Expanded Notions of Artmaking Through New Materialism

Home , Agential realism, Fritjof Capra, Karen Barad

Artmaking as Entanglement: Expanded notions of artmaking through new materialism

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Ramya Nathan Ravisankar, M.F.A.

Graduate Program in Arts Administration, Education and Policy

The Ohio State University

2019

Dissertation Committee

Dr. Jennifer Richardson, Advisor

Dr. Jack Richardson

Dr. Melinda Rhoades

Copyrighted by

Ramya Nathan Ravisankar

2019

Matter and materiality are integral to the artmaking process, but research into

materiality in this realm has been largely unexplored. Instead, discussions and

explorations of artmaking practice are articulated with the assumption that the artist is the

primary active agent. This dissertation interrogates how artmaking and philosophical

inquiry can expand current understandings of the concepts of matter, material, and

materiality in artmaking. This study looks to the philosophies of Heidegger and Merleau-

Ponty and their reaction to the pervasiveness of Cartesian dualism in Western and their

contributions to notions of subjectivity, Being, being-in-the-world, embodiment, and

perception, and these ideas form the basis from which this study develops. New

materialist thought offers a significant contribution to the discussion of materiality and

artmaking practice enacted through this study. This dissertation is expanded through an

engagement with the new materialist theories of the feminist philosopher and theoretical physicist Karen Barad. Particularly, Barad’s concept of entanglements as they pertain to her theory of agential realism and her notion of onto-epistemology, or knowing in being, inform the research process in this dissertation. Moving away from merely reflexive accounts that privilege the artist and researcher as the prime subject in artmaking, this study instead embraces a diffractive methodology. This methodological direction is inspired by Donna Haraway and developed by Karen Barad and entails reading insights

ii through one another to generate and attend to the differences and interferences enabled.

By diffracting the theories that undergird this research through artmaking practice and philosophical inquiry, differences and new understandings are generated. In this study,

artmaking practice and philosophical inquiry serve as methods through which insights on

the role of matter, material, and materiality in artmaking practice develop. Attending to

the insights emerging through the diffractive approach to artmaking and philosophical

inquiry enables a reconceptualization of the materiality in and of artmaking practice so

that the very notion of what constitutes materiality in artmaking is in flux.

iii

I extend heartfelt appreciation and gratitude for the work of mentors, professors,

and peers who guided me through this process.

Dr. Jennifer Richardson, thank you for providing the perfect amount of understanding, patience, and guidance to help me finish this project.

To my dissertation committee, Dr. Jack Richardson and Dr. Mindi Rhoades, thank you for being a part of this process.

A special thank you to Dr. Sydney Walker, your input helped me improve and grow as an

artist, researcher, and writer. Dr. Patty Bode, your presence and friendship have been

unparalleled. Dr. Deborah Smith-Shank, thank you for being a wonderful mentor.

Thank you to everyone in the Arts Administration, Education and Policy department at

The Ohio State University, especially Kirsten Thomas, Lauren Pace, Brian Javor, and

Michelle Attias.

And finally, A huge thank you to my friends and family for your support.

2004...... B.A. Linguistics, The Ohio State University

2004...... B.F.A. Painting and Drawing, The Ohio

State University

2007...... M.F.A. Studio Art, Pratt Institute

2012 to 2015 ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department

of Arts Administration, Education and

Policy, The Ohio State University

2017 to Present ...... Art Instructor, Department of Art,

Capital University

Publications

Hur, H., Ravisankar, R., Smith-Shank, D., & Turk, R. B. (2016). The nest as metaphor:

Reflections on mentoring, growth, and material culture. Visual Inquiry, 5(3), 393–

405. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1386/vi.5.3.393_1

Fields of Study

Major Field: Arts Administration, Education and Policy

Specializations: Art Education

Abstract ...... ii Dedication ...... iv Vita ...... v Table of Contents ...... vi List of Tables ...... ix List of Figures ...... x Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1 Biographical Wave/Strand 1 ...... 1 Statement of the Problem (the Intersections of Waves/Strand 2) ...... 6 Research Questions ...... 9 Artmaking and Materiality (Theoretical Wave/Braid) ...... 11 Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty ...... 12 New Materialism ...... 19 Methods of the Study (or The Braiding and Unbraiding) ...... 20 Post-Qualitative...... 21 Diffraction ...... 22 Waves and Braids ...... 24 Outline of Chapters ...... 26 Limitations ...... 29 Chapter 2: Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty ...... 31 Dualism ...... 32 Issues with Dualism ...... 35 Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Dualism ...... 40 Heidegger ...... 43 Technology, Handlability, Artmaking, and Materiality ...... 53

Merleau-Ponty...... 60 The Body in Perception ...... 66 Art, Artmaking, and the Body...... 72 Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophical Development Through Art and Artmaking ...... 74 Conclusion ...... 81 Chapter 3: Artmaking, Material, Materiality, New Materialism ...... 83 Situating Materiality: Probing Materiality/Material through Artmaking ...... 85 New Materialism: Entanglements that matter ...... 100 The new materialism of Karen Barad ...... 105 Making sense of Barad through Art ...... 119 Art, Art Education, and New materialist thinking ...... 124 Conclusion ...... 132 Chapter 4: Methodology ...... 134 On arts-based research ...... 136 On naming: Why call it artmaking-research/artmaking-research-philosophical inquiry? ...... 139 Post-qualitative, Posthumanism/New Materialism ...... 140 On reflection, reflexivity, or self-reflection/reflexivity? ...... 144 Post-Coding...... 147 Diffraction and Diffractive Methodology as diffracted through artmaking ...... 148 Diffractive Methodology Diffracted ...... 152 Applied Diffractive Methodologies ...... 161 Braided Hair and Diffraction ...... 165 Diffractive artmaking-philosophical inquiry ...... 169 Chapter 5: Material (Jasmine) ...... 172 Jasmine, Biographical Strand ...... 174 Growing Jasmine ...... 177 Jasmine, Biographical-Theoretical Strand ...... 181 Chapter 6: Discourse (Textual Provocation) ...... 212 Diffraction as knowing through, seemingly circuitously ...... 213 Heaps of Language ...... 216 On Touching Heaps of Language ...... 223 Barad Poems: Continuing to touch heaps of language ...... 229 vii

Chapter 7: Conclusions and New Beginnings ...... 244 References ...... 256

viii

Table 4.1: The distinctions between diffraction and reflection (Barad, 2007, p. 89-90) ...... 146-147

Figure 1.1: Strands, Braids, and Waves ...... 25 Figure 4.1: Reconstructed Braid (2007)...... 166 Figure 4.2: Reconstructed braid (detail) ...... 166 Figure 5.1: Pressed Jasmine Garland 1 (2014) ...... 176 Figure 5.2: Pressed Jasmine Garland 2 (2014) ...... 176 Figure 5.3: Hand with turmeric powder (2015) ...... 180 Figure 5.4: Hand with turmeric dyed string (2015) ...... 180 Figure 5.5: Belle of India (2015) ...... 184 Figure 5.6: Twisted Jasmine (2015)...... 184 Figure 5.7: Image of my table mat entangled with an image of one of Dieter and Bjorn Roth’s table mats...... 188 Figure 5.8: Fragments 1 (2017) ...... 192 Figure 5.9: Fragments 2 (2017) ...... 194 Figure 5.10: Pressed Magnolia (2014) ...... 202 Figure 5.11: July 2015, jasmine garlands ...... 204 Figure 5.12: one week, 2018 ...... 207 Figure 5.13: Thinking in Making sketch (2017) ...... 208 Figure 5.14: Jasmine carcass (2017) ...... 211 Figure 6.1: Touching (2017) ...... 225 Figure 6.2: Touch is never pure or innocent (1), (2017) ...... 230 Figure 6.3: at (2017) ...... 234 Figure 6.4: at (from Instagram) (2017) ...... 237 Figure 6.5: gg (2017) ...... 239 Figure 6.6: gg (from Instagram) (2017) ...... 239

“The improbable unfolding of recent events has led me to consider that no one thing is one thing only. How people endow what is familiar with new, ever-evolving meaning, and by doing so release us from the expected, the familiar, into something unforeseeable. It is in this unfamiliar realm that we find new possibilities. It is in the unknown that we find hope.” — River El-Saadawi, a character in the Netflix series Sense8 (Wachowski, Mitchell, & Hemon, 2018)

Biographical Wave1/Strand 1

After earning an MFA, I made no artwork. I graduated, moved out of the studio, moved into a new studio, set everything up, and thought I was ready to go. But I just sat there, frozen. It took a while, but I eventually started making art again, but my work was different, and I felt different. This experience was not expected, but it did lead to insights about my artmaking practice. Mainly, I realized that I am but one element in a complex network of agents involved in my artmaking practice. Perhaps I should have known that already, but it is not something that was discussed in my MFA program. We discussed the technical and conceptual aspects of finished artworks, but I do not recall discussions on the nuances of the practice of artmaking. I mistakenly assumed that setting aside a studio space would allow me to resume making the same artwork as I had in graduate school.

1 The term “wave” is a reference and nod to the diffractive method that informs this study that takes cues from Haraway (1992) and Barad (2007, 2014). 1

I realized a need to attend to the sidestepped and often ignored aspects of my artmaking practice, which I see as the material elements, rather focusing solely on my

actions. I needed to think more deeply about the materiality of artmaking practice. By

that time my artmaking practice stalled, so I looked to artists whose work I admired to

hear whether the way they articulated their making practices could help me shift my

thinking. During graduate school, I had the pleasure of having a life-changing studio visit

with Janine Antoni, so I thought she and her artwork could provide the same incisive advice and insights as I had experienced during her visit to my studio. I googled her and

found a lecture from YouTube given by Antoni as a part of the Thinking Like an Artist

Conference2 organized by the Guggenheim Museum. In the YouTube lecture, Antoni discussed her creative process. Towards the beginning of her talk she discusses how her work actively calls to her and she describes, “when I’m making an object, there’s something happening over here that is calling me desperately to pay attention to it when I

turn to look at that thing, the thing that I was making calls me” (Antoni, 2011). Antoni’s

elucidation alludes to an attunement she has developed with the material/materiality of

her artmaking practice. This statement stuck with me. This statement inspired the

questions that guide this dissertation. Through my tribulations, I came to question the assumption of the artist as the only agent in artmaking. This was the agential relationship

I was taught throughout my formal artistic training but is this really how artmaking

2 The Thinking Like an Artist: Creativity and Problem Solving in the Classroom Conference took place from June 3-4, 2010. 2 unfolds? I started to wonder why, how, and to what extent the objects, material, space, and even the state of my own body had such an influence in artmaking practice.

These questions bring forward memories from my childhood that hint at a longstanding engagement with notions of agency. I recall a Hindu celebration that occurred each year where I would wake up and the books I was reading would be missing; it was like a reverse Christmas. I would come downstairs from my bedroom to find that my parents borrowed my books and placed them in front of a freshly decorated altar to the goddess of knowledge, Saraswathi. This ritual was intended to appease the goddess who was represented as both a humanoid figure and simultaneously embodied in the books at the altar. After we said some Sanskrit words in the direction of the altar, we had to take our books and mindfully read a page from them. The ritual, this act of reading the book as if we were reading the goddess, was meant to be an homage to knowledge itself. Recalling this occurrence through the theoretical approaches I undertake in this dissertation re-places this memory in a different context as it troubles the notion of a fixed and finite boundary between entities. In this memory, Saraswathi is goddess, image, book, and knowledge at the same time. This is akin to the oscillating boundaries, agencies, and materialities explored through this project.

This recollection further inspires this project because it is the catalyst for my interest in developing more nuanced understandings of the material/materiality in artmaking while attending to and sorting out the agency of both human and nonhuman entities in art practices as the ritual involving the books did in my childhood memory.

This memory serves as inspiration as it informs and situates my approach to questions on

3 the influence of objects, material, and body in artmaking. Interestingly, there has always been an underlying narrative approach to my artwork, so it seems apt that my questions about artmaking, embodiment, and materiality are also influenced by these recollections, primarily as they relate to artmaking practice.

My initial interrogation into the relationship of embodiment and materiality lies in the perceived delineations between these areas of inquiry. To me, these seem like arbitrary delineations because when observed, these issues permeate, overlap, and infuse through one another. This seems especially evident from this biographical wave, which situates how I come to the project of this dissertation. This wave informs my perspective on these theories and especially how my upbringing and Hinduism-informed thinking might influence my understandings.

This project uses theories of embodiment as explored by Merleau-Ponty

(Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 2012, 1968) as a basis for the re-thinking of materiality through artmaking. This interest in embodiment and the malleability of boundaries between the artist’s body and material is informed by my study Bharata Natyam (a South Indian dance form) from about the ages of five to fifteen. I was taught complex and coordinated face, hand, and body movements through which various Hindu stories and myths are told. The storytelling and narrative qualities of this dance form influence my approach and view of artmaking. Primarily, I understand the biographical and theoretical as inherently connected rather than discrete elements of my approach. These waves of influence diffract through one another to create new insights and openings that inform and enhance my assertion that artmaking, embodiment, and materiality are connected and that the

boundaries between these concepts are malleable and porous. The artist (the body) and

the materiality through which artmaking is enacted are inseparable. It is much like the

biographical perspective that informs how I frame my research. I am interested in

investigating the perceived boundaries between these entities to envision a way to discuss

how these areas of inquiry might inform a generative, different, and productive

conversation on the notions of materiality as interrogated through artmaking.

Being open to the influence of my personal history and letting these waves of

influence serve as a guide as I begin this inquiry helps to ground my thoughts and

approach to this dissertation. Allowing my background, culture, approach to artmaking,

and personal recollections to function as waves or threads throughout this exploration of

artmaking, embodiment, and materiality serves as the basis for this inquiry and helps

shape the conceptual and philosophical direction of this dissertation. If I used a detached

faux-objective voice in this project, the work may appear more academic, but I feel it

would be at the detriment of the unfolding of this research. I use this biographical wave

to insert subjectivity and constantly remind the reader that there is no claim to objectivity

in this project. Instead, I attempt to look beyond my own actions, de-center my subjectivity and agential force and attend to the material, discursive, and material- discursive3 implications of artmaking. Personal, theoretical, and material implications of

this project are connected in this work and as such need to exist in tandem throughout this

dissertation. My personal background, professional background, artmaking practice, and

3 The term “material-discursive” is one coined and used by Karen Barad in her writings to indicate that materials have discursive implications and discourse has material implications and that the dichotomous relationship between these terms needs to be rethought. 5

theoretical understandings are entangled with and through the project of this dissertation.

This entanglement is fundamental to this project and will be served as the aforementioned

elements emerge, diminish, ebb and flow as this project develops.

Statement of the Problem (the Intersections of Waves/Strand 2)

We tend to assume that artmaking is inherently an anthropocentric activity. As

such the artist is considered as the primary agent of in artmaking; this assumption is

perpetuated through our discussions of artmaking as an activity that depends solely on the artist. This seems related to the pervasiveness of Cartesian dualism in Western philosophy because it places the mind above other entities. Additionally, preceding

Cartesian dualism, the separateness of the realms of the ontological and epistemological is also a deeply impactful assumption in much of Western philosophy.

Given the impact of Western philosophical traditions, it is perhaps natural to see the artist as the primary agent in artmaking. Coming from a different cultural background that adheres to a non-dual philosophy, I find it difficult to keep perpetuating dualist thought. Adding in the storytelling and mythological traditions I grew up with, it is also problematic for me to consider that matter and materiality is so rarely considered.

Inspired by this conundrum, this study considers what the implications of focusing on matter and materiality in artmaking practice are. Instead of privileging the artist’s mind and perpetuating the myth of artistic genius, this study attends to the implications of upending assumptions of artmaking as a human-centered activity while keeping questions of matter and materiality at the forefront.

According to Lange-Berndt (2015) “materiality is one of the most contested

concepts in contemporary art and is often sidelined in critical academic writing” (p. 12).

Focusing on issues of materiality in and of artmaking allows us to reconsider the agential forces at work in artmaking practice. This dissertation asks what is at stake when we consider artmaking as an apparatus that is finely tuned to attend to both the human and nonhuman/material entities involved. This does not erase the artist in artmaking practice; instead this is a consideration of what is gained by thinking about material and thinking through material.

This study emerges through and relies heavily on the concepts proposed by Karen

Barad throughout her writings. Barad’s theories are considered through a foundational

knowledge of Heidegger’s work reconnecting Dasein/Being to being-in-the-world and

Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical work on embodiment and rethinking the linkage of the

body and world. Barad’s work is informed by insights garnered through her work in

theoretical physics, science studies, and feminism. Part of Barad’s aim is to reconnect the

ontological and epistemological into what she calls an onto-epistemological outlook.

What this sets up is a reconnection of the realms of being and knowing to be rethought as

knowing in being (Barad, 2007). She offers a theory of “agential realism” which rethinks

the relationship between matter and discourse as causal and fundamentally links

discursive practices to material consequences and material to discursivity. This is also

related to Barad’s notion of entanglement which she positions as a fundamental

interconnection of things, particles, people and entities are created through their

entangled states and as such are linked inextricably. Barad (2007) suggests that

boundaries are enacted through the intra-action of entangled material-discursive

phenomena. The static, pre-existing boundaries of dualism are rethought in this approach.

Boundaries do not pre-exist entanglements and they are negotiated through the intra-

action of material-discursive phenomena.

As I read literature from Art Education4 researchers, I found that there are only a few (Garoian & Gaudelius, 2001; jagodzinski & Wallin, 2013; Pérez de Miles & Kalin,

2018; Powell & Schulte, 2016; Richardson, 2015) engaging with new materialist/posthumanist ideas. As I continue to engage with new materialist theories, I became more captivated with these ideas. I recognized that there is a great deal of potential for these concepts in Art Education, and specifically for artmaking practice. The purpose of this study is to address the gap in the existing literature of Art Education and add to the number of researchers working through new materialist/posthuman ideas and employing a diffractive methodology to study artmaking5. This study brings new

materialist philosophies and diffractive methodologies to question existing notions of

materiality in artmaking practice. Through this study, I propose that a focus on

materiality, as informed by new materialism is useful in developing new understandings

for Art Education research and artmaking practice.

4 This reference is limited specifically to researchers who identify as Art Education scholars. There is additional literature touching on new materialist/posthumanist ideas from other research disciplines. 5 Instead of referring specifically to visual art or artmaking based in visual phenomena, I chose specifically not to limit the making in this study to a discussion of solely visual entities. Limiting thinking to a specific media is counterproductive to generating insights and does not accommodate the ideas of entanglement and intra-action that inform this study. 8

By looking at two strains of thought from my artmaking practice, I discuss

insights that emerged through the artmaking process and the “results” of my study

emerge as realizations, questions, and provocations on notions of materiality in artmaking

practice. These writings are as much a part of the artmaking process as the physical

artworks and artmaking process because the writing process allowed me to crystalize

what insights emerged during the making and notetaking I did as a part of these strains of

thought. One project details an interaction with the material of jasmine flowers, and the

other project discusses the result of an encounter with a difficult paper by Karen Barad.

Both projects involve using a diffractive methodology to read insights from the jasmine

or Barad paper through the theoretical foundations of this study. This diffractive

methodology allows me to read insights through one another and attend to differences and interferences as they emerge, especially as they pertain to matter and materiality.

Research Questions

The focus of this study is to expand notions of materiality in artmaking by looking at artmaking practice as a phenomenon through which to generate insights. This is done by interrogating what it means to view artmaking as intra-active and through an onto- epistemological lens. By using a diffractive methodology, insights generated through a process of entangled philosophical/artmaking-based inquiry will be employed as a way to address the following primary question:

- How can artmaking and philosophical inquiry expand current understandings of

material and materiality?

Sub-questions include:

- In what ways does employing diffractive methodology through philosophical

inquiry-artmaking-research enable a generative practice that can trouble

existing boundaries and expectations of art practice?

- What are the consequences of disrupting the trope of artist as primary agent

in artmaking by de-centering the artist’s/my position and attending to

materiality?

o What are the implications for artmaking that emerge by attending to and heeding both nonhuman and human agencies?

- How do expanded notions of material/materiality influence how artmaking

practice is considered/theorizing/practiced?

These guiding questions are addressed through the theoretical underpinnings that inform this project and form the basis of inquiry for this dissertation. As mentioned in the following section, I hesitate to use existing methodologies and naming conventions for describing the insights enacted through artmaking-research. These terms are so fundamentally inter/intra-connected in my view that it is problematic to use the strategies

discussed, for example, by Barone and Eisner (2011) in their book Arts Based Research

or in Art Practice as Research by Sullivan (2005). Specifically, strategies that look to

reflection and reflexivity as a primary strategy of data collection and focus on the

artist/maker as a primary agent in research and artmaking. The progenitors of these

approaches have carved a path for this project that would not be possible without their

contributions to art, art education, and research. Instead, I attempt to provide a different methodological and theoretical path by looking to new materialism to enact a diffractive

10 methodology that is primarily informed by Karen Barad (Barad, 2007, 2014). From this theoretical position, I hope to advance the work beyond the boundaried, reflective approaches that come before. This project serves as an acknowledgment of the critique of arts-based research put forward by jagodzinski and Wallin (2013) that suggests that there is a need to move away from specifically humanist, reflective practices towards something that engages with posthuman ideas. At times this work may allude to a critique of existing approaches to Arts-Based Research, it is not. Instead, this dissertation aims to explore one possibility to “move the chains” forward in the ongoing discussions on artmaking, research, and any practices that actively generate diffractions and differences.

