Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education

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Ethics and the new materialism: a brief genealogy

of the ‘post’ philosophies in the social sciences

Bronwyn Davies

To cite this article: Bronwyn Davies (2016): Ethics and the new materialism: a brief genealogy
of the ‘post’ philosophies in the social sciences, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of
Education, DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2016.1234682

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DISCOURSE: STUDIES IN THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EDUCATION, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2016.1234682

Ethics and the new materialism: a brief genealogy of the ‘post’

philosophies in the social sciences
Bronwyn Davies
Youth Research Centre, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This paper explores the relation between poststructuralist theorising Reflexivity; diffraction;
and new materialism with a particular focus on the work of matter; representationalism;
Barad. Tracing the lines of thought, particularly as they relate to post-humanism;
entanglement
ethics, through the works of Foucault, Butler, Cixous and Deleuze
the paper finds a range of concepts that anticipate and link
directly with Barad’s work. Barad’s emphasis on the agency of
matter, and on how matter is made to matter, is found to be
new. The different analytic work that can be done with these
various philosophers is explored through three intra-active
entanglements; first, among preschool children and a rock,
second, between a girl and a chimp raised as her twin, and third,
between humans and cows.

Introduction and background

At the 2015 AARE conference, Margaret Somerville and I debated the place of post-huma-
nist new materialism in relation to poststructuralist theory (2015). Margaret had surprised
me with her claim that new materialism offered a radical break with ‘poststructuralist’
thinking-doing.1 I had, until we began work on our debate, taken new materialism to
be an exciting creative, evolutionary extension of poststructuralist thought rather than a
radical break from it. My further exploration of the relations between them brings me
to the point, in this paper, of seeing them as both continuous and discontinuous – as
dis/continuous. In Barad’s own words:
… creativity is not about crafting the new through a radical break with the past. It’s a matter of
dis/continuity, neither continuous nor discontinuous in the usual sense. It seems to me that it’s
important to have some kind of way of thinking about change that doesn’t presume there’s
either more of the same or a radical break. Dis/continuity is a cutting together-apart (one
move) that doesn’t deny creativity and innovation but understands its indebtedness and
entanglements to the past and the future. (Barad, cited in Juelskjær & Schwennesen, 2012,
p. 16)

This paper is, then, an exploration of the ways in which new materialist thought both
departs from and is continuous with poststructuralist thinking. It focuses in particular on
ethics, since that is the conceptual space in which new materialism’s most serious

CONTACT Bronwyn Davies daviesb@unimelb.edu.au

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 B. DAVIES

challenge to previous thinking-practice in the social sciences might be said to take place –
and more practically, as a way of finding a path through a vast and complex set of issues.
Poststructural philosophies have had major implications for the way we think about and
thus practise our research, implications that we have been exploring and experimenting
with since the late 1980s and early 1990s in social science research generally and also
in educational research. The conception of human life in terms of the individualized
liberal humanist subject was a primary target of early poststructural analysis. Yet in
varying ways that individualized subject can be said to live on in current qualitative
research as the primary actor. So much is this so, that Lather and St Pierre (2013) have
called for the development of ‘post-qualitative’ methodologies that might take us into
what Spivak (1999) calls the ‘new new’, informed by elements of the new post-humanist
materialism.
Liberal humanism, and its modern cousin neoliberalism, both contribute to the central-
ity and importance of human affairs and their performance by individual human subjects.
Those subjects are variously constructed as rational, competitive, striving for power, and as
self-governing, and, increasingly, as narcissistic.2 Reflection is the strategy those liberal
humanist individuals use to make visible to themselves their own subjectivities (or identi-
ties, or essential selves). Early qualitative research took up reflection and reflexivity as one
of its major anti-positivist tools for acquiring insight into the human condition. Then, fol-
lowing poststructuralism’s demolishing of such a thing as an essential self, qualitative
researchers continued, in the absence of alternative strategies, to rely on reflection as a
primary tool for generating and analysing data. Reflexivity gained, if anything, greater pro-
minence as a research tool, fed in part, at least, by the feminist poststructuralist decon-
structions of the binary structure of our epistemologies, insofar as that deconstructive
work opened up the possibility of seeing embodiment and emotions as intrinsic elements
of all human existence. And how else were we to explore embodiment and emotion
except through a reflexive examination of our own embodied emotions?
New materialist thought makes a fresh challenge to the taken-for-granted ascendance
of all things human in qualitative research, and it argues for the co-implication of humans
with non-human matter, where the subject is ‘already part of the substances, systems, and
becomings of the world’ (Alaimo, 2014, p. 14). It further challenges the apparent indiffer-
ence of qualitative research to the ways human thinking-doing affects what will matter in
the world (Barad, 2007).
Lather and St Pierre’s recent intervention, calling for a post-qualitative research, can be
read in several ways simultaneously: as a play on words that invites us to move beyond the
conceptual limitations of current qualitative research; it simultaneously invokes and works
with the various ‘post’ philosophies, including post-humanism, that have emerged over
the last 30 years; and, finally, it can be read as inviting a radical break with the poststruc-
tural-thinking-doing that informed much of our work until now. What I explore in this
paper is this interface between the ‘old new’ of poststructural philosophies and the new
new, informed by post-humanist new materialism. I ask, what are the new materialists,
and Barad in particular, providing us with, conceptually, that we lacked before? I then
explore how what they offer is already-emergent in various poststructural writings. And
finally I explore three entangled intra-actions, one with humans and a rock, one
between humans and a chimp, and one between humans and cows, and with each
one, reading them with concepts from both post and new materialist thought-practice.
 DISCOURSE: STUDIES IN THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EDUCATION 3

