“This Wave in the Mind”: Resonant Becomings in Reading-Writing Inquiry

Postqualitative Planes

Postqualitative inquiry invites researchers to compose, curate, choreograph, and improvise research methods, to bring into question traditional research processes (Lather, 2016; Nordstrom & Ulmer, 2017; St. Pierre, 2011). Methods are invented and reinvented in a world of shifting, ephemeral data encounters: data take flight; data make and unmake us in postqualitative inquiry (Ellingson & Sotirin, 2020; Koro-Ljungberg & Maclure, 2013; Taylor et al., 2019). Researchers represented by “we” and “I” come under question in the posthuman turn (Sweet et al., 2020); the coherence of the subject leaks out (Tesar et al., 2017). The re-imagination of qualitative research practices explicitly involves a figuring out of what a method does, rather than what it is, reflecting a fundamental shift from an epistemological inquiry to becoming, to ontology (St. Pierre, 2016).

The field of postqualitative inquiry has proliferated over the recent years and yet remained dispersed (Carlson et al., 2020). Postqualitative inquiry is thus rhizomatic: a play of lines of flight in the middle (Nordstrom & Ulmer, 2017), where “what is at question in the rhizome [ . . . is] all manner of “becomings” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 10). Similarly, “rhythms of thinking-in-writing” help in re-envisioning an uncertain world (Bridges-Rhoads, 2018, p. 646). Reflecting some of the thoughts on poetry that we encountered earlier, Ulmer (2017) writes poetry as a means to attune to “slow ontology” (p. 209):

“In adopting a Slow Ontology,

we might return to nature

or perhaps take a Slow Roll through the city,

cycling through rain drops,

heartbeats, and rustling leaves—

writing through jet streams, occasional hibernations, and static.”

For Ulmer, there is a turning to nature, writing with nature, writing the rhythms of nature as Virginia Woolf (2011) does in The Waves.

It is useful to explore rhythm, especially in the context of writing, to show how it enables a tuning in to or resonating with others’ voices. According to Eleni Ikoniadou (2014), rhythm is the gap in the middle that refers to “both regularity and unpunctuated flow, symmetry and motion as well as the confinement of movement and pause” (p. 11). Dance and music and poetry take shape within rhythm. Rhythm is a force in the middle, what Ikoniadou calls the “middle force” (p. 13), that foregrounds the affective dimension in an event. Rhythm marks out poetry from prose, though one finds lyrical prose that evokes poetry, as in Woolf’s writing. And how might writing and rhythm be related to reading—and, in the specific context of this article—to my reading of postqual ¹ literature?

In response, I turn to Ursula Le Guin (2004) who evocatively writes about telling (or writing) a story and reading:

telling the story is a matter of getting the beat—of becoming the rhythm, as the dancer becomes the dance. And reading is the same process, only far easier, not jading: because instead of having to discover the rhythm beat by beat, you can let yourself follow it, be taken over by it, you can let the dance dance you. (p. 152)

Drawing inspiration from the physics of resonance, Le Guin writes about the synchronization between bodies, between subjectivities, and where communication happens in that moment of synchronization, when the “dancer becomes the dance.” My reading of the scholarly literature on postqualitative inquiry becomes such a dance—I am swept away by the fluid forms, follow closely the footsteps of the authors I read, and flow along the lines of flight that emerge from the varied creations and curations that the literature provides. The rhythm of postqual finds me and twirls me into different space–time processes. Poetic inquiry thus enables me to tap into the rhythm of the articles and merge them with the rhythms of my life as lived across different space–times.

Among all the diversity of articles, I would like to focus on two specific ones that seem to push the boundaries of postqualitative inquiry, albeit in different ways. Both articles disrupt my thinking and eventually lead to a deeper understanding of the productive possibilities of inquiry in general, and poetic inquiry more specifically. A discussion of the first article and my poetic response to it follows immediately, while a discussion of the second article and my response comes in the section after next.

