that the transcript excerpt with which we begin this article runs the risk of installing readers as spectators. The ease with which a focus on text reinscribes the fragmentation of events into various dualisms—researcher–researched, spectator–watched, interview–transcript—we seek to problematize, promoting certain dis-ease in the face of the transcript. How does the “open” outside of the walking interview, presented as a transcript, become a sedentary enclosure, like the school building to which the teacher responds, introducing the possibilities of watching and being watched, rather than listening and response? Horn and Williams (2005) link the spectator stance to our overreliance on discursive representation as the basis for particular epistemologies and ontologies: “The limitations of our epistemologies . . . are based within the ontological constraints of observers whose knowledge of the world rests upon our observations and descriptions of it” (p. 749). And, of course, to play the role of observer or voyeur, one first must make visible the object of analysis. Traditionally, the interview apparatus has sought to make visible the enclosed, complete humanist subject.

Elizabeth St. Pierre (1997) advocates for approaches to inquiry that shift away from the humanist subject to an emergent poststructural subjectivity. The humanist subject emphasizes an enclosed, static subject that, in turn, establishes a clear sense of internal and external (a division that separates the individual from the multiple contexts in which he/she is immersed). This static subject demonstrates a strong sense of self-definition and determination (I know who I am; I have a core self that remains unchanged regardless of time or space). To trace the consequences of traditional uses of the humanist subject, we must identify subjects that are privileged and rendered more legitimate over time. These subjects are often generalized in contemporary culture in terms of what it means to be a citizen or even a person in our society. Within the context of the interview, refusing the humanist subject disrupts the spectator interviewer who gazes upon the humanist subject being enclosed. ⁵ Thus, to displace the humanist subject is to disrupt the legitimated subject positions that enjoy privilege in our contemporary context.

This is inquiry as intervention in the reproduction of normalizing subjectivities that is the residual process of a disciplinary society. As the logics and practices of identification-based-on-exclusion are explored in Michel Foucault’s (2003) analysis of the movement from a disciplinary to a regulatory society, the decentering of the subject takes on the import of social justice: How can we intervene in the “techniques of power” that maintain modern racism, the right to kill as a form of survival? We want to emphasize the social implications of a materialist approach to research. Foucault (2003) recognizes the intersections of micro and macro practices evident in techniques of power and the right to kill: “When I say ‘killing’, I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on” (p. 256). Language derives from material experiences and has material effects. With respect to subjectivity, the discursive structures that privilege certain identities over others also enclose particular bodies, and these enclosures convey the right to live and the right to let die. In the intra-action between language and materiality, words themselves can be understood as bodies, affected and affecting. We might thus ask, what simplistic epistemologies, ontologies, and methodologies infringe on interventions into regulatory practices?

The recognition of a poststructural subjectivity presents a new ethical imperative to “think differently than we have thought” (St. Pierre, 1997, p. 2), to consider newly possible interpretations of the world in which we live. Poststructural subjectivity, in comparison to humanist subjectivity, “is without a centered essence that remains the same throughout time” (St. Pierre, 1997, p. 5), and is produced through multiple (and often-contradictory) discourses. This shift away from the humanist subject requires a simultaneous rejection of traditional rationalities that seek “true” knowledge of “authentic” selves. St. Pierre asks the contemporary methodologist to escape the language of humanism, what she calls our “mother tongue,” which expresses static binaries, and negative structures that potentially keep us all—not to mention the participants who collaborate within our inquiries—tied to the deterministic lines of thought emblematic of post/positivism. For St. Pierre, intervening in humanism requires the methodologist to participate in “getting free of oneself” (p. 2). As St. Pierre notes, traditional methodological approaches do little to free oneself from humanism, most often resulting in the reification of the humanist subject. This is strikingly apparent in traditional uses of the interview as a technology that produces the enclosed subject. Rather than “getting free of oneself,” we suggest that we may be able to practice despite humanism, or we may be able to practice poststructural subjectivity as a kind of tactical wandering that includes possibilities foregone in our self-enclosure. We may begin to witness our becoming selves and imagine possible interventions in this process, engaging sense at the level of affect and material embodiment.

In response to the glorification of the humanist subject, Barad (2008) offers a relational ontology that is posthumanist and “refuses the representationalist fixation on ‘words’ and ‘things’” (p. 132). Instead, Barad describes a “relationship between specific exclusionary practices embodied as specific material configurations of the world (i.e., discursive practices/(con)figurations rather than ‘words’) and specific material phenomena (i.e. relations rather than ‘things’)” (p. 132; original emphasis). In other words, Barad’s relational methodology highlights processes and the hidden embodiment of logics of abstraction within material structures. This shift to relational ways of being and knowing holds significant implications for our inquiry processes in contemporary contexts. For Barad, “Discourse is not what is said; it is that which constrains and enables what can be said” (p. 137). Rather than limiting her understanding of discourse to language, Barad infuses discourse with power and agency. For Barad, “discourse” incorporates the material affectivity of language, its coming to sense, rather than simply what makes sense.

