A critical posthumanist and new-materialist approach to research has paved the way for new modes of inquiry where the hierarchies between human and the more-than-human are blurred. The constitutions of human ecologies, functionalities and representations are all reassessed. The human subject is reconfigured among all things so that it is not central to the existence of that which is alongside it. The posthumanism driven by Braidotti (Reference Braidotti2013), opening up our sense of assembly between self and others, including nonhuman others, and environmental interconnections; Haraway’s (Reference Haraway1997) notion of diffraction, seeing the meeting points between the human and more-than-human through the effects of difference; taken up by Barad’s (Reference Barad2003) theorisation of the entanglement of matter and its performative intraactions outside anthropocentric hierarchies; all open new directions that are being explored within environmental education. A turn to affect also leads us to an understanding of the interrelations between the human body, social and cultural influences, but also the individually experienced, prelinguistic embodied connection to things.
Driven by the posthuman turn, questions around representationalism, positivism and the centrality of the human subject are being posed: If the human subject in education research has traditionally come to understand the world through a preconfigured linguistic controlling of processes, how then can we move forward in research? As St. Pierre (Reference St. Pierre2021) argues, the subject researcher is tainted by their own interpretation and therefore, cannot be objective. Further, they are never neutral nor separated from their lived social positioning. As many feminist, queer, postcolonialist, Black, Indigenous and intersectional scholars have already pointed out, a humanist ethics creates a ‘universal’ human citizen; one who is male, White, heterosexual and able-bodied. Those outside of this normative epistemological framework are positioned as ‘other’ and therefore, less ‘human’. Here, postqualitative inquiry can reshape an approach to research where all bodies, including the more-than-human, are engaged with from a de-centralised, embodied and relational position. Theory in analysis makes for an opening up of methodological practices and rejects the predetermined position to inquiry. Instead of a fixed and positivist method, a postqualitative inquiry influenced by critical posthuman and new-materialist de-centring of the human subject opens the way forward to learn through doing, which in turn leads to experience and affective understanding.
I take my cue from Lysgaard and Bengtsson (Reference Lysgaard and Bengtsson2020), who state that: ‘Education is at its core not causal, but open’ (p. 1461). This ‘thinking with theory’ (Jackson & Mazzei, Reference Jackson and Mazzei2012) and moving with practice is a praxis that creates further potentialities within postqualitative inquiry where methodological questions are created through the doing of researcher, participant and all that they encounter. A method in a conventional humanist qualitative methodological (St. Pierre, Reference St. Pierre2021) tradition does not exist nor is it explicitly sought.Footnote 1 However, through a postqualitative and affective lens, methodological questions come into being through the performativity of all matter. The outcome is a knowledge-affect, with the understanding that knowledge in this sense is not singular or quantifiable, just as method does not exist as a distinct epistemological form and does not preexist the research.Footnote 2 Thus, for the researcher praxis becomes both decentred and performative, where the lived-in moment created, but not controlled by the researcher, generates new connections as a way of imparting new forms of generative knowledge-affect. Perception comes through relation to the things we encounter, even though we know that we, as human subjects, are not central to all things.
In this paper, I take a critical posthumanist and new materialist approach alongside an understanding of affect in order to critically engage with an in-progress, intermedial artwork, We Found a Body. Through analysing this interactive and situational artwork, which from hereon in I will refer to as an art-game, I offer a reading through Barad’s conception of intraaction, to look at a connecting of environment, body and technology. I argue that this connection becomes a material, so that a new body, or intrabody is created. I look at the affective encounters of meaning-making that this can achieve by studying affect from the position of game-play.
My contention is that affective encounters such as this, where participants experience their bodies, the ‘natural’ world and their technology in new embodied ways, sets the scene for working with theory where the outcome is through guided interaction that creates questions or conversation rather than a predetermined method. This pedagogical approach decentres the researcher as well as the human subject participating in the art-game creating knowledge-affect and pedagogical encounters. I propose that an approach such as this one can manifest as inquiry for environmental education where similar generative interventions can be purposed according to the site that the art takes place on. I will now go on to discuss We Found a Body.
We Found a Body, Viralising a Network of Messy Systems
We Found a Body, is an intermedial research project that positions itself within the realm of postqualitative inquiry through art practice. It is an endeavour in-development, meaning that it was conceived, a minor prototype was made ready to be tested, and then was cancelled due to the Covid lockdown in Melbourne, Australia, June 2021. Since this time there has been more reading and connections made as to what this research project can do.Footnote 3 As a form of postqualitative research, We Found a Body, the work, is unfinished, and as research it is becoming as a concept-driven inquiry through reading theory, which will in turn advance its practical investigations. As Elizabeth St. Pierre has noted countless times, postqualitative inquiry exists in and through theory (notably poststructuralism) as a moving forward in research and an understanding that the researcher can never be a reliable conduit for a universal reality. I take stock of this in moving forward as I discuss this project, where following Deleuze and Guattari (Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987, see footnote 1), I am starting at the middle.