“Improvising Bags Choreographies”

The first article I select and respond to is one where the dance of the postqualitative inquiry seems to reach heightened intensities. In “Improvising Bags Choreographies ² ” (Taylor et al., 2019), normative research practices are disrupted through “research-creation improvisations” (p. 7), where an everyday object like a bag is foregrounded and played with in different ways to highlight its active and affective agency. Through their partly planned, partly improvised choreographies conducted in the traditional site of a research conference, the authors “destabilize” forms and forums of research production and representations. As the authors experiment from across space–time distance to cut up, rip fabric, stitch pieces, or assemble bags; as the researchers disappear or appear in bags, there is a lighthearted play with postqualitative methods that is also a serious questioning of normative processes of doing research.

Reading the article makes me chuckle in amusement even as it makes me look at objects around me with fresh eyes. There is a lightness in my step as I imagine the myriad possibilities that postqualitative inquiry opens up. Yet, without a warning, the ripped-up bags seem to rip some threads in the fabric of my memory. Two long-forgotten bags make their appearance in my living room, spectral presences from an uneasy childhood, forcing me to look at them, really look at them: a green shawl, and a canvas bag. These memories are of two separate incidents—events that disturbed the rhythm of my childhood; yet were not remembered till now. I do not claim to the veracity of my memories, neither does the poetic form require a reporting of facts. The poem begins as a “found poem” (Bhattacharya, 2007; Leavy, 2015, p. 81) where specific words taken from the article are incorporated into the poem. However, later on it draws on memory and becomes a poetic narration of certain events from my childhood. My memory data are quite probably morphed and contaminated by other events, and creative license is taken in the spontaneous penning down of the rhythmic flow of words:

Undone by Data

I read of bags:

Cut up

Stitched

Carried

Being carried in

Conference Bags

Paper bags

Ready for your hand bag

Disemboweled bag

Mattering

Becoming

Companion-species.

And

Reading of the 88 bag images

Pulsating

With potentialities

The images that come to my mind

Are

A lost bag

And the bag which wasn’t a bag

At all.

Strange, isn’t it?

What memory dredges up?

Reading about a playful

Experimentation

With bags

The 88 and counting

Different bags

I do not think

Of my mother’s black bag

With pockets and zippers

Enough

To organize

All our lives.

I do not think

Of the

Beautiful

Handstitched

Machine made

Artisan created

Factory Produced

Cloth leather canvas

Bags

That I loved gifting my friends

And being gifted with

In turn.

I do not think

Of my backpack

My companion

Of several years

Going places

As I teach

Reach

Study

Travel.

I do not think

Of grocery bags

Which I could have

Given that

So many of them

Seem to have taken up

Residence

With me

In the short time

I have been in Arizona

No.

I think of none of these.

Though that would have been easy

Understandable

Reading about the

Travel bag

Handbag

Shoulder bag

Shopping bag

88 and counting.

No.

Instead.

I remember.

Rather,

I am transported

By the bags

To my childhood

Dismembered

Turning the corner

Of the hotel corridor

To find my grown uncle

My big strong muscular uncle

The only man I knew

At that point

In my life

Who ever worked-out-

In-the-gym-uncle

My devil-may-care

“Bullet” riding

Adventuring

Uncle

Shaken up

Despairing

With his forehead against the wall.

Why!

Because

He had done the unthinkable

He had gone lost

His brother’s travel bag!

My uncle

Was responsible

For carrying all our luggage

My uncle

Keeping track

Counting

Making sure

All our bags were safe

As we boarded trains

Buses

Taxis

And

Poured out of

Taxis

Buses

Trains

In my childhood

Traveling from city to city

Three families travelling together

On various vacations.

His brother’s luggage

Was just as unique as he was.

It wasn’t a suitcase.

It wasn’t a rucksack.

It was a rather large canvas

Bulge.

A cross

Between a Duffle and Hold-all

That would stand up

Rather than lie down.

That bag

Held everything

He travelled with.

His clothes, his shoes, his caps, his books.

And whatever else he took.