Intraview: From Script to Sound

Our shift from interviews to intraviews draws from a Deleuzian conception of negative and positive difference. Negative difference “separates or divides one meaning from the other for something to become meaningful” (Hultman & Taguchi, 2010, p. 529). This may be seen in interviews where two discreet humanist subjects interact, with one subject’s (the interviewee’s) meaning gleaned by the other (the interviewer) through strategies of hierarchical division and separation, enabled by a vast array of technologies (e.g., processes of analytical coding or discourse analysis). The production of exclusionary difference in qualitative inquiry is, in many ways, procedurized and derives from principles of negation—I am this because I am not that—disjunction as a form of exclusion (Widder, 2009). ⁶

As the forces of an event interact, “each change in either of them will resonate in the other” within a “relational field of immanence” (Hultman & Taguchi, 2010, p. 530). The metaphor of sound in “resonate” is not accidental. For Deleuze (1990), the “univocity of Being signifies that Being is Voice that it is said, and that it is said in one and the same ‘sense’ of everything about which it is said” (p. 179). Voice joins rather than divides. Bodies are seen to affect other bodies within an event, becoming the stable identities we will later signify as the past, as knowledge, as reality. It is this becoming that wandering may make available, mobilizing an intra-action between the known and what may be known. The surface of sense is produced when “speaking is effectively disengaged from eating” (p. 187). Specific to our concern with the simplified traditional interview, abstraction “results from bodily states,” or “sound” that “becomes independent” and “ceases to be a quality attached to bodies, a noise or a cry, and that it begins to designate qualities, manifest bodies, and signify subjects and predicates” (p. 187). In this way, the sentence, or the saying of the subject, seems to be the only reality to which we have access.

Alternatively, the intraview challenges the subject’s installment in the sentence. Individuals, no longer understood as subjects, become an assemblage of multiple historical, present and future encounters. Even individual bodies become multiple in their enactments within an event. Thus, the intraview challenges the authenticity of the humanist subject and suggests the primacy of more processural ways of encountering the world in which we live. “Linking acts and footsteps, opening meanings and directions, these words operate in the name of emptying-out and wearing-away of their primary role. They become liberated spaces that can be occupied” (de Certeau, 1984, p. 105). Like de Certeau’s footsteps, or those noises of bodies that do not become part of the visual transcript—we might recognize in the intraview those noises, acts of becoming, that cannot be contained in typeset. Furthermore, before we sit down, we may imagine the interview encounter as other than sedentary, more than simply an exchange of words.

At the level of everyday practice, the separation of “sound from bodies” that makes “speech possible,” that makes the saying of the subject possible, limits our understanding of expression to negative significations (Deleuze, 1988, p. 74; 1990, p. 186). Though we may listen to the sounds of a recorded interview and challenge ourselves to hear more than the words of a narrative, to hear the aggregated noise of the event and, in turn, to be affected in the event of our listening, we rehearse and thus privilege the reading of the transcript. Perhaps our academic subjectivities depend upon such enclosures for their own sedentary expressions. Of course, this is not just a process of listening for the “outside” of the interview but of allowing the tactical level of our coming-to-sense to affect the event of the interview itself. As we discuss later, the embodied nature of metaphor and the material basis of thought implies that, through material interventions, we have different thoughts, and through shifts in metaphorical conceptualizations, we experience shifts in reality and possibility. In this way, the act of speaking-while-walking has the potential to change the pathways between our thoughts, as well as how we articulate them, and conceptualizing the research process as a wandering may make us more aware of our embodiment in the research event, at whatever moment, as well as those possibilities we forgo in coming to a sensible, proper enclosure.

The intraview brings bodies to the surface and, in fact, treats words as bodies with material effects. It draws from a sense of positive difference in which “difference is a continuum and a multiplicity, rather than a difference in a system of separations and divisions” (Hultman & Taguchi, 2010, p. 529). Here, difference joins rather than subtracts, recognizing all things (including bodies, material environments, the production of selves) as engaged in overlapping relations through the singular event, brought “together through their difference” (Widder, 2009, p. 215; original emphasis). Through this notion of positive difference, traditional principles of causation are disrupted, as there can exist no hierarchy of cause-and-effect relations; all causes are themselves effects. ⁷ The inquirer may focus on divergences and convergences, which are considered positive distance within difference, expressions that affirm “the power to differ” (Colebrook, 2006, p. 1) and animate the power to divide.

