Not So Innocent Anymore

Objectivist–Realist Assumptions

In Lee’s (2004) historical description of recording devices in interviewing and in other literature (e.g., Beddall-Hill, Jabbar, & Shehri, 2011; Hammarsley, 2003; Speer & Hutchby, 2003), the terms used to describe recording devices gesture toward objectivism, the epistemological stance in which meaning, reality, and so on exists “apart from the operation of human consciousness” (Crotty, 2003, p. 8) and humans and objects preexist meaning and reality. The aforementioned authors use terms such as “capture,” “naturalistic,” and “preserved” when describing recording devices. These terms are situated within objectivism because meaning and reality are distinct from human consciousness. Meaning, knowledge, and reality from interviews are captured and preserved in their natural setting with the use of recording devices so that the researcher can analyze them. In this way, meaning, knowledge, and reality are stable entities outside of the researcher that she can grasp with the recording device. Douglas (1985) wrote, “But [the recording device] is such a powerful weapon in the fight for truth that it must be used in all situations where it is allowed” (p. 83). Douglas’ war metaphor indicates an objectivist battle in which qualitative researchers use recording devices as weapons in the battle to capture meaning, reality, and knowledge. Meaning, reality, and knowledge are out there in the field, and one must take her recording device to ensure that she conquers them. The battle is only won when the researcher and her trusty recording device capture meaning, reality, and knowledge.

The discourses surrounding digital recording devices also gesture to what Ashmore and Reed (2000; drawing on Mishler, 1991) describe as a stubborn realist ontology. Crotty (2003) explained realism as “an ontological notion asserting that realities exist outside of the mind” (p. 10). Realism suggests that the recording device captures those realities and meanings that exist outside of the researcher. Those realities and meanings are, of course, linked to other people’s lived experience. Denzin and Lincoln (2000) wrote, “Qualitative researchers study things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of or to interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them” (p. 5). To do such work, qualitative researchers who use interviews as a method of data collection need a tool, a recording device, so that they can “capture the words and perceptions” (J. M. Johnson, 2002, p. 111)—or the ontological realities, meanings, and experiences of stable subjects and objects that exist outside of the researcher. Or, as Douglas (1985) stated, “Reality is now being recorded for posterity and for your study” (p. 85). Back (2012) critiqued such a naïve realism in which researchers assume that recording devices “‘capture’ the real” (p. 254). Instead he advocated that these devices “produce a realist imaginative object” (p. 254). Put another way, recording devices create social realities that qualitative researchers explore in their studies. Though he suggests that devices construct social realities, he still occupies a realist ontological framework. The recording devices capture or produce ontological realities thereby situating them in a realist ontological space.

Recording devices bound the ontological space of interviews and, by extension, epistemology. An interview is sometimes viewed as a one-time event that “is not reproducible and [from which] there is no going back” (Tessier, 2012, p. 447). For example, it is a common practice to begin and end the recording of the interview with discursive moves that situate the interview. J. M. Johnson (2002) wrote, “The interviewer commonly explains the purpose of the research” (p. 111) at the beginning of the interview and concludes with “summarizing some of the main points he or she has understood” (p. 111). These discursive moves bound the event of the interview. The recording device, then, is a boundary-making device in which beginnings and endings of interviews are made clear. Moreover, these discursive moves “provide the illusion of ‘being there’” (Back, 2012, p. 254) in the event of the interview. The recording device provides evidence of being in the field and the discursive moves associated with the devices prove that researchers did in fact interview the participants in a singular interview event. In this way, recording devices bound not only the singular event of the interview but also the “being there” of research. The singularity of the event—of being there in an interview—in turn bound meaning, knowledge, truth, and reality that are captured during the interview. In this way, recording devices occupy an objectivist–realist framework in which meaning, knowledge, truth, and reality are bound in singular epistemological and ontological spaces.

Objectivist and Realist Material-Discursive Proliferations

In addition to recording devices capturing, preserving, and binding the natural setting of an interview, they are viewed as a tool to reduce bias. According to Lee (2004), Chicago School sociologists in the early 1920s developed the modern form of the unstructured and structured interviews that were recorded using a researcher’s memory of the interview, jotted notes, and shorthand, “a more or less faithful rendering of what was said” (p. 870). Later, stenography was used to record interviews. The stenographer often sat behind (and out of sight of) both the interviewer and interviewee and recorded the entire conversation. Because of the technology available at the time, interviews were generally brief with staccato-like facts. Lee suggests that such brevity might be linked to stenographers focusing on key instances that supported research questions instead of verbatim accounts. After the Second World War, magnetic recording became the tool of choice. According to Lee, the first reference to tape recorders appeared in the sociological literature in 1951. Because the audio recorder did not require a third person (the stenographer) or extensive note taking, “it allowed interaction in the interview to retain a more natural character. In addition, tape-recording eliminated the conscious or unconscious bias associated with note taking” (p. 878). As such, researcher bias is reduced because the recorder captured natural interaction. The researcher does not sully the natural interactions, meanings, reality, and knowledge with her potential biases. The recording devices, then, are tools to work against researcher bias, a hallmark of objectivism and post-positivism.

