A case for posthumanism - Part 5 - Methodology
“What will undo any boundary is the awareness that it is our vision, and not what we are viewing, that is limited” - James Carse
Apart from a final summary of key resources, this will be the last piece in this series on posthumanism. There are a lot more ‘posts’ I want to tackle over the coming months: post-professionalism and post-qualitative research not being the least of these.
But speaking of post-qualitative research, this penultimate post looks at how we might actualise posthuman thinking in research and practice. But to do that, a couple of warning shots need to be fired. The first is that methodology is probably a poor name for this work because it is a term that’s been so corrupted in healthcare research — especially by qualitative health researchers — in recent decades, that it’s come to stand for a pernicious mode of capture that ensnares many novice researchers.
This is how Elizabeth Adams St Pierre recently described her experience as a doctoral student;
‘It was so easy, so clear, so accessible. [Qualitative research methods] told me what to do and when and how to do it. I didn’t have to think. I didn’t need any theory at all, really. I could just get some data and then organize them into themes that appeared all on their own. All I had to do was follow the recipe and then write up my findings. So simple, really, to just be a functionary of the method. So dreadfully boring’ (St. Pierre, 2023).
Qualitative health research has become deeply Cartesian and humanist. It is often mechanistic and instrumental. It privileges discovery and feeds the desire to stabilise ideas around concepts like being and identity. And ‘although it claims to be interpretive, its empiricism leans toward logical empiricism’ (ibid).
It encourages students to focus on which methodology they will choose from the expanding buffet of pre-validated options available to them. I had a student recently advised by a colleague to use autoethnography for a study proposal that the advisor hadn’t even read. Another colleague was told that their faculty would only allow them to use one of five (why five?) well-known and tightly structured qualitative methods for their doctorate.
Philosophy and ontology still remain worrisome words for a lot of health researchers, and the question of which arrangement of ontology and epistemology might form the lifeblood of the study, are often substituted for the desire to ‘choose your methodology and get going’ (ibid);
‘It certainly never occurred to me as a doctoral student that if I began my study with the immanent ontology of poststructuralism I would not think or use a preexisting social science research methodology that is not immanent. If I had actually begun my dissertation research with poststructuralism, I would not have done that interview study at all. After all, in his Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault wrote over and over again that he was not interested in the speaking subject—that he worked in the order of discourse instead. It is interpretive, not poststructural, work that focuses on the voices of people describing their everyday lived experiences. But I just followed the qualitative process I’d been taught like an obliging doc student. I went to the field and interviewed and observed and did all the “empirical” things you’re supposed to do as an empirical qualitative researcher. But the “empirical” I studied was limited to people’s words and what I “observed.” The richness of the empirical could not possibly be captured by qualitative methods’ (ibid).
How, then, might we use the ontological and epistemological approaches set out in the first four parts of this series on posthumanism to frame ways of thinking and practicing without falling back into the cozy but ultimately suffocating recliner of qualitative methodology?
There are clearly some things we should avoid — including prescriptions. So, one way to think about the best way forward might be to think of a set of dispositions that orientate the way we palpate (rather than discover or define) our creations.
Put another way, if I were examining a posthuman thesis, what applied principles would I expect the candidate to base their study around?
Some methodological pointers
Our tendency is to want to understand things spatially — to give everything spatial coordinates, physical form, a defined shape, and mass. We ask where are memories, illnesses, or pains ‘found’ or ‘stored’ in the body. We essentialise entities and fix them in ‘being’. We like identities, images of solidity and permanence: “This is a book”.
But this act of colonisation and capture strips away all of the creative energy that makes the universe the swirling vortex of emergence that it really is.
So while spatial questions are valid in themselves, they have come to dominate almost all the ways we think in healthcare research whilst also obscuring the dynamic power of creativity.