The artwork was conceived through lockdown in Melbourne in 2020. In these months inhabitants of the city were only allowed to leave the house for ‘essential’ reasons such as grocery shopping and 1 h of exercise, and only within a 5 km radius of our dwellings. During this time, my connection to the world outside my front door as well as to nature felt strange and slightly desperate. My mornings would include a 45-min walk of my dog, along a large green area with a creek running along it. Late at night was a different interaction with nature but felt just as compelling. In order to lull myself to sleep during this time of high stress, I would watch mostly European crime dramas. The stories were similar. Violent abuse, often institutional, and a tired and traumatised police officer. Importantly, the natural environment was one of the many protagonists. Most scenes were framed through the use of an establishing drone shot, where humans became ant-like within the wild unruliness of snow-covered stretches of land and mountains, cliffs with waves lashing up against them and islands equal parts green grass and dark stone. As a viewer I mapped the narrative of ‘who-dunnit’ against the backdrop of nature grandiose. Experiencing nature on my morning walks, and again as I lay in bed with my laptop looking down into nature on the screen, my visions of the technological and material world started to overlap.
Thus, We Found a Body began as a reaction to my own fusion between narrative seriality, crime, the natural environment and technology. Looking down at my feet walking against nature resembled the act of looking into my laptop with a scene framed from above. The crime here as I walk, is the massive degradation enacted upon our environment. I began to conceive of a project that could make this point, highlighting the human subject’s connection to the world around them, not through an intellectual engagement with the idea, but in the form of an affective connection to all things.
Bruno Latour suggests that:
We must not think of the personal and the collective as two distinct levels. The big climate questions can make individuals feel small and impotent. But the virus gives us a lesson. If you spread from one mouth to another, you can viralise the world very fast. That knowledge can reempower us (cited in Watts, Reference Watts2020, para. 4).
The project takes this quote, alongside Donna Haraway’s sense of ‘staying with the trouble’ Haraway (Reference Haraway2016) where the human and nonhuman, or kin, are intimately connected in a network of messy systems. If we are to move forward, to enact change that will slow the climate emergency, we must feel and understand ourselves as a link within a larger system beyond the simply human. The aim of the artwork, described in detail below, is to create the entanglement between human and environment as an act of climate activism, where the human subject exists alongside and within the environment rather than separate from or above it. The work motions towards a new-materialist understanding of the world against anthropocentrism. This also poses questions around a tactic that could be harnessed as postqualitative inquiry; that of affective encounters through an art-game leading to new ways of knowing. I see this project as coalitional and insurgent research and public-led pedagogy.
The TV crime genre frames this work. It is a serial narrative, albeit experimental in style, where participants follow a digital map on their phones in order to find different episodes hidden at various outdoor sites. Participants access each episode through their smartphones where a QR code is hidden within a ‘natural’ or urban space. Within the digital map are clues guiding them towards the QR code embedded within the architecture of the space. In this regard the participant also becomes detective, looking for clues to lead them towards the killer. The ‘body’ found within the first episode is not named or shown, but it is the Earth’s body. The killer is all of us in the sense of who we vote for, where we allow our money to be invested and what we buy. The potential suspects in the narrative are scared, frustrated and confused, in the same way that many of us are or can be in the face of the massive harm that we’re causing.
The artwork acts as a game of hide and seek: As the participants try to seek different episodes, their phones are digitally corrupted and their screen starts to waver, or error messages appear according to their placement on the map, digitally hiding the narrative. They must realign their phone through arm movements or press interactive buttons which visually mimic the material space they are standing in, in order to ‘uncorrupt’ their map and get to the next episode. Here, the participant becomes a performer, and the environment becomes a material that envelopes them and actively changes the digital interface of their phones and the direction they must follow. The physical bodily participation of the participant tangles itself into the story so that the digital and material environments mesh and implicate them as relational and coextensive players in worlds larger than their individual selves. The project functions as a form of urban play in a way that decentres and reconstructs participants so that their bodies, their technology, the narrative they watch and the environment they ‘play’ in become intertwined. As Barad states: ‘Matter and meaning are not separate elements’ (2007, p. 3) and it is here where we see ‘meaning’ mattering in new ways. I will go on to read We Found a Body from a posthuman position of performativity in order to engage with the idea of intertwinement, or in Barad’s words, entanglement and analyse how the materialisation of the technology from the art-game, the environment, the narrative and the participant takes place.
