A Queer Cyborg Ethnographer in the Performative Friction of Dissenting Ontologies

On the Possibility of Two Ontologies Co-Existing

As Denzin and Lincoln (2018) point out, the discipline and practice of qualitative inquiry are “midway between two extremes, searching for a new middle” (p. 1). The terms “positivist” as well as “interpretivist” have been very contested, however since the main aim of this article is not to propose philosophical claims but rather to explicate a methodological speculation, a rough estimate is constructed here, built for the purpose of argumentation in this article.

Positivism and interpretivism can be perceived as extremes of a continuum where research approaches shift like a pendulum from one end to another. The material and ontological turn then, in this article located within agential realist onto-epistemology, would be situated in the middle of the pendulum movement (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008; Barad, 2007; Coole & Frost, 2010; Hultman & Lenz-Taguchi, 2010). The research setting scrutinized in this article does not claim that two different ontologies do and can co-exist, but rather seeks to lean toward imagining a speculation: Could it be possible for two ontologies to simultaneously co-exist, as though parallel universes?

In the field of quantum mechanics, a long-held speculation was recently established empirically with photons: in “Wigner’s friend” experiment, it was shown that two observers could experience different, conflicting realities simultaneously, based on measuring equal superposition of two possible states (Proietti et al., 2019). The physicists’ finding supports the playful thought experiment presented in the article at hand.

In their ongoing research project, Lenz-Taguchi et al. (2018) are creatively reconfiguring intersections between the natural, technological, and social sciences. Aronsson and Lenz-Taguchi (2018) ask what might be produced in encounters between neuroscientific research and preschool literacy practices where experimental thinking is used to disrupt and deterritorialize conventional ways of seeing the individual child’s development and skill acquisition. Lenz-Taguchi et al. (2018) have encountered the need to adopt what is conceptualized as “a multi-epistemological approach” where they map epistemological territories to even put into confrontation the taken-for-granted assumptions of each discipline. Lenz-Taguchi et al. (2018) elaborates working on an ontological continuum and ponders if possibly there might not be one overarching ontology to explain everything but rather multiple ontologies and epistemologies, simultaneously working according to their own and differing logics, and only partly, or not at all, overlapping another.

What is relevant here is not even the question of what implications ontology has for methodological choices made in research but how the ontology per se produces the phenomenon under investigation and how simultaneously co-existing ontologies produce friction that can be found productive in qualitative inquiry, as is argued in this article. To recognize where the dissenting ontologies are producing friction, the different research approaches need to be acknowledged, which will be demonstrated in the next section of the article, “empirical frictions.”

St. Pierre (2011, 2012) points to neopositivist movements within educational research that since Western Enlightenment have been based on the impervious quest for validating rational truths that resist problematizing the limits of knowledge it enables. As Nordstrom (2015, 2018) unfolds in her work, conceptualizing humans, nonhumans, living, and nonliving differently than in conventional qualitative inquiry puts the researcher in a place of confusion. There are no ready-made methodologies once the inseparability of matter and meaning are taken into account, and under those circumstances, the researcher has to start inventing how to plug different elements and participants together. In the case of in “antimethodology” (Nordstrom, 2018), the collisions between research concepts and practices were generative even when operating in two different ontologies. So, similarly in this article, opening up the taken-for-granted assumptions of the consequences of engaging with certain ontological commitments is brought to light in the rubbing of uncomfortable dissolve, as exemplified in the “queer reiterations” running through the article.

The Ethnographer Entangled Within Agential Realism

This article is grounded in agential realist onto-epistemology where binaries of matter/discourse and human/nonhuman are refused and the agential force of matter is acknowledged, not merely considered to be constructed or represented by social and cultural processes (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010; Coole & Frost, 2010). Even when working with dissenting ontologies, the approach adopted in this article moves beyond oppositional binary logic and rather, stays in the friction of the paradoxical state. The shift from linguistic turn to the material turn recognizes that “[m]atter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers” (Barad, 2012a, p. 14). In Barad’s agential realism, matter and meaning are mutually constitutive, affective and agential, and throughout entangled. This challenges the notion of the humanist Enlightenment subject as an individual ethnographer (also within auto/ethnography) as there cannot be a distinct cohesive human center once agency is shared among all participants.