Recording devices that preserve natural interactions and reduce researcher bias also articulate a post-positivist or objectivist construction of validity. J. M. Johnson (2002) wrote, “A verbatim record is the ideal if the subsequent analysis is to be valid and meaningful” (p. 112). In other words, for the interview to be valid, it is ideally recorded. The recording device captures the verbatim interview and its meanings and realities in their natural settings. A researcher can then discover those meanings and realities from the recording device during transcription and/or analysis. However, validity, as Lather (1993) reminds us, is a post-positivist and objectivist construct, a story of science.

Off-the-record comments, a “hallmark of qualitative interviewing” (Warren, 2002, p. 92), that are “sometimes as important as those derived from tape recordings” (p. 92), provide a space to explore the ethical and political dimensions of recording devices. The participant may request that certain comments be made off-the-record, or beyond the boundaries of the interview. The decisions made about what is observed and communicated—or what is made visible and invisible by participants, researchers, and recording devices—affect meaning, truth, reality, and knowledge because those comments may have “direct relevance to the research” (King & Horrocks, 2010, p. 116). King and Horrocks, in a brief paragraph, go on to suggest that those decisions are many times based on ethics and politics. While interview literature abounds with the ethical, political, and personal aspects of interviewing (e.g., Briggs, 2002; Ellis & Berger, 2002; Holstein & Gubrium, 1995), the vast majority of that literature does not address the recording device. If anything, the ethics and politics of recording devices are minor discussions. The absence of any substantive discussion gestures toward a viewpoint that recording devices are apolitical, acultural, and aproblematic.

Denzin (2002) wrote, “We inhabit a secondhand world, one already mediated by cinema, television, and other apparatuses” (p. 833). Such a world, he claims [drawing on Holstein and Gubrium (2000) and Atkinson and Silverman (1997)] is an interview society, a society that celebrates stories told through interviews by recording them. Some participants, however, may not choose to inhabit or question such a society. S. Johnson (2008), in her research about metadiscourse and linguistic identities of African American speakers of African American English (AAE), explained that some older participants (especially older men) were suspicious of the recording device and worried that the recording might later come back to haunt them. Given the troublesome history of academic research and African American communities, such concerns about possibly interpreting the recording device “as a surveillance device” (Back, 2012, p. 248) are understandable and warranted. In addition, Goody (2010) suggested the audio recorder allowed for richer examination of myths and rituals in anthropological work without addressing the cultural dynamics of recording devices. Sanjek (1990), another anthropologist, suggested that recording conversations might hold cultural biases about conversations. As such, recording conversations becomes a delicate dance of negotiating cultural ideas about conversations and the Western desire to record reality. Wenger (2002) described how she worked with older participants and their reluctance toward recording devices and, by extension, the interview society. Likewise, the interview society may very well be a classed society due to the availability of technology and the trust given to that technology. These examples gesture to the idea that while participants may inhabit the interview society, they may view that world with suspicion and such a suspicion may be linked to recording devices. Recording devices, then, can be linked to race, age, class, culture, and politics even though the qualitative inquiry and anthropological literature many times do not explicitly acknowledge these areas.

Feminists Reinharz (1992) and Oakley (1981) recommend feminist practices that work against positivist claims of power relations, objectivity, and bias in interviews. Both Reinharz and Oakley advocate that feminist researchers must work toward balancing power relations in interviews. It is the researcher, feminist or otherwise, who presses “record” or writes a note in her notebook. Decisions about what to record and not record are power moves because of the aforementioned political dimensions of recording devices. Both authors, however, do not interrogate how recording devices may affect power relations. Moreover, Oakley, in her critique of positivist, or what she called hygienic interviews, observed that sociologists who use interviews do not “actually bother to describe in detail the process of interviewing itself” (p. 31). Oakley does not describe one vital part of the interviewing process—the recording device. As noted above, the tape recorder is usually used to capture meanings in a bias-free way, a very objectivist and hygienic way of doing interviews as Lee (2004) suggested. In this way, her critique of the hygienic positivist practices of interviews is not fully articulated. Without interrogating the onto-epistemological assumptions of the recording device, feminist interviewing has yet to realize an important aspect of the critique against positivist interviewing practices.