Responsive Listening, Or Wandering Through the “Voice Gaps”

Importantly, as we critically distance conventional practices such as the interview, we reveal the very systems of logic that have so dominated our patterned processes of meaning-making. Though we habitually latch onto selves as they become visible and evident through techniques and technologies of power—and though we may rush to name these selves in terms that reproduce conventional logics and social structures—wholesale rejection of such structures may only reaffirm them and contribute to cycles of social reproduction. We can never be free of subjectivity, though we may attend to its becoming—to the intra-active social, discursive, and material processes of subject formation. However, to interrupt such processes, we argue, requires an approach that may seem indirect to the self-consciously discursive, what de Certeau calls tactical, rather than proper or strategic.

In the critical examination of the traditional interview, its relation to the humanist subject, and the negative difference it presupposes, its legitimacy and unity begin to loosen and other possibilities emerge: “strategic unity can only be disclosed as strategic—as the outcome of action rather than some immutable ground—through the disruptive and anomalous power of tactics” (Colebrook, 2006, p. 699). Still, we cannot adopt the spectator stance to harness the power of the tactical, to make it visible without rendering it strategic. For this reason, we choose to describe walking and wandering as indicating or mobilizing the tactical, rather than as representations of the tactical. Furthermore, we are aware that walking enables some possibilities while forgoing others and that its affective potential at this current moment relies on the sedentary character of traditional structures in which we hope to intervene.

Rendering tactics purposeful diminishes their disruptive potential. “Tactics are not conscious disruptions of that order, but unintended dilations, wanderings, or events that occur beyond sense of order” (p. 699). Such an understanding of the wandering nature of tactics prompts the question: how can we interpret the interview as intraview without simply sentencing the subject? For de Certeau (1984), “a politics of reading must thus be articulated on an analysis that, describing practices that have long been in effect, makes them politicizable” (p. 175, 173). Further, argues de Certeau, recognizing the “withdrawal of the body” and the visual “distancing of the text” renders creative otherwise negative distance, such that the critical act of distancing makes possible a reading body that may wander through “voice-gaps” that “narrate interminably” the “expectation of an impossible presence,” which transforms “into its own body the traces it has left behind” (pp. 163-164). This, in effect, highlights the affective potential of sound on the body of the listener or the possibility of a tactical wandering while engaged in strategies of analysis and interpretation.

Recall our walking interview with the elementary school teacher that began this article. As noted earlier, there are multiple ways to “read” this encounter. On one level, the teacher notes the different felt emplacements she experiences both within the school and without. In many ways, she expresses that when walking the halls of the school and working within the classroom, hers is a body seen—the school asserts a property of surveillance. Yet her descriptions of the freedom felt when participating in discussions beyond the school campus present a body heard—one that refuses her abstraction as a normalized, interpretive subject. Similarly, relistening to the recording of the walking interview allows for consideration of bodies heard. Breath mixes with wind as birds call. Sniffs extend to pauses, and embodied vibrations preface sound and words. Equally as important, the walk produces minor disruptions to train of thought. At moments throughout her walk in a local park she asks, “Which way are we going? Oh, I just forgot what I was saying”; such disruptions are traditionally read as distractions and removed from the interpretive process. However, these tactical disruptions may produce new trajectories of meaning-making. All participants remain engaged in an event, one that folds into itself, allowing for mess-up’s, repair, recovery, return, and spaces of collaborative possibility.

In writing this article, we return to the recorded interview, to the sound of voices, laughter, pauses, footsteps, the noise of hallways, the wind, cars, and the movement of the microphone. We may operate within indirect ways of knowing, buffeted by the wandering dimensions of tactical interventions. The return to the recorded interview can become such an intervention, as the event of listening returns us to a sound we almost immediately convert to text in our listening. This, itself, is an embodied expression, the separation from sound that makes language possible. Furthermore, it inserts a pause, a positive distance between the recording and the transcript, a pause with perhaps its own sound, the affective response of the listener who smiles in response to the sound of laughter, who becomes excited by understanding and intellectually responding to an idea, who enacts in the motor centers of the brain the physical counterpart to metaphorical representations.