Artmaking and Materiality (Theoretical Wave/Braid)

Interrogating questions of materiality is an aspect of artmaking. Contemporary artists are especially aware of the physical and material engagements of their practice.

Through my own artmaking practice, I am made aware that there is more to the material engagements of artmaking than just an ongoing negotiation of how to shape inert material; in other words, it feels evident that the material enacts an agential force that needs to be acknowledged. The new materialist ideas that guide the theoretical foundation of this study offer a radical rethinking of how the agency and agential forces are conceptualized. Instead of seeing agency as an attribute belonging to a particular entity, new materialists theorize agencies as the ongoing negotiation of relationships. The approach to materials and materiality of artmaking is nothing more than a standing

reserve6 from which we create is often the default approach for the teaching and learning

of studio art. This always seemed strange to me, especially given my background as an

Indian-American artist whose worldview is deeply shaped by the experience of the world and universe assembled through the stories from my cultural heritage. I thought, surely,

there must be another way to approach materiality and agency in artmaking practice.

This study began as a series of questions and hunches on artmaking practice.

These notions were uncovered through preliminary observations on the material

engagements present in my artmaking practice. I then realized that the same questions

and issues are present in the artmaking practices of various contemporary artists as well.

Insights derived through these observations are what inspired the initial direction of this

research. In this section, I begin by discussing how the work of Martin Heidegger (1962,

1977) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962, 2012) and Merleau-Ponty and Lefort (1968)

form the basis from which I approach the new materialist/posthumanist theories that

drives the work of this study. In the next section, I discuss new materialism, focusing

mainly on the writings of Karen Barad (Barad, 1998, 2003, 2007, 2012, 2014; Barad &

Documenta (13), 2012).

Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty

Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty provide a foundational wave, to this study. Along with the previously discussed biographical wave, these philosophies add to the

6 The term “standing reserve” or Bestand is a Heideggerian term referring to the idea that objects are entities that exist only as things to be used by people. The implication is that once all objects are reduced to only their use value, then the world itself can be viewed as a resource to be used, overcome, and dominated (Heidegger, 1977). 12 perspective from which I approach this project. Both thinkers put forward understandings that offer a historically relevant account of the Western resistance to understanding subject and object as two distinctly separate entities. This separation is a significant aspect of this study as it is difficult for me to contend with due to my upbringing. My worldview is shaped by the non-dual philosophies advocated by Hindu scholar Adi

Shankara whose concept of Advaita Vendanta suggests that all of existence is part of the same fundamental whole called Brahman (Menon, n.d.). Although one can, on the surface, comprehend how one’s upbringing shapes a worldview, it is quite challenging to find ways of describing this shaping in a manner that are easily comprehensible. To help elucidate my difficulty with Western notions of dualism, I offer this quotation.

The Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu text, states:

When one sees Eternity in things that pass away and Infinity in finite things, then

one has pure knowledge.

But if one merely sees the diversity of things, with their divisions and limitations,

then one has impure knowledge.

This passage from the Bhagavad Gita describes types of knowledge. The passage shows a flux between finitude and infinity which points to a somewhat nebulous understanding of things and time. The second line offers a correlation between division and limits and

“impure” knowledge; that the quality of knowledge is to see past divisions. These ideas inform my approach. (Though, I don’t know about using the terms “pure” and “impure” about knowledge). What this passage does do, is show the instability of boundaries to which I am accustomed. I feel this familiarity with flux is a service to the way I view and

enact my research. These Advaita Vedanta footings are very apparent in familiarity with

the new materialist philosophies that also add a layer of understanding and further the

theoretical underpinnings of this project. Culturally, I identify as Indian-American, and

because of my upbringing the way I see the world is deeply influenced by Hindu thought.

This socio-cultural identity has shaped my approach to thinking so much that I have a

difficult time generally wrapping my head around dualist ideas. So, to progress in this

study, it is necessary for me to develop an understanding of how and why this

subject/object and mind/body dualism exists in the West and permeates Western

approaches to art and art education.

Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty cite Descartes’ dualism as the concept that codifies

the separation of subject/object/mind/body. However, the view of the mind/body or

subject/object as separate entities is pervasive in the West as is the thought that these

entities are entirely separate from the world. Ancient Greece is often considered the

foundation of this schism (Grosz, 1994). Descartes’ dualist philosophies reaffirmed this

tradition, which has formed much of the basis for Western approaches to thinking on issues of the subject and object, mind and body, and world (Grosz, 1994). Dualism has also influenced the delineations between different ways of knowing, splitting, for example, physiology and psychology. I look at a Renaissance thinker like Leonardo da

Vinci as an example of a pre-Cartesian scholar whose efforts traversed multiple

modalities of thinking, doing, and enacting his artmaking practice. I view da Vinci as a

great example of someone who researched through artmaking. By looking at his work

and sketches, it is evident that he arrived at new understandings and generated new

insights through his artmaking practice. Arbitrary distinctions and dichotomies did not

limit him; although he is primarily remembered for his paintings when one takes a deeper

dive into his artworks and various folios, it is also apparent that he was also an engineer, a scientist, and a tinkerer. To me, da Vinci was a scholar who was responsible for

rigorous research that manifests through the sketches, paintings, schematic diagrams, and

prototypes with which he unfolded his artmaking/research. There is a freedom to his

scholarship that seems almost impossible after Descartes. Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and many new materialist philosophers find it necessary to upend to Descartes’ dualism and understand the pervasive impact Cartesian thought has had on Western approaches to knowledge-making studies and education. The concept of dualism and its impact will be discussed in Chapter 2 because it is important to comprehend how Western philosophy enacts Cartesian dualism to determine how non-dualism can offer another approach that

troubles this way of thinking and knowing.

For me, artmaking is a logical site and apparatus7 through which to understand the

need to, at times, unify our understandings of subject/object/mind/body/world, but also notice other instances where boundaries between these entities naturally develop and disintegrate. Unlike Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, I do not seek to completely undo

Descartes’ dualism because I have come to admire his skepticism about sensory data. As this research develops, and as artmaking becomes further entwined with technological apparatuses, it may become helpful to re-engage with Descartes’ cynical approach to the

7 Karen Barad (2007) uses the term “apparatus” to describe a method or means of investigation that is particularly attune to entanglements. This term will be explained further in Chapter 3. 15

information received by our bodies. However, to clarify, Descartes’ claim that subject

and object are constant and have definite boundaries is my primary contention with

dualism. By understandings Descartes’ contributions to Western philosophy it seems

somewhat legitimate to accept a pre-existing boundary between subject and object, thing

and thing. Generally, the new materialist sentiment towards Cartesian dualism is

described in less combative terms.

Coole & Frost (2010) describe:

The prevailing ethos of new materialist ontology is consequently more positive

and constructive than critical or negative: it sees its task as creating new concepts

and images of nature that affirm matter's immanent vitality. Such thinking is

accordingly post- rather than anti-Cartesian. It avoids dualism or dialectical

reconciliation by espousing a monological account of emergent, generative

material being. (p. 8)

Here Coole & Frost call for an approach to existing modalities that does not reify dualism by suggesting a complete rejection of existing modes of thinking; instead, they suggest

that we look through Cartesian dualism. Though it may be easier to reject prevailing and

existing approaches categorically, it does more service to understand, question, and build

on these notions.

In this vein, I do want to question the philosophical primacy of dualism to

ascertain whether it is possible to vacillate between bounded and unbounded thought; can

we have boundaries between subjects, but also understand these boundaries as permeable

and impermanent? From my experiences as an art student and through the course of

research for this dissertation, it seems that the artist is often perceived as the primary and

only agent in artmaking practice in the West. However, I wonder what it would mean to

consider the agency of other elements involved in artmaking practice, especially through

an interrogation anchored in the notions of materiality and material agencies enacted

through artmaking practice.

This study evolves by exploring the philosophical contributions of Heidegger and

his concept of Dasein (being), being-in-the-world and handlability as they relate to the discussion and understandings of materiality through artmaking. I engage with Bolt’s

(2004a, 2004b, 2011) take on Heidegger because she forms her arguments and

discussions through art and artmaking practice and her writing creates a useful parallel

for this dissertation. Bolt (2011) explains Dasein as a term that describes being, or what it means to be in human existence, and it is linked to Heidegger’s idea of being-in-the- world as a way to understand Dasein. The way one understands Dasein is by being-in- the-world because it is impossible to understand Dasein as an abstract concept outside of its context (Bolt, 2011).

Heidegger’s concept of handlability is related to the Dasein and its being-in-the- world because handlability describes the idea of learning through doing. While conceptualizing an entity is often helpful, the knowledge gained by actually doing something is a fundamental way of knowing. You have to “handle” something to really know how to use it. As Bolt (2004b) describes “Through such dealings, our apprehension is neither merely perceptual nor rational. Rather, such handling reveals its own kind of

tacit knowledge” (p. 1). By understanding Heidegger’s contributions to re-asserting the

fundamentality of Dasein as only being understood through being-in-the-world, it becomes possible to develop a conceptual approach through which to move beyond the more restrictive features of dualism. Additionally, paying particular attention to Bolt’s

(2004a, 2004b, 2011) interpretations of Heidegger’s notion of handlability through what she terms “creative arts research” helps develop an approach to Being that helps bring together my cultural understandings of Being through an approach that is grounded in the

Western philosophical tradition.

Considering the contributions of Heidegger to the reconciliation of Being and the world, it then becomes apparent that to resolve the separation apparent between being-in-

the-world and the body, engaging with Merleau-Ponty’s (1962, 1964b, 2002, 2007a,

2007b; Merleau-Ponty & Lefort, 1968) philosophies of embodiment help negotiate this divide. His approach to existence, phenomena, and experience are grounded and understood through our bodies. Merleau-Ponty’s ideas on perception contribute to the discourse on materiality in this project. Of interest in Merleau-Ponty’s view is that there is no distinction between perception (human perception) and perceiving. In this view, perception is not a passive activity; the perception/perceiving are generative activities.

Because the artist is an embodied subject, it is vital to consider the role of embodiment in how materiality may be interrogated through artmaking and particularly how the concept of embodiment enhances the discussion and ongoing troubling of the conventional wisdom surrounding the agential negotiations of materiality through artmaking. Merleau-

Ponty’s ideas help further this dissertation by proposing an outlook that questions the

18 boundaries between subject/object, mind/body and nature/culture that is prevalent in the

West. Furthermore, his development of ideas by engaging with the art and artmaking of

Cezanne helps shape the methodology of this study.

New Materialism

The concepts introduced through Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, help form the basis through which to explore materiality further using the ideas of new materialism.

New materialism is a rapidly emerging set of ideas and philosophies that engage with new approaches to materiality informed by a variety of subject areas including science, philosophy, feminism, geography, and art. The variety of subject areas and disciplines contributing to the scholarship of new materialism makes it a compelling source for ideas through which to expand notions of material/materiality in artmaking practice. This study is particularly informed by Karen Barad whose background in theoretical physics adds rather interesting ideas from which to interrogate artmaking. Her concepts of agential realism, entanglement, material-discursivity, apparatus, and phenomena, which will be defined in Chapter 3, are useful in developing an approach through which to discuss an expanded view of materiality in artmaking. Barad also blurs the delineations between ontological and epistemological understandings; she suggests an onto-epistemological approach to phenomena through which we can understand the ongoing negotiation of boundaries and meanings. Barad’s ideas are supplemented in this study by Bolt (2007,

2010), Barrett & Bolt (2013, 2014), Bennett (2010), Coole & Frost (2010) and Grosz

(1994). I address these thinkers further in a review of the literature on new materialism in

Chapter 3. These thinkers do not all identify explicitly as working strictly with new

materialism, but their ideas approach the project of new materialism or issues of

material/materiality in some way. It is important to note that new materialism itself is

referred to by a few monikers that appear to include ideas similar to those found

identified as post-human thought and post-humanism. Many researchers engaging with

new materialism appear to use these terms interchangeably; for the sake of clarity in this

study, I will try to use only new materialism or provide a slash (e.g. new

materialism/posthumanism) to refer to these ideas unless I am using a direct quote.

Methods of the Study (or The Braiding and Unbraiding)

This study operates as a post-qualitative philosophical inquiry enacted with and through a diffractive methodology. The terminologies and labels offered in the previous

sentence are rife with genre-specific definitions, so below I offer an overview of these terms. These terms will be further elucidated in Chapter 4 which will explain the

methodological underpinnings of this dissertation and provide background

understandings of how I will attempt to work through a diffractive method in my

artmaking-research practice. It is important to bring attention to the fact that I am not

using existing modes and terminologies for the co-mingling of philosophy, artmaking, art, and research. This is an intentional move because many of these existing methods do not do enough to rethink the assumption that the artist is the primary agent in artmaking and research. Specifically, these approaches still maintain and assume that boundaries between these entities are pre-existing rather than emergent. This study aims to rethink boundaries between entities as enactments that are porous and malleable. In this pursuit, it helps to look beyond existing methodological approaches to arts-based research. This

work is inspired by jagodzinski and Wallin (2013) and their discussion of how arts-based

research, artmaking, and art education can approach the research process as an event or a

becoming rather than solely as the pursuit of creating an object. In this study, I call what

happens “artmaking-research” or “artmaking-research-philosophical inquiry.” This is so I can have a name to call it, but I hope that the lack of creative naming somehow resists categorization. If possible, I would not name, differentiate the work within this study as artmaking, research, philosophy or other. It would just exist. However, at times it does become necessary to draw boundaries around the act of research itself, and so some categorization and delineation of boundaries becomes necessary. As such, artmaking- research seems to work, but I would like to think of this naming in the vein of this study, that this boundary is porous and ephemeral. As I situate and unfold my understandings of diffraction as methodology, I remind the reader to keep in mind that diffraction aims to create difference and sometimes that means making this messy. In other words, bear with me.

Post-Qualitative

This study is best described as falling into a post-qualitative approach to research as informed by (Lather, 2013; Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; Ulmer, 2017). In their article

“Post-Qualitative Research” Lather and St. Pierre (2013) described that they intend to

“make it clear that rethinking humanist ontology is key in what comes after humanist qualitative methodology” (p. 629). As this dissertation is deeply entrenched in a posthumanist theoretical frame, it is necessary to employ methods that fall under the post- qualitative umbrella.

In this study, the post-qualitative approaches to data and research are based on

seeking methods that do not depend on reflexivity or reflection. Instead, these methods are rooted in theoretical concerns of the new materialist turn which have to do with forming boundaries through research, and the subject/object relationships that qualitative studies tend to reify. Because this study relies heavily on new materialism, it needs to look to post-qualitative researchers recognize the need to move beyond qualitative methods, like coding data, to find ways of understanding that are less reflective and more emergent. In this study, post-qualitative approach questions the primacy of existing qualitative methods that detach the researcher from the research study or methods that intimate that once data collection is over that data fits into tidy categories for a researcher

to interpret. Post-qualitative methods do not constitute a specific method per se; instead it

is a way forward that troubles existing methods to allow for research findings to emerge

instead of being forced by a well-meaning, but biased researcher.

Diffraction

The findings of this project are propelled through the continued engagement with my own artmaking practice. Haraway (1992) and Barad (2007) suggest that understandings generated through a diffractive approach are developed by reading insights and ideas through one another. My approach to a diffractive method employs artmaking, discourse (as writing), and material/materiality as the means through which to generate knowledge and insights that are applied to propel this inquiry further. Bringing

Barad/Haraway’s method/concept of diffraction to inform an interrogation of artmaking/research practice and working through a diffractive methodology in this

inquiry should be a generative pursuit. As Donna Haraway (1992) states “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” (p. 300).

Through reviewing various approaches to enacting a diffractive methodology, I

realize that it is a method that resists categorization and neatness. It seems impossible to

understand or explain diffractive methodologies without just doing diffraction or

diffracting something in order to attend to the differences. The guiding metaphor of diffraction is different from reflection. Reflection, as in a reflection of a mirror, replicates what you project in it. If you stand in front of a mirror, you see yourself. So, using reflection as a method of generative research and understanding might work for a while, but I wonder if it remains effective over a long timeline of deployment. Diffraction can be visualized by imagining two rocks dropped in a still pond. Both actions cause diffraction patterns to appear on the surface of the pond from the disruption each rock creates. When these patterns coalesce, the patterns are multiplied through one another like complex matrices. Doing this with information and “data” received through the

Artmaking/Research process is challenging. In this study, shifting from my approach

from reflection to diffraction allows me to produce and attend to the differences enabled by readings insights through one another. I can read the “data” attained through

entanglement and intra-action with material through new materialist theories to allow for

insights, interferences, and differences to emerge. Resisting relying solely on reflection in

23 order to enable difference in research is challenging, the result, however, has so much potential. So, I attempt this diffractive method in this study.

Waves and Braids

This dissertation explores how to further understandings of material and materiality through artmaking. The assertion in this project is that issues of materiality are challenging to articulate and research, especially while emphasizing artmaking- philosophical inquiry as a means and method for this research. The project attempted here is not neat and tidy, and it is not intended to be. This project gets in the thick of figuring out conceptions of materiality in and through contemporary art and artmaking. The project should unravel as it ends. By using a diffractive methodology, this project seeks to produce and attend to difference instead of reflecting sameness. As such as this project progresses, and the braided waves of this diffraction pattern start to break apart and come together as new and unexpected insights are produced.

I look to the notion of braided hair as a metaphor through which to articulate my approach. This metaphor is inspired by Sullivan’s (2005) articulation of a braided approach to arts-based research, but it does not employ the approach laid out by Sullivan.

Sullivan’s (2005) braided metaphor of visual arts research offers a way to visualize and conceptualize pre-existing threads of inquiry consisting of interpretivist, empiricist, and critical strands that combine to inform art practice (p. 105). Sullivan breaks down the braid into further detail, but it feels like a way to view artmaking as a system or workflow, rather than an emergent process that relies on more than theoretical concerns to drive it forward. Additionally, I do not prescribe to the need to codify artmaking

24 through a visual metaphor to guide the research. I look to the braid in its totality, the tactile experience of braiding hair to guide this approach to research as well as the visual understandings that develop through braiding and unbraiding.

The first step to braiding hair is to separate out strands. The strands are then braided with other strands until you reach the end. Usually, at the end, there is a hair band tied at the end so the braid does not unravel. However, eventually one must unravel the braid, and when that happens, and the hair is combed, the braided strands retain some of the shapes of their braided state, but the strands are mixed together. This is the process I intend to pursue herein. I will introduce various strands of thought and then undo these strands and comb the hair of this research and allow the insights from each strand of thought to transform through artmaking.

Figure 1.1: Strands, Braids, and Waves

Outline of Chapters

In Chapter 2, I situate the study by developing a familiarity with Descartes’ dualist philosophies. I engage with Descartes to situate the philosophical underpinnings of both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and to appreciate why these thinkers felt they had to radically re-assess dualism. Working through Cartesian dualism also allows me to develop an understanding of the foundations of Western philosophy and dualism itself, which is not a way of thinking that comes naturally to me. I then dive into specific concepts presented by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, including but not limited to considerations of Being, being-in-the-world, and the body/embodiment perception.

Chapter 3 provides an overview of the major concepts, theories, and theorists that inform my understandings of new materialism. In this chapter, I delve into the definitions and distinctions (if any) between the terms post-human, posthumanist, and new materialism. The chapter begins by focusing on contemporary art, presenting and discussing how artists and artworks allow understandings of material and materiality to change through the artmaking process. I then contend with Barad’s theories as these ideas first sparked the questions that formed this dissertation. Barad introduces a lot of new terminology and neologisms that need to be explained to form a basis for understanding the way these ideas inform the diffractive methodology employed in Chapters 5 and 6. I will discuss other theorists whose work is grounded in posthumanism, post-human, and new materialism and their concepts will be probed to inform the theoretical framework of this project. This chapter also presents how materiality is shaped and understood through artmaking by engaging with the other researchers (Barrett, 2007; Barrett & Bolt, 2013;

Carter, 2004) whose work contends with how to conceptualize Artmaking/Research as it

pertains to material and materiality.

Next, Chapter 4 provides the theories that inform the design of this study. I begin

with an explication of the reasoning behind the choices of research methods employed in

the study. I continue with an explanation of diffraction as a concept and what

differentiates diffraction from other research methodologies, especially research that

involves artmaking and art education. Next, I provide examples and discussion of how

diffraction is employed by researchers who are interested in issues of attending to

difference through their research practice. I discuss how their research provides

compelling directions for thought that are generative and productive. Finally, based on

the approaches to diffractive methodology discussed in the chapter, I explore strategies to engage with this diffractive methodology enacted through philosophical inquiry/artmaking/research. I do so by pulling in examples of artmaking from other contemporary artists to elucidate and develop this methodological approach.

