Alienating Apparatuses: Behind the Scenes of the Neoliberal Academic Assemblage

Re-Storying the Teacher Story

In my dissertation (Rath, 2015), I use Barad’s (2007) concept of apparatus to think about stories, in particular, the stories used by teacher preparation programs to train teachers. Narrative representations of teaching serve a particular purpose in teacher preparation because teaching requires “complex practice under conditions of uncertainty” (Grossman et al., 2009, p. 2058). That is, practitioners must be able to exercise professional judgment and adjust quickly to changing circumstances, and representations of teaching are offered to teachers-to-be to make this daunting task more manageable. The use of representations also allows novices to develop careful attention to the components of teaching practice, provides an approximation of practice as an opportunity for analysis and problem solving, models strategies put to work in various contexts and under various circumstances, and gives student teachers access to diverse classroom settings that may not be available in their practicum and student teaching experiences. In other words, representations do important and necessary work in the preparation of new teachers.

Many such representations of teaching practice are examples of what I call the Teacher Story, a tale of some (not too dire) problem that resolves neatly into a learning opportunity that obviously improves teaching practice. Teacher Stories reflect momentary disconcertment, a moment of puzzlement in which one’s certainty is disrupted (Verran, 1999), but not the sort of productive struggle that yields new thinking. Such stories, perhaps inadvertently, obscure the profession’s messiness and contingency, its indeterminacy and doubt, its shifting and transient nature; they are linear narratives—tidy, straightforward, readily intelligible—whereas teaching practice is messy, circuitous, and often confusing.

As Rosiek (2013) notes, our inquiries and the knowing they produce “do not offer mere representations of independent objects. They become material semiotic interventions in the continuing stream of experience” (p. 699). The stories central to teacher education rely on what Barad (2007) calls “thingification—the turning of relations into ‘things,’ ‘entities,’ ‘relata,’” (p. 130), in this case the reduction of teaching practice into a series of pedagogical moves, instructional strategies, and scripted interactions. In my dissertation, I set out to re-story teaching practice, collaborating with in-service teachers to see how we might story teaching differently.

Story as Apparatus

Using Barad (2007) to frame the project, I argue that stories are apparatuses, knowledge-producing practices that, however temporarily, resolve indeterminacy. Barad uses various terms in Meeting the Universe Halfway—measurement instrument, measurement process, measurement, and experimental practice—before settling on apparatus or that which “enacts a cut” between objects and “agencies of observation” (p. 114). For Barad, objects with determinate properties and boundaries do not exist separately from the processes by which they are made intelligible. If there is no inherent distinction, the only way to distinguish between an object and the agencies of observation is to impose one by choosing an apparatus.

… every measurement involves a particular choice of apparatus, providing the conditions necessary to give meaning to a particular set of variables, at the exclusion of other essential variables, thereby placing a particular embodied cut delineating the object form the agencies of observation. (p. 115)

Barad describes this cut as “constructed, agentially enacted, materially conditioned and embodied, [and] contingent” (p. 115). Making such a cut resolves indeterminacy, at least for the moment and under specific circumstances, and the object becomes intelligible. Put another way, objects and “concepts obtain their meaning in relation to a particular physical apparatus” (p. 120). Apparatuses “enact agential cuts that produce determinate boundaries and properties” (p. 148), and are the “practices of mattering through which intelligibility and materiality are constituted (along with an excluded realm of what doesn’t matter)” (p. 170).

That we think in narrative has become a commonsensical notion; telling stories and telling about stories, their nature and their significance, turns up in a wide variety of fields. In the social sciences, this attention to stories is referred to as the narrative turn or the literary turn (for surveys of the narrative turn in social science research, see Andrews, Squire, & Tamboukou, 2013; Hyvärinen, 2010). Because thinking in narrative is such a ubiquitous notion, the apparatus-ness of stories is perhaps less visible than usual; that is, Barad argues that apparatuses come to be taken for granted as a function of their apparatus-ness, and I think stories are particularly vulnerable to such assumptions: stories are sentimentalized, which makes it harder to look carefully at how they work.