But

Somehow

It was my uncle

Who was responsible

For the safe keep of the bag

And in the crowded marketplace

In counting the various

Handbags

Suitcases

Duffle bags

Backpacks

Of the three travelling families

My uncle missed

Taking out that bag

From the luggage racks

Of the bus.

Something came over him–

My uncle.

As the enormity of his failing

In losing his brother’s bag

Washed over him.

How old must I have been?

Eight or ten?

Yet

I realized

Sympathized

Empathized

Because to lose that bag

Was just not done.

The weight of failing

Driven deep into the depths

Made my uncle despair.

I am unable still to

Name

Exactly what it was that my uncle failed in doing.

Wasn’t his brother older? Taller? Wiser?

And did he have no responsibility

In taking care of his own baggage?

Why was it always

Someone else’s fault?

Why was responsibility

Never

Something that he bothered with.

Like that other time.

Earlier.

When my grandfather died.

He walked off.

With a bag which wasn’t a bag.

His large green shawl.

Pashmina.

Which he wrapped around him in the winter.

Always.

He put it down on the floor.

Took all the books he could carry

From his enormous gigantic library

Tied it up in a bundle

Slung it over his shoulder

And walked out.

Walked out.

Leaving others

To deal with his father’s funeral

And the grieving and mourning.

Walked out.

So that.

He didn’t have to be responsible.

Walked out.

So he didn’t have to deal with his own mess.

That he had created in his mind.

How old was I?

Four, five?

I remember

The green shawl.

Heavy, bulky, showing the outlines of books.

Walking out of the gates.

To disappear

For some days.

I remember.

Suddenly.

Dismembered.

Bags.

Yes. Bags.

Something heavy.

Something light.

A sigh.

A putting down to rest

Of that heaviness.

Of his non-respon-sibility.

That

everyone else

around him

had to stand in for.

Bags

Data

Lives

Undone

Done.

* * *

The materiality and the heaviness of the bag that seemed to have weighed me down imperceptibly over the years are finally put to rest. Attuning myself to “Improvising Bags Choreographies” in turn helped me attend to those spectral bags, and they leave the material world to join the world of the departed ancestors. Poetic inquiry makes me understand affects and rhythms anew and become attuned to the unseen: I realize that “poetry matters because it serves up the substance of our lives, and becomes more than a mere articulation of experience . . . it allows us to see ourselves freshly and keenly. It makes the invisible world visible” (Parini, 2014, p. 181). Poetry allows us to resonate to unseen rhythms of our lives; the gaps and silences of poetry enable one to not just articulate that which is otherwise inexpressible, they point to the ineffable, and in writing poetic inquiry, enable us to see ourselves differently.

“Kitchen Research Practices”

“In(tra)fusion: Kitchen research practices” ³ (Alexander & Wyatt, 2018), the second article that I select for discussion in this article, enacts postqualitative inquiry through collaborative writing practices. The affective and experimental intensities that were heightened in “Improvising Bags Choreographies” seem to be subdued here, and thus provides an interesting contrast. Moreover, there is also a sharp difference in my reactions to the two articles. While the first article showed me possibilities, I am left wondering about the field of postqualitative inquiry in the second article I read. These authors engage in a play of words, the cups of coffee being the “infusion,” enacting in(tra)fusion and being an “intrusion” (Alexander & Wyatt, 2018). The authors enact postqualitative inquiry through what seems to me to be the replication of traditional research practices with minor differences.