Chapter 5 presents the first example of the “findings” of my Artmaking/Research project enacted through a diffractive method as detailed in Chapter 4. This chapter is guided by the theme “material provocations.” Here I discuss my intra-actions with a jasmine plant that presented itself through artmaking. I work through new materialist understandings of agency to elicit further understandings of how this project, this artmaking, functions in an entangled state, paying particular attention to issues of agency, materiality, and discursivity of the work. Insights emerging through this project are informed by the theoretical underpinnings of this dissertation presented in Chapters 2 and

3. Through diffraction, I read the theoretical through the material to produce material- discursive enactments. This chapter also offers an opportunity to de-center the artist as the primary agent and attend to agential forces at work between material-human entanglements in artmaking.

The guiding theme of Chapter 6 is “textual provocation,” and this chapter provides a second example of the “findings” of my research. In Chapter 6, I describe a strand of thought that has been diffracted through artmaking to provide further avenues for Artmaking/Research. In this chapter, like Chapter 5, I employ an informal narrative to work through the sequence of events that produced the possibility of this project. I begin by writing about my difficulties reading an article by Karen Barad entitled “On

Touching—The Inhuman That Therefore I Am.” Her paper is incredibly engaging, but for me, the words kept rearranging themselves each time I attempted to read. As a result,

I read this paper quite differently, and in hindsight in a manner that is quite diffractive. I discuss this series of works through an exhibition of works that attempt to solidify and materialize text that I saw at the Museum of Modern Art. This sowed the seeds of the idea that text, words, and discourse could have material qualities and consequences.

In the concluding chapter, Chapter 7, I discuss the implications of attending to materiality in artmaking and employing a diffractive method in philosophically informed artmaking/research. I revisit my guiding/research questions and highlight moments in

Chapters 5 and 6 where insights into these questions may have arisen. I discuss these insights and their implications for future research avenues. I then turn to Barad’s extensive theoretical work and probe further for future research strands.

Limitations

This dissertation involves experimentation and thinking through a theoretical lens, methods, and methodological direction that are likely to be unwieldy at times. This study is limited in that due to these decisions, the direction and insights that emerge through the work will likely veer into unexpected terrain. This is an acknowledgment that this will happen and that the study is designed to expect these moments. I set forth on this study with the intent that the insights developed through this work will address the research questions and direction while also attending to the differences that emerge through the diffractive analysis employed.

The work of this dissertation is done through my own artmaking process, which seems to reify the centrality of the artist that I discuss a desire to overthrow. However, artmaking is the practice through which the understandings and conceptualizations about materiality emerge, and as such, it is an intrinsic part of the research process. Without tapping into facets of my own ongoing and established making practice, I would be unable to attend to the subtle insights that emerge through the process of being entangled.

Although Barad, and the other new materialists and posthumanist scholars referenced in this study are inherently working through a feminist perspective, I do not address it directly and engage with the queer feminist side of this theoretical sphere.

Working with theories that are entrenched in and developed through a specifically feminist standpoint is exciting. It is a continuation of the work and research I did while working at the Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Due to the specific focus of this dissertation having to do with notions of materiality and artmaking practice

29 as well as the methods and methodology that guide this study, the feminist side of these theories does not emerge as I had hoped. I do intend to engage with the implications of new materialism’s feminist basis in the future.

Lastly, this dissertation offers a personal, but profoundly theoretically informed look at materiality through artmaking. As such, it is probably not as applicable to all art educators. The audience of this work might be limited to artists and art education theorists who seek to engage with new materialist/posthuman ideas. However, because of the personal, first-person writing style, I hope that it can provide art education practitioners at the K-12 levels strategies for engaging differently with their artmaking practices.

“The philosopher…is a perpetual beginner, which means that he takes for granted nothing that men, learned or otherwise, believe they know. It means also that philosophy itself must not take itself for granted, in so far as it may have managed to say something true; that it is an ever-renewed experiment in making its own beginning.” — Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. xv-xvi) “Man is but a network of relationships, and these alone matter to him.” — A. de Saint-Exupery (as cited by Merleau-Ponty, 1962)

This chapter explores the philosophies of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and how

their ideas inform and expand my understandings of materiality and artmaking. These twentieth-century philosophers help ground my approach to the new materialist ideas that

round out the theoretical approach to this study. These thinkers have proposed concepts

that are both interesting and crucial to this dissertation and offer a firm basis from which

to view and explore new materialism/post-human understandings through artmaking.

Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty among others are often cited as fundamental to the

concepts outlined by new materialism, object-oriented-ontologies, post-human/transhuman thought and speculative realism (Barrett & Bolt, 2013, 2014; Bolt, 2004a, 2007,

2011).

To begin this chapter, I explicate the concept of dualism because both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty devote significant discussion in their magnum opuses to question the prevailing separation between subject and object in the West cemented by Descartes’

Meditations. I focus on the issues that dualism offers to the reconnection of

mind/body/subject/object that both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty propose. The chapter is

then divided into two sections, one discussing Heidegger and another discussing

Merleau-Ponty. In both sections I address key terms and ideas put forward by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty that form the basis for my understandings of new materialism. Since existentialism and phenomenology are at the heart of the philosophies of both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, they grapple with concepts such as perception, human-world relationships, the body, and materiality; these issues emerge in each section. Finally, I discuss how these concepts provide a necessary and significant theoretical basis for this dissertation, foretell new materialism, and bring forward compelling issues prime for troubling matters of materiality through art and artmaking practice.

Dualism

Dualism, as a general concept, holds that there are two fundamentally different types of things or principles. We see these binarized beliefs in theology and philosophy through ideas such as soul/body, good/evil, light/dark, heaven/hell, ad infinitum.

Although there are different types of dualism, conceptually dualism is the claim that the universe consists of two distinct kinds of substances—mind and matter—that are not reducible one to the other. Dualisms are pervasive in the West and stretch as far back as the origins of Western philosophy. We can look back to Plato to see dualist notions in ancient Greece. As Plato argues in the Republic, “The soul of man is immortal and imperishable.” Plato believed that a person’s soul, or mind, existed before their body and continued to exist after the death of the body (Schick & Vaughn, 2010). The immaterial soul, as it goes through a process of reincarnation, attempts to return to the realm of the

immaterial Forms as Plato claims in his “Affinity Argument” in the Phaedo (Schick &

Vaughn, 2010).

Descartes attempts to answer the mind-body problem in his Meditations on First

Philosophy by arguing that the mind is utterly distinct from the body and physical objects

of any sort (Thomson, 1997). To Descartes, a person is a mind or mental substance whose sole essence is to be conscious; although the body is necessary, as far as we know, it is possible for the mind to exist without the body (Thomson, 1997). In Meditations,

Descartes begins his project employing a systematic “Method of Doubt” that questions his former beliefs with the goal to only engage with the beliefs that survive his examination (Thomson, 1997). Beliefs that survive the process form the basis of his future arguments. Beginning with nothing and afraid that a malicious demon could be deceiving him, he realizes that he cannot doubt his existence without also affirming it.

Descartes (2003) states in his Discourse on Method, Part IV:

I noticed that whilst I thus wished to think all things false, it was absolutely

essential that the ‘I’ who thought this should be somewhat, and remarking that

this truth ‘I think, therefore I am’ was so certain and so assured that all the most

extravagant suppositions brought forward by the sceptics [sic] were incapable of

shaking it, I came to the conclusion that I could receive it without scruple as the

first principle of the Philosophy for which I was seeking. (p. 23)

Here, Descartes does the philosophical work to think through his own existence. Because he enters his philosophies from a place of extreme doubt, he must rebuild truths by confirming that his thoughts and his mind even existed. Descartes moves on, satisfied 33

that his existence is proved in the Cogito, which is the principle of proving existence

based on the fact that he is thinking and aware. Once Descartes proves to himself that he

is thinking, he expands his philosophy by attempting to show other beliefs/ideas, those

outside of himself are true. The next step is to prove that material things exist as well. His

method is to verify his ideas and perceptions as clear and distinct and then prove them to

be either true or false. In order to show an idea as clear and distinct, he attempts to prove the existence of God, which allows him to take these ideas as evident because God would not allow him to be deceived. Proving God’s existence was a way for Descartes to assuage any doubts he had about his principles.

Through some philosophical maneuvering, Descartes is able to convince himself that God exists. As a result, he can then demonstrate that the essential nature of the mind or mental substances is different from the essential nature of the body or material substances (Thomson, 1997). Descartes makes several arguments and replies to objections. The three most important ones are the argument from clear and distinct perception, the argument from divisibility, and the argument from doubt (Schick &

Vaughn, 2010). Descartes argues that mind and matter are different and that his essence is his mind, and he asserts that he can recognize that his essence is his mind.

Descartes (2003) claims:

There is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is by nature

always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible. For, as a matter of fact,

when I consider the mind, that is to say, myself inasmuch as I am only a thinking

thing, I cannot distinguish in myself any parts, but apprehend myself to be clearly

one and entire…But it is quite otherwise with corporeal or extended objects, for

there is not one of these imaginable by me which my mind cannot easily divide

into parts, and which consequently I do not recognise as being divisible; this

would be sufficient to teach me that the mind or soul of man is entirely different

from the body, if I had not already learned it from other sources. (p. 118)

In Descartes’ view, he/his essence is distinct from his body and could exist without it. His idea of matter is that its essence is to be spatially extended and infinitely divisible, and this proves that it must be separate from the mind because the mind as a mental substance is indivisible. The last argument utilizes Leibniz’s Law (if two things are identical, then they have the same properties), and states that since he cannot doubt that his mind exists, and he can doubt that his body exists, the mind must be distinct from the body (Thomson,

1997). Descartes’ proposal of a separate mind and body has significantly impacted and percolated throughout Western philosophy. Its reach has been far enough to become a kind of internalized doctrine that seems to be followed by the general public. The notion that mind and body are separate entities, because of the seed of doubt faced by Descartes, has had far-reaching consequences for philosophy in the West. For this study, tackling

Descartes even at a surface level helps to understand the fissure between mind and body in the West.

Issues with Dualism

Interestingly, although Descartes contends that mind and body are entirely separate, he recognizes that they are causally linked in a “special” way. At one point, he even suggests the pineal gland as the intersection between mind-body interaction, but this

35 problem of interaction was recognized early on by his critics and later attempts to reconcile it led to other branches of dualism such as property dualism and epiphenomenalism (Thomson, 1997). However, there are other recognized problems with mind/body (or ontological) dualism. The first problem is to explain the interaction between the mind and the body. Descartes admits that this interaction is a mystery to us, and we cannot directly experience it. The mind, as a non-extended substance without physical properties, seems to be affected somehow by physical events, for example, if you are pinched, you feel pain.

The next problem deals with the issue of other minds, namely that Descartes has proven to himself that he has a mind, but how can he know for sure that other people have the same immaterial minds? Although Descartes concedes that other people exist with the minds and bodies in a manner similar to himself, he is unable to come to this conclusion merely through observation. He admits this fact when he states “when looking from the window at beings passing by on the street below, I…say that it is men I am seeing…[But] what do I see from the window beyond hats and cloaks which might cover automatic machines” (Dreyfus, 2000, p. 54). If he can only know his own mind, he is in danger of falling into solipsism.

Additionally, in unpacking his dualism, Descartes does not tell us what the mind is; he states what is not, for example he posits that mind is a nonmaterial substance, but never states what might constitute the mind. He also does not attempt to deal with issues of consciousness as they relate to his conceptualizations. It seems as if the ontological

question may be solved, at least for Descartes, but his ideas do not adequately address the

character of the mind—so is this really a solution?

The general tendency away from Cartesian dualism is due, at least in part, to the

work of most phenomenologists and existentialists, mainly, Heidegger and Merleau-

Ponty, who found that reification of strict binaries problematic. For these thinkers,

making either/or judgments impose a way of thinking that does not provide the level of

nuance needed. An attempt to understand and analyze Descartes ideas is prevalent in

Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty’s respective theoretical works; each philosopher seeks to

overcome and even overthrow the subject/object binary proposed through dualism.

Descartes’ dualism conceptualizes the mind as a concept that is not related to the

physical body; he conceives the mind as an entity that transcends the body and by

extension the world (Lycan, 2008). The notion that problematizes this Cartesian division is that experiences, such as sensations and sensory information, seem like our bodies feel these experiences before, or at the same moment, they are thought in the mind. Related to the connection of mind to the physical body, treating the mind as immaterial creates additional cracks in Cartesian dualism—if the mind is immaterial as Descartes states, it becomes difficult for anything relating to the mind to affect material and space (Lycan,

2008). The proliferation of the scientific method and science, in general, has led to a re- alignment in perspectives. The “objectivity” that science presented created a need for a third-person perspective as opposed to a first-person perspective, and this has had an impact on philosophy as well (Lycan, 2008).

Additionally, theories describing a distinct cleft or disruption between binarized notions of mind and body, subject and object continue to be influenced by developments in psychological and neurological research that shows a strong linkage between electrical brain signals and thought (Blakeslee & Blakeslee, 2008). Research findings like those of

Alan Jasanoff (2018) who writes from a scientific perspective about the connectedness of mind, body, and environment, indicate that viewing the mind as an entity separate from its physiology needs rethinking. There is also increasing observability of the interactions between physiology and thought processes made possible by advances in technology.

However, this does not necessarily show that the mind is reduced to its physical parts; instead, this evolution of thought suggests that there is a link between what we conceive as “mind” and what is considered part of human physiology. In moving to a system that embraces the ambiguity of not defining an a priori concept of mind, we gain the ability to consider how “mind” may emerge through its entangled realities. Moreover, by considering an emerging view of mind and body, we can attend to how these ideas emerge through their entanglements, rather than trying to consider each entity discretely.

The notion that boundaried conceptualizations of mind and body emerge through their entangled states offers a way to move beyond dualism without completely undoing it. It would be much simpler to go along with Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and others in their dismantling and rebuilding of Western philosophy altogether. However, as a newcomer to Western philosophy and dualism, I think something might be gained from keeping these notions floating around namely that we do not continue to reify absolutism

in our thinking. Shutting the door to Descartes and dualism is problematic because it does

describe how the world feels as if we are separate and discrete entities.

Dreyfus (2000) makes a compelling argument for Cartesian dualism by describing our technologically mediated world. The need to leave one’s home is considerably lessened due to technological advancements; we can communicate and engage in a variety of activities and “our minds seem to expand to all corners of the universe”

(Dreyfus, 2000, p. 49) while our bodies stay put. This reading of technological mediation indicates a bifurcated view of mind and body, and it is a view that seems sensical. The

information we receive from technological mediation is, well, mediated. This information

hits our sensory data after it has been received and sent through various devices and

screens (Dreyfus, 2000).

If we stayed indoors, would it feel so wrong to view the outside world as illusory?

If our skepticism is correct, then was Descartes’ concept of a bifurcated body and mind, and subject and object so incorrect? Remarkably, although dualism seems so foreign to me at first, Dreyfus’ assertions for the need for Descartes’ extreme skepticism in the

wake of technology makes sense. This concept parallels the idea of “maya” presented

throughout Indian thought. Maya is the veil of illusion that keeps us from seeing the

eternal oneness of which we are a fragment. I wonder if this extreme skepticism of perception is useful? According to Dreyfus (2000) “Modern skepticism about the existence of the external world begins with Descartes. Before Descartes, there had been skeptics, but they questioned their reasons for believing anything, not especially their perception” (p. 50). It is compelling to consider that even in Descartes’ time, the way

people perceived and understood their world was already mediated through technology like the telescope and microscope (Dreyfus, 2000). The part where Descartes assertions get a bit difficult to follow is his proven belief in a God and that our soul is the organ of

“true” sight (Dreyfus, 2000).

In this discussion of technology and telepresence is where the post-human/new materialist ideas concerning technology and mediation become compelling. Are we detached consumers who experience without our bodies or are we co-created through our experience with technology and telepresence? I wonder if Dreyfus (2000) was correct in stating that “as we spend more and more time interacting remotely, we may erode our embodied sense of a risky yet trustworthy world that makes physical or human contact seem real” (p. 63). Alternatively, is it possible that we are engaging through our bodies differently? Post-human/new materialist ideas offer a way forward to consider how our bodies are remade as we interface with technology and telepresence. We can imagine that our bodies are constituted by the circuitry through which we engage with the world.

Which means, that while a modicum of skepticism is perhaps useful, perhaps we instead should re-envision what constitutes our bodies.

Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Dualism

Heidegger upends the Cartesian view of the world through his ideas. He rejects the idea that the world is something separate from Dasein. Descartes’ dualism is taken to

task throughout Heidegger’s Being and Time, and this is due to the fundamental

mismatch between Descartes’ view and general skepticism of existence. For Heidegger,

scientific views of the world that insist on the separation between mind and being are the

kind of ideas that Heidegger is trying to combat throughout his works, and this is the

chief task throughout Being and Time. As Critchley (2009a) explains it, “Heidegger

insists that this lived experience of the world is missed or overlooked by scientific inquiry

or indeed through a standard philosophy of mind, which presupposes a dualistic

distinction between mind and reality” (para. 6). For Heidegger, dualist notions get in the

way of experience and what he calls Umwelt, which he defines as the environment in

which we are all surrounded and engaged (Critchley, 2009a). However, Heidegger’s

distinctions between the Being of humans and the being of everything else may create an

unintended binary to the nature of being. Furthermore, it seems to reify Descartes’

distinction between thinking things and extended things, where the human subject is the

only entity capable of thought and that this subject has access to a world of objects

(Critchley, 2009a).

For Heidegger, human beings are different because they are defined in terms of temporality and personal history. For him, humans and objects are fundamentally different because humans cannot be defined by their function. Heidegger’s focus on grounding his philosophies on what he observes and witnesses through his own Being prove to be the most valuable to his phenomenological method (Critchley, 2009b). What

Heidegger does do is upend the dominance of an epistemological view of the world of relationships between humans, objects, and the world. He does this by asserting that

Dasein (Being) and being-in-the-world are the same, which means that for Heidegger a person is their world and their existence depends on their being. Therefore, in this sense,

the concept he offers is counter to the strict subject/object distinctions proposed by

Descartes because Heidegger proposes a system where being and the world are

inextricably linked. Even though there may be vestiges of dualism in some of

Heidegger’s foundations, his main idea suggests that Cartesian dualism is not useful to

his theorization of being-in-the-world, because we are unable to extract ourselves from

the world as Descartes and his method suggest.

Through many of Merleau-Ponty’s writings, including Phenomenology of

Perception, Descartes and the Cogito (the dictum cogito ergo sum) is presented as

something that he needs to contend with before he can adequately assert his view of

bodily perception and experience. Several passages show Merleau-Ponty grappling with

mind/body dualism proposed by Descartes. Merleau-Ponty (1962) discusses Descartes through the classic “piece of wax” example here:

When Descartes says that the understanding knows itself incapable of knowing

the union of soul and body and leaves this knowledge for life to achieve, this

means that the act of understanding presents itself as reflection on an unreflective

experience which it does not absorb either in fact or in theory. When I discover

the intelligible structure of the piece of wax, I do not identify myself with some

absolute thought in relation to which the wax is a mere result, I do not constitute

it, I re-constitute it. (p. 49)

What Merleau-Ponty is suggesting here is that there is no way to understand without

considering a connected mind and body. One cannot reflect on an experience that is not

gathered through experience. For Merleau-Ponty, thought is a result of specifically

embodied practices. He explains through the example of a piece of wax that when he

thinks about the wax, it is not in connection with the wax purely gained and accessed

through thinking. He does not create the wax, but it does bring up previous encounters

with wax.

Further into Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty devotes a section of his

discourse to the Cogito. I imagine this is due to the pervasiveness of Descartes and dualist

understandings in the West before the pragmatists, existential phenomenologists, and

philosophers such as Austin and Wittgenstein (Dreyfus, 2000). For Merleau-Ponty, it

becomes integral to his ideas to undo dualist conceptualizations of a detached mind that

perceives. Toadvine (2016) explains that “Merleau-Ponty argues that we cannot separate

the certainty of our thoughts from that of our perceptions since to truly perceive is to have

confidence in the veracity of one’s perceptions” (p. 24). Counter to Descartes and the

skepticism that forms the basis for dualism, Merleau-Ponty calls for us to trust our

perceptions, because we cannot consider thought an a priori construct to perception.

Heidegger

In Heidegger’s attempts to move past the reigning dualist notions of his time and think through different conceptions of his reality, he proposes quite a few concepts that remain relevant to this study. The task is then to sort through his ideas and try to make sense of the various terms that Heidegger coins specifically for use throughout his writings and to focus on concepts that have the potential to aid in the philosophical inquiry of this study. This section offers a general introduction to my understandings of

Heidegger’s thought and provides a basis on the Heideggerian concepts that present the

43 most potential for adding to the discussion of artmaking through new materialist concepts while helping to further understandings of the materiality in artmaking practice in the ever-evolving constellation of contemporary art/artmaking practices. These ideas also provide a basis from which to build understanding through new materialist concepts introduced in the next chapter. Additionally, these concepts help to develop even further shifting understandings of materiality in artmaking.

Though Heidegger claims a philosophical lineage from Edmund Husserl,

Heidegger’s approach to phenomenology seems to be troubled with existential questions, possibly drawing from Sartre. Heidegger’s texts are noted as some of the most obfuscating and frustrating to read and comprehend. At times, it seems that he is as contrary as possible in setting forth his philosophical foundations because he refuses to use the discourse of philosophy that existed at the time of his writing and thinking.