The conceptual limitations in current qualitative research can be seen to come from
more than one direction. According to Barad, they are a carry-over of Newtonian and
Cartesian thinking (2007). They can also be seen as a response to the present emphasis
on neoliberal governmentality with its ruthless individualism and its sole valuing of
productivity and profit.3 Critique, and the openness of poststructural thought, are anath-
ema to neoliberal bureaucrats (Davies, 2014a), and their attitudes have inevitably
impacted on our research practices, not least because neoliberal governments have
required greater surveillance and control of the individualized neoliberalized workers
who have been cut loose, via neoliberalism itself, from other values (Davies & Somerville,
2015). It has become common-place and unremarkable, then, to find in current qualitative
research:

. the separation of the researcher from what s/he observes;

. the moral dominance of the rational/powerful researcher over the subordinate, passive
object of research;
. representationalism – the presumed capacity of the researcher to represent with words
the reality s/he observes, including the reality of the researcher’s own reflexively exam-
ined thought processes;
. the associated assumption that language and modes of data collection/generation are
transparent;
. little or no attention paid to physical matter other than the matter of the embodied
human subject;
. the dominance of ‘planning’ such that the research, in practice, is entrapped in its pre-
conceptions; and finally;
. a technical conception of ethics that reduces it to a box-ticking exercise to be signed off
by various institutional management committees.

In the next section, I explore what it is Barad has to offer us in our thinking-doing of
research, and I will come back to the intensification of individualism that the assemblage
of neoliberalism gives rise to.

Barad’s conceptual innovation

Barad’s radical intervention is to draw our attention to the representationalist trap social
science researchers had fallen into, or never quite pulled ourselves out of. Representation-
alism is based on Newtonian geometrical optics – an optics that envisages boundaries of
separate entities with clearly demarcated interiors and exteriors. She offers instead a phys-
ical optics, thus taking us to ‘questions of diffraction rather than reflection’ (Barad, 2008,
p. 122). Elaborating on the concept of diffraction Barad says:
What often appears as separate entities (and separate sets of concerns) with sharp edges does
not actually entail a relation of absolute exteriority at all. Like the diffraction patterns illuminat-
ing the indefinite nature of boundaries – displaying shadows in ‘light’ regions and bright spots
in ‘dark’ regions – the relation of the social and the scientific is a relation of ‘exteriority within’.
This is not a static relationality but a doing – the enactment of boundaries – that always entails
constitutive exclusions and therefore requisite questions of accountability … I offer an elabor-
ation of performativity – a materialist, naturalist, and posthumanist elaboration – that allows
4 B. DAVIES

matter its due as an active participant in the world’s becoming, in its ongoing ‘intra-activity’.
(p. 122)

And she adds, ‘It is vitally important that we understand how matter matters’ (p. 122).
In a footnote on the concept of diffraction, Barad cites Haraway (1992) working her way
past the geometry and optics of a static triadic relationality thus:
Diffraction does not produce ‘the same’ displaced, as reflection and refraction do. Diffraction is
a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection or reproduction. A diffraction pattern
does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of differences
appear. (Haraway, 1992, p. 300)

Haraway was working toward the idea that Barad goes on to develop, that words and
things cannot be understood as separate entities, but are intra-active, affecting each
other, each with the vital capacity to affect and be affected.
In musing on how qualitative research has trapped itself conceptually in Newtonian
representational logic, Barad (2008) asks, provocatively:
What compels the belief that we have a direct access to cultural representations and their
content that we lack toward the things represented? How did language come to be more
trustworthy than matter? Why are language and culture granted their own agency and histori-
city while matter is figured as passive and immutable, or at best inherits a potential for change
derivatively from language and culture? How does one even go about inquiring after the
material conditions that have led us to such a brute reversal of naturalist beliefs when materi-
ality itself is always already figured within a linguistic domain as its condition of possibility?
(pp. 120–121)

Barad explains how Bohr’s (1949/1963) philosophy-physics enables us to unseat these

remnants of Cartesian and Newtonian epistemologies in our work:
Bohr’s philosophy-physics (the two were inseparable for him) poses a radical challenge not
only to Newtonian physics but also to Cartesian epistemology and its representationalist
triadic structure of words, knowers, and things. Crucially, in a stunning reversal of his fore-
father’s schema, Bohr rejects that atomistic metaphysics that takes ‘things’ as ontologically
basic entities. For Bohr, things do not have inherently determinate meanings. Bohr also
calls into question the related Cartesian belief in the inherent distinction between subject
and object, and knower and known.