Refiguring the traditional interview “as strategic—as the outcome of action rather than some immutable ground” (Colebrook, 2002, p. 699) makes available to us the wandering, purposeless tactics of the intraview; still, to enclose these tactics within particular goals of disruption or expression is to diminish their potential as tactics. Our understanding is that the walking intraview as an embodied event becomes an occasion for the tactical negotiation of bodies in space, unforeseen trajectories, environmental interruptions, the sounding of footsteps and breath. However, its effect on the sense of words uttered as, and in response to, the interview may perhaps only be understood as indirect or metaphorical. The material wandering of the walking interview perhaps encourages the metaphorical wandering of thought, the expression of affect, such that what may not find proper expression in the visible-strategic finds voice. ⁸

Tactics are improvisational, lack specific location, and might be understood as spontaneous moments of creativity. The work of the critical inquirer, then, might be to listen to the tactical without calling it strategy. To do this, one engages in responsive listening, dwelling in the purposeless, metaphorical process of becoming with knowing. What looks like a gap, then, finds voice in its affective potential.

Experiencing Metaphor

For 30 years, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1999; 1980) have argued that logics of abstraction misrecognize the metaphorical nature of nearly all abstract expressions. Because our conceptual systems are primarily metaphorical, “what we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 3). Most often, metaphorical representations pass unnoticed within daily context. People rarely realize how often they use metaphors or even that certain invoked representations are metaphors at all (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999; 1980). Instead, representations are taken as reality rather than conceptualizations of reality. Embodied metaphor thus presents an avenue through which to understand how we conceptualize our reality, how we make meaning—drawing from embodied experiences in material contexts—rather than simply stating the meanings we have made. Thus, methodologically, embodied metaphor works against the logic of abstraction, the oversimplification of processes of human meaning-making. ⁹

Neisser (2003) examines metaphor as more than substitution, but as an element of thought that constitutes an “act of embodied imagination, that is, as a form of situated cognition” (p. 35). The descriptions of our experiences of the world in which we live, often produced as a narrative telling, are layered with metaphor, a means of presenting a depth to human experience. As Neisser writes, “metaphor is an activity for coping with the world. It is how we make sense of things. Even when subconscious, metaphor is an interpretive strategy—a heuristic device which opens up new symbolic and cultural fields” (p. 38). Metaphor, as coming-to-sense, pulls from embodied experiences to convey happenings that literal language cannot represent. Concepts gain meaning through their linkage with embodied experience—they become imagined and represented via metaphor.

Within the field of cognitive psychology, Raymond Gibbs (2006) offers empirical research that supports the link between embodied experience and metaphor. As Gibbs writes, “bodily activity provides a major source for metaphorical concepts and the language people use to refer to these ideas” (p. 455). Key to Gibbs’ research is the assertion that metaphorical language remains grounded in patterns of embodied experience. Thus, the idea that “seeing” a resolution or “getting over” a loss draws from (or in Gibbs’ language, “recruits”) embodied experiences to produce meaning. Of course, the link between cognition and embodiment that Gibbs researches in cognitive psychology was anticipated by Merleau-Ponty (1962), who noted, “if the words ‘enclose’ and ‘between’ have a meaning for us, it is because they derive it from our experience as embodied subjects” (p. 236). Interestingly, the two words referenced by Ponty have a strong valence in the traditional interview, as we have theorized above, indicating multidirectional intra-actions among language and embodiment.

Other scholars have examined the intersection between knowing, coming to know, and material experience within metaphorical expression. For example, a recent study published in the journal Science (Lee and Schwartz, 2010) suggests that given the chance to (literally) wash our hands after making a decision, we may experience less “postdecisional dissonance,” forget some of our former confusion, and experience a kind of blank-slate effect. Clinical psychologist Annie Rogers (2006) writes about her method of using physical metaphors to encourage her clients to play out what they cannot say and perhaps do not know. The act of “knowing,” often rendered as a purely conceptual activity, thus finds traction in bodily activity and points beyond knowledge to what may be known. Knowing manifests as an event, a becoming within embodied experience.

Metaphors have a quality of seeming indirect, noncausal, or peripheral. This “indirect relation between the two forms of knowledge,” what Deleuze (1988) interprets as “seeing and speaking,” may not be understood through a logic of causation or a negative dialectic (p. 82). Their relation is, rather, a designation of the “power relations which they presuppose and actualize” (p. 82). In this way, in thinking through metaphors, “thinking addresses itself to an outside that has no form” (p. 87). To address what is absent from traditionally linguistic-based analyses, several scholars have pointed to metaphorical analysis as a means to access previously overlooked perspectives on and interpretations of the social world. Steger (2007) argues for analyses of metaphors within individual narratives as a means to access insights into an individual’s “unexpressed values, beliefs, and assumptions” (p. 4). Thus, metaphor asks how the “unexpressed” is perhaps expressed differently, surprisingly, indirectly.