The post-modern critiques (Gubrium & Holstein, 2003; Law, 2004; Scheurich, 1997) generated from the linguistic turn have attempted to wrestle the interview into a post-modern space. Law (2004), Richardson (2003), and Scheurich (1997) mention the use of recording devices in interviews (e.g., interviews were recorded), but do not critique them. It is assumed that researchers record an interview so that meanings can proliferate, realities constructed and deconstructed, validity questioned, inequalities explored, binaries studied, and subjectivities (de)constructed. However, the texts with which many post-researchers deconstruct humanist conceptions are the result of recording devices. Simply put, the text and its deconstructions are not possible without recording devices. The assumption and/or absence of acknowledging recording devices suggests that even as researchers deconstruct humanist conceptions of texts, language, power, the subject, and discourse, they are “implicated in the problematic [they] discuss” (St. Pierre, 2000, p. 479). The very matter—the recording device, a “mundane practice of research” (MacLure, 2011, p. 998)—that allows for the deconstruction of interview texts has yet to come under post-structuralism’s wary gaze.

An Objectivist–Realist Material-Discursive Practice

The repetition of objectivist and realist discourse (e.g., the capture of meaning, knowledge, and reality in their natural settings; bias; validity; and so on) and absences of discussions about recording devices in multiple paradigms cohere to form a material-discursive practice, a “material configuring of the world through which determinations of boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted” (Barad, 2007, p. 335). Recording devices capture and preserve meanings, knowledge, and truth in one-time only bounded social interactions; reduce bias; record reality; and create valid data even though those meanings, truths, and so on may be critiqued and/or deconstructed. Surviving forty years of paradigm shifts that moved qualitative researchers away from objectivism and realism, the tape recorder and now digital recorder are considered natural entities that are not to be questioned, just used in research. The discourses around recording devices are so “‘normal’ and ‘natural,’ it is difficult to think and act outside of [them]” (St. Pierre, 2000, p. 485). The normalized and naturalized discourses cement themselves into practices. According to Lee (2004), since the 1970s, the tape recorder no longer needed much legitimation, it was (and still is) “a general expectation that anyone carrying out in-depth interviews would be well advised to use a tape recorder” (p. 878). Lee claims that key authors such as Patton (2002) and Kvale (1996) treat the recording device in an “unreflexive way” (p. 879). In fact, only four index entries are dedicated to tape recorders in Gubrium and Holstein’s (2002) Handbook of Interview Research. ⁴ Moreover, critical, feminist, post-colonial, post-modern, post-structural, and post-humanist work have not interrogated the recording device—even though this work critiques the material-discursive practices of validity, bias, interview methodology, and stable subjects, objects, texts, and so on. The repetition and subsequent normalization of this material-discursive practice creates a space in which researchers are caught in the snares of objectivism and realism even though they may not subscribe to those onto-epistemological frameworks.

Agential Realism

Barad (2007) defined agential realism as “an epistemological-ontological-ethical framework that provides an understanding of the role of human and nonhuman, material and discursive, and natural and cultural factors in scientific and other social-material practices” (p. 26). In other words, agential realism does not rely on a binary system in which, for example, humans and nonhumans are opposed to each other. Instead, binary terms are epistemologically and ontologically inseparable. In this way, “knowing and being cannot be isolated from one another, but rather are mutually implicated” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 116). Because of the inseparability of binary terms as well as knowing and being, Barad (2007) uses the term intra-action, “in recognition of their ontological inseparability, in contrast to the usual ‘interaction,’ which relies on a metaphysics of individualism (in particular, the prior existence of separately determinate entities)” (p. 128). Put another way, intra-actions assume that humans, nonhumans, culture, discourse, and so on are entangled and do not preexist each other. Intra-actions between these entities create different phenomena, or “different patterns of mattering or ‘diffraction patterns’ are produced in the agential intra-actions between different types of matter that need not necessarily involve humans” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 117). As a result, knowing and being are intra-active processes from which different phenomena become intelligible. In summary, agential realism assumes an onto-epistemological connection between humans, nonhumans, culture, discourse, and so on that intra-act with each other to produce phenomena.

Unlike the material-discursive practice described in the first section of this article in which the researcher is undoubtedly the center and preexists meaning, knowledge, and reality, intra-actions in agential realism assume that researchers are not the center of action. Barad (2007) explained,

But phenomena—whether lizards, electrons, or humans—exist as a result of, and as part of, the world’s ongoing intra-activity, its dynamic and contingent differentiation into specific relationalities. “We humans” don’t make it so, not by dint of our own will, and not on our own. But through our advances, we participate in bringing forth the world in its specificity, including ourselves. (p. 353)

In other words, the researcher is no longer the center. Her research questions and practices do not make a world. She, her research questions, and tools (i.e., recording devices) are part of and the result of the ongoing intra-actions of the world. A researcher, then, participates with the world to create an articulation of a dynamic world. In this way, bias is inherent in agential realism because researchers “are themselves specific parts of the world’s ongoing configuration” (p. 341). Simply put, a researcher cannot tease herself apart from the world because she is part of and results from the ongoing intra-action of the world.