It might be said that the epistemological framework that Bohr develops rejects both the trans-
parency of language and the transparency of measurement; however, even more fundamen-
tally, it rejects the presupposition that language and measurement perform mediating
functions. Language does not represent states of affairs, and measurements do not represent
measurement-independent states of being … [Yet] Bohr finds a way to hold onto the possi-
bility of objective knowledge while the grand structures of Newtonian physics and represen-
tationalism begin to crumble. (2008, p. 131)

Barad characterizes her thinking as post-humanist, thus taking a firm stand against liberal
humanist individualism. We are, she argues, entangled in many more forces than we can
possibly be aware of, and ‘To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as
in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence.
Existence’, she says, ‘is not an individual affair’ (Barad, 2007, p. ix).
And those discursive/material entanglements are not just with other humans, but with
animals, and with organic and inorganic matter. In taking up these insights, our research
 DISCOURSE: STUDIES IN THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EDUCATION 5

cannot ever simply be about humans and their subjectivities, not least because we cannot
assume that humans are separate from other beings and the other matter of which the
world is made up:
There is an important sense in which practices of knowing cannot fully be claimed as human
practices, not simply because we use nonhuman elements in our practices but because
knowing is a matter of part of the world making itself intelligible to another part. Practices of
knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don’t obtain knowledge
by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world
in its differential becoming. The separation of epistemology from ontology is a reverberation
of a metaphysics that assumes an inherent difference between human and nonhuman,
subject and object, mind and body, matter and discourse. Onto-epistemology – the study
of practices of knowing in being – is probably a better way to think about the kind of under-
standings that we need to come to terms with how specific intra-actions matter. (Barad, 2007,
p. 185. Emphasis added)

And what it is that is made to matter in our intra-actions ‘as part of the world in its differ-
ential becoming’ lies at the heart of Barad’s ethics.
In the next section, I trace a genealogical map of the ways I see new materialist ethics as
emerging out of, extending dis/continuously, and cutting together/apart the poststruc-
tural scholarship that I have understood myself and those I have worked with to be enga-
ging in over the last 30 years.

A brief genealogy of ‘post’ philosophy and ethics

Foucault offers a radical break with liberal humanism and the dominance of the rational
individual’s reflexive/reflective accounts of social life. He makes it possible to see discourse,
such as neoliberal discourse, working on us and through us, thus also challenging the sep-
aration of epistemology and ontology. The radical potential that Foucault offers us, as
intellectuals, is not through attempting to form the political will of individual subjects
(knowers), but through bringing ‘assumptions and things taken for granted again into
question, to shake habits, ways of acting and thinking, to dispel the familiarity of the
accepted, to take the measure of rules and institutions … ’ (Foucault, quoted in Gordon,
2000, p. xxxiv). Having understood the constitutive power of discourse, it was discourse
he worked with, not as separate from acting and thinking, but as deeply implicated in it.
Foucault characterized the form of individualization under neoliberalism as dangerous,
and advocated de-individualization through strategies of multiplication and displacement.
Of this strategy, Rose (1999, p. 97) observes, Foucault was challenging … [neoliberalism’s
desire that we become isomorphic with our] institution as it shifts and changes at govern-
ment’s economic will [… He was interested rather in how we might] free ourselves up to
engage in incisive critique, however dangerous that might seem to be. His call is for a
radical openness to difference and the multiplication of ideas through which transform-
ations are made possible.
Foucault’s ethics recognizes that there are ‘different ways for the acting individual to
operate, not just as an agent, but as an ethical subject of this action’, and he suggests
that at the same time ‘the contradictory movements of the soul – much more than the
carrying out of the acts themselves – will be the prime material of moral practices’
(1985, p. 26) – that is, of moral judgment and control. What the human subject does,
6 B. DAVIES