Returning to our walking interview with a research participant and teacher, we recognize the surprising metaphorical articulation of the “unexpressed” and how such meaning draws from material encounters. Early in the interview, while still navigating the halls of the school, the teacher begins, “So, we’re just walking? Right, just walking.” Here, the focus on the walking of the interview—if sedentary, the teacher might have begun, “So, we’re just talking? Right, just talking”—brings material context to the fore and intervenes indirectly, metaphorically in the sense and subjectivities expressed. While still in the school, the teacher responds to the laughter of teachers and students echoing from rooms adjacent to her own: “I like our hall.” She then shifts her commentary to reflections on student work that adorns the walls and its correspondence to lesson plans and themes. Here, she makes visible her collegial relations, as well as the relations between student products and the curricular structures, relations that give each proper meaning. Walking through the school hallway promotes the teacher participant’s use of strategy—the space of the school links to educational discourses and the teacher’s own positioning as an institutional subject, seen within space, rather than enacted in time. In this process of enclosing herself within her role as teacher, within the space and logic of the educational institution, she may also be seen in intra-action, inhabiting a nowhere of the tactical that continually becomes the somewhere of proper place and identity.

Once she exits the building, the teacher gains material distance from the institution, and the tone of her expressions change. Spatialized logics of positioning and linear logics of causation are interrupted by laughter and guttural noises that express disgust, frustration, or confusion. As we mention above, wandering does not free us of our humanist subjectivities, though it may illuminate their formation. Though she has left the school building, the enclosures of institutional discourse and politics still exert their presence and effect, She talks about taking data “back to my classroom,” closing or opening “my door,” students coming into the classroom after vacation, welcoming supervisors to come into her classroom and observe her pedagogy. The logic of the school building serves the material basis for the teacher participant’s self-positioning, even in her walk away from campus. However, the material wandering enacted through the intraview parallels her cognitive wandering. She no longer points to visible correspondences of meaning-making (as in the school, where student art work is identified as a direct product of strategic pedagogical action). Instead, she hesitates, admits confusion (“I don’t know, I just mean, I don’t know”) and offers more indefinite trajectories of meaning-making. In short, the material shift from the bound campus of the school to the more indeterminate time and space of the walking intraview seems to mobilize the tactical—the mutual production of agency and knowledge in the intra-action between bodies and space.

When asked to describe select administrative decisions regarding a community project, she proclaims, “Well, I think it all sucks” and struggles to articulate the emotive force of her resistant expression. At several moments, she explains her own choice to include novel studies in her classroom practice, despite the administration’s requirement that she use basal readers. She explains that she loves it and the students love it. The scripted teaching and learning prescribed by the basals are “easy.” When asked why she so resists the institutional policy—though enacting it seems simple, and though she has met consequences for resisting it—she says, “because it’s awful!” This knowing that it is awful, she explains through references to her own and her students’ enjoyment or lack of enjoyment in classroom work.

Although decisions about curriculum and instruction exist in the proper place of the classroom, enjoyment circulates through the nowhere of the tactical. The teacher participant tries to elaborate on this enjoyment-in-learning that cannot be seen and is not recorded by traditional assessments:

Because I know that everybody has to take standardized tests, you know, colleges look at them, and I know it is important to be a good test taker, but I don’t think that’s the only way to measure learning or success. I think if you come in my room and you see my kids banging tuning forks and putting them in water or playing a door fiddle or partner reading with a friend, talking about the characters and looking for vocab words and coming to my vocabulary doors and writing down that they’ve written it or they have spoken it, you can see that they’re learning and that they’re enjoying it. Who [laughs], who likes to take a standardized test? No one. And that’s not always the best indicator of success or of learning.

It becomes clear that this enjoyment is the teacher participant’s tactical requirement for her work and for her role as a teacher: enjoyment voiced in the gaps between literature circles and basal readers, among her becoming-teacher and her students-becoming-students, expressed in the classroom’s effect and in the effect of the positive distance between her wandering and the school distance.

On the part of the researcher, mobilizing the tactical requires an understanding of the potential for walking and listening to intervene in traditional interview structure, including interpretation of the interview event itself, a kind of wandering between speaking and eating that highlights their metaphorical relation. The intent of this approach may be found in this intra interval, between and within the material and the discursive, attending to both and their seeming indirection. As depicted in the transcript excerpt that begins our article, the teacher concludes her walking intraview, invoking more purposeless, wandering, indefinite expressions of her goals as a teacher. “At School,” “not at school,” “at work,” “at school,” “I don’t know, you know.” “When you’re at school,” the teacher says, looking at the exterior of the school building from the parking lot. At school now, but not at school, not having been at school while talking about school, she faces this return in the shape of herself in front of the school building. She does not verbalize a purpose to her tactics that clearly counter the logic of the regulated, scripted curriculum. Her hesitations, pauses and indeterminate shifts between assertion and question dot the recorded intraview and foreground the creative possibility of affecting and being affected. As we mobilize the tactical in our own research practices, we might investigate how such becomings are given voice.

