Category: Poststructuralist thoughts

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Geological nature of autism research

Today, I “accidentally” came across an article by Marcelina Piotrowski “Writing in Cramped Spaces” (2017). Jenni had posted several other articles from the special issue of Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 8(3) in the module “Doing PostQual I” and I became intrigued by the other articles in the roster.

Piotrowski’s writing is thorough, very well documented and organized. She is talking about cramped spaces and links medicine, literature, geography, ecology, art, and philosophy to  explain postqual and intersciplinary research. By doing so, she actually illustrated the concept with her own writing. On the highlighting index, this article received the brightest, most highlighted marks.

This read came at an excellent time–I struggled to start writing the lit review for our first POI study publication, and Piotrowski’s work helped me on two fronts: she began her writing with the discussion of disciplinary research–a direct hook to POI study, and explained why writing can become problematic. I  feel better, I can try putting that lit review together.  A post from earlier today captures some of my struggles as I try to figure out  how I am getting lost in exploration of the wildnerness of postqual and methological, political, and cultural dilemmas of educational research and yet, hearing my mom call me to dinner from three feet away. Of course I am having all these epistemological adventures in my head, without leaving the backyard!

Anyway, at the end of the article, when Piotrowski started pulling in ecology as an illustration of ecology as emploed by  Guattari, I thought about using geology and archeology to write about autsim. Autism is a multidisciplinary concept, but somehow, it is very much territorialized within each discipline. If you assemble all the plains of research together, you will end up with a very crude sculpture of Autism. I want to see if I can dig up some archeological artifacts buried in layers of sediment of research produced by multiple fields and their epistemological traditions. It would be cool to do a postqual meta analysis of autism research. Map it, take it apart. See at what point the division in to high and low autism came to be. The DSM wars, the methodologies used. It would be neat to take on geology or archeology as a guide because sediments are formed by the climate, geological, and biological activities. So I can at least map the climate of the culture, scientific methodological rock samples, and play with it some more to develop my methodology of inquiry as a parallel to geological and archeological research. I could do a survey of literature by year of publication. Tons of work, but maybe well worth it.

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Barad Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter

“The belief that grammatical categories reflect the underlying structure of the world is a continuing seductive habit of mind worth questioning. Indeed, the representationalist belief in the power of words to mirror preexisting phenomena is the metaphysical substrate that supports social constructivist, as well as traditional realist, beliefs.” p.802

“A performative understanding of discursive practices challenges the re-
presentationalist belief in the power of words to represent preexisting
things. Performativity, properly construed, is not an invitation to turn
everything (including material bodies) into words; on the contrary, per-
formativity is precisely a contestation of the excessive power granted to
language to determine what is real. Hence, in ironic contrast to the mis-
conception that would equate performativity with a form of linguistic
monism that takes language to be the stuff of reality, performativity is
actually a contestation of the unexamined habits of mind that grant lan-
guage and other forms of representation more power in determining our
ontologies than they deserve.” p.802

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Barad, intentionality according to Bohr, and QMT

Stil in the first chapter of “Meeting Universe Half Way”  that impressed me so much from the getgo and new directions for my thinking are opening up as fast as they can. I like Barad’s exercise in analogical thinking, though she exposed such thinking as one of the major flaws in Frayn’s work in addition to unapologetically turning a blind eye to actual historicacl accounts. On page six, Barad writes about analagical thinking:
“analogical thinking (…) so often produced unsatisfactory understandings of the relevant issues.”

Later, she uses it to demonstrate what this kind of thinking can still produce if the thinker actually bothers to apply the theory correctly. She expands on the principle of complimnetarity proposed by Bohr, and shows how it leads to very different conclusions from Frayn’s. She writes,

“according to Bohr, we shouldn’t rely on the metaphysical presuppositions of classical physics (which Bohr claims is the basis for our common-sense perception of reality); rather, what we need to do is attend to the actual experimental conditions that would enable us to measure and make sense of the notion of intentional states ofmind. In the absence of such conditions, not only is the notion of an ‘‘intentional state of mind’’ meaningless, but there is no corresponding determinate fact of the matter. To summarize, the crucial point is not merely that intentional states are inherently unknowable, but that the very nature of intentionality needs to be rethought.” (pp. 21, 22)

Her exercise illustrates both the folly of Frayn’s logic and the way Bohr’s principle of complimentarity relate to philosophy. Brilliant!

