Lines of Affect and Performativity

“I Sing the Body Electric”

Examine these limbs, red black or white . . . they are very cunning

 in tendon and nerve;

They shall be stript that you may see them. (Whitman, 1959, p. 121)

In his poetry, Walt Whitman did not seek to exalt the body—but to extract its palpability. Whitman sought to dissect the scope of feeling that our bodies have in relation to the “lifeworld” (Schutz & Luckmann, 1983) so as to enrich our awareness of its potency. In expressing the rawness of feeling and emotion amid which our bodies unfold,

Whitman set out to elevate the status of physical existence as a theme and inspiration of modern poetry, fully exploiting the metaphorical possibilities of material life as well as advocating a complete realization of the body as a source of psychological, social, and political well-being. (Killingsworth, 1998)

With Whitman’s words in mind, the intent of this article is to explore how our bodies—their unfolding sensation, creation, and well-being—can become more explicitly positioned within qualitative research from a complex, nondualistic perspective. It is argued that such a perspective involves foregrounding the interplay between affect and performativity. The possibilities that stem from this intermingling of bodies and movement can inspire us to reconfigure the new ways in which we can conceptualize data and conduct our research. Building on Denzin and Lincoln’s (2005) nine moments in the history of qualitative research, Onwuegbuzie, Leech, and Collins (2010) suggest “methodological innovation” as the tenth; this involves “[u]tilization of innovative approaches to reflexivity and latest technology and computer-mediated communication” (p. 698). To guard against pursuing superficial innovations within qualitative research, Travers (2009) suggests we must maintain meaning amid commercial and institutional pressures. All of these historical, contemporary, conflicting and emerging moments of qualitative research are interdiscursive and they can be construed as overwhelming in choice and direction. However, therein lies the adventure and challenge for how we improvise with data: “Life is not easy, nor is qualitative research. Methodological simplicity can offer an escape, but without challenges or movement toward Otherness it can also hinder methodological inspiration and creativity” (Koro-Ljungberg, 2012, p. 816). As Whitman suggests in his poetry, let us not only look closer at the sensations of how our bodies respond (“electric”) but also, take responsibility for the creation of our expressions (“I sing”); I propose we apply this ethos to qualitative research. In the words of Deleuze (1995), “a spark can flash and break out of language itself, to make us see and think what was lying in the shadow around the words, things we were hardly aware existed” (p. 141). Reimagining data in qualitative research can provoke such sparks, requiring us to respond and take responsibility for the unfolding “shadow around the words.”

Entanglements and Encounters

While I’m in my five senses

they send me spinning

all sounds and silences,

all shape and colour

as thread for that weaver,

whose web within me growing

follows beyond my knowing

some pattern sprung from nothing—

a rhythm that dances

and is not mine

In her poem “Five Senses,” the ways in which Judith Wright articulates and exposes the threads of sensation and creation is captivating. Stemming from this idea of sensory threads, the notion of entanglements, or “sensory entanglements” (Blackman & Venn, 2010), enticingly suggests the rich possibilities we can encounter and create within qualitative research as we become more open to these lines of affect. In Dewey’s terms (1934), we can view this process of entanglements as “[i]ntrinsic connection of the self with the world through reciprocity of undergoing and doing” (p. 257). Further to this notion of flow and threads, Ingold (2007) asks us, “What is a thing, or indeed a person, if not a tying together of the lines—the paths of growth and movement—of all the many constituents gathered there?” (p. 5). To foster this ethos of interweaving which creates, rather than constricts, requires openness. Levinas (2008) articulated sensibility as “exposedness to the other” (p. 75); such an optic illustrates the vulnerability of responding to our senses as well as taking responsibility for the associated practices we shape and create. The idea of “exposing” senses recalls Deleuze’s (2005) encounters with Francis Bacon’s artwork. Bacon’s ability to evoke raw, thick layers of feeling emanating from smooth backgrounds is a powerful example of how an encounter with art can transcend our known senses: “Between a color, a taste, a touch, a smell, a noise, a weight, there would be an existential communication that would constitute the ‘pathic’ (nonrepresentative) moment of the sensation” (Deleuze, 2005, p. 30). This exposure of experience in art, according to Dewey (1934), is the same exposure of sensation and creation we can have in life, in nature—and dare we say our research inquiries? Foregrounding bodies-materiality within qualitative research compels us to open new lines of data, their entanglements, and encounters. This involves becoming open to the proximity of possibilities, which is required to explore sensation and creation. There is a risk in exposing ourselves to sensations, just as there is risk amid all journeys of creation. What adventures in qualitative research will capture your imagination? McCoy (2012) foregrounds complexity within her invitation toward a “methodology of encounters.” Some dances with data are now described, which may spark new rhythms and “choreographies of practice” (Law, 2009, p. 13) to unfold, spin, and grow.