Throughout his writing and especially in his text Being and Time, Heidegger proposes a radical rethinking and even the dismantling of the philosophical tradition. It is because of this desire that he introduces terms throughout his writings that seem to define and redefine concepts that perhaps already had a name attached to them. Although this aspect is often confusing to the contemporary reader, it does allow Heidegger’s thinking to move past merely extending the thought of his time; he radically reshapes thinking about significant philosophical questions such as epistemology, ontology, perception, and subjectivity. This radical rejection of existing norms to form his own terminology is perhaps what allows him to rethink the assumptions posited by Descartes, of a divided mind/body/world. Heidegger proposes a philosophy that attempts to rethink this idea and

asserts that we should be less doubtful of our lived experience and accept it as a way to

understand our experience rather than somehow try to detach ourselves from a situation

of which we are already inextricably a part.

Heidegger accomplishes his goal of dismantling existing philosophies by

establishing a new vocabulary for his ideas. Heidegger introduces the concept of Dasein

which is a German term that has the literal translation of “there-being” (Wheeler, 2017).

Heidegger’s conceptualization of Dasein is distinct because it seeks to connect subjectivity to the world instead of considering the subject as a separate entity from the objects, space, and matter that inhabit the world (Critchley, 2009a). Dasein is a compelling notion and represents what Heidegger calls the act of “being” for human beings, which is central to his re-thinking of experience and existence (Heidegger, 1962).

Heidegger uses his interpretation of Dasein to distinguish the Being (with a capital B) of humans versus the being (lowercase b) of objects and the world. Dasein then is understood as a kind of linking or linkage of two previously disparate concepts— humans/subjects and being (Bolt, 2011). Dasein is useful for this study because it allows us to think about the act of Being/being that does not just focus on the actions of humans.

Heidegger considers the importance in the world for Dasein and the importance of Dasein in the world. As a concept Dasein should not be understood as a synonym for a human being, rather it is a way to describe how a person or people enact the task of being-in-the- world.

How Dasein or Being relates to the world is what Heidegger describes as being- in-the-world (Wheeler, 2017). Instead of conceiving of separate subjects and objects that

relate to each other externally, Heidegger offers a different view that suggests that a

Dasein as related to and fundamentally of the world. Being-in-the-world suggests that human beings are immersed in an “Umwelt” or environment of which the Dasein is an intrinsic and active part (Critchley, 2009a). Dasein/Being and being-in-the-world represents the concept and inextricable connection between these ideas. Connecting these ideas is important because it allows us to probe further into the intricacies and levels of interconnectedness we see, especially through artmaking. By viewing Dasein as a starting point, or basis for new materialism, we can move to explore how it works through artmaking, because connecting the concepts of Being and being-in-the-world become a way to understand the philosophical underpinnings of new materialism, which is itself a way to expand our view of the interconnectedness and intra-action8 between Being,

being and being-in-the-world. Rethinking the dualist assumptions of previous

philosophies and asserting that the boundaries between subjects and objects are porous is

central to posthumanist and new materialist philosophies.

It is then compelling to consider the way Heidegger views subjectivity

specifically through his rethinking. Heidegger’s method of articulating subjectivity as an

ongoing process is one that emerges as central to establishing a vantage from which to

understand new materialism. For Heidegger, each person projects the world, and through

this projection, we create the world we inhabit. The nature of consciousness is thus a

function of the co-mingling of Being and being, or the confluence of human beings,

8 Intra-action is a neologism introduced by Karen Barad to rethink the notion that boundaries and entities pre-exist their interactions. Through the term intra-action Barad suggests that entities emerge through their intrinsic entanglements with other entities. This concept will be further explained in Chapter 3. 46

object beings, and being-in-the-world. Although new materialism does not quite grapple

with the question of how things come into existence, these philosophies do deal with the

extent of human/object co-mingling going so far as to question subject/object distinctions

that are so often taken for granted in much of Western philosophy. What makes

Heideggerian thought relevant in this project is that Heidegger proposes as humans we

are in a co-constitutive relationship with being (other humans, things, objects) that enacts

and projects the world.

Heidegger states:

That Being which is an issue for this entity in its very Being, is in each case mine.

Thus Dasein is never to be taken ontologically as an instance or special case of

some genus of entities as things that are present-at-hand. To entities such as these,

their Being is ‘a matter of indifference’ or more precisely, they ‘are’ such that

their Being can be neither a matter of indifference to them, nor the opposite.

Because Dasein has in each case mineness [Jemeinigkeit], one must always use a

personal pronoun when one addresses it: ‘I am,’ ‘you are’ (Heidegger, 1962, p.

68).

The term present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) is presented throughout Being and Time; this

idea describes a situation in which we encounter objects in the world, and we know the

objects are there, but we may ignore them because they are not directly relevant to our

being-in-the-world. Heidegger’s willingness to contend with objects when other

philosophers, like Descartes, mostly ignored the world because they could not prove its

existence is why Heidegger is so crucial to understanding and re-examining materiality

through artmaking.

For Heidegger, we do not grasp the world through merely thinking about it or

constructing abstract ideas about it; instead, we apprehend and understand the world

through doing. When things are present-at-hand, they are perceived as inert objects that are just sitting there waiting for something to happen, and so we are perhaps unaware of the potential of these objects in our own process of being-in-the-world. One of the tasks of new materialism is then to take this rejection of a reductive role of objects to mere presentness-to-hand and take it even further to explore ways to give material and matter credit for its co-constitutive role in constructing humans, artwork, and even the world.

Heidegger’s radical rethinking helps to question previously accepted assumptions on the nature of the world, due to the prevalence of Descartes’ ideas before philosophers like

Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty.

The present-at-hand concept is a way for Heidegger to acknowledge things that are around us but are not inherently known, because they are not immediately relevant to our actions at that particular time. To contrast with this concept of things that are present- at-hand, Heidegger introduces a concept he terms readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) which he describes through the use of a hammer as an example by describing how equipment, and objects in general, cannot be known without use.

Heidegger (1962) states:

The hammering itself uncovers the specific 'manipulability' ["Handlichkeit"] of

the hammer. The kind of Being which equipment possesses-in which it manifests

itself in its own right-we call "readiness-to-hand" [Zuhandenheit]. Only because

equipment has this 'Being-in-itself' and does not merely occur, is it manipulable in

the broadest sense and at our disposal. No matter how sharply we just look [Nur-

nochhinsehen] at the 'outward appearance' ["Aussehen ]" of Things in whatever

form this takes, we cannot discover anything ready-to-hand. If we look at Things

just 'theoretically,' we can get along without understanding readiness-to-hand. But

when we deal with them by using them and manipulating them, this activity is not

a blind one; it has its own kind of sight, by which our manipulation is guided and

from which it acquires its specific Thingly character. (p. 98)

The claim here is that using the hammer is how we come to know its usefulness. While

Heidegger uses a hammer as an example, this concept of readiness-to-hand can also be applied to other objects, people, concepts and processes. We discover properties about the world through contact and use. Readiness-to-hand is relevant both when the thing we are using works and when we witness a breakdown. We know the hammer works through use, but it is also through using the hammer we know if it is broken and if its being is a liability to our Being. The hammer’s lack of functionality in a situation shows us that it had an intended purpose for which it can no longer be used due to the breakdown.

Similarly, often when we consider our artmaking practices, it is more likely that we notice the elements of our artmaking when something is amiss, or the practice itself experiences a breakdown. An example of this phenomenon is presented in Chapter 5 where I discuss a facet of my artmaking practice involving jasmine plants. I offer a glimpse of the project here to help elucidate Heidegger’s concept through artmaking. My

jasmine plants are in a winter hibernation phase, but one of them is not reacting well to

the cold air inside my drafty house. The leaves are drooping, and I do not know how to

help the plant. This breakdown between my knowledge of this plant and many years of

care for it do not help mend the plant’s being. When the plant is thriving, I notice only

that it is producing flowers and perhaps that it needs to be watered. In its breakdown, I

notice so much more about the quality of the soil, the air temperature and the humidity—

all elements that could be leading to the plant’s drooping leaves. The wilting and the

breakdown of the plant itself becomes a part of the artmaking process and informs how I

respond to the plant. For example, when one of my plants dropped all its leaves, I saved

the leaves and dipped them all in wax and placed them on a piece of paper to think

through whether the leaves could take on a different role as an artwork that emerged

through my artmaking practice.

The sticking point in the ideas of readiness-to-hand and present-at-hand as presented by Heidegger is that he sometimes assumes that these objects are perceived as inert or always used “in-order-to” achieve a goal or purpose. Heidegger also brings up the concepts of equipment/equipmental being and equipment totality (also referred to as

totality of equipment) (Heidegger, 1962). Equipmental being is concerned with entities

that are ready-to-hand and serve a purpose in our lives, and thus equipment is merely the

thing that is ready-to-hand, like a paintbrush for painting (Bolt, 2011). When we consider

all of the equipment and how it interrelates, then we are considering the equipment

totality or the network of relationships and assets that are ready-to-hand in the world

(Bolt, 2011). The equipmental being of things emerges through their properties and

practices. This is relevant for artmaking because the equipmental being of material and materiality emerges through the process of making one should determine the equipment totality of their practice as not only a consideration of items that are ready-to-hand but also determine what Heidegger presents as the concept of worldhood.

Heidegger (1962) states:

‘Worldhood’ is an ontological concept, and stands for the structure of one of the

constitutive items of Being-in-the-world. But we know Being in-the-world as a

way in which Dasein's character is defined existentially. Thus worldhood itself is

an existentiale. If we inquire ontologically about the ‘world,’ we by no means

abandon the analytic of Dasein as a field for thematic study. Ontologically,

‘world’ is not a way of characterizing those entities which Dasein essentially is

not; it is rather a characteristic of Dasein itself. (p. 92)

The concept of worldhood then goes beyond the consideration of presentness-to-hand, readiness-to-hand, and equipmental totality. As Heidegger explains above worldhood allows being-in-the-world, and since we know that Dasein and being-in-the-world are linked concepts, then worldhood then must include the totality of equipment and Dasein.

If the concept of World, as presented by Heidegger, can be understood as a way to understand the whole of the entities in the world, then worldhood is Heidegger’s description of how the Dasein is of the world and connected to it. Worldhood as a concept represents the being-there, being-ness of the World (Blattner, 2011). It is then imperative to not only consider artmaking through the conventional lens of material involving entities that are present and ready-to-hand. Even equipmental totality is too

limited a concept to apply to artmaking. In considering and questioning the shifting

materiality through artmaking, it becomes necessary to consider the worldhood of artmaking. Artmaking practice is no longer held as a reflective practice, but as a practice

that is active in co-construction of the world itself. It is a world-making practice, and as

such, it is crucial to shift the discussion of artmaking and materiality beyond on mere

material concerns, but instead, focus on a broader network of being-ness in the world that

is enacted and constituted by artmaking practice.

This consideration of the worldhood of artmaking makes sense when considered

through Heidegger’s contention that we are unable to view the world from an outside

perspective because we are already in the world, there is no way to get outside of it and

outside of ourselves for an “objective” view. These realizations bring us back to the

concepts of Dasein and being-in-the-world that seem to ground Heidegger’s philosophies.

In a sense, many of his assertions can be understood as the extrapolation of the concept of

Dasein to many entities in the World. This understanding can be furthered by considering

Heidegger’s concept of Dasein’s thrownness (Geworfenheit) (Heidegger, 1962). This concept explicates Heidegger’s notion that we are often not in control of what we do and often are swept up in the momentum of our daily lives. There are many things we have no control over, like where we live or when we are born. The things we cannot change about ourselves are what Heidegger terms our facticity (Heidegger, 1962). This concept is particularly relevant to artists and their practices because we can feel in our small subset of the worldhood of our artmaking that we experience this thrownness as we are often not the primary agents in our practice. We also cannot escape our facticity, which for me

52 manifests as an over consideration for the beings in my life; yesterday I apologized to a pencil for accidentally kicking it. This apology is most likely because I was made to apologize to items as a child because my Indian culture dictates that one should respect objects as you would other people. If you kicked a person, you would undoubtedly apologize, so that rule applies to objects as well.

Technology, Handlability, Artmaking, and Materiality

Though Heidegger’s Being and Time provides an extensive example of his ideas, it is also important to look to his essay “The Question Concerning Technology” to inform this discussion of how Heidegger’s take on human-tool relationships function. This take is informed by the analyses provided by several of Barbara Bolt’s writings on this subject

(Bolt, 2004a, 2004b, 2011). In “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger

(1977) discusses the implications of modern technology, presumably the technological strides being made during his active years. Throughout this work, he discusses his wariness towards modern technology and feels that it might subsume the human Dasein.

The goal of Heidegger’s essay is to look further into technology and figure out how it influences the way we use and think about it. Heidegger’s claims in this essay are almost prescient because he seems to foretell our current state of being-in-the-world.

Without technology, I am unable to remember phone numbers or recall driving directions. However, Heidegger (1977) does not recommend the strategy of burying our heads in the stand as he states, “Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it” (p. 4). We cannot ignore or escape technology, because it is

part of our worldhood and our equipmental reality; and we cannot merely improve

technology in an attempt to surpass our dependence on technology. We must develop a

way to overcome our thrownness when it comes to technology and learn to recognize

how to function with technology without letting it consume humanness. As a concept,

thrownness can be described as the way we find ourselves in our natural state, without effort. So, in my view, Dasein’s thrownness towards technology is to use it until we become consumed by it and unable to live without it. Overcoming this thrownness towards technology entails a reorientation towards technology where we redirect our energies and reassert our humanness in the face of overwhelming technologizing.

Heidegger discusses and defines what he considers technology and argues that the essences of technology is not technological (Heidegger, 1977). This assertion lets him move beyond the limit of just discussing forms of technology into discussing the broader ramifications of what technology does. He describes that technology is both a human activity and a functional aspect, but he pushes this description further to go beyond the way we grasp the concept of technology through our connection with it.

To expand his claims, Heidegger moves through four historical causes that

describe our evolving approaches to causality (Heidegger, 1977). He brings up an

example of a silver chalice to work through his ideas. The silver chalice is an object used

for Christian communion and Heidegger uses this recognizable object to explore notions

of causality, material, and materiality.

Heidegger (1977) writes:

Silver is that out of which the silver chalice is made. As this matter (hyle), it is co-

responsible for the chalice. The chalice is indebted to, i.e., owes thanks to, the

silver for that out of which it consists. But the sacrificial vessel is indebted not

only to the silver. As a chalice, that which is indebted to the silver appears in the

aspect of a chalice and not in that of a brooch or a ring. Thus the sacrificial vessel

is at the same time indebted to the aspect (eidos) of chaliceness. Both the silver

into which the aspect is admitted as chalice and the aspect in which the silver

appears are in their respective ways co-responsible for the sacrificial vessel. (p. 7)

Through the examples of the silver chalice, Heidegger discusses how the chalice is made of silver and that silver is responsible for adding to its “chaliceness.” Essentially,

Heidegger asserts that the cup’s being and meaning is indebted to its material and materiality. If the chalice was made of plastic, for example, would we associate the same meanings to it? For Heidegger, the answer is no. This discussion of the silver chalice also brings up issues of agency because the silver material is discussed as being “co- responsible” for the vessel. The example of the silver chalice allows Heidegger to work through his concepts of responsibility and indebtedness in references to his conceptualizations on technology as he sees it. As Bolt (2004b) describes, Heidegger wants to shift our perception of technology from one of instrumental use to a discussion involving care. Bolt (2004a) elucidates the concept of care by describing it through the artistic/artmaking process:

Heidegger establishes that the artistic process is one of responsibility and

indebtedness. Further, he claims that the artist is not alone in casing the art to

come about. In his estimation, a number of contributing elements, or conjunctions

are attributed with responsibility. (p. 72)

Heidegger uses the silver chalice as an example of explaining indebtedness and responsibility in making and Bolt applies Heidegger’s concepts to artists and artwork.

Bolt’s Heideggerian thought in art is poignantly articulated in her text Art Beyond

Representation. She skillfully moves through Heidegger’s writings to explain to an audience more interested in art, as she does in her book Heidegger: Reframed as well.

She introduces Heidegger’s notion of co-responsibility to represent how his rethinking of causality profoundly influences human-tool relationships, found primarily in his essay

“The Question Concerning Technology,” and how these relationships might influence the way we look at art (Bolt, 2004a). Bolt’s reading and explanation of Heidegger is relevant to this discussion because she approaches the analysis of his texts from the standpoint of a practicing artist. Her understandings as an artist help in unpacking Heidegger’s primary texts, but also to understanding how exactly Heidegger’s philosophies further understandings of art, artwork, artmaking, and material.

One compelling example of Bolt’s work follows Heidegger’s concept of handling/handlability (Barrett & Bolt, 2010; Bolt, 2004a, 2004b, 2007, 2011). Handling is a way to understand the indebtedness, relationships, and care that we experience in our interactions with objects. Handling and handlability are another way to describe the way we come to know the objects that are ready-to-hand or present-at-hand. For Heidegger, handling is the way he describes knowing through use and practice. Practice and praxis become increasingly crucial to the way artworks emerge through handling.

Bolt (2004b) states:

In proposing that it is through use that we come to understand the Being of tools,

Heidegger’s work on handlability enables us to rethink the relation that we have

come to know as artistic practice. In this relationship, the work of art is the

particular understanding that is realised [sic] though our concernful deal-ings with

the tools and materials of production. (P. 52)

Bolt’s discussion focuses on how materials are co-responsible for the emergence of artworks, and she discusses examples of artists, such as Patricia Piccinini, to explain her assertions. Piccinini is a contemporary artist whose work traverses a variety of artmaking modalities including sculpture, installation, video, and sound. She is most well known for her hyperrealistic, hairy, grotesque, human-animal hybrid sculptures. These sculptures evoke posthuman and transhuman philosophies because this work evokes the existing understandings of the human body while offering contorted, smashed, and uncomfortable possibilities for how the body could change or evolve through biological means, surgery, transplantation, or DNA splicing (Badham, 2017).

One could look directly back to Heidegger’s example of the silver chalice to explain what this conceptualization entails. Through Heidegger’s concept of handling,

Bolt argues for a seemingly post-human take on causality in artmaking, one where the artist is no longer the central agent creating the artwork. Instead, she proposes, “Thus, in this reversal of the causal chain of means and ends we can reconfigure the ‘artistic relations’: artists, tools, equipment, ideas, materials and processes become co responsible for the emergence of art” (Bolt, 2004b, p. 116). This statement takes the importance away

57 from the object being produced, the artwork, and places the importance on emergence and artmaking practice.

For Heidegger, our personal experiences lend themselves to how we inhabit the world and our being-in-the-world. Particularly salient in illustrating Heidegger’s influence on new materialist philosophies is evidenced through Dasein, which suggests an unfixed nature of Being and conceptualizes that human beings are inextricably linked to existence. This lack of fixity is a feature that new materialists, Karen Barad in particular, take up and further by suggesting that boundaries are in continual negotiation and ongoing reproduction. Heidegger’s Dasein privileges the perceiver in a way that brings them to the forefront of their world and thought. This privileging of the perceiver is due, in part, to the fact that being-in-the-world is inseparable from Being. After all,

Heidegger states at the beginning of Being and Time, “We are ourselves the entities to be analysed [sic]. The Being of any such entity is in each case mine. These entities, in their

Being, comport themselves towards their Being. As entities with such Being, they are delivered over to their own Being. Being is that which is an issue for every such entity”

(Heidegger, 1962, p. 67). By saying that he is analyzing us, humans, as the primary entity and subject of his inquiry is himself, and the process of uncovering the nature of being is necessarily funneled through him. The primary distinction is that while my Being is the primary conduit through which this information is mediated, this study explores the implications of attending to both the human and the non-human elements of what

Heidegger terms Existenz (existence). Heidegger ties both Dasein and being-in-the-world

to the perceiver’s biography and history, which informs my new materialist and post-

human understandings to build through Heidegger’s foundations.

Heidegger, while a maverick thinker for his time, stops short of where new

materialists take their assessments of human/material and human/world relationships.

Heidegger still insists on maintaining a distinction between objects and humans and

makes it clear that Dasein, Being/being, being-in-the-world are never entities that are merely present-at-hand or waiting for someone to activate them. For Heidegger, Dasein

should be understood as an ever-present manner of being there in the world and, because

of its fundamental linkage, to being-in-the-world. While this is a groundbreaking and fundamental assertion, it does not help further the discussion of material and materiality the way new materialism does. Heidegger’s philosophies were a direct challenge to empiricism and scientific views of the world that insist on the possibility of objectivity.

This challenge is currently being furthered by the work of Karen Barad whose new materialist philosophies are grounded in theoretical physics. Even as a scientist, she does not subscribe to the notion that objectivity is possible even through the scientific method.

Barad uses examples from science, through quantum physics, to explain her stance and her disbelief in empiricism. Engagning with Heidegger’s ideas helps to envison a starting point for the rethinking of the boundaries between human, material/materiality and world

that is offered through the discussion of Barad and new materialism explored in the

following chapter.