Realizing the rich and varied landscape of ethnographic inquiry (see, for example, Johansson, 2015; Ulmer, 2017a; Wyatt, 2017), this article focuses on the ethnograph/er, the functioning of the researcher subject and thus relates more with auto/ethnography (which, however, is a problematic field within posthumanist, more-than-human onto-epistemology). For this reason, the article is anchored mainly within posthumanist methodological scholarship rather than to ethnography as a field.

Particularly within qualitative ethnographic research, the importance of representation has been central. The division between the coordinates of the “field” and “re-presenting” the authenticity of the events and the representatives of the field appears to be based on a logic of “truth” being found in the real life-worlds of the research participants (Tedlock, 2000) or in the 21st century, in the “field” online (Gatson, 2011). This separation has been problematized within ethnographic research (Ingold, 2014; Marcus, 1995; St. Pierre, 1999; Vannini, 2015), and the article at hand continues with contesting this notion.

The agential realist onto-epistemology (Barad, 2007) changes the way of conceptualizing the ethnographic research process as “field” and “nonfield” cannot be separated anymore as they are constantly implicated with each other. The seeming separation of the particular space–time coordinates of “field” and “office” could produce an illusion that “Being There” (see Geertz, 1988) in the field would be the real and authentic part of the study. However, as Mazzei (2013) states, “[T]here can no longer be a division between a field of reality (—the places we inhabit), a field of representation (research narratives constructed after—), and a field of subjectivity (participants and researchers)” (p. 735). In other words, queering the binaries embedded in conventional research paradigms can be worked with productively in posthumanist inquiry.

Representationalism has been critiqued by feminists and queer theorists (Barad, 2007, p. 47). Agential realism challenges representationalism—“the belief that words, concepts, ideas, and the like accurately reflect or mirror the things to which they refer” (Barad, 2007, p. 86; Thrift, 2008). As Barad (2007) claims, “knowing does not come from standing at a distance and representing but rather from a direct material engagement with the world” (p. 49). This nonrepresentational understanding of scientific practices is performative and, as MacLure (2013a) noted, has radical implications for qualitative methodology: from researchers, this requires questioning of human subjects, the practice of interpretation, and what counts as data. For MacLure, one of the reasons for qualitative researchers to not better engage with the materiality of language is due to the humanist workings of representation (pp. 660, 666). Taking this nonrepresentational performative stance, the entanglements between data, theory, and research writing constantly intra-act and change with each intra-action.

Resisting Captivity: Untamed Data

It is a taken-for-granted assumption in qualitative inquiry that what we are used to call “data” must be recorded (Nordstrom, 2015; St. Pierre, 2013). It is as though the data only came into existence in captivity, and for capturing, we need technological recording devices (e.g., systems cameras, video cameras, tape and digital recorders). To think of not recording qualitative data is extremely disturbing. It is relevant to note that as Nordstrom (2015, p. 389) states, recording devices create social realities that qualitative researchers explore in their studies.

Until recently, the ontological status of data has been targeted very little questioning (Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2018). For this article, the way of understanding data as active and performative is crucial. Koro-Ljungberg (2016) writes about how the role of data, its conceptualization, its theoretical connections, and its “doings” are mainly taken for granted even in such qualitative research that aims to challenge conventional lines of inquiry (p. 45). She then asks what data could want when seen as reactionary and as provoking action (p. 46). MacLure (2013a, 2013b) writes about the wonder of the data and about refusing to see data as “dumb matter” mutely surrendering to the colonialist administrations of conventional inquiry (MacLure, 2013b, p. 228; Massumi, 2002, p. 173):

In a materialist ontology, data cannot be seen as an inert and indifferent mass waiting to be in/formed and calibrated by our analytic acumen or our coding systems. We are no longer autonomous agents, choosing and disposing. Rather, we are obliged to acknowledge that data have their ways of making themselves intelligible to us. (MacLure, 2013a, p. 660)

The entanglement of the researcher, the technological devices, the “data,” and questions of spacetimemattering are scrutinized in the following section.