Culture, politics, and society are both part of and result from intra-actions in agential realism. In the first irruption, I described the intra-actions between the recording device, the participant, my body, and the physical space of the object-interview. Rethinking this irruption with agential realism allows for another understanding in which these terms are inseparable. In their inseparability, we (recording device, cultural conceptions, participant, bodies, and the physical space of the object-interview) constitute each other as well as produce an articulation of the dynamic world. First, the intra-actions constitute us. For example, the participant, like Wenger’s (2002) description of her participants, viewed the recording device as suspect. The participant’s conception of the recording device can easily be linked to cultural attitudes about recording speech. I, however, had a different cultural relationship to the recording device because it was part of my training as a qualitative researcher. At the time of the object-interview, I followed the naturalized objectivist–realist material-discursive practice to a tee. I viewed the recording device as a naturalized part of research, a scientific tool not to be questioned. Competing and inseparable cultural perceptions constituted the intra-actions.

Second, the intra-actions that produced that irruption created a world that was unique from the other object-interviews I did in the study. I interviewed other elderly participants and they did not appear to have the same responses to the recording devices. As such, other object-interviews created other coagulations of intra-actions. Like humans, apparatuses are “not individually separable or determinate since they are always already implicated in ongoing intra-actions and enfoldings” (Barad, 2007, p. 450). In contrast to the material-discursive practice described in the first section of this article, the recording devices, researchers, and participants cannot be divorced from politics, class, gender, age, and so on because they are always already entangled with them. In addition, bodies (both of the researcher and participant) and the physical space of the interview matter and cannot be separated by the recording device. In the first irruption, I noted how my body (e.g., the crook of my elbow and my buttocks) intra-acted with the recording device as the participant and I walked around her home where the object-interview took place. In this way, recording devices are always entangled with a host of entities that generate different phenomena in each interview.

The recording device provides a way for researchers to work with the ongoing intra-actions that are part of and resulting from “the reconfiguring of the world [that] continues without end” (Barad, 2007, p. 170). Barad explained that apparatuses, or in my research—recording devices, make agential cuts, or “enact what matters and what is excluded from mattering” (p. 148). In the act of recording an interview, the recording device “enacts an agential cut—a resolution of the ontological indeterminacy” (p. 175). In other words, the recording device (and the person who clicks the record button on the machine) makes a provisional boundary for the interview. Boundaries, in agential realism, however “do not sit still” (p. 171) because of the indeterminacy of an ongoing configuration of the world. Simply put, the recording device places an arbitrary boundary around the interview therefore giving it some onto-epistemological security. This onto-epistemological security provides a space for researchers to interrogate what is provisionally contained within those shifting boundaries.

The provisionally bound space provides a space for researchers to make further agential cuts that “materialize different phenomena” (Barad, 2007, p. 178). In my first irruption, I could have ignored the paper rustling, muffled sounds, and the swish-swash of my corduroys. Instead, I attended to that irruption because I could not tease my body (myself), the physical space of the interview, and cultural perceptions about recording devices away from those intra-actions. Researchers do not willfully make agential cuts. Instead researchers “help enact” (p. 178) cuts in the ongoing configuration of the world. Because I was (and still am) part of and result of the intra-actions that the recording device provisionally bounded, I had to pay attention to the irruption. Simply put, I helped make the cut by attending to the irruptive intra-actions that created the world of that particular object-interview.

Likewise, participants help make cuts when they choose to go “off the record.” In the second irruption, I described how a participant did not want delicate information about her family’s mental health history to be recorded. In making the request, the participant helped enact a cut about what can be included and excluded in knowledge production. Barad (2007) wrote,

We are responsible for the cuts that we help enact not because we do the choosing (neither do we escape responsibility because “we” are “chosen” by them), but because we are an agential part of the material becoming of the universe. (p. 178)

In other words, cuts make us responsible because we are actively configuring a world. The participant actively created a world in which she attempted to ward off negative cultural attitudes about mental health issues. Because she was actively configuring that world, I had to honor her agential cut. However, what is included and excluded is never so simple. As I mentioned in the irruption, that conversation lingers in my body. In fact, when I emailed the participant about including this irruption in this article, she still remembered it. The conversation lingers because it was and still is part of a world that continues to configure itself. In other words, what is included and excluded by agential cuts does not mean something did not happen nor does it mean that I can pretend something away. That something is always part of and result of ongoing intra-actions.