Entanglements of Spacetimemattering
Barad’s theory of Posthumanist Performativity argues that the materiality of bodies or things cannot be produced from language and power relations alone. She rejects a clear demarcation between subject/object and instead argues through a reading of physicist Niels Bohr’s interpretation of quantum theory that humans, nonhumans, objects or things are not separate entities. They are instead phenomena, or parts of one another, reaching through time and space. To quote Barad:
phenomena are ontologically primitive relations—relations without preexisting relata. … [R]elata only exist within phenomena as a result of specific intraactions (i.e. there are no independent relata, only relata-within-relations. (2003, p. 815)
Here, materiality is not a given, but always in the process of materialisation, and in this sense the binary categories of ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ are also brought into question. Instead, these categories are always in the process of producing in reference to one another. To quote Barad: ‘This causal relationship between the apparatuses of bodily production and the phenomena produced is one of “agential intra-action”’ (p. 814). Space is not contained, and time is not linear. Instead, in Barad’s posthumanist approach, ‘existence … [is] an iterative becoming of spacetimemattering’ (2007, p. 234) and where ‘[p]henomena are entanglements of spacetimematter’ (2011, p. 125). With the concept of entanglement, Barad argues that within nature, there are no separate or clearly bounded objects, but that objects come into being through their entangled relations and are therefore always changing and mattering according to these dynamic processes of intraaction.
Barad’s relational concepts of agential intraaction and spacetimemattering act as performatives, where entities and their entanglements and variations through space and time bring each other meaningfully into being through iterative intraactivity. As Misha Myers has theorised, types of intermedial or transmedial artworks can be read through a posthuman performative lens, where mediatised space is meshed with physical locations to generate intraactions across time and space producing Barad’s notion of ‘the making of spacetime itself’ (Barad, Reference Barad2003 as cited in Myers, Reference Myers2020, p. 367). The intermediality and interactivity of certain artworks that involve human, environment and technology create affective bonds of connection between what may otherwise be viewed as separate. Following this logic, the dualism of humanism with the self/other binary is brought into question. As Carol Taylor comments:
If ‘we’ are already entangled with all and any ‘others’, such that the categories of I/you, we/them, us/other are rendered redundant, then there can be no ethical speaking ‘of ’ or doing ‘for’ ‘others’ in the relational ontology proposed by Barad, because ontology is relationality. (Reference Taylor, Bozalek, Braidotti, Shefer and Zembylas2019, p. 87)
In terms of a practice of research, a critical posthumanist and new materialist perspective understands also that the dualism between researcher and participant is flattened. I will now go on to analyse We Found a Body from this perspective and make suggestions for how it can be used within research.
My proposition for We Found a Body is that it creates a spacetime where participants, their smartphone, the video narrative and the environment they are in become relata-within-phenomena through their intraactions. Therefore, while the art-game is taking place, new materialities and connections are formed, where the participant is meshed with the environment they are in, through their smartphone through the intraactions taking place. The participant’s connection to the digital interface is not so much about technology but about their relation to technology. To quote Branden Hookway, ‘[t]hat the user of the interface is also its subject follows the notion of the interface as that which at once separates and draws together in augmentation’ (2014, p. 5). We see this clearly with We Found a Body, with the connection to the interface as a guiding tool, and also in relation to physical movement and the narrative guidance. For example, the participant can’t follow the map until they fix their phone and work with the digital interface, or inversely until they fix themselves through their movement and their bodily interaction with their phone, which is tied to changing the interface. This interrelationship creates a material ‘copresencing’ of the technology, research, environment and participant.