Here’s how Clair Colebrook explains how a spatial attitude shapes how we think about movement;
’We have usually thought of time as the joining up of movement; time is what links, say, each step of my walk into a perceived line or unified action. But we can reverse this and say that time, far from being some sort of glue that holds distinct points of experience together, is an explosive force. Time is the power of life to move and become. Time produces movement, but the error has been to derive time from movement’ (Colebrook, 2002, p. 40).
When we impose spatial concepts on processes that are fundamentally temporal we replace the divergence, becoming, flow, disruption, qualitative difference, plurality, change, intensity, and liminality of duration (time, aeon) with the appearance of linear progression, quantifiable unity, fixity and stasis, likeness, events linked in sequence, order, cause and effect, numbers, homogeneity, and the human fantasy of control (metric space, chronos).
What a focus on ‘duration’ (the term Bergson used to differentiate it from ‘clock time’) allows for, is a focus on movement, flow, and becoming, rather than stasis, being, and fixed identity.
For some, aberrant movement (Lapoujade, 2017) might even be the engine behind all forms of creative life because it is movement that brings entities into relation and, through them, the creation of a new world.
‘Deleuze’s ontology is a rigorous attempt to think of process and metamorphosis — becoming — not as a transition or transformation from one point to another, but rather as an attempt to think of the real as a process’ (Boundas, 2005).
’Intuition is... the movement by which we emerge from our own duration, by which we make use of our own duration to affirm and immediately recognise the existence of other durations above or below us’ (Deleuze 1988, p.33}.
Another important example of the way we can think about time and duration differently comes from Henri Bergson’s challenge to the traditional linear, survival-of-the-fittest narrative of (human) evolution. Bergson suggested that the evolutionary path humans had taken was only one path and that there were as many paths as there were entities in the cosmos. Our path has led us to value reason and logic and to believe that these traits made us exceptional. Our self-appointed exceptionalism then justifies our belief that we were entitled to bend the rest of the natural world to our advantage. But this path was only ever the expression of a particularly competitive, hubristic, and anthropocentric view. Other entities, becomings, processes, and flows will be entirely indifferent to this view, and so have their own expressions of a much more creative evolution; one that does not reduce duration to a set of quantitative measures and rational coordinates.
But how do we as humans access these other becomings, flows, and movements? How do any entities do it? (And here it’s probably worth restating the obvious point that we’re not just talking about other living beings here, even objects and things, but also processes and events, and other incorporeal entities like thoughts, social constructs, and stories.) Deleuze called his own approach to this problem transcendental empiricism (TE).
TE is empirical because it concerns the way all entities encounter the other through signs and manifestations without ever being able to fully capture or know the other, and transcendental because thought (again, not only human thought but that which is necessary for any entities to interact), allows entities to go beyond mere connection or relation to sense the real, necessary, virtual, private interior of the other.
‘The illusion is to think that because we are synthesising machines, that “mind” is therefore the origin of that synthesising activity. In fact, mind is already a synthesis of myriad inhuman encounters. What Deleuze calls “transcendental empiricism” is precisely his attempt to think the genetic evolution of the thinking subject, and to trace lines of potential deviation-transformation’ Link.
It is always tempting to try to make sense of the strangeness of posthuman thought by essentialising the thinking subject and imagining relations in some form like atoms, or billiard balls, or as mind maps with solid entities connected by thousands of intersecting lines. Everyone probably does it, because we’re so socialised to think spatially, not temporally. But, as I suggested above, this confuses a fundamentally creative process of becoming with identity and being. It gives solidity to things that aren’t structural. We see this even in posthuman research, especially in the use of assemblage theory.
Perhaps the idea of assemblages appeals to our mechanistic fantasy of solid entities connecting via invisible strings. The problem is the tendency to reduce assemblages to interconnect things. If all you have is a hand, a hammer, and a nail, then everything looks like a hand-hammer-nail assemblage. But assemblage theory is about processes, not the ‘things themselves’. It is the manifestation of duration, so is about becoming not being, flow not fixity (Buchanan 2020).