Atkinson and Delamont (2006), in their cautionary tale about the uncritical use of narrative, review the literature associated with the narrative turn in qualitative research in service of their call for increased analysis of how narratives work to make meaning and produce knowledge. They note that “social scientists need to treat narratives as ‘accounts’ and ‘performances’” (p. 166), and, thus, to carefully examine “the accounting devices they enshrine” (p. 167) and the esthetic and dramatic qualities they employ to make their point. That is, we need to analyze how the elements of craft in narratives serve certain rhetorical purposes. Atkinson and Delamont remind us that stories do not reflect, capture, or mirror some already existing reality: they produce it. As such, truth (or accuracy, or authenticity) is not a property of a story.

Although Atkinson and Delamont (2006), in their attention to stories as performances, mean performance in the dramatic sense of the word, their call for increased analysis of how narratives “create the realities they purport to describe” (p. 167) can be answered by thinking about stories with the concepts from Barad discussed above. For example, by thinking about story’s performativity, we can see how stories function similarly to other instruments of knowledge production; like the scanning tunneling microscope in Barad’s example, a story is a productive practice. As an apparatus, a story brings into being, however temporarily, a particular world by means of the selecting and sequencing that is inevitably part of the composition process. Thinking the story as apparatus lifts it out of debates about authenticity and accuracy and instead has us consider what it makes matter and under what conditions.

In more traditional accounts of teaching practice, teacher knowledge has been made to matter in particular ways, using particular story-apparatuses, to forward particular meanings, which make possible particular agential possibilities, all of which could be otherwise. As noted above, stories about teaching practice are too often presented as tidy, complete narratives. These polished compositions obscure the constitutive nature of storytelling by being overly committed to verisimilitude, causing the reader to suspend disbelief and become immersed in the narrative. To remain aware of how stories function as apparatuses, however, would seem to require a failure of verisimilitude: Readers must be continually, or at least periodically, distracted somehow, to remember to ask questions about how the text is working to produce knowing.

Storytelling Failures, Deliberate and Accidental

Out of both necessity and unexamined habit, the field of teacher education positions stories of teaching practice to be celebrated rather than analyzed (Atkinson & Delamont, 2006). I set out to construct a teacher story that—by means of a deliberate failure to resolve indeterminacy, a deliberate failure of verisimilitude—raises questions about the nature of teacher education and teaching itself: a diffractive story. A diffractive story is one that disperses and disrupts, overlaps and interferes, to resist an “easy sense” (Mazzei, 2014) of teaching practice. A diffractive story makes its apparatus-ness evident, inviting an interrogation of how it was produced, what it produces for readers, and what it omits or renders invisible. A diffractive story surfaces where differences get made, and (hopefully) makes a difference.

To experiment with diffractive storytelling, I played with creating a diffraction grating out of words. As Barad (2007) describes it, Meeting the Universe Halfway “works as a diffraction grating” (p. 37), in which she reads theories from a wide range of disciplines “through one another. . . to provide a transdisciplinary approach that remains rigorously attentive to important details of specialized arguments within a field, in an effort to foster constructive engagements across (and a reworking of) disciplinary boundaries” (p. 25). My collaborators and I had written together for months, and I extracted bits of these writings, sequencing the fragments together, arranging and rearranging to see what was there.

As I worked, I was reminded of standing outside the English building during a class break, all the former smokers loitering restlessly, not sure what to do with ourselves for these 15 min. I was a high school teacher working on a master’s in English literature at a university with a well-known creative writing program, and even though they were very suspicious of high school teachers, somehow I got taken in by a group of poets and nonfiction writers who worried a lot about typeface and white space and the placement of words on the page. Experiments in form—texts such as Chris Ware’s (2012) board game/graphic novel Building Stories and John D’Agata and Fingals’ (2012) Lifespan of a Fact—were debated and pronounced revolutionary or too contrived to be interesting. These writers were committed to the notion that readers’ interactions with text are shaped not only by what the text says but also by how it says it. Form does not follow from content so much as form and content are inseparable; it is impossible to determine where content stops and form begins. Although they were certainly not drawing on Barad to do so, they were talking about the apparatus-ness of textual form.