matters; it has material effects. Foucault’s particular interest is in the way discursive assem-
blages, like neoliberalism, shape the way in which we understand what matters, and the
ways we can be manipulated and controlled through what we understand as mattering.
Our ethical task as he sees it is to make that control of action, via particular forms of under-
standing, visible and re-visable.
In a Foucauldian analysis there will always be tension and contradiction in life, between
what one is compelled (externally and internally) to think-do, and what will be ethical
thought-action. Foucault offers, as a primary strategy, critique and transformation as the
basis of his ethics – through making a discursive system visible you had the chance to
change it because it no longer seems thinkable once you see how absurd or unjust it is.
But neoliberalism’s shape-shifting nature, its arbitrariness, its strategic cannabalising of
multiple discourses, while simultaneously abandoning any discourse that does not suit
its economic agenda, has made it a difficult target, and it has endured as a set of
governmental practices through which habits, emotions, and desires go on being
constituted.
Butler’s work with performativity and responsibility extends Foucauldian thought to
elaborate how it is not only what those with power do to oppress us within neoliberal
systems, or what the systems do once they take on a life of their own, but also what
we do to ourselves and to others as we struggle to gain power as autonomous and
viable beings. Performances are not just of something that we repeat from an original
that is external to us, but the performance, she argues, creates the thing itself that we
perform. Our work in making accounts of ourselves is not ‘to ferret out desires and
expose their truth to the public, but rather to constitute a truth of oneself through the
act of verbalisation itself. [This] emphasizes … the performative force of a spoken utter-
ance’ (Butler, 2004a, p. 163).
Butler’s analysis opens up an understanding of the utterance itself as an act, rather than
an account of what is ‘known already’. Neoliberalism only exists, then, to the extent that
we continue to perform it. To the extent we become its slaves who admire and emulate
its ideals we are simultaneously taking up the power it offers and making it real, not
just for ourselves as individuals who wish to survive, but as a system of thought-practice.
For neither Foucault nor Butler is ethics a matter for a sole individual. Both see social
systems as working on and through the individual, constituting the individual as social,
as therefore integral to and also responsible, on the one hand, to becoming recognizable
within the terms of that system, and on the other hand, as responsible for its maintenance
and/or its critique and transformation. There is, just as Barad observes, no such thing as
standing apart from it.
In contrast to Butler and Foucault, Cixous places a great deal of emphasis on the
material body and its agency. Through writing the body, Cixous brings materiality to
centre focus, not just the materiality of one’s own body but of the other, and of the
world of which the embodied being is part. It is through writing that she accesses the
body’s materiality – its agency. She says of the position of writing:
The initial position is a leaving oneself go, leaving oneself sink to the bottom of the now. This
presupposes an unconscious belief in something, a force and materiality that will come, mani-
fest itself, an ocean, a current that is always there, that will rise and carry me. It is very physical.
(Cixous, in Cixous & Calle-Gruber, 1997, p. 41)
 DISCOURSE: STUDIES IN THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EDUCATION 7

That physical body is also discursive. It is, in Barad’s terms, onto-epistemological. The body,
in Cixous’s writing, is a text, inscribed with language to be read:
Life becomes text starting out from my body. I am already text. History, love, violence, time,
work, desire inscribe it on my body, I go where the ‘fundamental language’ is spoken, the
body language into which all the tongues of things, acts, and beings translate themselves,
in my own breast, the whole of reality worked upon in my flesh, intercepted by my nerves,
by my senses, by the labor of all my cells, projected, analyzed, recomposed into a book.
(1991, p. 52)

Cixous emphasises the multiplicity of oneself, and its relations with ‘the whole of reality’,
and its emergence with and out of the other, what Barad would call its intra-activity:
The origin of the material in writing can only be myself. I is not I of course because it is I with
the others, coming from the others, putting me in the other’s place, giving me the other’s eyes.
Which means there is something common. (Cixous, in Cixous & Calle-Gruber, 1997, p. 87)

She too, like Foucault, is focused on the task of finding how to think the unthinkable in
order not to be caught in the same old places, the same old crises:
We go toward the best known unknown thing, where knowing and not knowing touch, where
we hope we will know what is unknown. Where we hope we will not be afraid of understand-
ing the incomprehensible, facing the invisible, hearing the inaudible, thinking the unthinkable,
which is of course: thinking. Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable
is not worth the effort. Painting is trying to paint what you cannot paint and writing is writing
what you cannot know before you have written: it is preknowing and not knowing, blindly,
with words. It occurs at the point where blindness and light meet. (Cixous, 1993, p. 38)

To dare to go where one is blind, where thought has not yet happened, where the
unknown is yet to emerge and multiply, is, for Cixous, ethical writing (Williams, 2012).
Ethics in this sense is an act of courage not to follow the lines laid down by neoliberalism,
or any other habituated discourses and practices, but to sink into the act of writing
through the materiality of one’s body and to allow that writing to take you to the as-
yet-unthought, opening up the possibility of acting differently in the world in ways that
matter. The matter and mattering of the human subject in its intra-activity with all of
the world is central to her ethics.
Deleuze offers us the concept of assemblage so that we can see how much more
complex the system of our entrapment is within and through discourse and discursive
practices, but also through our bodies, and our bodies’ relations with other forms of life,
through historical events and emotional commitments, and the repetitions that hold
everything the same. At the same time, he gives us the concepts of differenciation as
ongoing transformation, and lines of flight, not just as moments of escape but as necessary
for life, with the power to de-territorialise the complex lines of force that bind us; and in a
contrary direction, the constant re-territorialisations that take whatever is new and re-work
it back into the old territory.
Deleuzian ethics picks up the thread from both Butler and Cixous of the self’s implicat-
edness in the other, and, like Foucauldian ethics, makes a break with moralistic judgment;
it offers instead an ethics that is not so much spurred by the soul’s own contradictions but
by a radical openness to the emergent, multiple being of the other, where that other is
both human and non-human, organic and inorganic. His ethics specifically rejects the pos-
ition of moralism and moral judgment:
8 B. DAVIES