Responsive Listening, Diffractive Seeing

The interview, then, reveals an epistemological tension and a methodological quandary: we are in the world even as we seek to isolate our understanding of the world. Much of the above analysis points to the ways our conceptual system draws upon material, embodied experience. If concepts are created by the mind, they are created by an embodied mind that uses embodied experience to enact language. Our conceptual system, then, is embodied, interlinked with our experiences within the world in which we live.

Although our daily experiences find meaning through the integration of multiple material and social contexts, our language of inquiry does not always allow for such integrative recognition. Yet, as critiques of Cartesian duality should remind us, and as the social and material embodiment of divisive discourses urge us, we may find meaning in more integrative ways. We can begin to enact our own shifts in the physical metaphors of our methodologies. What does the shift from differentiation to integration look like? How does it feel? When we look at Figure 1 (above), what do we see and how do we make such meaning? ¹⁰

OPEN IN VIEWER Figure 1.

Most often, we make assertions about what we see through an analytical process of negative differentiation. We see five dots, five black dots, understood by their separation from the white background. We compare the dots—they are identical. Our analytical minds make distinctions, they categorize—these are dots, the rest is empty space. However, we may shift focus and try to see all the dots together, a kind of stepping back, an awakening of peripheral vision. Notice the experience of this shift in focus. It requires the physical relaxation of muscles around the eyes and in the forehead, maybe in the jaw. This kind of muscular release and optical shift is associated with an affective response in the body. Now, we may look only at the spaces between the dots, the white spaces. Resting the gaze on one space, we may include the dots and the other spaces within our field of vision, the space surrounding all the dots, the space of the page, of the room, the sound of the room, the sound of sense. Space becomes working space, mobile space, positive distance. These spaces contribute meaning. They give context. They form the dots, they shape the dots. The dots and space are involved in a dynamic interchange, meaning through integration, rather than differentiation. Importantly, the dots themselves become less noticeable in the process of coming to sense. This integrative and intra-active approach to meaning-making displaces the differentiated center that most often dominates our interpretive eye, thus making space for more of a Deleuzian thinking of the world in which we live. As Braidotti (2002) notes, “nothing happens at the centre, for Deleuze, but at the periphery, there roam the youthful gangs of the new nomads” (p. 78). The “micro” dimension of thought that is “irreducible to knowledge” is composed of “mobile and non-localizable connections” (Deleuze, 1988, p. 74). As differentiation makes way for more integrative modes of knowing, we become more nomadic researchers, and create new pathways of understanding, of being; we travel among previously undisclosed points of intensities.

It remains important to note that our work in this article is not simply to promote the inclusion of bodies and/or material places in our interview practices, but an integrative way of engaging with such forces through what Hultman and Taguchi (2010) term a “diffractive way of seeing” (p. 535; original emphasis). A diffractive way of seeing involves reading with, not against, data. With diffractive seeing, and with particular relevance to the intraview, we would like to join a whole-body listening, a responsive listening. We might conceive of interviews as encounters, where meanings intersect in the production of a surface tension that inevitably separates the seen from sounds. Though we may not be able to stop this process of diffraction, we can slow it down and learn to witness lines of flight, possibilities unthought in our coming to know. We may remind ourselves that “surface refers to a plane that brings together but also holds apart distinct domains, much like the ocean’s surface separates but also connects water and air” (Widder 2009, p. 211). Meaning, or “knowing,” is generated not through representationalism, but occurs within such events by the coming together of multiple forces in momentary alignment. Further, meaning extends from becoming-with (not distinguishing-from) the event as it patterns affect. Meaning transforms us because we extend beyond ourselves. Yet our oversimplification of the interview as a between-interaction and not an encounter-within, costs us the ability to recognize tactical resistances to standardized ways of knowing. We miss the wandering, improvisational nature of indirect logic formations and focus instead on normative strategies—what can be made visible through its containment.

Through intraviews we are fully engaged and we transform perception and perspective. As thinking engages the unthought, we may speak with a resonance that expresses the limitations and potential violence of negation, as well as indicate a univocity beyond the articulable, through our attempts to listen. As Hultman and Taguchi (2010) write, “what we do as researchers intervenes with the world and creates new possibilities but also evokes responsibilities” (p. 540). Thus, the intraview is our attempt to intervene in the production of the isolated human subject—a self-technology enacted by interviews—to slow the process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, to acknowledge lines of flight that may express the possibility of living and meaning differently within the creative world.