The participant follows a narrative that activates their bodies to move across the ground. Their feet touch the ground, their hands touch their phones. They see the site in which they stand doubled inside and outside their phone screens. They are both interior and exterior to the game. The intervention created means that they must follow a map to find a killer, and narratively as they follow each episode are walking in the land that is figured as murdered. They are both detective and murderer, but must follow the path created by the map, moving in space in order to be (and become) both things. The failure written into the game suddenly makes the digital image break up. The pixilation of the environment on the screen becomes more apparent and digitally ‘messy’ so that the thickness of the digital has a materiality. As Barad says, ‘“[m]atter” does not refer to an inherent, fixed property of abstract, independently existing objects; rather, “matter” refers to phenomena in their ongoing materialization’ (Barad’s emphasis Reference Barad2007, p. 151). Material and discursive processes work together, but not separately from one another, reacting dynamically in intraactivity to create an intrabody. ‘All bodies, not merely “human” bodies, come to matter through the world’s iterative intra-activity— its performativity’ (Barad’s emphasis p. 152). The intrabody performatively intraacted in We Found a Body is the materialisation that has come about through the activities of the human subject moving, looking, following and watching; along with other phenomena, so that everything is relata-in-phenomena, extending bodily production in an embodied way. As Barad says, ‘“environments” and “bodies” are intra-actively coconstituted. … Importanty, apparatuses are themselves phenomena’ (p. 170). This is a mode of nonrepresentational inquiry that is always becoming. ‘Post qualitative inquiry never is’ St. Pierre (Reference St Pierre2019, p. 9) tells us, and here the intrabody in not static, matter is iterative and becoming, dynamic and therefore queer.Footnote 4
The Queer Affective Relationality of Things
As Barad has noted herself, intraactions are inherently queerly performative in that they function as always changing and adapting in a fluid dance of relationality.Footnote 5 The queer subject changes in relation to their encounters, is never fixed, is always dynamic and never resting on a singular definition, just as matter in Barad’s posthumanist sense moves and changes according to its iterative intraactions. In the Queer Life of Things: Performance, Affect and the More-Than-Human, (2019) Stacy Holman Jones and Dan Harris argue that ‘we experience objects, animals, and nonhuman subjects as animate and animating agents that refigure our understanding of the queerly performative possibilities’ of Barad’s intraacting phenomena (p. 15). They do not see the more-than-human, including objects, in isolation but in a changing dance of affective relationality, bringing their thingness to the world. They argue that ‘objects have an agency that may not yet be recognisable to humans’ (p. 11, 12). This dynamic relationality that changes through affective encounters with the things or the matter of this world opens up further possibilities for an art-game such as We Found a Body in extending an approach within postqualitative inquiry and environmental education. If all things are both animate and animating, where new materialities are created through dynamic intraactions, and where the researcher positions themselves as tangled within (relata-within-phenomena) rather than central to the intervention through game-play such as this, then new unexpected relations can occur. The art-game is the generative mechanism created by the researcher and the outcome is the proposition of embodied responses across all matter. This mode of research can open up opportunities to share across time and space various inequalities and outlooks, and build cohesion between participants, human and otherwise. The affective encounters mentioned above mean that this is embodied research.
A Politics of Affect in Public Space
Gregg and Seigworth (Reference Gregg and Seigworth2010) propose that affect happens in the in-between of moments where language cannot describe the unconscious intensities driving us forward in movement or knowing or suspending us in moments of force. Affect to them:
is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-body and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations between these intensities and resonances themselves. (p. 1)
As stated, affect is bodily, and therefore embodied. Embodiment comes with affective encounters that have the capacity to create a politics of affect. Taylor references Brian Massumi in her discussion of the politics of affect, where bodies react to one another in an open and active way. She argues that ‘because affective politics are inherently collective, and dynamically traverse all bodies, they bring new potentials for in-forming those bodies in ways which can remodulate and re-form situations’ (p. 88). She states, alongside Massumi that a politics of affect has the capacity to collectively activate bodies against a normalised politics and instead ‘potentialise new modes of ethical becoming’ (ibid). Through the queer performative intraactivity of all matter, the boundaries between bodies are blurred so that moving in spaces activates new variations and events for these bodies. We Found a Body galvanises these bodies affectively and politically due to the very story it tells within its situated space where it acts as a form of becoming rather than an end in itself. Here, in research is a clear shift from the humanist subject to that of all things that are being affectively and interdependently connected in an ethical becoming.
Sara Ahmed also sees the collective through the lens of affective encounters, describing affect as ‘sticky’. She states that ‘[a]ffect is what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects’ Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2010, p. 230). Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2014, p. 11) does not discount emotion as a part of affect arguing ‘that it is the objects of emotions that circulate, rather than emotion as such’. Thus, according to Ahmed, it is through association rather than psychology that emotion sticks to objects and as objects move within the world, affect sticks to them through their different encounters. As she states, ‘emotions are relational: they involve (re)actions or relations of ‘towardness’ or ‘awayness’ in relation to . . . objects’ (ibid, p. 8). Bodies are directed or oriented through emotion and are therefore shaped into the world according to their affective intensity. Here, affect, emotion and materiality are produced in tandem. The reactions of affect on the body mould one’s place in the social world as well as our social imaginaries. This notion of affect celebrates a queer reading of the relational, where subjects and things move among and are oriented in different ways according to one another. We Found a Body takes place within the public sphere and has the active political intent of advocating for climate justice. As Edbauer Rice (Reference Edbauer Rice2008, p. 209) points out, ‘affect theory can have a significant impact on how we conceptualise the public sphere, whose discursive spaces do not mirror the normative public sphere that some theories suppose’. She questions how a critical intervention can take place that unsticks the problematic discourse from its current positionings and create a new affective expression of positive rearticulation and association. Through a flattening of ontologies where all matter comes to matter, linguistic definitions are lost, as is a vocabulary that counts on representation. Strategies that involve play through intermedial artwork are a disruption to humanist qualitative methodologies.