Somebody says or does something, you do not relate it to values. You ask yourself how is that
possible? How is this possible in an internal way? In other words, you relate the thing or the
statement to the mode of existence that it implies, that it envelops in itself. How must it be in
order to say that? Which manner of Being does this imply? You seek the enveloped modes of
existence, and not the transcendent values. It is the operation of immanence. (Deleuze, 1980,
n.p.)

In such an ethics, the realization of one’s identity, through establishing the moral values (or
indeed measurements) with which to judge oneself and others, is no longer the point. The
point is to become different from ourselves, to evolve creatively in the space that we open
up between and among us. We do so through exploring what Fritsch (2015) calls the emer-
gent intra-corporeal multiplicity that becomes possible in that space of Being.
Deleuze does not confine himself to humans, but also considers the animal, the organic
and the inorganic as integral to our intra-corporeality:
It’s not a question of being this or that sort of human, but of becoming inhuman, of a universal
animal becoming – not seeing yourself as some dumb animal, but unravelling your body’s
human organization, exploring this or that zone of bodily intensity, with everyone discovering
their own particular zones, and the groups, populations, species that inhabit them. (1995,
p. 11)

Barad’s reading of the new of new materialism

Barad offers a point of difference with both Foucault and Butler in that they do not pay
sufficient attention to the way in which the body’s ‘materiality plays an active role in
the workings of power’ (Barad, 2008, p. 128). Of Foucault, she says that he implicitly rein-
scribes matter as passive and that this is ‘a mark of extant elements of representationalism
that haunt his largely post-representationalist account’ (p. 128).
Barad’s critique of Butler concerns Butler’s lack of attention to the material e/affect we
have on each other. From Barad’s point of view: ‘ … performativity is not understood as
iterative citationality (Butler), but rather as iterative intra-activity’ (p. 146). Awareness
of that intra-activity, the capacity to affect and be affected, lies at the heart of Barad’s
ethics:
[Justice entails] the ongoing practice of being open and alive to each meeting, each intra-
action, so that we might use our ability to respond, our responsibility, to help awaken, to
breathe life into ever new possibilities for living justly. The world and its possibilities for
becoming are remade in each meeting. How then shall we understand our role in helping con-
stitute who and what come to matter? (2007, p. x)

Her final question here, ‘How then shall we understand our role in helping constitute
who and what come to matter?’ is a question that is immanent in her emphasis on
the re-making we engage in, in each encounter. Butler’s ethics is perhaps more in-
turned – I accept the unknowability of the other since I am unknowable to myself
(2004b).
Deleuze and Cixous, at least in part, satisfy Barad’s call for attention to be paid to the
vitality and mattering of non-human matter and our co-implication in the matter and mat-
tering of others. For Barad, the vitality of matter, and our co-implication with others, have
urgent implications for our accountability for the ways in which matter is made to matter.
As a physicist she understands only too well how the most minute intervention in matter
 DISCOURSE: STUDIES IN THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EDUCATION 9

can have devastating implications for life. The question of the agency of matter and how
that matter is made to matter is more central for her, then, than for either Deleuze or
Cixous.
It is worth noting before I conclude this section that in none of these ways of making
sense of the world, of our place in it, and our ethical obligations, whether that be post-
structuralist or post-humanist new materialism, is ethics a matter of separate individuals
following a set of rules. Ethical practice requires thinking beyond the already known,
being open in the moment of the encounter, pausing at thresholds and crossing over
(De Schauwer & Davies, 2015; Wyatt, 2014). Ethical practice is emergent in encounters
with others, in emergent listening with others, including non-human others (Davies,
2014b). It is a matter of questioning what is being made to matter and how that mattering
affects what it is possible to do and to think. Ethics is emergent in the intra-active encoun-
ters in which knowing, being and doing (epistemology, ontology and ethics) are inextric-
ably entangled (Barad, 2007).
In the next part of the paper I explore three intra-active entanglements. The first entan-
glement is of humans with each other, and with the materiality of a large granite rock; the
second a human-chimp entanglement when a chimp and a human are raised as twins; and
the third is the human entanglement with cows – as animals humans (sometimes) care
about, slaughter and eat.