Differential Dancing Meanings

The ongoing configuration of the world and the agential cuts made with that world has implications for meaning. Barad (2007) wrote, “Meaning is not a property of individual words or groups of words but an ongoing performance of the world in its differential dance of intelligibility and unintelligibility” (p. 149). In other words, the discursive boundary-making practices of “This begins the interview” do not bind the meaning of the interview. As described in the third irruption, it became painfully obvious that the recording device and I became entangled in an always already configuring world of shifting and contingent meanings and we (the recording device and I) had to catch up to it. We could only attempt to grasp that world of intra-acting entities that we joined.

The provisional boundary made by the intra-action of the researcher pressing “record” on the recording device in the physical space of the interview provides some onto-epistemological security for the dance of intelligible and unintelligible meanings generated by the intra-actions between researcher, recording device, participant, culture, space, discourse, and so on. In such a provisional space, “ambiguities always exist” (Barad, 2007, p. 430). In other words, meaning is always contested because different meanings are always possible on account of the ongoing intra-actions that produce them. In this way, researcher and recording devices can never capture meanings. Instead, recording devices and researchers attempt to grasp always already contested meanings that are part of and produced by dynamic intra-actions.

Transcripts produced by the intra-actions during and after interviews, then, are contested texts that constitute, not represent, realities and meanings. Barad (2007) wrote,

We don’t have the distances of space, time, and matter required to replicate “what is”; in an important sense, we are already materially entangled across space and time with the diffractive apparatuses that iteratively rework the “objects” that “we” study. (p. 384)

Because the world continues to configure itself, it is impossible for transcripts to represent, or replicate, the interview. Representation, or re-presentation, becomes impossible. The act of transcription, then, is an intra-action in which the intra-actions that constitute the provisionally bound interview are reignited when the researcher textualizes the intra-actions of the interview. Barad’s (2007) performative approach that “takes account of the fact that knowing does not come from standing at a distance and representing but rather from a direct material engagement with the world” (p. 49) is useful in thinking about such a vision of transcription. For example, I transcribed all the object-interviews in my study. I quickly learned that I had to insert photographs of objects as participants talked about them so that the text made sense. The objects, participants, discourse, culture, and I intra-acted together during the interviews, and I could not tease those intra-actions apart in the transcripts. The decision to include the objects was an agential cut that created a performance of the object-interview in which those intra-actions became intelligible. That agential cut also created a space for the intra-actions to proliferate during transcription. In this way, I continue to intra-act with the transcripts and, by extension, the constitutive intra-actions of the interviews. The agential cuts that researchers help make while transcribing matter because they constitute different onto-epistemological realities that are provisionally bounded by the recording device. ⁶

The performative transcripts provide a space for “particular concepts [to] become meaningful” (Barad, 2007, p. 339). The researcher—who is no longer the center, but always already part of and constitutive of the dynamic world—helps make agential cuts that create certain phenomena and reality in which concepts become intelligible. For example, the intra-actions of objects, subjects, and discourse and my attention to those intra-actions in the performative transcripts created a space for me to explore those intra-actions using Deleuze’s (1991b, 1993) fold, an a priori movement that renders the distinction between subjects and objects relational, or folding, unfolding, and refolding together such that they become entangled to each other. Those concepts, products of “ongoing open-ended articulation” (Barad, 2007, p. 342) of the world, are also always shifting. Because the world is constantly configuring itself, the objects of study—in my case the folding objects and subjects of family history genealogy—are always changing and folding. In this way, the sensation of exploding and proliferating meanings in the third irruption described above becomes intelligible in agential realism. The performative transcripts and the concepts made intelligible by that performance change and shift because it is part of and resulting from an ongoing dynamism of the world.

Responsible and Contingent Knowing

Because meaning and reality are part of and result from the ongoing dynamic world, a different conception of knowledge is warranted. In the fourth irruption, I noted that I was dumbfounded by the entangled world of that particular object-interview. Barad (2007) wrote, “We don’t obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are part of the world” (p. 185). Knowledge, then, is a dynamic process of intra-acting with an entangled world. In other words, knowledge is something that does not solely “exist in the human mind” (p. 379). Entangled researchers are always already saying, “we’ll see” about knowledge practices because they cannot tease themselves apart from entangling intra-actions. Such knowledge requires a different onto-epistemological stance in which “knowing is a direct material engagement, a practice of intra-acting with the world in its dynamic material configuring, its ongoing articulation” (p. 379). This conception of knowledge allows me to diffractively work with phenomena produced by the intra-actions in my study. Such work is an attention to “diffraction/difference pattern[s] of intra-acting entangled states of nature cultures” (p. 89). For example, I attended to the Deleuze (1991b, 1993) fold and the constant dynamism of the worlds of interviews. To maintain such dynamism, I created a concept, the ensemble of life, a loose grouping of objects that fold, unfold, and refold with an ancestor that is open and connectable. The concept materialized from the intra-actions in my study (e.g., the objects participants shared with me; what was said about the objects; how those objects folded with ancestors; the foldings created a space to see entanglements between objects, ancestors, culture, history, and so on; and how those folds created a contingent group that was(is) open and connectable to other objects-ancestors as well as culture, history, and so on; the theories I used to help me think; and so on). And, as I continue to intra-act with my study, new materializations of the concept will undoubtedly emerge. For instance, the ensemble of life I wrote about in my dissertation (Nordstrom, 2011) has moved and shifted as I continue to intra-act with the concept (e.g., Nordstrom, 2013, in press). Each intra-action matters in my knowledge production because I am always already intra-acting with the concept and my study.