On How the Dissenting Ontologies Started Producing Each Other

Had the research project proceeded without the friction of dissenting ontologies, here is how the methodological process would most likely have gone:

However, as this article demonstrates, engaging with posthumanism transforms the research process. When taken seriously, agential realism thoroughly challenges conventional research practices, as is further elaborated in what follows. Ruptures, uncomfortable confusion, and queering of binaries began to take place.

THE QUEER REITERATION OF THE ALL-SEEING-EYE. On a September morning, I had arranged to arrive at the field school by an estate car to transport a very special observation device in the back, the 360° video camera called “MORE”: a multimodal observation and analysis system for social interaction research.

The MORE system is designed for observation and machine-aided analysis of social interaction in real life situations, such as classroom teaching scenarios —. The system utilizes a multichannel approach to collect data whereby multiple streams of data in a number of different modalities are obtained from each situation. (Keskinarkaus et al., 2015, p. 1.)

The school janitor had arranged an electrician to help us screw the camera firmly in the classroom ceiling. They needed a ladder, and when the loud power drill did its work, the looks on children’s face appeared to show an utter fascination. Unfortunately, the camera base was first screwed in the ceiling the wrong way round. So, the janitor needed to call the electrician, and the ladder, back in order to unscrew the base. After which it was re-screwed. “The best thing is that the children will forget this camera in no time, as it is integrated in the classroom,” I was told.

It was a very material task to coordinate the passages of the variety of devices during each lesson but also to be the human participant responsible for managing all the digital-format masses (as well as their backup files) produced during the days. Only 15 hours of the MORE camera recordings would equal 3,7 terabytes of video and sound stream in captivity, meaning (and mattering) an enormous task in how to save, organize, arrange, view, and communicate with the so-called data. In addition, the ethnographic data consisted of a school-year long period of classroom participation with digital hand video cameras, journal notes, interviews with children, teachers and parents, as well as children’s writings and drawings.

In the initial project planning meetings, I was told that the MORE camera would be able to “capture everything” that takes place in the classroom. Even eye movement tracking, facial micro gestures, and heart rate could be analyzed by the recording system. The developers of the MORE present the capabilities of the system as follows. They wrote, “The growing trend to study learning both “in situ” and in ever greater detail has led to a search for tools to capture the complexity of real-life learning situations (Keskinarkaus et al., 2015, p. 2). The authors go on to explain:

[T]he observations can be targeted, for example, to the actions and speech of one particular person in the recording. In practice, it means that a researcher can validate several hypotheses even afterwards by browsing the captured data from different viewpoints. (Keskinarkaus et al., 2015, p. 5)

These advanced abilities of the observation system make visible the human-centered onto-epistemological assumptions of such psychometric research. But since I had curious openness towards the device, I would experiment with beginning to think about MORE’s agency in an agential realist ontology. I would speculate with what would happen when we switch the device from one ontology to another — from the positivist ontology to agential realism. What could illustrate the ontological science fiction entrance gates better than the MORE camera existing simultaneously in two different ontologies, appearing so very different, doing such different things in each, being produced in one ontology, productively operating also in another? So when entering an agential realist ontology, MORE would begin to operate with very different productiveness, posing a variety of questions to be scrutinized methodologically. I would play with the image, filtering its topographies and contours, viewing negative images with colors upside down, and paying attention to its ethnographic agencies in the research entanglement.

The one thing framed out from the all-seeing-eye is the 360° camera itself. As Deleuze (1986) stated, “out-of-field refers to what is neither seen nor understood but is nevertheless perfectly present” (p. 16). The camera was ultimately invisible to itself—out-of-field—yet its presence in the classroom was somewhat ubiquitous, as will be analyzed later in this article. In the following negative screen capture image of the video material recorded by MORE, “everything” taking place in the classroom can be seen, although curiously enough not one thing: the MORE camera itself (see Figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Negative screen capture image from the research classroom by the 360° MORE video camera, queering the representation of classroom data.