Our senses are rich entanglements that unfold along material, social, and temporal lines; this suggests a more “equal commitment to all of our senses” (Forsey, 2010, pp. 566-567) within qualitative research. Rodaway (1994) in his book “Sensuous Geographies” describes how the

more one explores the nature of sensuous experience, phenomenologically or scientifically, the more one becomes aware of complex associations, substitutions, and transformations operating between the different sense organs, the human body itself, and the integral role of various complex mental processes. (p. 26)

Our senses do not run parallel to what we create or our subsequent well-being—they involve a bodily-material choreography, or “meshwork” (De Landa, 1995). Relating to this, the data collection of “sensory ethnography,” Pink (2009) explains, “takes as its starting point the multisensoriality of experience, perception, knowing and practice” (p. 1); this “starting point” can be richly applied to a range of methodological inquiries. For instance, how can we disrupt the ways in which we “see” data? How can we more richly explore its tones and textures? Within the context of higher education, Gourlay (2010) draws on multimodality to suggest “the potential benefits of expanding the qualitative repertoire towards a more visual orientation are considerable, in terms of both the research process and objects of analysis” (p. 86). Novel forms of data can also be gained from further exploring our sense of touch, our bodily interrelationship with the world. Paterson (2009) describes this “haptic system” as being comprised of kinaesthesia (movement), proprioception (bodily position) and the vestibular system (balance); and that “for evoking and describing sensuous dispositions and haptic knowledges benefits from the styles and methods involves in experimental or creative writing” (p. 785). Data can also be compellingly aural: whispering, inciting, deafening. Hall, Lashua, and Coffey (2008) invite “noise” back into qualitative research. Within urban studies, Adams (2009) “reflects on soundwalking as a methodology for engaging city users in research investigating people’s relationship with soundscapes and the built environment” (p. 6). Music elicitation is another possibility for data collection: “Music is an under exploited resource in social science research,” Allett (2010) explains, “yet it could be used in innovative ways to benefit methodology” (p. 2). As we begin to reimagine new ways of utilizing the aural within qualitative research, let us enrich this repertoire with the notion that data can be silent; Maclure, Holmes, Jones, and MacRae (2010) describe in their study how silences “carry traces of voices that have the power to affect us, precisely because they exceed the limits of the spoken word” (p. 498). Imagine also engaging more with olfactory data, the sense of smell; how does it interrelate with our other senses, draw on memories, culture—and augment our interpretation of data? Coronodo (2011) compellingly explored smell in relation to film and memories to understand more about her identity as a Mexican migrant. And let us not forget taste: “an intimate part of hospitality, ceremony, and rituals religious and civic” (Korsmeyer, 1999, p. 3). For instance, van Hoven (2011) documented multisensory experiences, such as the tasting of berries, to explore tourism in the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia, Canada; this approach revealed and challenged how tourists experience and conceptualize nature. And what of our “taste” of data? What does our selection of data say about what we deem palatable, or the research practices we partake in? For instance, in regard to data collection in the health profession, “Little has been written about how nurses can use all of their embodied sense to identify their own taken-for-granted assumptions about the environment and trigger new lines of questioning for further observation, interviews of document collection” (Edvardsson & Street, 2007, p. 25). More recently, Cromby (2012) articulates the progression toward an “affective turn” in clinical qualitative research. Further to provoking how we can disrupt routine approaches to data, Stoller (1989) invites ethnographers to employ a “sensual” approach in their data collection, yet warns against a Eurocentric approach: “considering the senses of taste, smell, and hearing as much as privileged sight will not only make ethnography more vivid and accessible, but will render accounts of others more faithful to the realities of the field” (p. 9). This is both an invitation and a challenge, which can be opened to all qualitative research—toward exploring new culturally diverse lines of engaging with data.

These “entanglements” with data suggest lines of affect as new opportunities within qualitative research practices (where they may often have been compartmentalized, veiled, or even absent). Affect provokes us to look afresh and unfold new qualitative research lines through foregrounding the senses: “The body is collective. It is a multi-phased relation that defines itself through co-efficients of tranversality expressive in the practice of becoming” (Manning, 2010, p. 125). This process of “liberating practices,” as Guattari and Negri (2010) suggest, involves “a principle of transversality that will enable them to be established by traversing, as a rhizome, heterogeneous social groups and interests” (p. 123). This transversal thought offers new insights into how bodies-materialities can spark new directions within methodological traditions: “to trace lines of flight . . . style carves differences of potential” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 141). Let us also consider how these “lines of affect” emerge. Reimagining qualitative research practices requires rethinking the ways in which we “encounter” our senses, that is, their lines of performativity. “Too often social science research and knowledge is oddly abstracted and distanced from the sensory, embodied and lived conditions of existence that it seeks to explain” (Mason & Davies, 2009, p. 600). If we acknowledge that our senses are irreducible from what we encounter then this has repercussions on how we shape our research practices. For instance, the “sensate perspective” that Edvardsson and Street (2007) describe in relation to nursing research can aid in “questioning the taken-for-granted to develop comprehensive and rich data” (p. 30). As Deleuze and Guattari (1994) suggest, “Something in the world forces us to think. This something is not an object of recognition but of fundamental encounter . . . It may be grasped in a range of affective tones. . . . In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed” (p. 176). The research opportunities of these encounters and tonalities can often be overlooked in methodological traditions: “What makes a reported sight more objective than a reported sound, smell or taste? Our bias for one and against the other is a matter of cultural choice rather than universal validity” (Fabian, 1983, pp. 107-108). The process of becoming more open to the diversity and multiplicity of encounters corresponds to a “world-making dispositif” (Kanngieser, 2012, p. 267). Such encounters foreground “lines of performativity” as opening up new possibilities within our research practices where they may have been culturally marginalized or obscured.