“Kitchen research practices” thus seems to open up lines of dissonance rather than resonance at first glance. Yet, even though I do not find resonances with the writing, the writing demands a response from me as I engage with the deeper questions about the field of postqualitative inquiry. In keeping with the rhythms and invitations of poetic inquiry, it seems that there is a “responding to something you feel claimed by, can’t yet articulate, or maybe even identify” (Lee, 1995, p. 31). Certain questions start simmering beneath my conscious mind which come to the surface only in retrospect: Where is the borderline between the qualitative and the postqualitative? Can such a line ever be envisaged or will there always be spillovers from both directions? What intensities of mutations and choreographies would qualify some research as postqual and not others? Are mutations and choreographies then the new markers of postqualitative inquiry? Can there be an overlap between traditional qualitative inquiry and postqualitative inquiry? Moreover, are there intersections between arts-based research practices and postqualitative inquiry, given that both provide creative possibilities? And if there are, then how can one demarcate postqualitative inquiry as beginning at a certain point in time and doing something different? Trained in academic practices and habits of thinking, I keep coming back to the “So what?” question regarding the article. With the as yet unformed questions nagging me, the image of a kitchen table with freshly brewed coffee brings up certain memories of coffee (and tea) from my childhood, and the memories start following me around until I let these words spill over the paper.

Tea and Coffee

Tea and Coffee

Could have been

An exemplar Diamante

For the poetry workshops

I conducted with children,

I muse

As I hold a glass of organic carrot juice in my hand

Contemplating the tree in front of my window.

A eucalyptus

  Sparkling after the rains.

    My glass

      No less bearing the mark of privilege

Than the coffee I come up against

    In the pages of postqual research articles

  Yes, you heard me right.

No, not:

  Not a mug of coffee at my side.

      But printed

           On the pages

        Of the peer reviewed articles

    That I am reading right now.

The coffee that people in the West

Seem to need to write.

Coffee that perhaps,

Is as much a staple for them as this carrot juice is to me.

  A coffee without which

  So many here claim

  They cannot think, cannot write.

There is a politics, a hidden genealogy

Of addiction here, that somebody needs to explore, I realize!

Just as tea had its colonial, economic, psychosomatic, psychic history

In India and the “orient.”

But.

Returning to those articles I am reading . . .

  That coffee on the page

    Seems to be oozing privilege to me!

      The aromas described

        So minutely

           Even the “icky” substance

           Left at the bottom of a mug

As postqual researchers

             Collaborative writers

Flit from an Apple

             To another Apple

To type words

             Respond to

What another wrote.

        I find that description

      Of coffee mugs

    Macbooks

  A nip in the air

Outside

    As the researchers move around the kitchen table

Inside

Highly privileged.

Hence,

Highly disturbing.

    Is that what postqual is about?

    Navel gazing?

    Here three people

    Gazing at each other’s perhaps

    Instead of their own ones

      Solipsistic, nevertheless.

      Self-referential.

And why am I

  Holding a glass of organic carrot juice

Typing on a laptop,

  Judging that?

    Finding that so disturbing?

I look at the eucalyptus

  Feel the March winds blowing

Desire inducing

  Dreaming into the distance

When I should be

  Working on my lit review.

I remember the times I have stood in front of trees

  Always lost

In that dreamy half-world

  Where anything was possible

The moringa at Bangalore

  Little bees buzzing near the blooms

The un-remembered name of a tree

  A gorgeous magnanimous canopy of green

Just under my tiny balcony

  In Bombay

My only solace in the even tinier apartment

  Where you opened the main door

And walked into the bathroom—almost.

The mango tree in Kolkata

  Across our yard

    In the neighbor’s garden

  Beckoning me . . .

Always

This fascination with

  Play of light

On the leaves

  Dancing in the breeze

Always a special fascination

  In March

When exams were around the corner;

  Deadlines now –

And yet

  I would stare

      And dream

    And lose myself in those leaves

  Always a trace

    Of desire that invades

      When the March winds blow

    A something yet to come . . .

Remembering Kolkata

  That mango tree

Which would be laden

  With fragrant blossoms

The “mukul” . . .

  I also remember my Dimma

      Making pots of tea.

Tea seems more domestic

While coffee is exotic

Erotic even,

Perhaps.

  Tea, easily bought

  From the corner store

  Unbranded

  Coming from Darjeeling though,

  Just a few hours away to the north.

While coffee.

That was more precious.

Hardly drunk.

Rarely served -

On special occasions

When guests came home

  Coffee

    Those ads on TV

      Nescafé—a woman, westernized

        Standing at the verandah

        Of a lovely home

      Caressing her palms

        Lovingly around the mug . . .