Working with the mobile multimodal recording system MORE in the school context, the first author soon started to detect the privileges of being a cold metal box screwed firmly in the classroom ceiling. The 360° camera would be provided with almost magical attributes in what was expected of its presence. It seemed that the highly developed technological device carried a priori capabilities in its classroom-penetrating existence, the ultimate positivist virtues such as objectivity, reliability, validity, measurability, repeatability, rationality, and even omnipotence.

The underlying assumption behind developing more and more advanced recording devices seems to be that once carefully captured, the data can be entered and re-entered endlessly, never-changing, monolithic, perfect; independent of any irruptions; and existing as digital-format chunks that can be controlled and put into neat boxes called “results.” As there is a chain of thought that what happens in “real-life” (the classroom with children) is the truth waiting to be captured by the ethnographer as reliably and carefully as possible and then to be shared with audiences in academic peer-reviewed journals, it does seem to make sense to put as much effort as possible to developing these capturing devices and in accountability culture, funding them.

But this article claims that the logic here assumed as though causal – a more advanced capturing and analyzing device producing an ever more truthful understanding of what is “real” and thus bringing us academics closer and closer to so-called “excellence” in our knowing – is questioned when brought in the light of an ontology different from positivism or interpretivism. As pointed out by de Freitas (2017):

The use of video analytic software without adequate attention to how such software is structuring the data becomes increasingly problematic as we begin to rely more and more on findings based on this data. We need to examine how this technology shapes what we are able to see. —The danger is that we are all too likely to treat the video image as a recording of “raw data,” indexical of a given time-space relationship, as though it were a transparent realist representation of an event. (pp. 211–212)

When merely seen as the truth-producing representational apparatus as speculated above, many opportunities of the MORE recording system are lost. Practicing a one-sided view in research rules out important possibilities for the not-yet-known to emerge, as we further demonstrate in what follows.

Normal AND Queer, Biased AND Innocent

The MORE system is located within a hegemonic scientific paradigm that does not need to ground itself by clarifying the prevailing assumptions behind certain methodological choices or by articulating its ontological commitments. Contested this way, it seems that when the ontology is self-evident, it does not need to be named. It needs to be problematized how the hegemonic approach, free from explicating its fundamental commitments to ontology and epistemology as its practices are simply considered “normal,” is limited in many ways. By scrutinizing the friction produced by the dissenting ontologies of the research project, it becomes clear that the MORE system has been programmed to its observing task according to a particular view of what learning (or literacies) mean.

The focus is on an individual human learner which shows in the use of personal microphones attached close to each participant’s mouth for recording speech and for not recording noises that could be considered disturbing. An assumption of the device is that researchers are mainly interested in transcribing and analyzing language. Even if social interaction was to be studied, this would be ruling out the participation of different material actants in the events, viewing the relevance of matter at most instrumental and as separable from the human participants. In this particular research case, a rather peculiar curiosity was that the literacy events often took place in the school corridor, whereas the highly developed camera was firmly attached to the classroom ceiling—in other words pointing out the assumption that formal literacy learning at school is located in a certain space, the classroom and by desks. Thus, the very basic assumptions of the MORE system programming show certain normative expectations and bias of what learning and research are expected to look and sound like. So, who was claiming that technological devices are objective and free from bias, as has been challenged by Nordstrom (2015)?

As for agential realist ethnography taking place in environments where human beings act inseparably with nonhuman participants, a relevant question to ask is: What can be, in the first place, recorded using technology? When working closely together with the MORE system and constantly coordinating the passages of different mobile devices, the first author of this article began to feel herself very warm, soft, huggable, and affect-driven; but also equipped with senses left out of technological recording, such as smell, touch, and taste. And as accompanied by the highly developed but algorithm-driven technological devices, the human researcher would also feel herself as possessing human intelligence together with years of educational training and practical experience. It was as though the human and the machine produced negative images of each other by working so closely together. So, what MORE did to humans and what humans did to MORE started to seem fundamentally inseparable in the socio-material entanglements of the research project arrangement.