Merleau-Ponty

Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to a fundamental re-assessment of Western philosophy presents an embodied approach to the discussion of existence, phenomenon, and experience. Presenting the idea that human experience is fundamentally and necessarily enacted through our bodies brings the body to the forefront of ongoing discussions of experience. Like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty saw his ideas as an extension of Husserl’s phenomenological traditions, which it is, but he also extends the concepts proposed by his existentialist countryman Jean-Paul Sartre as well as Martin Heidegger.

Particularly compelling is Merleau-Ponty’s use of Heidegger’s Dasein, being-in-the- world and the inextricable linking of those concepts in the way experience and perception occur. Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to the troubling of materiality in the West is best explored through his work on perception. Throughout his work, he explores and attempts to develop a way to describe embodied experience and perception. He articulated that even if our perception of an object is incorrect, that is the only access to that object we have so we must attend to it. Merleau-Ponty also grounds our perceptions through our bodies rather than some transcendent disembodied consciousness, which breaks from other phenomenologists of his time (Landes, 2013). Considering the body as fundamental to our perception makes Merleau-Ponty’s ideas a compelling and vital basis from which to consider new materialism because as Coole (2010) writes:

If for Merleau-Ponty it is corporeality that introduces meaning or structure into

matter, this is because the body literally incarnates material capacities for agency.

Existence is for him an internally productive, formative process wherein meaning

and matter are irreducibly interwoven. (p. 101)

It is compelling to consider how artmaking practice is grounded in the body of the artist

and is, therefore, a corporeal practice. The work in this dissertation is grounded in and

through my body’s encounters with the materiality through which artmaking practice

emerges. If meaning and matter are fundamentally intertwined, then a study of materiality

must include a discussion of the body. The body’s role and its interaction with matter and

materiality provide fodder for a dynamic rethinking of materiality in artmaking. In this

section, I will investigate how the concepts brought forward through Merleau-Ponty’s

work informs this study.

In Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty makes a case for a

philosophical outlook that questions the boundary between subject and object, nature and

culture, established by Plato and Aristotle and furthered by Descartes (Carman & Hansen,

2005). As the anthropologist Thomas Csordas (1993) states, “for Merleau-Ponty,

perception began in the body and, through reflective thinking, ends in objects. On the

level of perception, there is not yet a subject-object distinction we are simply in the world” (p.137). Like Heidegger’s thinking through how our being-in-the-world necessarily influences the way we access beings/objects around us, Merleau-Ponty too wishes to return to experience to figure out how our bodies intrinsically influence our interactions with the world and other entities. Even though many new materialist scholars discount binaries and dualism as outmoded, there are instances when these theories seem relevant and vital to the discussion of experience. The philosopher Mark Johnson, whose

work employs Merleau-Ponty’s theories of embodied perception and experience in his discussion of cognitive neuroscience and linguistics, aptly describes how our everyday experiences reinforce dualism.

Johnson (2007) states:

One important reason is that our lived experience itself reinforces an apparently

inescapable dualistic view of mind versus body. We don’t have to work to ignore

the working of our bodies. On the contrary, our bodies hide themselves from us in

their very acts of making meaning and experience possible. The way we

experience things appears to have a dualistic character. (p. 4)

We must recognize that in our daily lives, we do not actively acknowledge the interactions of our minds, bodies, and the world. Most of the time our bodies fade, and we keep an outward focus on the world, and this is one reason that dualism and Descartes are discussed with experience. If we describe the way experience occurs, then dualisms and binaries remain the way our world unfolds to us. It is necessary to acknowledge the connection between the body and the world found in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophies in facilitating the expanded definition of materiality that this study pursues because the body, objects, and the world include properties that relate their consideration to the consideration of material and material practices, as conceived through new materialist thought.

Merleau-Ponty positions his philosophies as a rethinking of the significance of the body in his developing interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenology. He saw that his

62 primary hurdles to working through the idea of embodiment philosophically were the traditions of empiricism and intellectualism. Merleau-Ponty sees empiricism as an approach that only considers phenomena through causes and external relations (Landes,

2013). Merleau-Ponty uses the term empiricism to describe a detached, scientific view of the world, one that relies purely on objective observational data to come up with claims about the world. An empiricist then considers detached objectivity possible and desirable.

Merleau-Ponty refers to this objectivity as “pensée du survol” or the act of thinking from above with a “God’s eye view” (Landes, 2013).

Intellectualism, on the other hand, approaches phenomena through a concept called “constituting consciousness” which implies that a transcendent consciousness creates the world and its meaning (Landes, 2013). In Phenomenology of Perception,

Merleau-Ponty continues the philosophical foundations of the project he started in The

Structure of Behavior which is to eliminate the existing and pervasive intellectual barriers between intellectualism and empiricism (Landes, 2013). His way of accomplishing this task is to work with these concepts through his phenomenological method. His methodological approach is linked to Merleau-Ponty’s assertion, throughout

Phenomenology of Perception, that we must describe actual experience rather than continue to employ reflective analysis as a philosophical method as proposed by

Descartes and Kant. Reflective analysis assumes that there are absolute structures in place that comprise consciousness (Landes, 2013).

For Merleau-Ponty, the key is to describe one’s own experience rather than try to assume there is some transcendent source of experience. Merleau-Ponty’s disagreement 63

with both empiricist and intellectualist/reflective assumptions is an important element of

his philosophical method. This return to description and the actual phenomena helps to

ground the inquiry of this study. Expressing and understanding the importance of perceptual experience was deeply influenced by the ideas of Gestalt psychology/theory that was prevalent around the same time as Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical work. Those subscribing to the ideas of Gestalt psychology advocated that you could not separate elements from a whole during perception (Carman, 2008). In other words, you must to consider perception as a whole experience rather than try to separate or divide it arbitrarily. For Merleau-Ponty, Gestalt psychology offered a way to break through some of the divisions enacted by Cartesian dualism as well as the separation between the intellectualist and empiricist traditions. Elizabeth Grosz (1994) postulates that Merleau-

Ponty’s interest in Gestalt theory extends to his treatment of human senses because he realizes that the inherent nature of human senses precludes them from being studied or perceived separately, even though they might be considered discrete phenomenon. This

interest seems to also further his strong aversions to Descartes’ dualism as well.

Although Merleau-Ponty began his career with a fascination with Gestalt theory,

ultimately it too needed to be overcome through the development of his

phenomenological method. He suggests a concept called the “phenomenal field” which is

an adaptation of Gestalt theory, but it distinctively and accurately allows the Gestalt

structure to adapt and ebb and flow the way our perception does through our lived

experience.

Merleau-Ponty (2012) explains: 64

Sensing is this living communication with the world that makes it present to us as

the familiar place of our life. The perceived object and the perceiving subject owe

their thickness to sensing. It is the intentional fabric that the work of knowledge

will seek to decompose. (p. 53)

In Merleau-Ponty’s introduction to the discussion of his “phenomenal field” concept, he describes his intent through the words quoted above. Landes (2013) describes this phenomenal field as one that “sustains interweaving relations between objects and the landscape, between objects and embodied perceiver, and even between the present and the past” (p. 147). For Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenal field concept coupled with his phenomenological method is the path to understanding how sensing and perceiving are interrelated to each other and to the world. It is through this concept and method that we can discover how these ideas are interwoven and linked. It is important to clarify what

Merleau-Ponty means by “sense” and “sensing.” He is writing in French, so his translation of the French word “sens” and this is linked to the English word “meaning” or

“direction” (Landes, 2013). Perception, in this context, refers to information gathered through our being-in-the-world.

The description of interweaving relations given by Landes (2013) also describes a similar outlook to many post-human/new materialist scholars who describe meshed and entangled understandings of the world. What is also interesting is the descriptive language Merleau-Ponty uses in describing this as a “thickness” to the character of subject and object in perception. As he describes the concept of “phenomenal field,”

Merleau-Ponty does indeed describe the linked, thick, and even messy character of 65 subjects and objects through perception (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). It seems that sometimes, perception feels structured and ordered, but not always, and Merleau-Ponty was keenly aware of the need to embrace ambiguity throughout the development of his embodied phenomenology.

The Body in Perception

Merleau-Ponty devotes a significant portion of Phenomenology of Perception to develop his embodied philosophical view and to develop an understanding of how the body is involved in perception. To do this, he discusses some common assumptions brought forward by our tendency to bifurcate our experience that we need to think through to understand the implications of an embodied philosophy. Merleau-Ponty calls the dualistic separation of body and world the “objective body.” Dualism describes how those in the West tend to understand bodies and the concept of the body in the world; the body is comprehended as an object in the world rather than an inextricable part of the world. He suggests that instead of taking this scientific and clinical view of how the body and world are related, and that we think about the body and world differently. He suggests an idea he terms the “phenomenal body” which is the experience of the body in and through perception that is different from the “objective body.”

Merleau-Ponty (2012) provides a succinct explanation:

We will see that, in science itself, one’s own body evades the treatment that they

wish to impose upon it. And since the genesis of the objective body is but a

moment in the constitution of the object, the body, by withdrawing from the

objective world, will carry with it the intentional threads that unite it to its 66

surroundings and that, in the end, will reveal to us the perceiving subject as well

as the perceived world. (p. 74)

Here, Merleau-Ponty proposes that in order to overcome our tendency to view our bodies

as objects in the world in a detached way, we must change the way we look at our bodies

in the world, in doing so we can see how the mere presence of our bodies are linked to

what we perceive. He suggests that through experience we can discover how we came to

see the body as an object as well as other objects in the world. Objective thought and the

objective body are both a kind of common sense, knee-jerk reality of experiencing, but

that to get to the heart of perception we must somehow overcome this tendency to divide

our experiences into neat categories. The view of the phenomenal body is then a way to

begin to do the work required in coming to a preliminary understanding of perception.

Merleau-Ponty (2012) uses an example of being stung by a mosquito to introduce how

these moments bring forward the phenomenal body within the phenomenal field.

Merleau-Ponty (2012) states:

The patient bitten by a mosquito need not look for the point of the bite; he finds it

immediately, because it is not for him a matter of situating it in relation to axes of

coordinates in objective space, but rather of reaching with his phenomenal hand a

certain painful place on his phenomenal body. Between the hand as a power for

scratching and the point of the bite as a place to be scratched, a lived relation is

given in the natural system of one’s own body. (p. 108)

This example expounds the concept of the phenomenal body by showing that we need not

always view the body as an object to perceive it. Merleau-Ponty cites the examples of the itch created by the mosquito bite as a way to sense the location of the bite. The move by the hand to scratch the bite is seamless and often done without even noticing it happens.

The feeling of the itchy spot is so intense that it requires attention. This relationship between the body and itself does not require one to view the body as an object to be scratched, but it is a sensory reaction where the body is scratched. We do not readily think about how our hand is scratching; it just scratches. This move to consider the body itself is what Merleau-Ponty proposes through this concept.

Both the concepts of objective body and phenomenal body are related to the previously described concept of “phenomenal field,” because for Merleau-Ponty perceiving, sensing, and the body need to be grounded in space and time. Though it is important to understand that this field is not conceived as a mere backdrop to the activity of the phenomenal body, rather this field is continually constituted through the interactions of the body in the world. As Carman and Hansen (2005) explain, “What

Merleau-Ponty calls the ’phenomenal field’ is neither a representation nor a locus of representations, but a dimension of our bodily embeddedness in a perceptually coherent environment, a primitive aspect of our openness onto the world” (p. 51). This concept offers a glimpse at Merleau-Ponty’s burgeoning idea that the body and world are connected vitally and essentially. He continues to explore and articulate this connectivity in his later writings and comes to some particularly remarkable and useful ideas in the chapter entitled “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” found in Merleau-Ponty’s (1968) book

The Visible and the Invisible; ideas from this text will be explored later in this chapter.

Oddly and perhaps unknowingly, he creates an oppositional relationship between the

phenomenal body and objective body that he also reexamines in later writings order to

rethink this division.

Particularly illuminating is Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of body schema through several works, culminating in Phenomenology of Perception. A “body schema” is a term

Merleau-Ponty applies to the possibilities of perception through our bodies and their being-in-the-world. The concept of a body schema explains how we know our bodies are moving and where our bodies are relative to objects, but that we do not have to see or explicitly tell our bodies what to do (Landes, 2013). The schema is a fluid quantity that can incorporate parts of the world into it whenever necessary. For Merleau-Ponty, the body moves because the body schema holds in it all the possible movements the body can perform (Grosz, 1994). He also describes the body schema as a “field in which the subject's cohesion and identity as a subject and its intimate incarnation in and as a particular body take place” (p. 95). Grosz (1994) describes Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the flesh as a concept that ontologically underlies his investigation of perception through the body. However, he does not want to create another concept, but one that is,

“a condition of both seeing and being see, of touching and being touch, and of their intermingling and possible integration, a commonness in which both subject and object participate, a single ‘thing’ folded back on itself” (Grosz, 1994, p. 36).

Interestingly, although some earlier translations of Phenomenology of Perception propose the interchangeability of the terms “body schema” and “body image,” current 69

scholars of Merleau-Ponty insist on distinguishing these concepts. As Taylor Carman

(2008) the distinction between these terms can be traced back to their usage in Kant’s

Critique of Pure Reason. Carman (2008) states that “The body scheme is thus precisely not an image of the body, for images are objects of awareness, whereas schemata sketch out in advance and hence structure our awareness” (p. 106). The distinction between schema and image is that the schema constitutes a kind of range of possibilities that our bodies are capable of enacting through their being-in-the-world. This range of possibilities, this schema, is the range of motion, actions, and function that our bodies have available to them as a function of their being-in-world. Moreover, it is important to note that this concept implies that the body cannot be considered from outside of itself, much like Heidegger expressed that Dasein cannot be considered outside of being-in-the-

world.

To develop his body schema concept, Merleau-Ponty works through an example

of Schneider who was a patient studied by the psychologists Gelb and Goldstein

(Toadvine, 2016). Schneider had aphasia, which is a disorder that manifests through a

person’s use of language; it is usually caused by brain trauma or damage to the left side

of the brain (Grosz, 1994). Merleau-Ponty uses neurological disturbances as examples

throughout his writings to aid in the development of his ideas, such as phantom limb and

agnosia (Grosz, 1994). Schneider’s example facilitates Merleau-Ponty’s formulation of a

concept he names the “intentional arc,” very simply put; this concept describes how we

know the world around us. The case of Schneider is helpful because due to his brain

70 injury he is unable to comprehend the world in the way that someone without brain trauma could.

The “intentional arc” concept is particularly compelling to developing an approach to the project of new materialism as it describes a situation that “projects around us our past, our future, our human milieu, our physical situation, our ideological situation, and our moral situation, or rather, that ensures that we are situated within all of these relationships” (Merleau-Ponty, 2012, p. 137). New materialism presents a similar concept, which is largely to articulate and explore, based on emerging concepts in humanities and scientific research, how the boundaries between subject and object, body and world are more fluid than we previously imagined. Merleau-Ponty’s “intentional arc” concept does a remarkable job of articulating these ideas and go far to inform current research that involves the body and subject/object relationships.

As Elizabeth Grosz (1994) explains:

For Merleau-Ponty, although the body is both object (for others) and a lived

reality (for the subject), it is never simply object nor simply subject. It is defined

by its relations with objects and in turn defines these objects as such—it is "sense-

bestowing" and "form-giving," providing a structure, organization, and ground

within which objects are to be situated and against which the body-subject is

positioned. The body is my being-to-the-world and as such is the instrument by

which all information and knowledge is received and meaning is generated. It is

through the body that the world of objects appears to me; it is in virtue of

having/being a body that there are objects for me (p. 87). 71

Here, Grosz succinctly states the importance of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas even today. The very nature of bodily being is interrogated and upended by his theoretical explorations.

He is perhaps the first Western theorist to articulate the importance of the body in being, perception, knowledge creation, and meaning-making. Merleau-Ponty brings the body to the forefront by saying that it is because we have bodies and “are” bodies that the concept of “objects” exists.

Art, Artmaking, and the Body

To work through the nature of objects, Merleau-Ponty employs an example of a

blind man’s stick. He explores the implications of the stick and how it affects the body

and its movements. Merleau-Ponty’s theorization of the extension of the body’s reach

and the way the stick becomes a part of the body and demonstrates the embodied mind

because it is almost as if one can feel through the stick. Merleau-Ponty states, “The blind

man’s stick has ceased to be an object for him, and is no longer perceived for itself; its

point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch,

and providing a parallel to sight” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). Here Merleau-Ponty explicates

that somewhere along the way the stick stops being an object and becomes incorporated

into the blind man’s body map. If this view is fused with Merleau-Ponty’s take on the

tool as an extension of the human body, this too could add additional complexity to a

discussion of artmaking. If we look to the tools, spaces or sites of artmaking to inform

our discussion this could inform theoretical discussions of the aforementioned elements

as agential units that do not pre-exist intra-action but instead are delineated through their entangled9 state with the presumably human artist.

Merleau-Ponty looks to art to demonstrate how mental faculties and physicality

are linked. He posits that expressions of art or music cannot be distinguished from what

they express, much like the gestures of the body (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). In discussing

poetry in relation to the body, he states, “It is well known that a poem, though it has a

superficial meaning translatable into prose, leads, in the reader’s mind, a further existence

which makes it a poem” (p. 174). The poem’s meaning and existence is extended across

individuals, the writer, and the reader. For Merleau-Ponty, the words of the poem are

secondary to the way it transforms in the reader (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). This process

leads to Merleau-Ponty’s development of the idea of the transference of meaning through

bodily extension; much like the stick the blind man uses and feels is an extension of his

own body, so too are the words of the poet or the brush of the painter. Bodily extension

marks a compelling distinction in the act of meaning-making according to Merleau-Ponty

because he links the medium of expression and meaning. Merleau-Ponty relates his

formation of this concept through an analysis of visual art and music.

Merleau-Ponty (1962) writes:

9 Karen Barad’s idea of entanglement will be explored in detail in the following chapter, but it is relevant to introduce the concept now in a precursory capacity. Barad (2007) describes entanglements as the way boundaries and individual entities emerge rather than pre-existing their entangled state (p. ix). Additionally, Barad (2007) states “that space, time, and matter do not exist prior to the intra-actions that reconstitute entanglements (p.74). 73

The musical meaning of a sonata is inseparable from the sounds which are its

vehicle: before we have heard it no analysis enables us to anticipate it; once the

performance is over, we shall, in our intellectual analyses of the music, be unable

to do anything but carry ourselves back to the moment of experiencing it. (p. 212)

Through this example, Merleau-Ponty is able to show that the meaning of a sonata cannot be considered alone; it must be experienced and perceived from the whole experience of the music. These entities—the music, meaning, and experience—are inextricably linked.

Moreover, we can extrapolate that just as the musician thinks through music, the artist thinks through the artmaking process. Merleau-Ponty looks to art because he sees artistic expression as uniquely able to show that the mode of expression cannot be separated from what is expressed and the only way you can get a sense of the work is to encounter the work directly (Merleau-Ponty, 2002). He compares this linkage demonstrated by considering art and artmaking to the way we should be considering our bodies as well. Merleau-Ponty (2002) states that our body “is a knot of living significations” and it is similar to the way modes of artmaking and the artwork produced are related (p. 153).

Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophical Development Through Art and Artmaking

A particularly compelling example of this “knot of living significations” is seen in

Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of Cézanne’s works. He looks to Cézanne’s artwork and approach to artmaking to assist in working through his theoretical explorations. The complexity and temporal nuance found in Cézanne’s work and method seem to help

Merleau-Ponty expand his ideas, at times, it feels as if Merleau-Ponty can incorporate 74

Cézanne’s work into his own sphere and develop a deep understanding of both the work and the involvement of the body in Cézanne’s artmaking process. Merleau-Ponty devotes so much thinking to Cézanne’s work, that it is no longer merely just Cézanne’s work, but an exploration of the interaction of Cézanne’s works and writings through Merleau-

Ponty. As I consider Merleau-Ponty’s use of Cézanne in this chapter, it becomes

necessary to make it clear that this is in no way a formal reading or art historical account

of Cézanne’s artmaking; instead the artmaking process becomes a tool through which

Merleau-Ponty thinks. This method of thinking through the work of artists is a vital part

of this because it is a strategy I use to develop, explore and expand the materiality of

artmaking.

By considering Cézanne’s work in both Phenomenology of Perception and his

(1964) essay “Cézanne’s Doubt,” Merleau-Ponty arrives at moments of realization that expand his thinking. By considering the artist and artmaking, Merleau-Ponty makes remarkable strides in his approach to the body and its relationship and interconnectedness with the world. During one of his explorations of Cézanne’s work in Phenomenology of

Perception, Merleau-Ponty (2002) states “To have a body is to possess a universal arrangement, a schema of all perceptual developments and of all inter-sensory correspondences beyond the segment of the world that we are actually perceiving” (p.

341). Through his exploration of Cézanne’s work, Merleau-Ponty posits that the body’s

influence and reach is much further than we suspect, and that the body, its senses, and its

schema have a reach that is well beyond our awareness. He examines his relationship

with Cézanne’s work to develop this understanding. Merleau-Ponty equates that having

sense and senses and existence are related if not the same and that through our body’s relationship with the world we can have rich experiences that allow us to sense more than one thing at a time (Landes, 2013). For example, when Merleau-Ponty looked at

Cézanne’s work, he not only saw the relationships of color that create the illusion of form but found that he could sense the smell, sound, and taste of the work. These augmented senses happen because his sight is linked to the way he experiences his other senses and they often present in multi-layered experience, and never one at a time.