Intra-action – the capacity to affect and be affected: children-researcher-

rock
The following observation of children and a rock was made when I was contemplating the
nature of affect – the lines of force that flow between and among both human and non-
human subjects.
Three children are trying to scale a huge granite rock. One boy succeeds and he sits on the top
and beams encouragement at the ones still trying to reach the top. His body experiences the
surge of the others’ determination, and so does mine as I watch. The girl is so tiny, but she wills
her muscles to be strong and the boys behind her and before her share in her courage and
look happy. But suddenly she falls. The boys’ bodies immediately switch to alarm, shouting
to the teacher who comes running. Courage swings swiftly to alarm. Is she OK? Does she
want to leave the big rock? But no, her affect swings back to courage. The rock is so much
bigger than she is, but she tries again, and courage flows between the three. In a way it
doesn’t matter if she succeeds. It is the courageous leap, the momentary clinging on, and
then the slide down the rock face, followed by circling round for another turn, first standing
and watching the boy have his turn. But then a bigger boy runs up and goes straight up the
rock face and takes up almost all the space on the top. The small boy leaps and makes it too.
There are now three boys on the top and they are not making any room for her. The courage
that flowed between the original three is gone, and the girl turns quietly and leaves. (Davies,
2014b, 18–19)

Butler might offer a reading of this encounter among the children as a re-citation of a gen-
dered set of practices in which the exclusion of the girl is made inevitable, with the girl re-
citing her otherness to the boys by walking away. Although such reiterations of domi-
nance and subordination were not a common practice in my observations in this particular
playground, this moment can nevertheless be read as a performative accomplishment of
gender difference.
10 B. DAVIES

Deleuze and Guattari might read the children’s engagement with the rock in terms of
percepts and affects in which children become rock; in which there is only rock:
The landscape sees … Characters can only exist, and the author can only create them, because
they do not perceive but have passed into the landscape and are themselves part of the com-
pound of sensations. Ahab really does have perceptions of the sea, but only because he has
entered into a relationship with Moby Dick that makes him a becoming-whale and forms a
compound of sensations that no longer needs anyone: ocean. (1994, p. 169)

Cixous might attend to my writing about the children and the rock as an instance of me
sinking down into my body such that I can read the affect flowing among myself, the chil-
dren and the rock or as an ‘engagement of the world unfolding from within’ (Asberg,
Thiele, & van der Tuin, 2015, p. 150).
In a Baradian reading the children and I, together, are caught up in a mutual entangle-
ment with the rock; in attending to the children’s entanglement with the rock, one must
give matter its due and also attend to the rock’s entanglement with the children and with
me. The rock affects us in ways we might not notice if we were only tuned into humans. In
Barad’s terms, the children could be said to be making themselves intelligible to the rock,
while the rock is making itself intelligible to the children: ‘individuals and landscapes are
co-implicated in each other, as mutually entangled agencies’ (Davies & Gannon, 2013,
p. 369). But the rock’s geological time is much different from human time; the day of
the children playing on the rock is one among billions of its days stretching out longer
than we are capable of thinking.

Human-chimp entanglement
Fowler’s (2013) novel, We are all completely beside ourselves, is an examination of the ethics
of scientists’ treatment of chimps in the 1970s and 1980s, through a fictive space in which
a chimp and a human become twin sisters. That fictive account is closely informed by a
reading of scientific reports of scientists’ practices with chimps when it became fashion-
able in the US to have a chimp as a pet, and some scientists raised chimps as one of
their family. Fowler’s protagonist tells the story of being raised with a chimp as her twin
sister and being studied by her father and his students. Fern, a chimp, raised in every
way like her sister, believes herself to be human, but is taken from her family when her
twin is five years old. The novel explores the considerable grief of all the family at their
loss of Fern – their sister and daughter – as well as the profound ethical compromise
that it involves when the chimp is deemed no longer suitable to be a member of a
human family. The narrator reflects back on her life with and separation from Fern:
For me, Fern was the beginning. I was just over a month old when she arrived in my life
(and she just shy of three months). Whoever I was before was no one I ever got to
know. I felt her loss in a powerfully physical way. I missed her smell and the sticky wet
of her breath on my neck. I missed her fingers scratching through my hair. We sat next
to each other, lay across each other, pushed, pulled, stroked and struck each other a
hundred times a day and I suffered the deprivation of this. It was an ache, a hunger on
the surface of my skin. I began to rock in place without knowing I was doing so and had
to be told to stop. I developed the habit of pulling out my eyebrows. I bit on my fingers
until I bled and Grandma Donna bought me little white Easter gloves and made me
wear them, even to bed, for months.
 DISCOURSE: STUDIES IN THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EDUCATION 11

Fern used to wrap her wiry pipe-cleaner arms around my waist from behind, press her face and
body into my back, match me step for step when we walked, as if we were a single person. It
made the grad students laugh, so we felt witty and appreciated. Sometimes it was encumber-
ing, a monkey on my back, but mostly I felt enlarged, as if what mattered in the end was not
what Fern could do or what I could do, but the sum of it – Fern and me together. And me and
Fern together, we could do almost anything. This, then, is the me I know – the human half of
the fabulous, the fascinating, the phantasmagorical Cooke sisters. (Fowler, 2013, pp. 107–108)