The MORE observation system would have enabled the researchers working in the project to pursue Big Data coded, classified, and interpreted. MORE made it clear right from the beginning of the research process that it would not let the researchers not acknowledge its arbitrary and resistant agency. For posthumanist researchers, this meant being open to and staying with the confusion. What followed was that the most productive data began to come to light in seemingly small, delicate and mundane moments; they would definitely have been out of reach of any pre-determined majestic Hypothesis, no matter how carefully formulated for ‘royal science’(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2004, p. 405; Nordstrom, 2018). It would not have been possible to think with the data the way it is done here, had it not been to the entangled nature of human–machine intra-action.

Space–Time Coordinates: Researcher’s Chamber, University Campus, Ongoing

THE QUEER REITERATION OF THE FIELD AND THE RESEARCH CHAMBER. I sit by my office desk, my hands leaning on the computer keyboard, and watch back and forth the video from the school corridor where children bustle with their mobile phones. As a researcher I constantly merge with my office computer, the keyboard, the hard drive with MORE’s recordings. I speed up the video, watch the fast forward version of the running in the corridor. The children’s fluttering around from literacy tag to tag starts looking like a choreography of the diverse elements participating in the assemblage: legs sheathed in quilted trousers whipping, mobile phone screens glowing and speaking out directions, the personal MORE microphone wires waggling, the sound of the concrete corridor floor rumbling against the children’s feet. The phones and the tags together form a seeming coincidental navigation based on an algorithm coded in them, steering the children from certain letter tag to another as though in a cyborgian organism. Jasmin and Ariadne hum together a refrain, “o-o-o-o-o” in the rhythm of their footsteps as their phones direct them to seek for the letter “O” tag. ⁴ I zoom in and out of the video, from far looking at the multiple events taking place simultaneously, and up close at how the phone screens react to being brought to the near field communication zone of the letter tags. I shut off certain microphone soundtracks and focus on particular ones; and I take print screen pictures of the 360° panorama view in order to marvel at the almost cubistic classroom topography. I realize how the data is re-created under these new space-time coordinates; it is not merely a representation of captured real-life.

As unforeseen as it once seemed, it is the MORE recording system that in this article has shoved the researchers past the fundamental problems of representational ontology. The socio-material relations of the ongoing present of the field and the ongoing present of the analysis in the researcher’s chamber create what Barad (2010) calls “diffracted spacetimes” (p. 261). The different spaces of time enfold within each other and produce something unexpected in each performative becoming. According to Barad, time is diffracted through itself: the way past, present and future enfold through one another is nonlinear (Barad, 2010, pp. 260–261). So as settling in the researcher’s chamber to research the topic, the ethnographer is entering a yet-new-becoming with what was lived in the field and with what re-emerges in the researcher’s chamber.

As entered performatively, the reproduction of the literacy event in the researcher’s chamber (and on these pages) is constant new becoming of the data, analysis meaning and mattering a scrutinizing of these new becomings and relations between the historical experienced present and the new ongoing present in the researcher’s chamber.

By producing such an enormous mass of data bytes, the MORE system also creates a new possible “field” where the researcher can dive in, as though in a primeval sea of ethnographic digital-format fractal topographies. It is almost like one second of the 360° panorama video could be an endless sea of possibilities, craters and basins, and undercurrents, folding and unfolding fractally in a never-ending way. These frictions, the slow and thorough being/thinking/working with dissenting ontologies, have guided the way to the emergence of the Queer Cyborg Ethnographer.