Which, of course, forces upon us all kinds of ambiguities and uncertainties. For years now, existential philosophers have examined the ways humans have tried to address what Avital Ronell called the “gash of non-meaning” (see video below).
This ‘gash’ is a part of being conscious sensate beings. We dislike uncertainty and wonder why it is we have these remarkable capacities if there is no higher purpose. So we invent Gods, natural laws, and reason as ways to salve the pain that comes with the realisation of our impotence. Our reaching for “emergency supplies of meaning” (ibid) is used by many as justification for all manner of atrocities in our vain attempt to give meaning to our existence (see Simone Bignall’s fantastic explanation of how men’s existential impotence has been used to inflict rape, servitude, and other horrors on women).
Posthumanism argues that our desperate urge to salve the wounds of non-meaning through existential ‘therapies’ like faith and reason will never work. Instead, we should embrace our fundamental immanence; experience the fullness of being alive and the creative profusion that is life. It is what it means to be ‘schizoid’, in the Deleuze and Guattarian sense, to fully embrace the excess of life that comes when we let go of our nihilism and resentment, our desperate urge for certainty, reason, and our fantasies of command and control.
This is the nature of immanence. Not deferring life to an ideal that exists ‘outside’ of life (Plato), the endless negation that comes with the pursuit of logic and reason through science and ‘discovery’ (Descartes, Hegel), or the salvation to come from a life beyond this life (religion and many forms of spirituality), but the radical opening to creation that comes when we dispense with intellect and allow for the intuition and the endless repetition of difference to take centre stage.
To summarise all of this very partial summary of a posthuman methodology:
‘It is only by adopting the temporal perspective that we are able to think beyond the perspective of the human being and grasp the nature of reality as such’ (Roffe 2020, p.84).
And now, increasingly, the natural sciences are becoming aware of the need to move away from ‘spatial’ thinking;
’Everything we thought was stable, from subatomic particles to the cosmos at large, has turned out to be in motion. From the acceleration of the universe to the fluctuation of quantum fields, nothing in nature is static. The universe is expanding in every direction at an accelerating rate. What Einstein once thought was an immobile finite universe has turned out to be an increasingly mobile one. This acceleration also means that even space and time are not a priori structures, as we once thought, but continually emerging processes in an unfolding universe.
‘Even at the smallest levels of reality, what we previously thought were solid bodies and inviolable elementary particles, physicists now believe to be emergent features of vibrating quantum fields. These fields’ movement can no longer be understood as ‘motion through space, evolving in time’ as Newton had once understood it. Where an object is and how it is moving can no longer be determined at the same time with certainty. The old paradigm of a static cosmos built from static particles is dead. All of nature is in perpetual flux’ (Nail, 2021, p. 1).
But perhaps the last word should go to Gilles Deleuze, who explains how we might go about posthuman thinking like this;
’This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialisation, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 161).
References
Bignall, S. (2015). Iqbal’s Becoming-Woman in The Rape of Sita. In J. Roffe & H. Stark (Eds.), Deleuze and the Non/Human (pp. 122-141). Palgrave Macmillan.
Boundas, C. V. (2005). Ontology. In A. Parr (Ed.), The Deleuze Dictionary (pp. 191-192). Columbia University Press.
Buchanan, I. (2020). Assemblage Theory and Method: An Introduction and Guide. Bloomsbury Academic.
Colebrook, C. (2002). Gilles Deleuze. Routledge.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus — Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. (1988). Bergsonism. Zone Books.
Lapoujade, D. (2017). Aberrant Movements: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. MIT Press.
Nail, T. (2021). Theory of the Object. EUP. Link
Roffe, J. (2020). The works of Gilles Deleuze: Volume 1 - 1953-1969. re.press. Link
St. Pierre, E. A. (2023). Poststructuralism and Post Qualitative Inquiry: What Can and Must Be Thought. Qualitative Inquiry, 29(1), 20-32. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004221122282