Becoming with Knowing and Relational Realism

The recognition of the intraview as an engagement within multiple social processes makes possible a coconstructed performance of resistance: “performativity is actually a contestation of the unexamined habits of mind that grant language and other forms of representation more power in determining our ontologies than they deserve” (Barad, 2008, p. 121). Within the context of the traditional interview, “unexamined habits of mind” might rightly be recognized as manifestations of Cartesian duality and humanist subjects. Productive shifts to the intraview then, are performative acts of resistance, a means of displacing the humanist subject we noted as called for by St. Pierre (1997) earlier. And this resistive performativity requires a sustained reconception of realism, a means of linking processes of embodiment and emplacement with relational ontologies and epistemologies.

What links contemporary theorizations of embodiment and processural interpretations of the world in which we live is a reconfiguration of realism. Lakoff and Johnson (1999) advocate for recognition of “embodied realism,” a system of meaning that recalls reason to once again acknowledge corporeal experiences. Reason never develops despite our bodily interactions with the material world, but because of such a relation. As O’Loughlin (2006) writes, “When we reason, we do not transcend our bodies, but remain grounded within them, our thinking arising from the very peculiarities of our animal embodiment” (p. 84). Lakoff and Johnson (1999) utilize embodied realism as a means to justify an interpretive process that emphasizes embodied metaphor: nearly all of our discursive conceptual work is rooted in materiality. Key conceptions that undergird the development of embodied realism are more fully developed in Barad’s (2008) notion of “agential realism.”

Positing a notion of “agential realism,” Barad (2008) asserts the notion of intra-action over interaction as a means for foregrounding an “agential cut” that enacts locally-constituted separations between subjects and objects (p. 133). This agential cut stands in contrast to the traditional “Cartesian cut” that assumes an inherent distinction between subject and object. Importantly, Barad’s notion of the “agential cut” does not allow for preexisting determinant relations but rather lays claim to emergent relations within (rather than external to) phenomena and reworks, as a consequence, “the traditional notion of causality” (p. 133; original emphasis). A classic example of the trouble with inherent ontological distinctions—and one subsequently outlined by Barad (2008)—is the historical designation of light as a particle or a wave. Of course, debates concerning the nature of light extend back to the time of Newton. Yet contemporary quantum mechanics asserts that light exists as both a particle and wave, and claims of one over the other simply extend from a priori assumptions about the nature of the universe. Consequently, light is defined through its intra-action with light-defining assumptions and technologies enacted in the name of such assumptions. The interview, as we have outlined earlier, functions as both an institution within our transitioning disciplinary society and a technology of regulation within biopower.

Our assumptive strategies for engaging with others through inquiry implicate both what we can know and how we can come to that knowing. Thus, returning to the interview, whether we seek emergently relational ways of knowing, for example, or the transmission of knowledge from one subject to another (intraviews or interviews, respectively) matters. If we orient ourselves toward finding light particles, we find light particles. If we seek light waves, we find light waves.

Methodological Return: The Becoming Transcript

So what does this emphasis on agential/embodied realism do to the interview? We might strive to understand interviews as events, or perhaps even what Barad (2008) terms apparatuses or “open-ended practices” (p. 134). Apparatuses are never in place “before the action happens” and negate the possibility for closure as they have no inherent boundary marking inside and outside (Barad, 2008, p. 134). Apparatuses, then, draw to the fore tactical formations of knowledge, opportunistic resistances that operate in spite of normative subject positions.

Furthermore, the performative element of the intraview makes possible areas for renewed contestation. If we understand, as Barad (2008) does, that agency is not something to be held or given but a doing, a means of enacting within processes of becoming, we then have a responsibility for intervening in such processes, “to contest and rework what matters and what is excluded from mattering” (p. 144). We find engagements with embodied metaphors as a useful entry point into the production of that “mattering.” Returning to our experience engaging in the walking interview, taking the isolated transcript as representative of “the interview” does not allow us to see the affective expressions of embodied metaphors on those who give them voice or on those who listen—it occludes processes of “mattering.” Instead, we advocate for the recognition of multiple agential spaces throughout the intraview (e.g., the transcript, but also the school building, the walk, the local park in which the walk took place). These agential spaces are not simply empty backdrops before which interviews occur—they are the intraview and, as such, must be relationally known.