Merleau-Ponty’s (1964a) essay “Cézanne’s Doubt” helps him develop his approach to his method of phenomenological inquiry and it is the first essay where he explicitly works through painting to do so (Landes, 2013). The essay appeared in Sense and Nonsense as well as other collected anthologies of his work (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b,

2007c). It provides a phenomenological account of what Cézanne does through his artmaking and how these works are a summation or crystallization of Cézanne’s life and experiences. As previously stated, Merleau-Ponty is not interested in providing an art historical reading of Cézanne’s artistic intentions or artwork; the work is a means through which Merleau-Ponty can explore his theories and arrive at his conclusions without too much influence from Cézanne’s views of the work. While parts of the essay indicate that

Merleau-Ponty is interested in finding linkages between the artist’s personal history and his approach to painting, he certainly does not want to depend on Cézanne’s biography.

According to Merleau-Ponty, a key feature of Cézanne’s approach to painting is that he did not “choose between sensation and thought as if he were deciding between chaos and order” (Merleau-Ponty, 2007a). The draw of Cézanne’s work is that it attempts 76

to compress and expand time, representing multiple moments on a single canvas and this

act resists and expands the limits of painting up to that point. Cézanne subverts convention and Merleau-Ponty is drawn to this ability because it helps him think through

his ideas with a useful example based in art and artmaking. Cézanne paints an object as it

takes shape, not the form he thinks the object should resemble. He makes painting viable

in the time of photography by painting over time, not things themselves (Merleau-Ponty,

2007a). Merleau-Ponty (2007a) states, “the lived object is not rediscovered or

constructed from the data of the sense; rather, it presents itself to us from the start as the

center from which the data radiate” (p.75). This harkens back to Merleau-Ponty’s

assertions that our perceptions, and by extension our senses, may not always be accurate,

but we need to look to them to form a basis from which to think through how we

perceive. Here he states that once we form an idea of how we may perceive an object, that idea presents itself when we encounter an object. It is from this preconception that we must begin and perhaps even undo the work of our initial perceptions. Furthermore, through Cézanne’s work, Merleau-Ponty makes a bold claim about the causality of expression.

Merleau-Ponty (2007a) states:

Expression cannot, therefore, be the translation of a thought that is already clear,

since clear thoughts are those that have already been said within ourselves or by

others. “Conception” cannot precede “execution.” Before expression, there is

nothing but a vague fever, and only the work itself, completed and understood,

will prove that there was something rather than nothing to be found there. (p. 69) 77

Here Merleau-Ponty grapples with what exists before expression; he works through how

communication and expression are related. His thought process is similar to what we

perhaps take for granted in artmaking practice. That ideas, concepts, and knowledge do

not pre-exist their interactions with the work. It is through the artmaking process that we

arrive at moments of clarity in our work. Rarely is a pre-formed idea brought through a piece exactly as it started, rather any pre-conceptions we have are twisted and permanently changed as we begin to work through both the conceptual and the material.

Merleau-Ponty and New Materialism

Merleau-Ponty’s focus in his writings is mostly to develop a way to talk about the role of the body in perception. However, in the latter parts of Phenomenology of

Perception and in his later works. his ideas evolve to include further implications of how his theories about the body influence entities that may, at first, seem outside of the scope of his project. Upon further inspection, we find that he is working through and following his streams of thought brought forward through his explorations of embodiment.

Merleau-Ponty makes some interesting assertions regarding the fluidity of perceived boundaries that is compelling to consider as a part of his research and as it relates to the project of new materialism. He asks, “If my consciousness has a body, why would other bodies not “have” consciousness?” (Merleau-Ponty, 2012, p. 367). This question within the context of his thinking through an embodied philosophy is compelling, but when it is considered within a contemporary context through the ideas brought forward through new materialism, it creates an interesting dialogue between the question Merleau-Ponty poses and the questions that are still being asked by new 78

materialists. Why is it that the material entities in our world are not considered and

theorized similar to bodies? Perhaps Merleau-Ponty was not quite extending his question to the world of materiality, but he does ask whether other bodies have “consciousness,”

and we are continuing to grapple with what constitutes a consciousness so many years

after Merleau-Ponty’s question.

Merleau-Ponty extends this line of questioning to other ideas like time and

temporality in addition to an ongoing interrogation of subject/object boundaries and

definitions. As he works through Phenomenology of Perception, he finds it difficult to

enact a boundary around the concept of “self” or “I.” He viewed the formation of the self

as an ongoing process, this idea similar to the view of Karen Barad, and other

posthumanist/new materialist scholars suggest and will be expounded in the next chapter.

Merleau-Ponty sees his “self” as an ambiguous construct that is never fully understood

and he describes that he must accept “the fact of the world as the invariable framework of

all illusion and all disillusion: I know myself only in my inherence in time and in the

world, that is, I know myself only in ambiguity” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 402). The

ambiguous hold he has on how his “self” is tenuous and fleeting and his related to time,

and as a function of time is compelling and adds depth to the ongoing considerations

through new materialism. Merleau-Ponty turns to this notion of never quite being able to

grasp and understand himself at any given moment; the moment he thinks he gets a hold

on an understanding, he is confronted by his past self and his future self, and he would

have to incorporate the information brought by both his past and future (Merleau-Ponty,

2012). Merleau-Ponty also speaks of time as a relative phenomenon through his

suggestion that “Time is, therefore, not a real process, not an actual succession that I am

content to record. It arises from my relation to things” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 478).

This linkage with the concept of time to “things” is also a compelling thought to help

bridge the philosophical work of Merleau-Ponty with the theoretical constructs of new

materialism as new materialism forefronts material engagements and relationships as a way to understand and even complicate assumptions. By grappling with the issues of time and temporality, Merleau-Ponty concludes that our experience of time is a sense

relationship to being-in-the-world. He suggests that both subject and object are

constituted in relation to time and being-in-the-world and are principally similar ways of relating to the act of being.

This confusion between the boundaries between subject and object is taken up through many of Merleau-Ponty’s later manuscripts, but perhaps the most compelling for this study is Merleau-Ponty (2007b) “The Intertwining—The Chiasm.” The term

“chiasm” means crossing over or intertwining of relationships (Landes, 2013). Merleau-

Ponty (2007a) insists on referring to the body as flesh because he sees this as a more apt

way of describing and grounding his thought. The work expands a moment found in

Phenomenology of Perception where Merleau-Ponty (1962) describes the feeling of two

hands, presumably belonging to the same individual, touching (p. 106). In this essay, he

points to this moment of touch as a moment where touch creates a chiasmatic encounter

between the hands. The concepts of subject and object become confused because both

hands are both subject and object at any given moment.

Merleau-Ponty (2007b) states: 80

We have to reject the age-old assumptions that put the body in the world and the

seer in the body, or, conversely, the world and the body in the seer as in a box.

Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is

flesh? ...the world seen is not “within” [dans] my body, and my body is not ‘in’

the visible world ultimately: as flesh applied to a flesh, the world neither

surrounds it nor is surrounded by it. (p. 399).(Merleau-Ponty, 2007b)

Here Merleau-Ponty implores us to consider the implications of the chiasm he puts

forward. He asks us to consider what is at stake when we stop assuming that any entity in

the world and through perception is neatly contained in a boundary. He proposes a

scenario where the body is the world and the world is flesh, and all of these previously

discrete entities have more fluid boundaries. This too is the aim of new materialist

considerations—to understand and examine what is at stake when we interrogate

perceived boundaries and consider what happens when we investigate these

interrogations.

Conclusion

Both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, stop short of where new materialists take

their assessments of human/material, human/world, body/material/time/space

relationships. Both philosophers grapple with maintaining a distinction between objects

and humans. Heidegger, for example, makes it clear that Dasein, Being/being, being-in- the-world are never entities that are merely present-at-hand or waiting for someone to activate them. Merleau-Ponty gets a bit further, but he does not entirely go as far as the posthumanist/new materialist scholars do regarding the assertion that subject/object 81 relationships and boundaries are fluid. For Heidegger, Dasein should be understood as an ever-present manner of being there, in the world and because of its fundamental linkage to being-in-the-world. Merleau-Ponty adds the dimension of asserting that flesh and the body be considered an integral part of perception. These are indeed still groundbreaking ideas, but it falls short of helping to further the discussion of material and materiality the way new materialism does because neither philosopher questions the idea that boundaries, between bodies, things, subjects, or objects could fluctuate or that boundaries could be enacted through the interaction, as Barad (2007) explains. Heidegger and

Merleau-Ponty’s philosophies were a necessary and direct challenge to empiricism, intellectualism and the scientific views of the world that insist on the possibility of objectivity. This challenge is furthered by the work of Karen Barad whose new materialist philosophies are grounded in her background in theoretical physics. Barad does not subscribe to the notion that objectivity is possible even using the scientific method. She uses examples from science, mainly through quantum physics, to explain her stance and her disbelief in empiricism; working through the ideas of Heidegger and

Merleau-Ponty help to understand the history of human/world, body/world/time/space, and subject/object relationships. This basis will help ground the questions of the nature of material/materiality opened up through the discussion of Barad and new materialism offered in the following chapter.

“From a critical perspective, the term ‘material’ describes not prime matter but the substances that are always subject to change, be it through handling, interaction with their surroundings, or the dynamic life of their chemical reactions.” — Petra Lange-Berndt (2015, p. 12)

In the previous chapter, I discussed the work of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, focusing on how their philosophies provide a crucial underpinning to the concepts that ground this study. Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty address some of the big questions of philosophy with which we still grapple. Their ideas provide a foundation from which to expand thought on the nature of being, the body, and artmaking. With this philosophical underpinning, I build an understanding of these concepts while pursuing a line of inquiry that discusses new and emerging approaches to materiality. As the quote at the beginning of this chapter suggests, the concept and term “material” is itself in limbo as scholars and artists seek to rethink the implications of ongoing scientific discoveries on how matter and material are conceptualized and the way we think about boundaries between entities.

This rethinking of materiality is attempted through various emerging philosophical approaches, including speculative realism, posthumanism, and new materialist scholarship, to name a few. My understandings of the aforementioned philosophies, with a focus on new materialism, are supported by the philosophical contributions of

Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.

This chapter continues a rethinking by discussing notions of material, materiality,

and matter in artmaking and posthuman/new materialist thought. In the first section, I

situate and define current understandings of materiality. This section draws on the work

of art historians, art critics, and philosophers from the 1920s to the present. I begin by

providing a discussion on some of the ideas that are central to the evolution of modern

and contemporary Western thought on material and materiality. To appreciate how these

ideas inform this project, I discuss relevant artworks by artists from the recent past, 1950

to current day, whose artmaking and artworks grapple issues that are relevant to the

discussion of material and materiality and help situate this discussion and present a need for a rethinking of materiality through posthuman/new materialist theories.

In the second section, I provide an entrée into the work of scholars working in the

relatively young philosophical tradition of post-human, posthumanist, new

materialist/new materialisms10. This review of literature is by no means exhaustive as this

is a rapidly expanding field of knowledge. Instead, this discussion provides ideas relevant

to this study. A significant portion of this section is devoted to the philosopher and

physicist Karen Barad, who deems herself a posthumanist/new materialist scholar. Barad

introduces quite a few key terms throughout her papers and her book entitled Meeting the

Universe Halfway. I define and investigate these terms through examples relevant to art

10 Though distinctions between these terms may be emerging currently, in terms of the conceptual underpinnings connoted by the terms post-human, posthumanisms, and new materialist/new materialism, I am unable to pinpoint any marked differences. Perhaps post-human and posthumanism through their naming infer a look beyond humanism. Similarly, new materialism perhaps began as a rethinking of materialist philosophies. However, currently the same scholars work within all of these naming conventions, often shifting their use of post-human versus new materialism based on the publication. 84

and artmaking practice to investigate how these ideas help expand the philosophical basis

of this project. By exploring concepts brought forward by emerging scholarship on

posthumanism/new materialism, I can probe how these notions have the potential to

further a rethinking of the materiality of artmaking.

Situating Materiality: Probing Materiality/Material through Artmaking

In the Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press publication Materiality, Petra Lange-

Berndt makes a case for the necessity of an edited volume of essays and writings on

material and materiality. In her introductory essay to this volume, Lange-Berndt (2015)

states that “Materiality is one of the most contested concepts in contemporary art and is

often sidelined in critical academic writing” (p. 12). This dissertation focuses on the

concept of materiality and aims to add to this discussion through a generative and

intertwined foray through writing and artmaking enacted by employing a diffractive methodology that is expanded in Chapter 4. Though a diffractive methodology may further complicate understandings of materiality, hopefully, the differences brought forward through this method will open new avenues for exploration and ultimately add to the ongoing discourse and conceptualizations of materiality in artmaking. It is beneficial

to discuss how the concept of material/materiality has been discussed in the past and

establish how this study can expand current notions of materiality in artmaking.

Materiality, as a concept related to this project, is understood as a term that

describes and refers to the matter of artmaking. In this case, this concept extends well

beyond the media/medium of art and artmaking as the media of artmaking refers to only

one small aspect of the multitude of material engagements of artmaking practice. The 85

terms matter, material, and materiality, in my understanding, refer to the conditions and

engagements through which the process of artmaking unfolds. I do not imply that a work

of art needs to be a material product, but the conditions through which a concept-based

work unfolds is usually a material enactment as it requires at least some engagement

through matter. The materiality of artmaking engages the embodied artist and the

material and discursive11 engagements through which knowing and knowledge are generated through artmaking. This understanding of materiality and material is deeply informed by the philosophical groundwork of Heidegger’s conceptualizations of being- in-the-world and handlability, Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of how experience is fundamentally embodied and especially the new materialist/post-human thought explored

in this chapter.

In approaching the task of conceptualizing materiality through these thinkers, it

helps to think through definitions of this term. Working through these definitions is

helpful even if it is merely as a means of moving forward from current assumptions of

materiality. The definition that comes close is from a glossary of keywords constructed

by scholars at the University of Chicago as a part of a Theories of Media course

assignment. It seems that their goal is to construct a glossary of terms frequently used and

without clear definition or understanding across disciplines. The following passage

appears on the entry for material/materiality on this glossary site.

11 Karen Barad (2007) coins the hyphenated term “material-discursive” to describe that materiality and discursivity are linked and work to produce knowledge. This will be elaborated further as the chapter progresses. 86

Hong (2003) writes:

The words material and materiality carry ambivalent meanings in vernacular

English. On the one hand, material is defined as "things that are material," which

emphasizes the physical aspect of things; on the other hand, it means "(in various

non-physical applications) something which can be worked up or elaborated, or of

which anything is composed." The second definition can be better understood

through its relationship to the first definition that, again, can be differentiated into

two major meanings: 1) something material is that which "pertains to a matter as

opposed to form"; 2) that which "pertains to matter or body; formed or consisting

of matter; corporeal." Thus, although material designates physical matter, it also

assumes potential from its association with non-physical matter. (para 1)

Hong provides something that approaches a mélange of the standard dictionary definition and other, more uncommon, approaches to the terms material/materiality. Particularly interesting here is her allusion to “non-physical matter” which at first glance seems like an oxymoron. How can matter, the building blocks of the universe, the stuff everything is made from, be considered non-physical? It proposes an interesting conundrum that she addresses in the rest of her concise, yet useful entry in this glossary. She traces the etymology of material from Latin to French to English and describes how understandings

of the term material evolved by citing examples from the philosophies of the Greeks,

Hegel, Kant, Marx, Benjamin, Greenberg, and Fried.

In his relation and historical influence on both modern and contemporary theories

of art, Walter Benjamin questions what is at stake in attending to what art is made from.

Benjamin navigates the issues of technological mediation and reproduction in his

landmark essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” He discusses art in the wake of technology that makes it possible to view and consume art indefinitely.

Benjamin proposes the concept of “aura” in his essay by describing it as an authentic experience one has in front of original art. He claims that reproductions are detached from the aura of the original and that replicating and reproducing the original diminishes the experience so much that the reproduction takes over for the original (Benjamin &

Arendt, 1986). Though, Benjamin does admit that reproduction also has the ability to reach farther than the original upending class structures that seek to conceal aspects of

culture from the rest of the world (Cavallaro, 2001).

An example of this is an internet-based service like Google Arts and Culture

because it offers users a chance to view artworks and cultural artifacts through their

mobile phone. The issue with this access is that often people substitute the copy for the

original and the original becomes obsolete and replaced by the copy. Benjamin’s

hesitation at the thought of rampant technological mediation is a valid reaction to the

prospect of infinite reproducibility that he was facing in his time. However, it should be

noted that Benjamin did recognize that reproductions could reach beyond the original, but

that reach may threaten the authority of the original object (Benjamin & Arendt, 1986).

Benjamin rightfully foreshadows that art may be made specifically for reproducibility

and this artwork may not make sense without the potential of being reproduced. The

binarized thinking that leads to the assumption that only original or only reproduction can

exist start to break down. As such, it is interesting to think about what Benjamin would

make of the “aura” of contemporary art given its ability to blur this line between original

and reproduction so adeptly, take Warhol’s screen prints for instance. Benjamin states

“Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical

periods, so too does their mode of perception” [Emphasis in original] (Benjamin, 1996, p.

104). It seems possible then that Benjamin is suggesting that the way we see is influenced

by what we see—the object of art and the reproduction shape the way we perceive. To

me this foreshadows the questions of agencies brought up through new materialist

interrogations, questions that are discussed as this chapter continues, and thus add a compelling layer to issues of material agency in artmaking.

Similarly, throughout Greenberg’s writings and art criticism there is an underlying understanding that art, specifically in formalist works, there was a “purity” and “truth” that one could comprehend. Greenberg also championed medium-specific art and art criticism which asserts that there should be an inherent separation between different artmaking mediums, like painting and sculpture. He suggests that purity is linked to accepting that the medium in which you work while you make art has limitations, and once you accept these limitations your work will express this purity

(Greenberg, 1988). Greenberg (1998) also asserts that the purity enacted through medium specificity is a way to affect physical response from the viewer. Greenberg is often associated with attempts to create distance from the work, to engage with only formal interpretations of an artwork, but here he asserts that purity is a way to elicit more than

just formal understandings of art, it is a way to elicit a physical and perhaps even affective response. Medium specificity notwithstanding, Greenberg’s inkling that art could physically influence a viewer is compelling when considering material agency in artmaking. This idea is just a glimpse at shifting conceptualizations of materiality in

Western philosophy, but it foreshadows a need to rethink assumptions on what constitutes the medium/material of artmaking.

Postmodern understandings of simulation, simulacra, and originality help extend the work of Benjamin and Greenberg and other Modernist conceptualizations, especially in the rethinking of what is meant by “aura” and “truth” in reproduction and simulation.

The implications of simulacra and reproduction are especially relevant to a discussion of

how to rethink materiality in artmaking practice because it elicits questions about the

nature of matter and material itself. Many postmodern theorists have grappled with the

implications raised by these questions of the real and simulation. For example, Derrida

picks up the question of the binary of original versus reproduction discussed by Benjamin

and moves to deconstruct this notion (Cavallaro, 2001). Moreover, and Deleuze describes

that a simulacrum is not merely a copy of an original. Instead, the copy has its own

connotations, and the copy takes on its own meanings (Cavallaro, 2001).

Though Baudrillard, perhaps the theorist most known for this discussion in

postmodern philosophy, holds that simulacra do not merely copy something real;

simulacra replace reality. Furthermore, he asserts that we as a society have lost the ability

to tell whether what we apprehend reality because we accept simulacra as real and we can

no longer distinguish reality (Baudrillard, 1983). Baudrillard describes the postmodern 90

world as “hyperreal” because it replaces the quotidian experiences of our lives with a

mediated, augmented, distilled version of the real.

Baudrillard (1983) writes:

What society seeks through production, and overproduction, is the restoration of

the real which escapes it. That is why contemporary “material” production is itself

hyperreal. It retains all the features, the whole discourse of traditional production,

but it is nothing more than its scaled-down refraction (thus the hyperrealists fasten

in a striking resemblance a real from which has fled all meaning and charm, all

the profundity and energy of representation). Thus the hyperrealism of simulation

is expressed everywhere by the real’s striking resemblance to itself. (p. 44-45)

What Baudrillard describes here is that the material of our lives is a simulated version of reality that we accept as real. I imagine what Baudrillard points to as hyperreal is the image of going to a concert and seeing every person in the audience viewing a real experience through their mobile phone camera. As I resist the urge to prove I was at the same concert they are mediating through their devices, it becomes difficult to resist the urge to view through their screens. Things like zoom functionality and Instagram filters create a hyperreal that is seductive, and it is difficult to escape what the cell phone image can offer. Art and artmaking can thrive in these liminal spaces between real and hyperreal. This is because artmaking practice is necessarily enacted through the material engagements pursued through the process of artmaking. Artmaking acts as both a site of inquiry and an apparatus through which insights are attended. Baudrillard (2003) argues that: 91

It is the very concept of medium that disappears—and must disappear: speech

exchanged dissolves the idea and function of the medium, and of the

intermediary, as does symbolic land reciprocal exchange. It can involve a

technical apparatus (sound, image, waves, energy, etc.) as well as the corporeal

one (gestures, language, sexuality), but in this case, it no longer acts as a medium,

as an autonomous system administered by the code. [Emphasis in original]

(p.284)

Baudrillard dissolves the notion of medium as an intermediary and equates the notion of medium with materiality (Hong, 2003). For Baudrillard (2003) the notion of “medium as intermediary” gives way to the notion of medium as “administered by the code” (p. 284).