Through ethical becoming and affective remodulations of bodies, environmental education researchers have the potential to use the art-game within climate activist research where ‘nature’ can be affectively experienced. Following Ahmed, bodies can be reorientated in the game situation, leading to new courses of affective encounter and stickiness. Projects such as We Found a Body can produce counternarratives where new modes of belonging within space and time are experienced. Extended ways of being human are at play where an intrabody is materialised in the performativity of matter as well as the performativity of the art-game, redirecting across time and space. This is a reimagining of the thingness (Harris & Jones, Reference Harris and Jones2019) of the world where new meaning comes to matter, which includes what we see and hear on our technological devices. This is not a method in research. Instead, it is a tactic where the agential capacities of the beyond-human are revealed through the knowledge-affect where research happens in the performativity of intraaction and moving in matter. It is through the new materialisation of body, environment and technology that teaches us, where we come to know and be affected alongside all things.
There are aspects to consider in going forward in finishing the art-game and for others making their own. Questions around who gets to play, why and how one plays, and the values that play performs need to be considered as well as how one is interpellated within the dominant hegemony and how this effects their play experience. First and foremost in my mind is being able to recognise and work with first people’s knowledge systems and histories with respect and inclusion. Spaces have histories and the importance of site and the cultures that exist within them cannot be ignored in writing the stories that take place on them. Likewise, maps have been used as colonising tools in their use of demarcation, segmentation and dispossession, and as Russworm (Reference Russworm2018, p. 76) notes, ‘we also know that gamic systems are influenced by things like algorithmic bias and that even the most seemingly abstract digital simulator is both encoded and decoded ideologically’. For the researcher using a postqualitative inquiry, these aspects influenced through the power structures of the hegemony must also be wrestled with.
In his article ‘Just making things and being alive about it’, Keogh (Reference Keogh2013) writes about the game Lim by video game designer, merritt k. In it, the player is a square trying to get through a nondescript maze. They start as a very colourful square but are attacked by being bashed into by other squares who are singular colours such as brown or blue. The attacks by the other squares are so violent that the screen shakes and white noise is created. The player’s only chance of saving themselves is to hold the ‘Z’ key down and change their colour to that of the attacking square’s. Alas, the more you ‘blend in’, the more that your own body starts attacking you, shaking and warping the screen, and making your movement impossibly slow. On top of this, if you blend in as brown, you still get attacked by a blue square and vice versa. Sometimes the physical attacks are so strong that your square gets pushed outside the maze all together, where you are locked out. However, being on the outside means that you turn back to your rainbow colours. In Keogh’s article, merritt k explains that she made the game the first summer that she was out in public space as a queer woman and wanted to make a work that translated the experience of being in public space by someone outside the normative heterosexual system. While Lim is representational, the affect that it creates through an experiential enactment of Ahmed’s description of how bodies are shaped through a relational directing/turning/redirecting is pertinent. The ‘body’ in Lim is affectively and materially produced. I use this example of a video game as a demonstration of how the art-game that involves bodily movement of the participant in space and in relation to the environment alongside digital and narrative worlds, can be affected by those other elements alongside the researcher. There is no method, but postqualitative inquiry informed by critical posthumanism and new materialism enables us to affectively and intraactively connect in a creation of knowledge-affect. What does walking across the ground reveal? What do the trees tell us? What does the narrative leading us across this site expose? We must be open to all these elements that teach us what we do not know from the starting point of our research. This new body or intrabody exists in the timespace of the art-game. With We Found a Body, a body dies, and a new body is found.
Acknowledgements
None.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Conflicts of Interest
None.
Statement
I attest that this this manuscript is an original work that has not been submitted to nor published anywhere else.
Cassandra Tytler is an artist and academic. She works across single-channel video, performance and video installation. She completed her practice-led PhD within the Faculty of Art at Monash University in 2021. Her research interest lies in performance in and of video, and its potential to create a relational and aware politics of resistance. She has exhibited, screened and performed work and spoken at conferences both nationally and internationally.