Let us once again return to the segment of the interview that begins our article with a focus on the impact of the performative element inherent in the intraview. Having moved her body from the institutional space of her work as a teacher to its outside and then through the outside spaces of dirt, hills, wind, trees, and sky, she returns to face the school building and notices she has been “more comfortable to talk.” Perhaps she has not felt “watched.” She changes pronouns from “I” to “you” to “we” and messes up in the attempt to locate creative discussions either in the school building or somewhere outside. We would like to suggest that physical interventions, such as walking, as well as a focus on space, potentially affect the structure of the interview and the meanings expressed therein. Furthermore, interpretation of the transcript may begin to incorporate shifts in physical space, affect, and embodied metaphor: how does the participant’s sense of her work, her relation to the educational institution, and her ability to discuss creatively, exceed the linguistic significance of her words themselves and extend to her confusion, self-correction, and the metaphors of (not) being watched, freedom and openness? Such a methodological shift requires a rethinking of the interview as not only a verbal exchange between two human subjects, but an event in which spoken, material, and affective expressions by human and non-human agents gather in a process of “‘doing’ something together” (Brinkmann, 2011, p. 63). Equally as important is the recognition that the intra-actions enabled by the walking interview make available relational ways of knowing that are materially grounded. Material interventions mobilize tactical awareness, as well as the possibility of new meanings, new realities.

Inserting a listening pause in the becoming transcript of the interview may highlight its potential for intra-action and our potential for intravention. Thus, we might understand the affective, agential potential of the transcript itself, as it takes on multiple meanings, shifting and changing over time, in new relations, and in overlapping contexts. In our own research process, first, there was the original transcript of the walking interview. Segments of that walking interview were incorporated into an action–research manuscript coauthored with the teacher–participant, presented at a national educational conference, and submitted to a research journal. As a coauthor of the article, the teacher reread her words in the context of the manuscript and with the recognition that her principal would also read the article. Invoking the metaphor of (not) being watched, the teacher asked to revise her words—the transcribed excerpts from the walking interview—to avoid any political fallout from her supervisor’s (mis)interpretation. Thus, she chose to rewrite her perspective, her voice, to sanitize its transmission. What, then, becomes of the “transcript”—the artifact that is meant to represent the interview? We now have three iterations of the walking interview: the original transcript created by the authors, specifically revised sections articulated by the teacher, and segments of the revised sections situated within the action–research manuscript (of course, there is a fourth and fifth as well: the slices of the original transcript in this article, as well as their interpretation).

As the participant revises the transcript, there remain traces of the walking interview in that process of revision. We can no longer conceive of or distinguish the first and/or second transcript—representations of the walking interview and self-conscious revision respectively—or attempt to understand the participant-as-humanist-subject. We must shift from thoughts concerning causal relation—why the transcript is like it is or what it reveals about its subjects—to investigations concerning its becoming, its wanderings. How does it come to matter? To affect? What multiple pathways lead to this point of revision, this intervention in the standard pathway of self-telling? To the articulable and the visible of the interview and the “micro” process of the unthought in the intraview? And how might the teacher–researcher’s revision, as an event itself, be heard as an intra-vention, an acknowledgment of the transcript’s enclosure, the implied spectator stance, and the possibility of using voice-become-text to affect the material and social context of her workplace? Does this process have a sound?

We cannot help but note that just before her return to the school campus, the teacher participant comments on the material context she negotiates: “This intersection is horrible.” She follows with an expression of her goals as a teacher: “They[students] just won’t take the easy way out. You know? Hopefully, they’ll see a problem in society and wanna fix it. Or not even just in society, maybe within themselves or a friend or a family. I just want them to be able to be productive [pause] in life.” The teacher participant, here, expresses her understanding of the intersection between the tactical and the strategic, a positive distance, which nonetheless presents dangers. Enjoyment in learning promotes motivation, an unseen and perhaps undervalued aspect of education. However, it ends up finding its proper place, in her expression, as essential to a productive citizenry. In the articulation of learning as enjoyment, perhaps the teacher participant ends by asserting her own place within education, not without the aforementioned disjunctures she encounters on her return to the school building.

Conclusion

Our interview inquiry found inspiration from Sarah Pink’s (2009) work on sensory ethnographies and her determination to (re)situate the interview as a constitutive event. For grounding the multiple and overlapping contexts that are the interview, Pink writes,

In interviews, researchers participate or collaborate with research participants in the process of defining and representing their (past, present, or imagined) emplacement and their sensory embodied experiences. If we situate the interview within a process through which experiences are constituted, it might be understood as a point in this process where multisensorial experience is verbalized through culturally constructed sensory categories and in the context of the intersubjective interaction between ethnographer and research participant. (p. 85)

Pink’s insistence on recognizing interviews as processes of emplacement and embodiment prompted us to ask how we can, in turn, make sense of the interview in relational materialist ways. More than interactions-between, intraviews are enactments-among. This recognition of the intraview draws on a Deleuzian notion of sense and positive difference, and requires a distancing and relaxation of habitually causal ways of knowing and living. It requires peripheral vision, whole-bodied listening, diffractive seeing, and nomadic thinking. In this way, newly creative, agential ways of being are recognized and intraventions are made possible.