In the same passage, Baudrillard (2003) states “Reciprocity comes into being through the destruction of mediums per se” (p. 284). This notion of reciprocity assumes a relationship between entities, but Baudrillard’s work also calls into question the notion of entities and boundaries themselves because he argues against the concept of a medium as an intermediary. Baudrillard’s assertion presages one of the goals of new materialism, which is to trouble the notion that boundaries do not pre-exist entangled states. The interweaving suggested by Baudrillard is also very similar to the concept of the cyborg as discussed by Haraway (1991) because it suggests that medium as a system that traverses both human and nonhuman apparatuses.

The testing of the notion of pre-existing boundaries and Baudrillard’s (2003) assertion that medium as “a system administered by the code” is interesting when viewed though Wafaa Bilal’s project the 3rdi which is an artwork that engages ubiquity and 92 abundance of images in our society. The images created by Bilal’s project, over time, act as a stand-in for the events that took place in Bilal’s life at this time. During the 3rdi project, a camera that Bilal had surgically implanted in the back of his head captured images of his whereabouts as he moved through the world. Interestingly, Bilal begins his artist’s statement for 3rdi by quoting Walter Benjamin’s chapter from Illuminations titled

“The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov” which discusses the nature of stories and strategies by which a listener of a story will be more likely to repeat the story they have heard (Benjamin as cited by Bilal, 2018). Bilal continues his essay companying 3rdi with an explanation about how he tells his story through the distribution of images taken by this camera installed in his head (Associated Press, 2010). The story of Bilal’s comings and goings from 2010 to 2011 are told through the photographs taken by the camera implanted in the back of his head. Once the camera took these pictures, the images were sent to a laptop that uploaded the images to a website (www.3rdi.me)

(Bilaal, 2018). The website is still up, and viewers can browse images from this year of

Bilal’s life. Many of the images captured depict the interiors of rooms, glimpses of people or black if the artist was sleeping in Bilal’s (2018) discussion of the 3rdi he explains that “The 3rdi makes a technological apparatus part of my body and distributes the recorded content openly within space using the internet” (para 7). This project and the continued access the artist grants to viewers brings attention to the culture of device-use, devices like mobile phones and google glasses.

Issues of surveillance and voyeurism are also relevant to a discussion of this project. We as viewers of this website become part of the story Bilal tells through the

93 images he uploaded. We draw conclusions from what the available images, but also from what is not shown. For example, Bilal was not permitted to document his photography class at NYU, so he capped the camera while he was teaching (Associated Press, 2010).

However, these blacked out images are joined by other black images taken while he slept, so it becomes difficult to narrativize blackness, but as I viewed the images, I found myself attempting to figure out where Bilal was and perhaps what he was doing. His project, then, becomes not only a record of the view from the back of his head, the project also encompasses the viewer’s questions, judgments, and narratives spun while viewing

Bilal’s images.

Curiously not directly discussed in Bilal’s 3rdi artist statement is the concept of the cyborg, which seems relevant because he surgically implants a camera into the back of his head and enables his body to become more than it was before the implant. The cyborg concept is compelling because it is sometimes seen as a progenitor to posthumanism which is relevant to a rethinking of materiality in artmaking. According to

Donna Haraway (1991), “[A] cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (p. 149). Through surgically implanting a camera in the back of his head, Bilal transcends his human abilities and because something more than human, he becomes a machine-human hybrid.

Because of this hybrid cyborg subjectivity enacted through his artmaking practice, Bilal’s

3rdi project is a compelling way to attend to the implications of simulation and the hyperreal because these issues stem from our immersion in a technologically mediated world.

My understandings of these concepts are grounded in my upbringing and exposure to Hindu thought. As such, I bring a different perspective to my comprehension of Baudrillardian concepts of simulacra and hyperreal. Namely this skepticism about reality reminds me of the Hindu idea of “maya,” which refers to the illusory nature of the material world. Maya is a concept sometimes understood as a veil between us and the truth or oneness represented by the term “brahman12.” Brahman is, in some schools of

Hinduism, considered the non-dual whole that is hidden by the illusory veil of maya. To me, these ideas are paradoxical because they suggest that the material world is an illusion, but the means through which many Hindus attempt to ascertain oneness with

Brahman is to engage fully with the material world. E.H. Johnston states that “early

Indian thought…drew no clear line of demarcation between material, mental and psychical phenomena of the individual… All classes of phenomena are looked on as having a material basis” (as cited in Larson, 1999, p. 249). So, in a sense, this describes a different approach to the perception and assessment of boundaries between various phenomena and so this influences my understandings of materiality, namely that a material thing is more than just the matter of which it is comprised.

Lange-Berndt (2015) makes a similar point by presenting an expanded concept of materiality that includes sound, language, and entities that do not have a physical presence. While considering contributions to expanded notions of material and

12 Brahman is a concept present in many approaches to Hindu philosophy. The approach described here is from the Advaita school with which I am connected, but there are other definitions to what brahman means to other schools of though. The meaning of these terms is a commonly debated topic among the various schools of Hindu thought. 95

materiality offered by Tim Ingold and Karen Barad, Lange-Berndt (2015) asks, “what does it mean to give material agency, to follow the material and to act with the material?”

(p. 13). While material culture and other anthropologically oriented approaches to material consider the human influence and effect on materiality; new materialism, object-

oriented ontologies, and posthumanism posit that the agential forces of both human and

nonhuman entities need to be considered, though theories that focus on material agency

are still emerging (Lange-Berndt, 2015).

Lange-Berndt’s (2015) edited volume Materiality includes contributions that

highlight the variety of approaches to the concepts of material and materiality in

artmaking practice. One such article is, Robert Morris’ 1968 article “Anti-Form” from

Artforum magazine where he discusses how artists like Jackson Pollock kept facets of the

making process alive in his artworks. Here Morris (2015) states that “The process of

‘making itself’ has hardly been examined” and he argues that the nature of Pollock’s

process involved an acknowledgment and rethinking of material and tool use in

artmaking (p. 92). Morris (2015) describes that through the flinging of paint during the

artmaking process, Pollock developed a sensitivity and mindfulness of the properties of

the paint itself. This sensitivity towards the materiality of practice allowed Pollock to

create works with fluid mark-making that had no predetermined plan and his work

operates to distill movement into marks on the canvas. When one considers Jackson

Pollock’s artmaking through Morris’ assessment the agential qualities of materiality that

Pollock attended to through his artmaking practice are evident. Pollock’s meditative

practice and his acceptance of the paint’s will to succumb to gravity are apparent to

viewers of his work, and it becomes a glimpse of the possibilities that arise when artists

attend to the agential qualities of the materiality of their practices.

Much like the ability of Pollock’s work to bring attention to material/materiality,

Robert Rauschenberg’s odd and delightful work Mud Muse forefronts its material composition. It is a clear square-shaped vat of mud-like substance that bubbles up, pops, and splats when it is installed in a space. The work was created through a collaboration between Rauschenberg and the Teledyne corporation as a part of the Los Angeles County

Museum of Art’s Art and Technology program between 1968 and 1971. Mud Muse bubbles in sync to whatever music is playing because it is hooked to a pump that releases compressed air into this vat of mud to make it move (Halperin, 2017). The ability to control movement through music was advanced technology when it was made (Halperin,

2017). Rübel (2015) explains that “the liquid mass presents in its formlessness -- emphasized all the more by the expansive rigidity of its metal limits -- an ultimate material experience. Mud Muse stages an amorphous substance that develops a perplexing kind of self-will” (p. 94).

The formlessness described by Rübel recalls the task of the landmark text

Formless: A User’s Guide by Rosalind Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois (Bois & Krauss,

1997). In it, they engage with George Bataille’s idea of the “informe” (French) or formless (English). Bois and Krauss (1997) discuss Bataille’s concept of “base materialism” and informe as:

Base materialism (of which informe is the most concrete manifestation) has the

job of de-class(ify)ing, which is to say, simultaneously lowering and liberating

from all ontological prisons any “devoir être” (role model). It is principally a

matter of de-classing matter, of extracting it from the philosophical clutches of

classical materialism, which is nothing but idealism in disguise. [Emphasis in

original] (Bois & Krauss, 1997, p. 53)

Working with Bataille’s provocations allows Bois and Krauss to discuss modern and contemporary art in an entirely different respect. Liberating it from previous discussions and taking the discussion from classical approaches to materialism and upending existing discussions of materiality in art. To me, Bataille’s base materialism sounds almost like the recently discovered existence of dark matter that is a matter but also completely overturns our existing understandings of material and matter to its core.

Indeed, in the recent reinstallations of Mud Muse, the Tate and Museum of

Modern Art have experienced some unique material challenges. To install Mud Muse, the preparators not only had to source the mud mixture, but they also had to get in the vat with giant immersion blenders to make sure that the mixture was blended thoroughly.

The artwork also has its own caretaker who made sure the installation was done to

Rauschenberg’s specifications. According to Leah Dickerman, curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, the caretaker “has a sense of when the mud has achieved the right sense of liquidity” (as quoted in Halperin, 2017). In its time Rauschenberg, through Mud

Muse, extends the possibilities for material/materiality in artmaking. The work is like a

mudslide because it picks up both human and non-human agents who have an intimate awareness of the work’s needs13.

Kraus and Bois (1997) end Formless: A User’s Guide as follows:

The other word to which Bataille turned to evoke this process of “deviance” was

informe, a de-classing in every sense of the term: in the separations between space

and time (pulse); in the systems of spatial mapping (horizontalization, the

production of the lower-than-low); in the qualifications of matter (base

materialism); in the structural order of systems (entropy). As this entire project

has worked to demonstrate, these processes marked out by the formless are not

assimilable to what the art world currently understands as abjection. Furthermore,

it is our position that the formless has its own legacy to fulfill, its own destiny—

which is partly that of liberating our thinking from the semantic, the servitude to

thematics, to which abject art seems so thoroughly indentured. [Emphasis in

original] (p. 252)

Here Bois and Krauss call for the concept of formlessness to continue to “fulfill its own

destiny.” They see this line of inquiry as a way of moving forward the way art is

conceptualized, historicized, and critiqued. The troubling and “de-classing” is what is

possible through viewing art and specifically artmaking practice through new

materialism.

13 This statement is meant to attribute agency to Mud Muse and not to anthropomorphize it. Although, this sounds like an anthropomorphizing statement, it should be taken as a sign of a limit of my abilities to properly describe the scenario. 99

New Materialism: Entanglements that matter

New materialism is an emerging philosophical approach that is related to other

different, but similar approaches to philosophy that forefront objects and materials

including, but not limited to, object-oriented ontologies, actor-network theory,

posthumanism, material feminism, and new materialism. These approaches are often

referred to as “speculative realism” which, in some cases, acts as a convenient umbrella

term for describing any theoretical stance that forefront matter or objects. This area of

inquiry has emerged with postmodernity, and it is reminiscent of approaches to matter

and materiality from philosophers like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze. Coole and Frost (2010) state that “Many of our ideas about materiality, in fact, remain indebted to Descartes, who defined matter in the seventeenth century as corporeal substance constituted of length, breadth, and thickness; as extended, uniform, and inert” (p. 7). Part of the new materialist project is to bring attention to the vitality of materiality and emphasize the inseparability and/or amorphous boundaries between human and nonhuman entity. In describing new materialism, Dolphijn and van der Tuin (2012) state that:

So far we have seen that new materialism is a cultural theory that does not

privilege matter over meaning or culture over nature. It explores a monist

perspective, devoid of the dualisms that have dominated the humanities (and

sciences) until today, by giving special attention to matter, which has been so

neglected by dualist thought. (p. 85)

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The distinction between new materialism and related theories collected under the speculative realist umbrella is that new materialism necessarily does not privilege materiality over other entities, instead new materialism attends to how these entities emerge through their mutual involvement.

As described in the previous section of this chapter, Donna Haraway’s cyborg concept is also a progenitor for posthumanism/new materialism. Wafaa Bilal’s 3rdi is an example of the cyborg concept because Bilaal constructs an augmented body that includes both human and machine elements. The human/machine created through Bilal’s implantation of the camera into his skull turns his body into a cyborg that is beyond human, or post-human. While there are many reasons to trouble the existing ideas, the cyborg concept indeed necessitates a radical re-thinking of humanism, materiality, and agency because it questions the rigid distinction between entities which is a core facet of posthumanism/new materialism. This section provides a foundational understanding of new materialism drawing from scholars whose ideas are useful for expanding the conversation of materiality in art and artmaking practices. A significant portion of this discussion is devoted to explicating Karen Barad’s contributions as her theories provided the impetus for this project. Importantly, her theory of agential realism provides insights for bridging discourse and materiality through artmaking. Barad’s work also offers the methodological direction (diffraction) for this study which will be developed in the next chapter.

New materialism is closely linked to the terms post-human, posthuman, and posthumanism, these terms are often used interchangeably. Albeit subtle, the reason I use 101 the term “new materialism” versus other synonymous terms in this study is that the term posthuman may suggest the centrality of the human agent. A goal of this dissertation is to trouble the primacy of the human agent in artmaking as a dominant trope. As such, for the purposes of this study, the term “new materialism” is used to describe these theoretical approaches as it linguistically displaces the primacy of the human subject and shifts the focus to materiality. New materialist scholars wrestle with issues of agency in the interaction of the agents in the world.

New materialist theorists Coole and Frost (2010) propose that attending to materiality is an essential undertaking. They introduce their edited book New

Materialisms Ontology, Agency, and Politics by stating, “as human beings we inhabit an ineluctably material world. We live our everyday lives surrounded by, immersed in, matter. We are ourselves composed of matter” (p. 1). Given the primacy of our experiences with matter, it should be necessary for those engaging in artmaking practice to, for once, spend some time thinking through material agency and engagements. The authors ask how we can continue to ignore matter in theoretical discussion if it is the stuff we are made from and the matter that comprises our experiences; the authors assert that new materialists see the relationship to matter not as a standing-reserve14, but that matter and embodied humans are actively involved in their becoming (Coole & Frost, 2010).

Inspired by the mind-body debate and the subject-object binary, a feature of the new materialist project is to reconsider this kind of oppositional thinking. New materialism is

14 Standing-reserve (Bestand) is a Heideggerian idea that when objects are defined in relation to human beings, they lose their objectness. This loss of autonomy for objects can extend to the world; the world too is regarded as a resource for use and manipulation. 102

both a radical rethinking of previously held ideas and a movement that seeks to enable

knowledge rather than offer purely critical or negative views of existing ideas.

New materialism conceives matter as active and having, “its own modes of self- transformation, self-organization, and directedness, and thus no longer as simply passive

or inert” (Coole & Frost, 2010, p. 10). This active view of matter displaces the idea that

humans are the only active agents in their dealings with matter. If matter can transform,

organize, and direct itself, then we must acknowledge this in our dealings with material.

Instead of trying to gain mastery materially, we should learn to work in conjunction with

the agencies displayed by the matter through which we enact our lives. In discussing

matter, it must also be stated that while the new materialism explicitly displaces

anthropocentric approaches in order to shift consideration to all bodies—material, animal,

machine. Displacing the primacy of the human agent and paying closer attention to

materiality is useful in re-considering how we might attend to material agencies in

artmaking. Coole and Frost (2010) state that:

new materialists are rediscovering a materiality that materializes, evincing

immanent modes of self-transformation that compel us to think of causation in far

more complex terms; to recognize that phenomena are caught in a multitude of

interlocking systems and forces and to consider anew the location and nature of

capacities for agency. (p. 9)

Here materiality is described as active, agential and intricate. Materiality does not refer to

a preexisting entity. Instead material emerges through a nebulous set of systems and

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relationships. Considering “materiality that materializes” and the immanent and

transformative qualities of matter/material without always assuming a human agent is a

goal of new materialist ontology (p. 9).

Coole (2010) draws on Merleau-Ponty’s later works to add to the new materialist

conversation. She sees seeds of new materialist thought across Merleau-Ponty’s world and she asserts that one of his goals was to explain materiality without relying on metaphysics (Coole, 2010). Merleau-Ponty pursued his exploration of materiality and embodiment to rethink binary oppositions, a project that new materialist scholars pursue as well. Looking to Merleau-Ponty, supplemented by Leibniz and Deleuze, offers Coole a glimpse at the seeds of new materialist thought. Coole (2010) explains that “we accordingly find in his work some timely suggestions as to how an anti- or posthumanist philosophy might proceed by conceptualizing an embodied humanity enveloped in nature, rather than as external to inert stuff it dominates” (p. 112-113). It is compelling to look to Merleau-Ponty not only as a philosophical basis, as I do in this dissertation, but also as an early champion for a rethinking of the body and its relationship to the world.

For Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger for that matter, there is no option for externality or a

“god’s eye view,” we must regard the world as we experience it. Our experiences in the world necessitate a re-thinking of traditional Western notions of agency as well. Coole

(2010) suggests that we can also look to Merleau-Ponty to “helps us to rethink agency: not as an essential characteristic of the rational subject, a deity or some vital force, but as those contingent capacities for reflexivity, creative disclosure, and transformation that emerge hazardously within the folds and reversals of material/meaningful flesh” (p. 113).

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By viewing agency as a force rather than an attribute, Merleau-Ponty adds nuance to the

rethinking of agential forces that new materialists, especially Barad, undertake.

Issues of agency are central to the work of political theorist Jane Bennet (2010)

who looks to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “assemblage” to inform her theory of

networked agents. She describes that agents in an assemblage have distributed agency.

This distributed agency also brings up issues with assumptions of causality; Bennett

(2010) troubles issues of the causality of individual agents through her notion of “vibrant

matter.” She says that “in emphasizing the ensemble nature of action and the

interconnections between persons and things, a theory of vibrant matter presents

individuals as simply incapable of bearing full responsibility for their effects” (p. 37). In

other words, if agents work together to enact an event, then all the agents involved in that

enactment are implicated. Bennett (2010) asks:

If matter itself is lively, then not only is the difference between subjects and

objects minimized, but the status of the shared materiality of all things is elevated.

All bodies become more than mere objects, as the thing-powers of resistance and

protean agency are brought into sharper relief (p. 13)

Bennett’s call to question the divisions between subjects and objects and give materiality its due is a goal of many new materialist philosophers.

The new materialism of Karen Barad

Although materiality has been addressed by philosophers, particularly in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, Karen Barad’s new materialist/material feminist

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theorizations offer a different perspective on the entanglements of discursivity and materiality while giving material its due attention. This section offers both an explication of terms used by Barad and a view into how I understand her compelling and complex

philosophical explorations through art and artmaking. Barad’s ideas offer layers and

nuance that feel like they can be unpacked differently depending on who reads the work.

This reminds me of art. When I look at a work of art, I bring my knowledge and

understandings to it. Sure, this is not at all a formalist understanding of art, but it

describes how I know art.

In the same way, when I read new materialist philosophers, particularly Barad, I

bring my non-Western perspectives and understandings. The similarities between my

non-Western upbringing and posthumanist/new materialist theories allow for an

immersed understanding which helps move forward the rethinking of materiality and

artmaking in this study. I bring attention to this familiarity because I hope it helps the

reader understand why these ideas are compelling and vital. One primary reason for me is

that these ideas are familiar. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, my background as an Indian-

American artist, my ontology, shapes the epistemological understandings herein. Barad

would describe this as “onto-epistemological” because, for her, ways of knowing and

being are fundamentally linked. This putting together of divisions helps rethink

materiality in artmaking as art moves beyond modernist conceptions to new, exciting, and

unknown territory.

One of my favorite passages of Barad’s writings is from a small blue booklet,

about four by six inches, that is from Documenta (13) from 2012. Documenta is a themed 106

contemporary art exhibition that takes place every five years. I recall Roberta Smith’s review of Documenta in Germany; I was interested in the description and the almost hopeful nihilism Smith offered for the future of looking at art and the curatorial vision described. Smith (2012) writes:

Ms. Christov-Bakargiev [the curator] seems to have intended it to be the first of

its kind in terms of its sheer porosity, the way it blends with the world. But its

incomprehensible, viewer-defying vastness perpetuates an old model, the curator

as all-seeing-god, on a disheartening scale. In this way, it seems as much a dying

breed as a new start. (p. C21)

What Roberta Smith seems to suggest here is that Christov-Bakargiev’s curatorial undertaking for Documenta (13) does not seek to separate the artwork from the world and that, for Smith it creates a dissonance that is both difficult and promising to process as a spectator. The curatorial vision presented in this exhibition is an obliteration of codified gallery spaces for viewing art; this is a call to fundamentally question the boundaries between art, artmaking, and the world. Though, for Smith, it places the curator at the mast of such a vast undertaking both re-thinking and perpetuating existing notions of what a curator is and does.