As a result, a different ethics of knowledge is warranted. Barad (2007) wrote, “Knowing requires differential accountability to what matters and is excluded from mattering” (p. 380). In other words, knowing is an act of responsibility to the agential cuts I help make as I intra-act with the objects, ancestors, participants, culture, discourses, and so on that constitute my study. I cannot remove myself from that responsibility, and it wore heavy on me. I frequently wrote about such a responsibility in my research journal as I negotiated how to make sense of the entanglement that is my research. Specifically, I wrote about not falling prey to what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call interpretosis, “human kind’s fundamental neurosis” (p. 114) about the supposedly constant need to interpret and signify texts and actions. I wrestled with questions about how transcripts, analysis, and the creation of a concept might stabilize entanglements from which I cannot extricate myself. Barad helps me to think about such a responsibility. She wrote,

Intra-acting responsibly as part of the world means taking account of the entangled phenomena that are intrinsic to the world’s vitality and being responsive to the possibilities that might help us flourish. Meeting each moment, being alive to the possibilities of becoming, is an ethical call, an invitation that is written into the very matter of all being and becoming. (p. 396)

Such an onto-epistemological-ethical framework asks me to be held accountable to the intra-actions and allow them to become. It helps me to see how the transcripts are contestable performances that are always available to different possibilities. In this way, my response to the participant’s question in the fourth irruption (“How are you going to make sense of it all?) is always “We’ll see. We’ll see how these intra-actions constitute us and move us into different spaces. We’ll see how we become in those spaces.” Any knowledge I produce is about opening possibilities and becomings—not closing them down.

The ethics of knowledge in agential realism gestures toward a sense of validity in which I am ethically obligated to take account for the agential cuts I help make with my data. Such a sense of validity extends Lather’s (1996) conception of rhizomatic validity, which she explained as “a journey among intersections, nodes, and regionalizations through a multi-centered complexity” (p. 680). Each leg of the journey has different stakes of responsiveness. Those responses are, of course, the agential cuts I help make. Those agential cuts create “different materializations of the world” (Barad, 2007, p. 380) and are inextricably linked to a responsibility to dynamic knowledge production. Barad explained such a responsibility as “a matter of accountability for what materializes, for what comes to be. It matters which cuts are enacted: different cuts enact different materialized becomings” (p. 361). In other words, agential cuts matter. They matter a lot because different materializations become possible. Simply put, the cuts and how a researcher attends to those cuts matters because those cuts constitute an articulation of the world and how that articulation materialized. Validity, then, is a responsibility and ethical practice of attending to agential cuts that make certain phenomena and becomings intelligible.

Writing With Atomic Parts and ANDS

In an entangled world of humans, nonhumans, nature, culture, and so on in which meanings differentially dance in provisional worlds that demand a responsible and contingent knowing, how might researchers (who are no longer in the center) write in such shifting spaces? The language with which we write is always embroiled in humanism, for, as St. Pierre and Pillow (2000) remind us, humanism is “our mother tongue” (p. 4). In this way, we can never reject humanist language—we must always work within and against the confines of humanist language. However, Foucault (1984) wrote that the “humanistic thematic is in itself too supple, too diverse, too inconsistent to serve as an axis of reflection” (p. 44). How, then, might researchers who work with agential realism locate supple spaces in which to diffractively write entangling and contingent worlds?

Humanist language is a subject-centered language. In most Western European languages, the subject usually precedes the verb in a sentence. In this way, the subject is quite literally the doer before the deed (e.g., I write an article). Summarizing Nietzsche, Barad (2007) wrote,

Nietzsche warned against the mistaken tendency to take grammar too seriously: allowing linguistic structure to shape or determine our understanding of the world, believing that the subject-and-predicate structure of language reflects a prior ontological reality of substance and attribute. The belief that grammatical categories reflect the underlying structure of the world is a continuing seductive habit of mind worth questioning. (p. 133)

As has been noted, agential realism asks readers to rethink the habits of mind in which the subject precedes all action. Verbs and a variety of nouns entangle the subject and throw into radical doubt the humanist grammatical structure in which the subject takes precedence. How, then, might researchers interested in agential realism begin to question the grammatical structures that produce certain habits of mind, especially the habit of a subject-centered grammar?