Barad-izing the Cyborg: Change and Resistance

This is an era of humans ubiquitously merging with different digital technologies, foregrounding the inseparability of human and machine. The “queer reiterations” presented throughout this article are examples of moments of friction that one by one lead to the emergence of the Cyborg Ethnographer. One of the implications of this article is that Haraway’s cyborg has been “Barad-ized” by queering it within Barad’s agential realism. For Barad,

Queer is itself a lively mutating organism, a desiring radical openness, an edgy protean differentiating multiplicity, an agential dis/continuity, an enfolded reiteratively materializing promiscuously inventive spatiotemporality. What if queerness were understood to reside not in the breech of nature/culture, per se, but in the very nature of spacetimemattering? (Barad, 2012b, p. 29)

The queerness of the dissenting ontologies was an affective and embodied experience for the first author, consequently troubling the conventional notions of practicing qualitative inquiry. Even though this article has not been seeking to directly connect with quantum physics, the need to challenge the hegemonic research paradigms has been apparent during the “slow ontological” (Ulmer, 2017b) work of writing this research report. Conventionally, academic scholarship has proceeded along the logic of INSTEAD (MacLure, 2013a), aiming to prove opposing knowledge incorrect and to resolve any emerging friction; but when inspired by recent quantum physical findings (Barad, 2007; Proietti et al., 2019), it is possible to play with the speculation of multiple realities existing simultaneously.

Haraway (2016, p. 3) suggests the need to cause trouble and stay with the trouble to arrive at unexpected collaborations. In interdisciplinary research designs, the insights of the Cyborg Ethnographer with a queer determination are much needed: following rather than discarding the sense of friction; staying with the frictions and the troubles, adjusting to two impossible things simultaneously. This uncomfortable determination begins to unveil the productive queerness beyond existing conventions, honoring the dissolve and offering new kinds of re-entry angles for operating as an ethically and politically responsible researcher.

Barad (2014) wrote, “Electrons are queer particles. —They are particles. They are waves. Neither one nor the other. A strange doubling. A queer experimental finding. A theoretical impossibility — a disturbing paradox” (p. 173). There are leaks and discontinuities for those willing to follow them. When two simultaneously present ontologies yield two different looking phenomena with the same name (e.g., “new literacies”), a Cyborg Ethnographer began to work with this friction. These frictions began to make visible the rubbing against of which began to make both look queer in relation to each other. Re-thinking the prevailing notions of “field” and “data” from the perspective of performative and queer ontologies and spacetimemattering can be a productive approach for scholars working with the quotidian complexities of today. In the case of the research project analyzed in this article, the phenomenon at hand was “new literacies”; however, similar ontological, epistemological, ethical, and methodological frictions could emerge had the topic been something else. What is relevant is the serious, yet playful engagement with ontological commitments and their queer, cyborgian consequences.

Due to the neopositivist accountability culture that is gaining more and more foothold in the neoliberal academia, working with unaccustomed research approaches carries capacities for change. As Ulmer (2017a) states, “thinking differently about methodology is an ethical, political, and intellectual imperative” (p. 12) much needed by the inseparable cyborgs intra-acting with planet Earth.

THE QUEER REITERATION OF CYBORG FU-TURISM. Pictures of ”cyborg” on my Google search portray almost exclusively male figures—tall and strong, armed with big weapons. This is not how Haraway meant it, and this is not the image of the queer cyborg ethnographer. I have created a Spotify playlist called “cyborg” for writing this paper; I listen to Sun Ra’s cosmic jazz and Janelle Monáe’s android “funkstress” songs. I realize the soundtrack for my writing is afrofuturist (Gipson, 2016), yet reminding myself about the risk of appropriation. During this long research process, the cyborg has been about what Braidotti (2019) calls “the missing people”: about minor knowledge systems, “feminists, queers, otherwise enabled, non-humans or technologically-mediated existences,” about the struggle for “actualizing minority-driven knowledges” (p. 21); most of all, it is about imagining possible futures (p. 23). For me, being entangled with wires and devices and working with children and families who are newcomers to Finland and in a vulnerable position highlights the ethical charge of producing posthumanist inquiry. The Queer Cyborg Ethnographer started emerging in the small and mundane sound of the swishing of winter trousers. Now, that rhythmic refrain carries Braidotti’s (2011, p. 69) words with it: “. . .[T]he cyborg can act as an empowering political myth of resistance. . .”