In my experiments with the apparatus of textual form, I eventually settled on a variety of fragments in different voices, and sequenced them by choosing titles for each fragment and ordering them alphabetically: A move intended to be ironic given the proliferation in recent years of stepwise teaching how-to manuals. In an effort to invoke the structure of a diffraction grating on the page, I formatted the fragments as single-spaced, justified block paragraphs with a bit of extra padding—white space—between paragraphs. My plan was to share the story, entitled “The ABCs of Teaching,” with preservice teachers in the last term of their preparation program, and I dreamt of using their responses to make a case for how the story worked to diffract their own experiences in the classroom and their future-teacher worries about the classrooms they would be responsible for in just a few weeks through the voices of my in-service teacher collaborators.

Convinced that I was on to something magical and brilliant, I extended this content/form experiment into the dissertation itself, breaking up the traditional analytic voice with fragments in a personal one. I was constructing a diffractive account that made visible how, as Lenz Taguchi and Palmer (2013) describe it, “thinking, seeing and knowing are never done in isolation but are always affected by different forces coming together” (p. 676). As Barad (2007) notes, “diffraction is marked by patterns of difference” (p. 71), in particular, the “differences that our knowledge-making practices make and the effects they have on the world” (p. 72). Here again, I wanted the fragments, which foreground my thinking and seeing and knowing, to evoke a diffraction grating, highlighting how they at times amplify and at times interfere with the ideas presented in the main body of the text.

As the project unfolded and I began to share “The ABCs of Teaching” with different audiences, I became fascinated by the ways in which it failed. Student teachers who read my story resisted the anonymity of the voices, trained as they were to read only certain people as legitimate sources for the storying of teaching. An American Educational Research Association (AERA) reviewer thought it was a problem that I had “created a linear teacher narrative” myself: “I can’t think of anything more linear than ABCs, yet that is the title of your narrative.” It turns out that irony does not always come through in the text.

Perhaps the most spectacular failure, however, I discuss in detail in the next section, and it had me set aside this project for more than a year, as it produced an alienation from the work that made it very difficult for me to continue it. It is a failure produced inside the mechanisms of the neoliberal academic assemblage, and has to do with what is deemed intelligible and worthy, with what counts and to whom.

Agentic Capacity and the Neoliberal Academic Assemblage

As a student of Lisa Mazzei, I am well-trained in thinking with theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) and the methodology of the “posts” (St. Pierre, 2011); I take an expansive view of what counts as data and know better than to code whatever it is I decide to consider (St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014). I was thrilled to be able to play in the space of possibility opened up by postfoundational approaches to research and felt encouraged to reach for creative writing and art practices to play with my data, to collage and remix (Holbrook & Pourchier, 2014), and to take risks. Perhaps noticing my slide into increasingly imaginative data analysis practices, Lisa encouraged me to consult the university’s thesis editor early in my writing process to make sure the textual innovations I was proposing—at various points I considered using marginalia, pull quotes, handwriting—would be acceptable in the document I needed to submit to the university.

As it turns out, no. No they were not.

In our first meeting, the editor’s greeting was, “MLA, APA, or Chicago?” She handled the APA manual carefully as she pulled it from a shelf, though it would soon be clear that she had no need of the hard copy: the rules flowed from that green Papermate Flair felt-tip pen, the likes of which I had not seen since I was a child, onto the pages of the draft chapter I had brought with me to illustrate my formatting plans. When she reached the first fragment, her pen hovered over the page and she looked up at me for an explanation. I had distinguished these sections from the analytical sections of the work with formatting choices similar to those in “The ABCs of Teaching” and set them inside square brackets, which conventionally signal material that has been inserted for clarity. As I tried to explain, she went back to work, striking through the bracket and the padding, indicating that I should indent and double space. When I tried to explain that my formatting choices were part of the larger argument I was making, that I could justify them with properly rigorous citations, she conceded that I could italicize the fragments to distinguish them from the main body of the text, but that they must otherwise be formatted “correctly.” I objected again—cautiously, of course, as this woman was the final gatekeeper of the project, her approval required before I could officially graduate—that large blocks of italics are difficult to read, and she replied that I was being fussy, that esthetics are not more important than rules, that this is the way it is done, the way it must be done.