    Inhaling the aroma

      Of coffee,

    A blissful look on her face.

Affluence oozing out . . .

  Is that privilege she inhales?

        And yet

What does this have

Anything to do with anything?

  Isn’t this also navel-gazing?

  What am I accomplishing?

What did they accomplish?

At their kitchen table?

  Other than to say

  That Brexit was a loss of hope

And that the same interview changed.

I had written down a bunch

  Of critical words

  In the margins

  Of this article.

Especially its obsession with coffee

    And its self-indulgence enough to describe the

      Opening of [their] laptops as they

“Raised the seductively smooth, warm silver membrane embossed with its bitten forbidden fruit” ⁴

  Perhaps, what this article does for me

    Is to question deeply

  Go beyond the play of words

The thrill of ideas

  Beyond exhilaration

And makes me question

  If this is indeed

    What postqual is about.

Providing lines of flight

  Which for me

For this article

Seems fanciful flight.

Postqual, perhaps

  Would make us think differently

           See differently

    That which we saw with tired eyes.

Postqual perhaps

  With Foucault and Cixous

    And Barad and Deleuze

      As well as with

        Ubuntu and Tao ⁵

          And with a myriad others,

Would make us gasp

  Caught in the middle of a thought.

Postqual perhaps

  Should make us rethink

    Re-turn

      To theory

    To philosophy

  To the hard task

Of making sense in a senseless world

Even if it is

  Through playful flight.

    Even if, making sense does not make sense

    In the postqual world

  A making non-sense then, however,

  That is charged with light.

Postqual perhaps

  Would make the relentless spin

    Around the sun

      Slow down for a nanosecond

    Slow down the warming up

  Of melting ice.

And in that time

  That duration

  In that heartbeat

  Of a moment

Create a dis-order

  A rupture

  Of our thoughts

  Of our lives.

Create a rupture

    Of our thoughts

        Our lives.

* * *

“Research poetry [is] not just another form of representation mirroring an object prose text” (McKnight, 2018, p. 214) but moves beyond it, to realms of uncertain knowledge, unthought unexpected rhythms. Faulkner (2009) cites Hirshfield to emphasize the singular role that poetry plays: “Poetry can do what other forms of thinking cannot: approximate the actual flavor of life, in which subjective and objective become one, in which conceptual mind and the inexpressible presence of things become one” (p. 100). In a similar vein, the poems evoke long-forgotten memories and help me articulate what I had difficulty in theorizing; they help me in thinking the unthinkable (Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2015). The subjective and the objective merge into writing that flows, writing that refuses to follow the strict argumentation of stereotypical academic writing.

I had had different reactions on reading the two articles. Looking back, I realize that the articles disrupted my thinking, though in different ways, and I responded with poetry to both. The poetry showed me what I could not comprehend logically. Its affective dimensions provided me access to an understanding that seemed out of reach till then. The articles made me remember scenes and events from childhood that had receded from memory; each article made me respond differently; yet while writing the poems, quite the opposite affect was induced. The poetry raised questions as well as provided tentative answers—or rather, openings, about research, about inquiry, about reflexivity and possibility.

Viewed from this perspective then, both “Kitchen Research Practices” and “Improvising Bags Choreographies” strike a rhythm in me; resonances are created and my voice merges with the existing voices in creating further lines of flight. There is an “entrainment” (Le Guin, 2004), or in the parlance of the postqualitative, there are entanglements and assemblages. Ursula Le Guin (2004, p. 165) writes, “listening is not a reaction, it is a connection. Listening to a conversation or a story, we don’t so much respond as join in—become part of the action.” Moreover, borrowing from postqualitative writers, “we” becomes the “noun ‘w-e,’ a proxy for the authorless singularity of ‘writing-and-experimenting collective’” (Charteris et al., 2019, p. 1). Situated in this context, what get highlighted are not different voices making different statements, but voices without bodies (Mazzei, 2013) where the enactment of subjectivities occur in the middle of researcher-participant, or in our case, in the middle of reading-writing-responding to research.