Fern was not only an intimate much loved child in this family, but through the human
ape’s fantastic capacity for imitation, she had become integral to the material/
emotional/intra-active being of her human twin. And at the same time it was possible
for her father, who undoubtedly loved Fern, to put her in a brutal experimental laboratory
once he deemed his (human) family to be no longer safe, given Fern’s increasing strength
and perceived lack of moral inhibition.
Fowler ponders deeply in her novel on how it is that a family who loved their chimp
daughter could have allowed her to go to a place where she would be placed in a
small cage and subjected to inhumane experiments. She quotes Derrida on the topic of
cruelty to animals being where we learn our inhumanity:
In 2004, Jacques Derrida said that a change was underway. Torture damages the inflicter as
well as the inflicted. It’s no coincidence that one of the Abu Ghraib torturers came to the mili-
tary direct from a job as a chicken processor. It might be slow Derrida said, but eventually the
spectacle of our abuse of animals will be intolerable to our sense of who we are. (Fowler, 2013,
p. 238)

While Butler and Foucault might be interested in the way scientific discourse worked to
legitimate the change in Fern’s life, and Deleuze might ponder the becoming human
becoming animal nature of the encounter, this story, for me, is most interesting in
terms of Barad’s concept of diffraction, of the fuzzy borders created by light spots in
the darkness and dark spots in the regions of light (2008, p. 122), or in this case, animal
in human and human in animal – a relation not understandable through a Newtonian geo-
metrical optics that envisages separate entities with clearly demarcated interiors and
exteriors, but through a physical optics, taking us to ‘questions of diffraction rather than
reflection’ (p. 122). The nature of the relationship between Fern and the narrator is not
one that can be best understood as an engagement between two individual entities,
each able to be represented through the specificities of the species differences
between them. Rather they can be understood through the diffractive processes of
intra-action, where each affects the other, and where the agency of each is ‘only distinct
in a relational, not an absolute, sense’ since ‘agencies are only distinct in relation to their
mutual entanglement; they don’t exist as individual elements’ (Barad, 2007 p. 33. Emphasis
in original).

Human-cow entanglement
In 2010 in Australia the export of live cattle to Indonesia was suspended following shock-
ing revelations of the inhumane method of their slaughter. Journalists had secretly filmed
the slaughtering process in a number of Indonesian abattoirs, and when the documentary
went to air a significant proportion of the nation went into shock. For those who could
bear to watch it, the suffering of the cows became their own mirrored, visceral suffering.
12 B. DAVIES

The apparent cruelty and contempt brought to the death of the cows was experienced as
impossible to bear. The Australian population demanded that ‘our cattle’ should not be
treated with such cruelty, and the government responded accordingly and banned live
beef export to Indonesia. The same had happened in 2006 leading to the banning of
the ‘live beef trade’ with Egypt.
Much of the discussion that followed, in part provoked by the farmers’ outrage at
having their livelihood interrupted without warning, focused on the requirement in Aus-
tralian law4 that animals be stunned prior to slaughter to minimize their suffering, thus
allegedly preventing any unnecessary injury, pain or suffering. It is required that animals
are stunned in such a way that they are unconscious and insensate to pain throughout
the process of slaughter. This requirement was compared with the halal practices in Indo-
nesia and other Muslim communities, which do not usually include stunning.
The Arabic word halal means permissible, and the rules of slaughter are based on what
is permissible under Islamic law. That is, the animal has to be alive and healthy, a Muslim
has to perform the slaughter in the appropriate ritual manner, and the animal’s throat
must be cut by a sharp knife severing the carotid artery, jugular vein and windpipe in a
single swipe. Blood must be drained out of the carcass while the animal is still living.
Some interpretations of the Koran make stunning unacceptable (that is not-permissable)
practice. For the men working in the abattoirs, their responsibility to the well-being of the
cows they slaughtered need extend no further than the rules defining halal practice. They
do what is permitted and nothing else need be made to matter, or even may be made to
matter. If more were required, the scriptures would have said so. To this extent, their prac-
tice could not be said to be ethical in the post or new materialist sense, since it involves no
more than rule-following – no responsibility to ensure that the animals suffer no unnecess-
ary injury or pain or fear.
It is interesting to observe the constitutive power of discourse at work dividing east and
west into a good-bad binary – Islamic practices as bad and western practices as good; it is
also interesting throughout this debate to see the assertion of rules as providing ready-
made answers to how things should responsibly be done according to one set of laws
or another. The debates offered one body of research that suggests that animals who
are not stunned prior to slaughter experience unnecessary pain, fear and other adverse
effects. The argument for stunning, as a pathway to ethical slaughter, was presented as
unassailable. Yet another body of research was offered that reports that stunning is not
necessarily the answer, as it too can be practised in an inhumane and brutal way. For
my part, I began to wonder if mass slaughter itself was the source of inhumane treatment
of animals – but also to ask how poststructuralism and new materialism might help me to
think through this messy entanglement of thought-practice.
It is not of course just animals that humans treat brutally. The Holocaust, Abu Ghraib,
Guantanamo Bay, Australian refugee camps, the stolen generations of Indigenous and
British children, sexual abuse of children, Isis, the war in Vietnam, violence and sexual
abuse of women, the refusal of euthanasia as a humane end to human life – the list
goes on and on of human cruelty to each other. Cruelty can go on because we turn a
blind eye to it, or find a way to tell ourselves it is actually acceptable. Or else it is a
minor or temporary aberration. Or else the victims have no power with which to resist.
And sometimes we tell each other they deserve it (O’Brien, 2015) – or else, that it is my
job, I just do as I am told. Or it is the norm – what we have all come to expect. The
 DISCOURSE: STUDIES IN THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EDUCATION 13