I could have pushed back, to be sure. I could have solicited Lisa’s help to insist that my formatting choices were part of the larger argument of the work, not mere esthetics (as though there is anything mere about esthetics) but a necessary methodological intervention. Other scholars have successfully completed dissertation projects much more controversial than mine—I am thinking here of Ken Gale, Jane Speedy and Jonathan Wyatt’s (2010) coauthored dissertation or Nick Sousanis’ (2015) recent graphic dissertation, Unflattening. But the possibilities for methodological innovations are constrained, I will argue, by various forces at work in the neoliberal academic assemblage. This encounter with the dissertation editor was really a small example of a larger encounter with the neoliberal academic assemblage and what kinds of knowledge it values, by what acceptable means that knowledge can be made intelligible, and how unruly knowledge is made to mind.

Although there are a variety of ways to think with theory about this encounter with the thesis editor, here I put Bennett’s (2010) explanation of the assemblage and its agentic capacity in conversation with descriptions of the neoliberal university (Davies & Bansel, 2007; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2000) to frame my (re)consideration. Bennett’s assemblage—“living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within,” in which “power is not distributed equally,” and in which elements cohere “alongside energies and factions that fly out from it and disturb it from within” (pp. 23-24)—could be as easily illustrated by a large research university in this neoliberal time as a blackout or a hurricane. That is, as Slaughter and Rhoades (2000) note, academic capitalism undermines “the fundamental social roles of public higher education. . . [by] serving corporations’ global competitiveness” (p. 73). Increasingly, undergraduate tuition replaces state and federal funds to cover operational costs, rendering precarious every university employee except those with the most institutional power already: tenured faculty members and contracted administrators. In the neoliberal academic assemblage, undergraduates are revenue sources until they become commodities to be consumed by corporations, and graduate students are cheap labor until they become advertisements for one university as faculty members at another, on panels at national conferences in expensive cities, or in the pages of peer-reviewed journals. Tenure and promotion are attached to production, not of knowledge necessarily, but of citations and service, and administrators secure lucrative, multiyear contracts by leveraging their performative concerns for the trope of the day: student outcomes, equity and diversity, global citizenship, and so on.

Inside the “knowledge economy” of the neoliberal academic assemblage are “vibrant materials”—ideas, scholars, projects, programs—that work against these competitive, commodifying forces, while being produced by and implicated in them. Put more crassly, if I want the credentials being sold by this knowledge economy, even if only to put them to work against it, I have to become an individualized, competitive, consuming subject, “at once more governable and yet [believing myself] to be both individual and free” (Davies & Bansel, p. 254). I have to manage my “resources” such that I can survive becoming such a subject, while also remaining engaged in the collaborative, community-based work that I am invested in as a means of resisting the forces of neoliberalism more broadly. I have to perform a cost–benefit analysis of insisting on my diffractive formatting: What will it cost in terms of both personal capacity and institutional capital, and what will it yield in terms of intellectual and personal integrity? And what are intellectual and personal integrity worth inside this assemblage in which I am becoming a scholar?

Thinking through the confederation (Bennett, 2010) of sample chapters, APA guidelines, green pens, pressures to get through (in the sense of both finishing and passing into another space), the job market, my commitments to students and teachers, deadlines, anxiety, honoring the stories my collaborators shared, the logistics of academic intelligibility, formerly smoker poets, square brackets, and so on, helps me discern that the thesis editor is neither the responsible party nor a stand in for one. I cannot blame her and her green pen and her insistence on following the rules. Rather, as Bennett suggests, I must develop “a cultivated discernment of the web of agentic capacities” (38) to understand my “response to the assemblages in which [I find myself] participating” (37), and perhaps choose a different response the next time.

Alienating Apparatuses

In this instance, I allowed my thinking and my writing to be disciplined by the neoliberal academic assemblage in which I have chosen to participate, and to reformat my dissertation to comply with institutional requirements. To the thesis editor, acting in this instance as the voice of the governing force, these formatting adjustments did not even register as concessions: the formatting was decorative rather than substantive. To me, however, in a project about how stories work as knowledge-producing apparatuses, the structure of my meta-story was also (at least hopefully) a knowledge-producing apparatus: the formatting was substantive, not decorative, part of how the apparatus functioned to make matter matter (Barad, 2007).