The assemblage of my-writing-past-selves-present-circumstances join with collaborative practices in the kitchen, collide with bags-data-becomings. To look at the question then, not what research is, but what it does, is to observe their effects on my becoming. What both of the articles do is disrupt. Break habits of thought. Habits of writing. Habits of being a coherent tidied up self that ignores problematic past and complicit present. Instead, it brings me to the middle of all that messiness. Deleuze and Guattari (1988) write,

The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away. (p. 25)

“W-e” are swept away, in the “waves” of reading-writing-becoming. Echoing words of Le Guin (2004) who echoes Virginia Woolf in turn, the poetry enacts a reading-writing-living inquiry which is created by and “creates this wave in the mind” (p. 7):

A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing . . . one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it.

Reading postqualitative literature created “this wave in the mind,” before words could be articulated, just as postqualitative inquiry pushes at the limits of language and representation to write or articulate a research-in-process, “using the tools [of language] that are shadowy, shifty, and completely unstable” (Carlson, 2021, p. 2). This wave in the mind is also embodied rhythm, which through poetry, sets to work a different kind of scholarship where ethics and aesthetics merge, where theory and lived experience fold within each other, where space and time unfold to rhythms and processes that are not linear, methodical, or controllable. There is an increase of existence through a different space–time configuration, where past selves meet those in the present, where multiple selves—spectral, ancestral, real, imagined, academic, poetic—strike similar chords across space–time divide and resonate, where there is an integration rather than fragmentation.

In poetry, there is a “willingness to let go” (Neilsen, 2008, p. 94), to be open to seen and unseen forces, to be open to silences and spaces where something is allowed to emerge, rather than willed into existence. Poetry can neither be methodical nor mechanical and can thus escape the tyranny of method. Instead of foregrounding structures and protocols as traditional methods end up doing, poetry foregrounds experiences and relationalities. Instead of closure, reduction and systematization that deadens knowledge, poetic inquiry creates openings and potentialities. Poetry enables us to move from a partial to an integrated, engaged and ethical response. Poetry can put theory to work by making it “more intensely affective” (McKnight, 2018, p. 202). Poetry can dance us to the middle of mythos and logos, through poetry as a process akin to living, to life itself (Leggo, 2008).

Among other possibilities then, what poetic inquiry does is to generate creative rhythms and encourage researcher-becomings, through a “tremendous undulation” (Ikoniadou, 2014, p. 13) that arise from certain research encounters. Yet, while resonances are created between the scholarly literature and my experiences, the poetic inquiry also raises some questions about postqualitative research that can be considered as openings even as this article comes to an end. Such questions are increasingly being asked of the field—whether postqualitative is becoming the new canon and closing down on itself, whether ethics can overlook politics, power and privilege that is at play in academia, whether there are other creative avenues to explore without the label of postqual (Bhattacharya, 2020; Carlson et al., 2020; Gerrard et al., 2017; Koro, 2021; Lester, 2020). These questions can become invitations for researchers to engage with the productive and creative intersections of and tensions between traditional qualitative research, postqualitative inquiry and arts-based research practices (specifically, poetic inquiry) in critical and meaningful ways.

In addition to engaging with research differently, poetic inquiry also enables one to engage with academic literature differently, envision academic writing differently. Readings generate wonderings in us, catalyze thought that might be more wanderings and musings rather than linear or “rational.” Researchers, especially those new to a field are asked to wander less, to pull out a single thread and make an argument which can become constraining and limit the wonderings to what can be neatly argued for or against. Instead, a poetic inquiry allows the wanderings and wonderings to lead to productive possibilities. I ask the readers to engage further with these questions: How can an engagement with academic literature move beyond reviews and arguments? How might one extend literature engagement so that resonances and rhythms are brought into play? What might become possible in such engagements with the immanent, the ineffable, the not-yet? Such an engagement might enable one to move beyond the narrow confines of arguments or propositions into open spaces of silences and invisibilities, and thus allow us to embrace uncertainties and not knowing.