arguments, or lack of them, whether the object of cruel practices be human or animal, rely
in large part on indifference, and on assumptions of difference, that is, that the matter of
oneself is different from the matter of the other.
Ethics, from both poststructuralist and new materialist perspectives, demands that we
examine the onto-epistemologies through which any events are constituted and constitu-
tive. We must continually ask: how are we mutually implicated in particular unethical prac-
tices; what practices of knowing and being are we mobilizing when we choose to engage
in them, or to ignore them; how are we dis/continuous with the world’s injustices; what
habitual emotions and embodied practices do we engage in that sustain violations of
others; how are our own bodies, bodies that we have in common, affected by and impli-
cated in ‘humanity’s inhumanity’; how can our eyes learn to see from the place of the
other; how can we engage in ‘understanding the incomprehensible, facing the invisible,
hearing the inaudible, thinking the unthinkable’ (Cixous, 1993, p. 38); and how can we
come to understand the enveloped modes of existence, in an internal way, that the exist-
ence of the other implies (Deleuze, 1980)? How can we learn to see what is being made to
matter in the onto-epistemology of our actions? And how can we become ‘open and alive
to each meeting, each intra-action, so that we might use our ability to respond, our respon-
sibility, to help awaken, to breathe life into ever new possibilities for living justly’ (Barad,
2007, p. x)?

(In)conclusion
I return, then, to the debate with Margaret Somerville with which I commenced this
paper. Having explored the dis/continuities between poststructural thought-practice
and new materialism, it makes sense to me that Margaret was focused on the
newness of new materialism in its capacity to address her work with Indigenous knowl-
edges and her current work on the emergence of the ‘anthropocene’ – the age when
human impact on the planet is finally acknowledged and becomes a matter of para-
mount concern.
Barad offers new concepts and new ways of thinking-doing our research, which do not
run against poststructuralist philosophy, but with it, at the same time bringing new
emphases and new priorities. Her primary intervention is the introduction of Bohr’s
physics/philosophy, with which she severs the Cartesian and Newtonian elements of
our thinking that have unwittingly carried over into the present. Barad’s take on Bohr’s
physics/philosophy involves us in a series of conceptual movements such as:

. giving up on the seduction of representationalism (with its triadic static difference

between the one represented, the representer, and the verbal representation itself);
. abandoning the illusion of the autonomous self-governing reflexively aware researcher
and opening up our analyses to the diffractive forces through which the doing of life
takes place, that is, moving from words and things to doings;
. recognizing that epistemology is always ontological, and that words are not the only
medium we can work with;
. recognizing our own and others’ constitutive enactments of boundaries and of exterio-
rities and interiorities as involving us, always, in asking in what ways the world in its
doing is being made to matter;
14 B. DAVIES

. recognizing matter as an active participant in the world’s becoming (Barad, 2008, p. 122);
. recognizing that not only matter, but also assemblages have agency (Bennett, 2010)
and
. attuning to the emergent nature of life in its becoming.

Notes
1. I hyphenate thinking and doing throughout this paper as, with Barad, I no longer see epistem-
ology and ontology as able to be separated.
2. Social media, and the prolific ‘selfies’ that feature there, have, arguably, intensified that narcis-
sism through giving it a platform and multiplying the technologies that mediate its performa-
tive possibilities. Narcissism is paradoxically both a claim to an essential self that exceeds all
else in importance, and at the same time is produced as an infinitely malleable self-image.
3. Attempting to understand neoliberalism and its impact on us as researchers has been some-
thing of an obsession of mine since at least 2000. This paper, draws implicitly on that research,
for example: Davies (2010); Davies and Bansel (2010); Zabrodska, Linnell, Laws, and Davies
(2011).
4. Specified within the Australian standard for the hygienic production of meat and meat products
for human consumption.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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