To question the seduction of grammatical structures that constitute language and the tempting habits they produce, it is first necessary to reconceptualize language and grammar in a state of disequilibrium. Instead of thinking of language as a system in equilibrium, Deleuze (1994) suggested that “language quivers in all its limbs” (p. 24), or, more simply put, language is always already in disequilibrium. Deleuze (1991a) provides a supple space in which to think about the disequilibrium of language and how such instability might help unlearn the habits of grammar. He wrote,

We start with atomic parts, but these atomic parts have transitions, passages, “tendencies,” which circulate from one to another. These tendencies give rise to habits. Isn’t this the answer to the question “what are we?” We are habits, nothing but habits—the habit of saying “I.” (p. x)

To relieve humanist language’s subject-centered tendencies, researchers might be well advised to begin the difficult work of unlearning the habitual “I” that positions the researcher in the center of the world. Unlearning the habit of “I,” then, is about locating the trembling spaces of language—those passages and tendencies—that make it possible to learn different habits of writing and being.

Unlearning this habit of the “I” is something that complicates my writing—makes me a “stranger in the language in which [I] expresses [my]self, even if this is [my] mother tongue” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 25)—as I learn and unlearn the habits of language. Deleuze’s stuttering, a poetics of “an affective and intensive language” (p. 23), helps me to both unlearn the habits of a humanist subject-centered language and learn different ways to express entanglements that throw into radical doubt such language. Such work is experimentation, “an open-ended process that explores what’s new and what’s coming into being” (Baugh, 2005, p. 91) with language and writing. It is an experimentation with grammar, “the atomic parts” (Deleuze, 1991a, p. x) of language and the “AND, AND, AND” (Deleuze & Parnet, 2002, p. 34) of humans, nonhumans, nature, culture, and so on. For example, in a recent conference paper (Nordstrom, 2014), I experimented with gerunds as a way to become a stranger in my mother tongue and work with the aforementioned entanglements. The use of gerunds as nouns created a contingent and shifting space of entangling humans, nonhumans, nature, culture, and so on without centering those movements with the use of “I” in the paper.

Following contingent linguistic tendencies that multiply with ANDS that open a space to unlearn the subject-centered habits of humanist language is no easy task. However, such writing may very well allow researchers to “take up a certain viewpoint toward the world in order to engage in certain ways of living” (May, 1996, p. 294). Such work has the potential to throw into radical doubt subject-centered writing practices and humanist language and grammar that support such practices as well as open up new ways of thinking about social phenomena. ⁷

Recording Devices in Agential Realism

By examining the four irruptions with agential realism, I have shown how recording devices cannot be taken for granted, a tool I use “to tell me how the world is in accordance with [my] human-based conceptions” (Barad, 2007, p. 335). An agential realist conception of apparatuses has allowed me to demonstrate how recording devices are “specific material configurations (dynamic reconfigurings) of the world that play a role in the production of phenomena” (p. 335). While I used the same digital recorder for all my object-interviews, the digital recorder becomes a different iteration, or material-discursive practice, of itself because it is configured differently in intra-actions between humans (e.g., researchers and participants), culture, politics, discourse, and so on. In this way, I cannot provide definitions for what a recording device is in my research practices, because the “diffractive apparatus iteratively reworks the ‘objects’ that ‘[I]’ study” (p. 384). As a result, I can only describe the recording device’s becomings as it continues to intra-act with other entities. No singular definition can describe the recording device because through its iterations and becomings it exhausts definitions. Moreover, I cannot provide clear ways for researchers to implement an agential realist account of recording devices in their own research. To do so would be to present recording devices as “mere laboratory instruments, static instrumental embodiments of human concepts” (p. 334). This article serves as an invitation for researchers to engage in the “open-ended and dynamic material-discursive practices” (p. 334) of recording devices in their research, to see how those material-discursive practices articulate certain “‘concepts’ and ‘things’” (p. 334) in their research.

While some may argue that the iterations of the recording devices made the knowledge presented in this article possible, the intra-actions that produced the iterations made this knowledge possible. Knowledge, as Barad (2007) reminds us, is “about intra-acting from within, and as part of, the phenomena produced” (p. 56). In other words, I do not generate knowledge. Rather, I, along with other humans, nonhumans, culture, politics, and so on, generate knowledge through our intra-actions together in particular places. This article is part of and resulting from my ongoing intra-actions with humans (e.g., participants, theorists, colleagues, and friends), nonhumans (e.g., objects of family history genealogy, recording devices, transcripts, research journal, computer, Internet, books, sticky notes, highlighters, pens, and my cats who always keep a watchful eye over me while I work), culture (e.g., academic culture, my cultural attitudes toward recording devices, and cultural attitudes of participants in my study), politics (e.g., reading the scholarly literature, intra-acting with the literature, writing, and responding to intra-actions in ethical ways), space (e.g., the physical space of the interviews, where I transcribed performative transcripts, and various places I call “home” and “work”), and so on. “‘We’ have ‘intra-actively’ written each other” (Barad, 2007, p. x) in this article. I only helped make agential cuts in these entangling intra-actions.