Drawing from Leela Fernandes’ Producing Workers, Barad (2007) uses a jute mill to illustrate the “intra-acting multiplicity of material-discursive apparatuses” (p. 237), through the dynamics of which subjects are produced and reproduced and power is configured and reconfigured:

Workers, machines, managers are entangled phenomena, relational beings, that share more than the air around them; they help constitute one another. The entangled, contingent, and changing material conditions of the shop floor produce much more than saleable commodities and the flow of capital is but one stream in the turbulent river of agencies. This shift in theoretical perspective makes visible particular kinds of agency and possibilities for reworking unhealthy and unjust labor conditions that might otherwise be missed if it is assumed that the sole progenitors of agency are human (and only particular humans at that). (p. 239)

Taking up this theoretical perspective allows me not only to see how I am being coconstituted alongside faculty members, thesis editors, and APA guidelines inside the neoliberal academic assemblage, but also to make some sense of my experience of being alienated from the scholarly project that occupied more than 2 years of my time, energy, creativity, and intellectual capacity.

Earlier I described my encounter with and capitulation to the discipline practices conveyed by the thesis editor—who was, I have been told by those who think I am overthinking, “just doing her job”—as a spectacular failure, and I experienced it as such in the moment and the immediate afterwards. That is, I am disappointed in myself for not insisting that there was nothing “merely aesthetic” about my composition. After all, I draw heavily on arts-based research in my framing of the project, and here I am succumbing to the pressures to make my work more conventionally intelligible. More significantly, I feel the final product was no longer an authentic representation of the thinking and seeing and knowing I experienced in the doing of this inquiry. I know it is unfashionable to use the language of authenticity in qualitative research circles, so I should clarify: I do not mean to suggest there is some inert knowledge I discovered that my dissertation fails to accurately or completely capture and render into language. I mean that I worked my way—in draft after draft, using technique after technique—into a textual rendering of my experiences of diffractive storytelling, making evident “the entangled structure of the changing and contingent ontology of the world” (Barad, p. 73). The reading of the story would, I thought, recapitulate the storying of the story. And now it does not, or, at least, not in the same way that it could have.

Finally, and what has taken me the longest time to recover from, my beliefs about what writing is and what writing does were called into question by the very institution I was producing writing to join. Writing is not about the world, but is of the world. That is, writing is not separate from—describing or representing—the material, but is a material practice of world-making from inside the world in which the writing and the writer in here. To discipline writing with a green Papermate Flair and the current edition of the APA handbook is to change its world-making capacity, to change the world it both makes and is. So I was left alienated from both the particular writing project and from the practice of writing itself. What I know about writing is one of the few knowings I brought with me into the academy that I thought, until this encounter with the thesis editor, might survive my becoming an academic (Brooks et al., 2017).

In the (re)consideration, in the bringing forward of the behind-the-scenes, I can see not only that alienation is, as Barad (2007) puts it, “but one stream in the turbulent river of agencies” (p. 239), but also some possibilities for questioning some of the unhealthy and unjust practices of the neoliberal academic assemblage. What kind of support, from institutions and those already established within them, do emerging scholars need if they are going to take up the call of postfoundational qualitative research? Who will do the work of educating the thesis editors and the institutional review board members and the external dissertation committee members about the legitimacy of innovative inquiry projects? Who will engage graduate students in conversations about self-care so they might increase capacity for advocating for themselves in spaces that are hostile to their work, and often also to their bodies? Who will examine policies and practices and how they intra-act with the neoliberal academic assemblage to, often unnecessarily, discipline the minds and bodies of the most precarious “vibrant materials” in the confederation?

Of course, I do not have answers for any of these questions. But I think there is something in the telling of this story that will have me (and hopefully you) move forward differently. Author Jeanette Winterson (2011) contends,

Stories are compensatory. The world is unfair, unjust, unknowable, out of control. When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. (p. 8)

Like the poets and writers of my earlier years, Winterson is describing the apparatus-ness of stories, how they enact cuts to temporarily resolve indeterminacy and produce knowing. This happens both in the stories we tell in our research, and in the stories we tell about our research, as this special issue invites us to do. These stories are compensatory, and they enact something that could not be before the storying of it.