So what of intentionality? As I read Barad’s application of this principle in the Frayns play context, i thought about how traditional research methods (both qual and quant) often focus on causality, the need to arrive at the root of things, but when it comes to social science these goals actually assume that an action or a behavior was intentional.

Here is another, more practical example: cover letters, or how abobut the times when i had to write several letters to explain why i want to be in this grad program or that one. Every time i struggled to find words. Now I realize that the trouble came from the obligation to explain my intentions, but intentions, as it turns out, are a very complicated matter. Each time, I managed to free a strand or two from the tangled up mess I encountered as I wrote, but I could never bear to go back to re-read my letters of intention after I submitted them. The thought of reading them again causes me a very-near-physical pain; they make me cringe. It is a highly reflexive process, and I muse at how other people do it. I never heard anyone complain about how writing a cover letter is a deeply conflicted activity.

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My first impressions of Barad

Reading the first chapter of the “Entangled Beginnings.” OMG, I had to stop and write my first impressions out because her words are so profound. In the first portion of the chapter, as she rounds up her argument about how the Quantum Mechanics Theory is being used in other contexts, such as the play that features the meeting of two famous physicists in Nazi Europe. She makes an importnat disctinction between the purpose of the play and purpose of the actual quantum physics studies. Barad goes on to hypothesize why we as a race are so smitten with QM, and I now totally get it: we simply do not understand it, but are drawn to it because of its potential to explain the numerous messy connection, relations, structures that traditional science and qualitative methods cannot explain. Or even worse, due to political reasons:

“Public fascination with quantum physics is probably due in large part to several different factors, including the counterintuitive challenges it poses to the modernist worldview, the fame of the leading personalities who developed and contested the theory (Einstein not least among them), and the profound and world-changing applications quantum physics has wrought (symboized by the development of the tomic bomb)” p.6.

Because ” The interpretative issues in quantum physics (i.e., questions related to what the theory meansand how to understand its relationship to the world) are far from settled.” p. 6

Barad’s next point about how we just use QM concepts, though we do not even understand them, hits very close to home. This the question of rigor and integrity. This is why I raised my brown at Manning’s (very liberal) use of music theory when she first introduced the Minor Gesture, this is why Hein’s reference to sound as a molecular structure (which he, in turn, seems to have picked up from Deleuze) is misleading. I think in our pursuit of crossing interdisiplinary boundaries we forget to check facts or at least make an attempt to gain some expertise in the field we seek to incorporate in our studies. Great point, Barad!

She next brings forth the problem of analogical thinking that results in “unsatisfactory understandings of the relevant issues” This one cuts me deep because my sense-making strategy is amost exclusively dependent on creating analogies. Guilty as charged, for sure. So how do i change that?

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Thoughts on knowledge

i feel like I am camping near the entrance of something important. I have been roaming these shores for months, unable to enter. I smell it, I see its contours obscured by fog, I hear sounds, I am drawn, but I cannot figure out how to grow gills. Arts based research and its philosophical fibers. Currents and waves. Or just an alien world, not necessarily one like a sea. I want to breathe it in, but even at my best, I am just a snorkler with a mask who bobs on the surface, limited by my physiology of a land creature. Or an earthling limited by my earthly shape. I am taking classes with Janet and now and then I talk to Jenni, and I want to come visit them where they are, but I was raised  a positivist. Positivism is my reality. I understand its rhetoric, or at least, I feel comfortable inhibiting its structures, but in my heart, I know I am more, much more. I never fit in. As a child, I used to draw a lot. I played an instrument and enjoyed classical music. I knew where to escape when life became monotonous with all its demands for sense-making.

Postructuralist ideas became a highway that brought me back to the familiar shores of thought. And now I am quieted and dumstruck by Erin Manning’s “what if knowledge were not assumed to have a form already? What if we didn;t yet know what needed to be taught, let alone questioned?” (Minor gestures, p. 9) What if? We are condiitioned and trained to live in the reality that Manning calls neo-liberalism. What if we did not have to conform? If only I could take a pill like Neo in the Matrix trilogy and wake up a real reality. Is it even a specific reality? Neo and his fellow humans shared one, but are realities singular?