Not So Innocent Anymore

Platt (2002), in her history of the interview, suggested that little research has been completed about the changing technologies of recording devices in interviews despite their importance in qualitative interviewing. Such an absence is understandable. Barad (2003) wrote, “Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter” (p. 801). Qualitative methodologists have focused so much on language, discourse, culture, and so on in the interview literature at the expense of matter, the material, objects, and so on. Matter, as the new materialists (e.g., Barad, 2003, 2007; Bennett, 2010; Hekman, 2010) have argued, has been left at the wayside and it warrants theorization. In this article, I drew on Barad’s (2003, 2007) work to focus on the theoretical consequences of making recording devices matter in qualitative research.

First, I performed a diffractive reading to demonstrate that recording devices never were innocent and mute tools that can be taken for granted. I argued that recording devices are both embodied and practiced with an objectivist–realist material-discursive practice in which certain conceptions of stable meanings, knowledge, and reality become intelligible. Those meanings, knowledge, and reality are then bound by discursive moves that define the event of the interview as a singular event. I then described how such a material-discursive practice supports post-positivist conceptions of bias, validity, and politics. While many scholars (e.g., feminist, critical, and post-structuralists) have critiqued ideas about bias, validity, politics, meaning, reality, and so on, the apparatus, the recording device, has remained unquestioned. As a result, even for the most critical qualitative researcher, recording devices are normalized and unquestioned scientific tools that operate within objectivism and realism in qualitative interviews.

I then shared four irruptions that called into question such an objectivist–realist material-discursive practice and created a space for me to explore recording devices within agential realism. I first explained agential realism as an onto-epistemological framework in nonhumans, humans, culture, discourse, and so on intra-act together. No one entity is a priori; instead, each entity intra-acts with each other to produce an articulation of a dynamic world. Then, I discussed meaning as contested, performative, and always in motion. Such a conception of meaning creates a dynamic process of knowing and being in a ceaselessly changing world that demands an ethical response-ability (Barad, 2007). The dynamism and ethics of contingent worlds in agential realism requires a rethinking of language and writing that throws into radical doubt subject-centered habits of grammar. Agential realism allows me to view the irruptions as productive and generative spaces that ask me to diffractively work with intra-actions and the phenomena they produce.

The material turn in post-humanism, “the crucial recognition that nonhumans play an important role in naturalcultural practices, including everyday social practices, scientific practices, and practices that do not include humans” (Barad, 2007, p. 32), provides a way for qualitative researchers to diffractively work with intra-actions that constitute our research practices. Nonhumans and their intra-actions with humans matter and we can no longer “take the distinction between ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’ for granted” (p. 32). Recording devices are no longer innocent, mute entities that can be taken for granted. They never were innocent or mute. Recording devices speak volumes about epistemological and ontological frameworks that, as we know from the crises of representation and legitimation and the diffractive reading in this article, are far from innocent. As a result, recording devices can no longer be taken for granted. Recording devices are material-discursive practices that are part of and result from onto-epistemological frameworks. Different frameworks are possible, and, as a result, different material-discursive practices with recording devices are both possible and desirable.

This article seeks to demonstrate how theory lives and breathes in recording devices and calls into questions those theories, those material-discursive practices, about recording devices. I attempted to “break with many of the assumptions of a methodological positivism” (Clough, 2009, p. 45) that undergird the material-discursive practices of recording devices by offering an agential realist material-discursive practice of recording devices in my study. In this way, this article is about doing theory by “being open to the world’s aliveness, allowing [my]self to be lured by curiosity, surprise, and wonder” (Barad, 2012, p. 207) of recording devices. In so doing, the theories that support the conventional material-discursive practices critiqued in the diffractive reading and the agential realist account that I detail positions theory as “not [some] mere metaphysical pronouncement on the world from some presumed position of exteriority” (p. 207). Rather, theories and methodologies are “alive and lively” (p. 207) and doing theories and methodologies “is being responsible and responsive to the world’s patternings and murmuings” (p. 207). Those researchers who are interested in implementing a similar approach in their research might be well advised to recognize the liveliness of theories and the world’s figurings and configurings that take them off-guard and throw into radical doubt the “transparent, natural, and real” (St. Pierre, 2011, p. 623) fictions that guide research practices. Such work may lead to unanticipated methodological thinking that pushes researchers into methodological spaces that shift further and further away from positivist methodological practices and open new ways of thinking about and doing research.