Ingold (2007) states how “every thing is a parliament of lines” (p. 5). In accordance with this, it is suggested that “lines of affect and performativity” can foster new entanglements and encounters of inquiry amid qualitative research. What we sense and what we create is a process of meeting, touching, movement, and tangling. Affect is rich in itself, yet richer affordances of inquiry unfold in examining affect’s interrelationship with performativity (the positioning and possibilities of our practices). As Clough (2010) suggests, a focus on affect and sociality involves both human and nonhuman bodies. Further to this, Levinas (1991) states how

The bit of the earth that supports me is not only my object; it supports my experience of objects . . . My sensibility is here. In my position there is not the sentiment of localization, but the localization of my sensibility. (p. 138)

This corresponds with Rodaway’s (1994) articulation of “corporeality,” which “subsists both in the structure of the body, as a physical object situated with other ‘bodies’ in a wider environment” (p. 31). Transversing encounters and entanglements articulates the situated threads and tonalities of our bodies-materiality unfolding. Toward this, and inviting further exploration, Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) notion of “assemblage” provides a pertinent lens to frame the folding and unfolding of new directions of data within qualitative research—their “unruly” and “heterogeneous” dimensions (Koro-Ljungberg & Barko, 2012; Law, 2006). These complex entanglements and encounters are evident in recent forays within rhizomatic (Gough, 2006; MacNaughton, 2004; St. Pierre, 2004), postphenomenological (Ihde, 2008), and “bricolage” inquiries (Denzin & Lincoln, 2003; Kincheloe, 2005; Rogers, 2012). Such “lines of affect and performativity” are entwined and unfold with one another, inviting sensation, defying stagnation. It is this language of flight, of possibility—through the planes of affect and performativity—which can provide new insights within qualitative research regarding the directions of our material, social, and temporal practices.

I Sing the Body Electric-Politic

Do you think matter has cohered together from its diffuse float, and

the soil is on the surface, and the water runs and vegetation sprouts,

for you only . . and not for him and her? (Whitman, 1959, p. 121)

Whitman’s poem “I sing the body electric” invites us to explore not only the power and potency of materiality and sociality but also the temporality of well-being as well. Killingsworth’s (1998) analysis of Whitman’s poem highlights how a “democratic consciousness ultimately depends on care and respect of the physical existence of every individual.” In closing this article, I emphasize this consciousness by adding the word “politic” to Whitman’s line. It is beyond the scope of this article to explore, but the purpose of this is to disrupt even further the optic for future qualitative research, not just “lines of affect and performativity” (as already proposed in this article)—but also lines of well-being. These “lines of well-being” entail a focus on agency and care: “Particular possibilities for acting exist at every moment, and these changing possibilities entail a responsibility to intervene in the world’s becoming, to contest and rework what matters and what is excluded from mattering” (Barad, 2003, p. 827). Such lines acknowledge the primacy of ethics (Levinas, 1991, 2008)—that our responses and responsibility is prefaced by the “Other.” Fostering novel research assemblages of sensation and creation is not only agentic but also political: “We argue that the purpose of social enquiry is to discomfit, to unsettle and question any taken-for-granted assumptions regarding social worlds and practice, including our own” (Hurdley & Dicks, 2011, p. 289). Foregrounding lines of affect, performativity, and well-being within qualitative research allows us to provoke these new methodological horizons. The interplay of our senses, creativity, and politics can richly inform research assemblages and welcomes new expressions of the ways in which we engage with data, or “sing the body electric-politic.” This openness relates to Dewey’s (1934) proposition that we become more attuned to our senses, and “[t]o some degree we become artists ourselves as we undertake this integration, and, by bringing it to pass, our own experience is reoriented” (p. 348). The proposition is for researchers to become more attuned to the artist within: How much do you dare to open up to the nuances and richness of sensation and creation? “Resistant to capture by ideology or language, wonder could be the proper business, not only of philosophy but also of qualitative inquiry” (Maclure, 2011, p. 1004); embracing “wonder” through exploring “lines of affect, performativity and well-being” can hopefully spark new methodological moments. Taking a leaf out of the artist Klee’s (1972) Pedagogical Sketchbook—who knows what will happen when you take a “line on a walk?” The complexity of contemporary practices both incites and invites these novel research assemblages stemming from “lines of flight” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988).