The Sage Handbook of Social Constructionist Practice. Группа авторов
worlding as inquiry is not only a means of assessing and theorising what is happening, it involves doing something to improve the living conditions of people and the sustainability of our human and non-human environments and it means engaging in transformative activities.
De-Centring Human in Social Construction
How we expand social construction from a primary focus on inter-human discursive practice to include other forms of materiality requires a new world-in-view of transmaterial discursive practice. This includes a review of what it means to be human as well as what/who is included in any study of discursive practice.
In her writings on the posthuman, Braidotti critiques how the concept of human has had its own binary logic (2013). The human hero, Anthropos, typicallymale-white-western-heterosexual-heteronormative-blond-tall-strong-alive-sexuallyactive-reproductive-young and so on, considers himself the highest entity on the worldly pyramid with a right to be owner-controller-namer of all other matter both within and beyond his reach (Braidotti, 2013). All other life forms are considered by Anthropos as inferior to him, passive, possessable, in need of control and therefore ‘othered’. This narrative of superior self and inferior other perpetuates not only social inequality but negates and neglects the needs of other material elements of the planet. Naming, Mary Gergen reminds us, is always a political act (Gergen, 2001). As researchers, we need to pay particular attention to the onto-epistemology of how our stories of ‘self’ and ‘other’ influence narratives of being in the world, of worlding (Barad, 2007).
What it means to be human has been changing. Humans are now techno-humans. To say we ‘have’ a phone perpetuates a distinction of separation, and ownership, between the human and the technological device. When we say, ‘My phone reminded me that …’ or ‘I messaged …’ these phrases still show phone and self as separate from each other and yet we have become fused with our gadgets (Haraway, 2004, 2015). Technology plays an increasingly significant role in how we interact in and with the world, how we communicate with others, in how our gadgets extend our memory, how we are remembered or lost by others, how we are identified by others, how we identify ourselves to our gadgets and remote systems, how we locate ourselves in the virtual-physical worlds, and how we are located by remote unknown others with or without our permission (Simon, 2010; Allinson, 2014).
Bateson (1972) posed the question of where the point of separation is between the blind man, his cane, and the environment he moves about in. Bronwyn Preece enquires into the intersections between ecology and disability, asserting from a first person account, that, ‘I engage with the other-than-human world as alive … I do not segregate biota from abiota, organic from non-organic, the trees from the forest, the ocean from the machines, the stone from mountain’ (Preece, 2019: 76). Braidotti (2013) asked if prosthetic limbs are really ‘otherwise human’. These questions invite us to consider if the phone can be seen as simply an implement (not us) to navigate the modern world (out there)? Or are humans enabling the phones to go about the business of remote corporations while the dominant narrative is of the phone enabling its owner? The mobile phone may not yet be a microchip under the physical skin of a human, but the proximity of humans and their devices is becoming increasingly intimate. Braidotti suggests that the relationship between human and technology has been extended to ‘unprecedented degrees of intimacy and intrusion’ (Braidotti, 2013: 89).
When we say we are inter-acting with someone or something, we are separating out parts of a relationship. The concept of ‘inter’ assumes ontological distinguishability between entities: things or people, apparently separate from ‘one another’, as configuring of ‘each other’, as doing things with ‘each other’. Gregory Bateson (1972) challenged the discursive practice of categorising, and therefore separating, subjects and things in a world which has the impact of obscuring relationality, highlighting differences over similarities and foregrounding thingness over relational activity. This separation of human and non-human can be understood as an epistemological error (Bateson, 1972). Nora Bateson asserts that transcontextual research is required to avoid these false separations. (Bateson, 2016). New materialist thinkers critique the anthropocentric narrative of human as separate from the world around them. According to Braidotti (2013) the posthuman subject is a ‘transversal entity, fully immersed in and immanent to a network of non-human … relations’ (Braidotti, 2013: 193). Karen Barad proposes that matter of all kinds is not separate but inevitably entangled. She says, ‘The very nature of materiality is an entanglement. Matter itself is always already open to, or rather entangled with, the “Other.” The intra-actively emergent “parts” of phenomena are co-constituted’ (Barad, 2007: 393). Barad explains that ‘humans enter not as fully formed, pre-existing subjects but as subjects intra-actively co-constituted through the material-discursive practices that they engage in’ (Barad, 2007: 168).
Deconstructing Animacy and Inanimacy
Part of the challenge for us as contemporary social constructionist, practice-based researchers, is to explore the language we use to describe human and non-human worlds so we can see that all matter is dynamic, agentive and communicative.
New materialist thinkers encourage us to deconstruct the language of animate/living, and inanimate/dead (Bennett, 2010; Chen, 2012), viewing this as a social construction which has served to teach communities and their colonisers a disconnection between their immediate local and their remote global environments. Jane Bennett discourages the term ‘environment’ in order to highlight ‘vital materiality’ (Bennett, 2010: 112). She points out that ‘We are vital materiality and we are surrounded by it, though we do not always see it that way. The ethical task at hand here is to cultivate the ability to discern nonhuman vitality, to become perceptually open to it’ (Bennett, 2010: 14). Donna Haraway says:
It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. (Haraway, 2016: 12)
A consequence of the anthropocentric narrative is to categorise matter as either animate or inanimate (Bennett, 2010). Rock is not inanimate, it is alive, and it hosts life, it protects life. It provides a platform for life. In terms of the time frame in which plants, animals and humans live, rock offers stability. We humans have a short life span compared to rock. Rock grows or changes in a relational world in mostly a much slower time frame to the life spans of humans, flora and fauna. We don't notice the parallel time worlds. We think rock and glaciers are dead because they are not moving in ways we can perceive with our eyes. We tell ourselves simple stories. We say they are frozen, immobile, inanimate. But it is we who are frozen in time. Our own time frame. A human time frame (Simon and Salter, 2019).
The Social Construction of Matter and Human Agency
We humans have come to think of the material world as made up of matter to consume. Rosi Braidotti says that ‘Nature is more than the sum of its marketable appropriations: it is also an agent that remains beyond the reach of domestication and commodification’ (Braidotti, 2006: 47). Performance-researcher, Jodie Allinson similarly challenges the advanced capitalist metaphor of environment as ‘consumable resource’ (Allinson, 2014). When natural resources become scarce, they become commodified. Indeed, the very language of natural resources speaks to an advanced capitalist view of nature as a resource to be utilised/colonised by humans – including those humans Anthropos deems to be inferior. People are forcibly moved or murdered, land is systematically stolen by those with special power, rain forests are left to burn to access rich materials that lie beneath the ground, mountains are physically deconstructed to produce material for building houses or roads. Sand dunes, with their own ecologies hosting interdependent communities of creatures, plants and other dwellers, are disappearing with rising sea levels, tramping tourists and the need for sand to build tower blocks and new islands for economic purposes.
This disappearance of matter – wait, no, let's not use a passive term as it promotes dissociation from our responsibilities for these actions – let's talk of matter being disappeared