Interestingly, considering Roberta Smith’s lamentation that Documenta (13)

displaying a “viewer-defying vastness” Barad’s (2012) contribution to the Documenta

(13) booklet begins with a meditation on nothingness:

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Nothingness. The void. An absence of matter. The blank page. Utter silence. No

thing, no thought, no awareness. Complete ontological insensibility. Shall we

utter some words about nothingness? What is there to say? How to begin? How

can anything be said about nothing without violating its very nature, perhaps even

its conditions of possibility? Isn’t any utterance about nothingness always already

a performative breach of that which too much simply in pronouncing its name?

Perhaps we should let the emptiness speak for itself. (p. 4)

Here Barad offers a consideration of what nothing or absence entails. She goes on to

describe in this rather poetic essay that we can describe nothingness, but when we try to

observe it, we cannot. She describes that a vacuum is the absence of matter, but to view

the vacuum we need light. When we introduce light, matter is introduced, and as such we

no longer view nothingness (Barad & Documenta (13), 2012). What I take from Barad’s

meditation on nothingness is that you must frame the concept of nothing through

something, at least in our current universe.

Barad’s discussion of nothingness reminded me of an excerpt from the Rig Veda

that discusses what existed before existence. The Wendy Doninger15 translation of the

Rig Veda the Nāsadīya Sukta, or what she calls “Creation Hymn,” offers a compelling parallel to Barad’s passage on nothingness. Doninger (1981) states that “there was neither non-existence nor existence then; there was neither realm of space nor sky which is

15 This translation is meant for the average reader rather than Indologists and Sanskrit scholars. Doninger’s translation focuses on the overall meanings instead of the nuances of the Sanskrit language, which I find helpful in this setting. 108 beyond. What stirred? Where? In whose protection? Was there water, bottomlessly deep?” (p. 25). Here too we see the complications brought forward by attempting to understand an unknown entity. In Doninger’s case, and in other more technical translations of the Rig Veda, we find that a priori existence is described in terms of existing material phenomena. Space, sky, and water are all used to attempt to explain what existed before existence was comprehended. Both authors discuss their intensely ontological questions regarding materiality. Matter and materiality are then fundamental to the way we know and explain the world as evidenced by both attempts. As such I find that materiality should also be a fundamental aspect of our discussions of art, art education, and artmaking practice as well.

To connect the many terminologies and the general queering of terms, Barad posits her theory of agential realism to “account for the materialization of all bodies—

“human” and “nonhuman”—including the agential contributions of all material forces”

[Emphasis in original] (Barad, 2007, p. 66). Bringing attention to the agential forces involved in material-discursive practices allows for a new understanding of causality and the agential capacities of a dynamic conceptualization of matter. Barad’s agential realism looks at the various forces through which boundaries are enacted. It is important to recall that in this agential realist account of forces, culture, matter, and boundaries are created through intra-action and are not preexisting. Barad’s agential realism extends Judith

Butler’s performativity and Foucault’s discursivity and implicates matter as having co- constitutive capacities in becoming. Susan Hekman (2010) writes:

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Her [Barad’s] claim is that agential realism can accomplish this goal by

acknowledging nature, the body, and materiality in the fullness of their becoming

without resorting to the transparency of nature. Thus what we are left with in

Barad’s account is not a world of words and things that we are trying, ultimately

unsuccessfully, to represent— the dilemma of representationalism— but a world

of phenomena, of material/discursive practices. (p. 76)

Hekman rightly describes the project of agential realism, which is to attend to the

implications of practices and not representations of practice16. Agential realism is described as “an account of technoscientific and other practices that takes feminist, antiracist, poststructuralist, queer, Marxist, science studies, and scientific insights seriously” (Barad, 2003, pp. 810–811). Although Barad does not call out the arts specifically, many of the insights generated by her account of agential realism prove relevant and provide exciting insights in a discussion of materiality in artmaking.

Agential realism includes what Barad (2007) calls “knowledge-making practices” which are how we understand the world and “material enactments that contribute to and are a part of, the phenomena we describe” (p. 32). The “knowledge-making” practices that

Barad (2007) refers to are primarily scientific and laboratory scenario from her work in physics, but I argue that artmaking too can be described as such a practice. In agential realism “knowing, thinking, measuring, theorizing, and observing are material practices of intra-acting within and as part of the world” (Barad, 2007, p. 90). Agential realism

16 For jagodinzki and Wallin (2013) represntationalism is a drawback of existing attempts at arts-based research, one that I hope to avoid through employing a diffractive methodology as informed by Barad and Haraway. 110 asserts not only that knowledge-making practices have material consequences, but that these practices are necessarily materially engaged and actively reconfigure the world

(Barad, 2007). Extending Barad’s thinking to artmaking assumes that artmaking is a knowledge-making practice, which I assert it is, then artmaking through its material configurations can co-constitute the world and give it form. Through agential realism, it is possible to examine the active, co-constitutive role that material and matter play in artmaking.

Additionally, this approach does not privilege the cultural or the material in production; rather agential realism treats production as a result of the intra-action. The interrogation of boundaries is a feature of this framework that Barad terms “onto- epistemological.” Barad (2007) elucidates:

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-epistem-ology—the study of

practices of knowing in being— is probably a better way to think about the kind

of understandings that we need to come to terms with how specific intra-actions

matter. (p. 185)

Barad argues here that continuing to consider ontology and epistemology separately does not correctly describe material-discursive practices. The term onto-epistemology

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describes “the study of practices of knowing in being” (Barad, 2007, p 185). It should be

noted that artmaking is considered here as a practice of knowing in being as described

above by Barad. As such, it is necessary to think about the materiality of artmaking in its

entangled state. As an artist, it is evident to me that the process of making art is one that

is onto-epistemological because it is a practice of knowing in being that is enacted

through matter. Ontological and epistemological insights do not emerge neatly and

discrete through the process of making. Instead, the boundaries between knowing and

thinking are emergent and negotiated through their intra-action.

The term intra-active has popped up previously in the description of this project

and will be explored here. Barad’s intra-activity should be discussed along with Barad’s

concept of entanglement. Barad (2007) prefaces her book Meeting the Universe Halfway:

Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning by stating:

This book is about entanglements. 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 is not an individual affair. Individuals do not

preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their

entangled intra-relating. (p. ix).

Right from the start, Barad entangles her readers into her theoretical understandings. In her preface, she de-centers her subjectivity by claiming that individuals are constructed through and because of their interactions, that boundaries are enacted, not static. Through this, as a reader, I begin to realize that the people she thanks in her acknowledgments had

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their part in helping Barad’s work materialize. This list of people includes people Barad

has met and authors who she only knows through reading their work; the list includes

Niels Bohr, Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Leela Fernandes, Vicky

Kirby, her parents, and her daughter. The boundaries of the book and Barad and the

people she thanks formed and re-formed as needed, their boundaries were co-constituted through their entanglements and intra-action

Barad’s conceptualizations of entanglements and intra-action also draw on the work of Michel Foucault’s concept of discursivity and Judith Butler’s notion of

performativity, and diffracts these ideas through her background in theoretical physics.

Niels Bohr’s theory of complementarity is an influence in Barad’s approach to new

materialism (Jackon & Mazzei, 2012). One discovery of Bohr’s work on

complementarity states, “every time we measure, say, an electron's position, the

apparatus and the electron interact in an uncontrollable way, so that we are unable to

measure the electron's momentum at the same time” (Faye, 2014). What this means for

Barad is that the nature of intra-relatedness changes both human and non-human entities

and that there is no way to make objective claims because everything emerges through its

entanglement. Barad asks how intra-action between human and non-human bodies

produces subjectivities and enactments (Barad, 2007). Elucidating Barad’s distinction

between interaction and intra-action is important. Barad (2007) explains that:

The neologism “intra-action” signifies the mutual constitution of entangled

agencies. That is, in contrast to the usual “interaction,” which assumes that there

are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction, the notion of intra- 113

action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through,

their intra-action. (p. 33)

Intra-action is a concept that posits that knowing is constituted by both discourse and

matter. Matter is not inert in intra-action; instead, it is dynamic; one knows matter

through entanglement with it. Jackson and Mazzei (2012) describe that this idea of intra-

action places an “emphasis on the inseparable nature of the resiliency of matter and its

productivity in concert with the human” (p.112).

Barad suggests that we might de-center our centrality as a human subject through

intra-action. It is necessary to not limit the focus to specific agents, such as human

agency. Instead, intra-action is conceived as a process of iterative becoming rather than a

discrete event. In the agential-realist framework “iterative intra-actions are the dynamics

through which temporality and spatiality are produced and iteratively reconfigured in the

materialization of phenomena and the (re)making of material-discursive boundaries and

their constitutive exclusions” [Emphasis in original] (Barad, 2007, p. 179). Here Barad

explains that intra-actions necessitate a reworking of current assumptions on temporality

and spatiality as well. These elements do not preexist intra-action or entanglement; they

materialize through entanglement. For example, while I write time seems to move slowly,

but as I glance at the clock the time is later than I expect. In this case, the temporal realities of this event are intra-actively enacted through entanglement.

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Like other new materialists, Barad defines matter through its becoming as well.

Just like the other phenomena articulated through agential realism, matter and materiality do not pre-exist intra-actions. Barad (2007) writes:

Matter is substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing, but a doing, a

congealing of agency. Matter is a stabilizing and destabilizing process of iterative

intra-activity. Phenomena come to matter through this process of ongoing intra-

activity. That is, matter refers to the materiality and materialization of

phenomena, not to an assumed, inherent, fixed property of abstract, independently

existing objects. [Emphasis in original] (p. 210)

Here Barad describes the unfixedness of matter as something that materializes through

intra-action and entanglement. In her elucidation of matter as process and not as an entity,

Barad refers to the notion of phenomena. Through agential realism, phenomena are the

consequence of practices that generate boundaries and are “the ontological inseparability

of intra-acting agencies” (Barad, 2007, p. 206). In this account, people are considered

phenomena, because they are agents contributing to the configuration of the world. For

Barad not all practices effectively produce phenomena, practices that do not account for

material and discursive enactments fall short of materializing phenomena. Artmaking as

practice attends to both discursive and material constraints as it materializes and is a

prime practice through which to attend to phenomena.

In a rethinking of materiality in artmaking practice, the entanglements, intra-

actions, and intra-sections that configure and reconfigure the world, things, bodies,

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matter, agencies, experiences, and other phenomena are considered active agents in their

co-constitution. The practice of artmaking itself is both an apparatus and a material-

discursive practice. This also influences how we theorize the artist’s subjectivity, which

tends to be the focus of art criticism and art history when examining artmaking in

contemporary contexts. If we view artmaking through a new materialist lens, subjectivity

is not produced solely by the artist: but rather artmaking is a practice of material-

discursive knowing, an apparatus, that is a dynamically intra-active process which

materializes phenomena and enacts material-discursive boundaries. To understand the

specific intra-action and entanglement of artmaking, it is necessary to apply an embodied

new materialist approach to an interrogation of artmaking practice. It is essential to

question modernist delineations of medium as described previously in this chapter.

Through this project, I assert that contemporary artists enact artmaking through their

material-discursivity, and the modernist concept of medium (painting, sculpture, etc.) is

irrelevant. Artmaking is the apparatus through which we attend to the agencies enacted

through our material-discursive practice. An example of this might be the use of

technology in artmaking serving not merely as inert tools, but as meaningfully active

agents in the creative process.

Material-discursivity is another vital concept offered in Barad’s theory of agential

realism. Jackson and Mazzei (2012) describe the concept of material-discursivity by stating that “the material is always already discursively produced, and the discursive is always already materially produced” (p. 111). According to Barad a material-discursive force is one that interrogates, produces, and re-organizes boundaries and differences

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(Barad, 2007). Examples of material-discursive forces are those that produce objects and subjects based on the way these forces relate to one another (Barad, 2007). Artmaking

then can be described as a material-discursive force through which boundaries and

differences are formed and produce subjects and objects based on the way various forces

come together.

For Barad, an “apparatus17” describes specific material-discursive practices.

Apparatuses are necessarily material-discursive because they have material consequences and produce meaning. This view of apparatus differs from the traditional view, especially from Barad’s science studies perspective. In that setting, an apparatus is an instrument or device to provide measurement. Barad draws on quantum physics to explain how apparatuses play a co-constitutive role in her agential-realism. She describes the double-

slit experiment where if a measurement is made then the results are changed; the act of

measuring changes whether you see an electron as a particle or a wave. Using this insight

from Niels Bohr and her background in physics, Barad reassesses the role of the

apparatus and its agency through her theory of agential realism. Barad (2007) provides a

detailed account of apparatuses in her theory of agential realism:

My agential realist elaboration of apparatuses entails the following significant

developments beyond Bohr’s formulation: (1) apparatuses are specific material-

discursive practices (they are not merely laboratory setups that embody human

concepts and take measurements); (2) apparatuses produce differences that

17 The concept of the apparatus is also developed through Giorgio Agamben expansion of the Foucaultian idea of a“dispositf.” However, Barad draws on Foucault’s notion and does not mention Agamben’s work. 117

matter— they are boundary-making practices that are formative of matter and

meaning, productive of, and part of, the phenomena produced; (3) apparatuses are

material configurations/ dynamic reconfigurings of the world; (4) apparatuses are

themselves phenomena (constituted and dynamically reconstituted as part of the

ongoing intra-activity of the world); (5) apparatuses have no intrinsic boundaries

but are open-ended practices; and (6) apparatuses are not located in the world but

are material configurations or reconfigurings of the world that re(con) figure

spatiality and temporality as well as (the traditional notion of) dynamics (i.e., they

do not exist as static structures, nor do they merely unfold or evolve in space and

time). (p. 146)

In agential realism, Barad asserts that apparatuses are not tools, but actively constitute the world. Even if a scientist uses an apparatus to gather data, in Barad’s agential realist account, the apparatus actively constitutes the becoming of that data and as such the data is not objective. Barad develops her notion of material-discursive practices and apparatuses through Foucault’s thoughts on discursive practices and Bohr’s concept of the apparatus. Apparatuses are active and productive phenomena that are intra-actively and continually produced and reproduced. Although Barad describes scientific discourse in this example, it is evident that artmaking too can be viewed as an apparatus, as a boundary-making practice, a phenomena negotiated through intra-action with the world, a practice without intrinsic boundaries, and an apparatus/practice/phenomena that is continuously reconfiguring through space and time.

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Barad introduces the concept of diffraction18 patterns to propose a diffractive

approach to thinking through the theoretical frameworks she presents. The concept of

diffraction is taken from Barad’s knowledge of the concept of diffraction in waves from

her background in physics. Barad makes a distinction between the concepts of reflection

and diffraction, and she feels that going beyond reflection is a necessary step in a new

materialist methodology. Diffraction is this attempt to transcend reflection. An

explication of Barad’s diffraction concept in Jackson and Mazzei (2012), they state “to

think of diffraction as a methodological practice, according to Barad, is to read “insights

through one another” (p. 114-115). This notion of reading insights through one another

harkens back to what diffraction patterns look like when experienced, in ocean waves for

examples. If you have two waves traveling through one another, you see each wave

become influenced by the other creating another pattern as a result of their merging.

Considering this example demonstrates that reflection is not enough to think through

intra-action. It is evident that one must do a diffractive analysis to think about their part

in the intra-action.

Making sense of Barad through Art

Because Barad’s concepts are somewhat tricky to understand when viewed as

singular concepts, I diffract Barad’s concepts through Jill Magid’s artwork, particularly her project entitled Evidence Locker. I hope not only to elucidate Barad’s theories as they

relate to a reconceptualization of materiality in artmaking, but I also hope to attend to

18 The specifics of diffraction as a concept and method are elaborated in the following chapter.

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differences and insights brought forward through diffraction as method. Jill Magid is an artist whose works are enacted situationally and draw on a variety of material-discursive

phenomena including technology, systems, law, and policies. In Evidence Locker created

in 2004, Magid befriended the Citywatch in Liverpool, England; this entity is responsible

for tracking the city surveillance cameras and is the most extensive monitoring operation

in England (Magid, 2004a). Magid requested that Citywatch aid her in creating several

video projects that involved asking the Citywatch cameras to record her posing on the

street. In other instances, she asked the members of Citywatch to help her walk in the

streets of Liverpool while being blindfolded (Magid, 2004b). This left the Liverpool

Citywatch responsible for her movements throughout the city. The project was captured

solely on Citywatch cameras. Magid submitted thirty-one request forms which report an

incident to the police to access the CCTV video. Instead of filling out these forms as a

lawyer or crime victim would, she approached the information request forms as love

letters expressing her thoughts and emotions as well as detailing her relationship with the

Citywatch and the city of Liverpool.

In Evidence Locker, Magid’s artmaking is materialized through the CCTV

footage that the Liverpool Citywatch collects. Magid created a website where visitors are

allowed access to the information she has gathered from the incident reports she filed.

Visitors to the site are invited to read a letter in a typed script font that asks them to add

to the artwork/artmaking. By visiting Magid’s site (http://www.evidencelocker.net), the

website visitor can access her work echoing the way she accessed her work by requesting

information from the police. On the first page of the website she includes a letter

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describing how she was captured on the cameras for thirty-one days, she invites site visitors to become witnesses to the events captured on the CCTV cameras (Magid,

2004b). At the bottom of this letter the words ‘Take Me Further’ are linked to the next page within the website. On this page, visitors are told, “To access my evidence locker, you must agree to be my witness” (Magid, 2004b). To agree to be a witness, site visitors must provide an email address, and we are told that after entering our email addresses we

will receive thirty-one emails containing the love letters Magid sent to the police (Magid,

2004b). She also explains that visitors also receive access to where her data is locked and

“the emails will lead you there [to the data locker]” (Magid, 2004b).

Barad describes material-discursive forces as any forces that may be important to the formation of human and nonhuman bodies. According to Barad there is a “host of material-discursive forces— including ones that get labeled “social,” “cultural,”

“psychic,” “economic,” “natural,” “physical,” “biological,” “geopolitical,” and

“geological”— that may be important to particular (entangled) processes of

materialization” (p. 66). Magid’s work engages with almost all the material-discursive

forces Barad lists above. The material forces acting through the work are the network of

cameras with which she engages through her artmaking. Discursive forces can be

identified as the relationships she develops with Citywatch personnel and the intimacy cultivated between Magid and Citywatch allowing her to enact a performance of walking down the street while blindfolded aided only by her trust in Citywatch. These forces indeed assert themselves in the formation of Magid’s work—her work would be

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impossible without the intense intra-action of the Liverpool government, police force,

CityWatch and all the material-discursive forces therein.

The work and the process by which it is realized does not privilege material or discursive processes; these processes seem to shape each other as envisioned by the concept of material-discursively. This is particularly evident in the way Magid’s work

approaches her requests for information sent to the city of Liverpool in the form of love

letters. While the letters themselves are phenomena of the apparatus of government, the

way website visitors access these letters, by providing their email addresses, does not

privilege language over the discovery of the letters. The letters, as phenomena of the

apparatus, matter as much as what is actually written on them.

The intra-actions through which Magid pursues her artmaking are complex.

Magid’s work illustrates how agential realism calls for co-constitutive intra-action of

agency in entanglements. We see that Magid’s her artwork is the result of intra-action

through a variety of entities—some of these entities are Magid herself, the city of

Liverpool, Citywatch, technology, governments, police and the general bureaucracy of

filing to have her paperwork released. Her work intra-acts with contemporary art

audiences by allowing individuals with links to her website to access and engage with the

information she requested through the writing of love letters to Liverpool city. Agency, in

this case, is processual, configured, and reconfigured. It is not a value attributed to any of

these entities individually, and it is through a process of intra-action of these entities that agential properties are in negotiation.

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For Barad, phenomena emerge through an apparatus and “are specific material

performances of the world” (Barad, 2007, p. 335). The apparatuses through which

phenomena are created in Magid’s work are the same entities with which she engages in

this work. The Liverpool city police, Citywatch, the internet, her website, site visitors and

e-mail are the main apparatuses through which Magid in concert with these apparatuses

allow phenomena to emerge. An example of an emergent phenomenon is the artmaking

itself because it too emerges because of an intra-action and material-discursive practice.

Boundaries, according to Barad, are only determinable when examined as a part

of a phenomenon. This means that the boundaries created through Magid’s work are

enacted through her artmaking process. Magid does not solely re-create or negotiate the

boundaries of the apparatuses and phenomena with which she engages—her actions are

one element in the constant renegotiation of boundaries that occurs in intra-action. Each element of Magid’s work, from the apparatus, phenomena, boundaries, and intra-actions

has agential properties in an agential realist view. In Magid’s artmaking, agency is

distributed across the elements from which the artmaking is enacted.

Meaning-making from Barad’s perspective suggests that meaning is not produced

solely by linguistic interpretation. In Magid’s work, meanings are constantly being

produced when her site is discovered. This could entail both human and nonhuman agents. The website Magid created is a prime example of this. If a new person visits the apparatuses/website, through their intra-action new meanings are produced. A nonhuman instance of meaning-making with the same phenomena could be enacted through this apparatus when a search engine bot combs through the code behind the site to test for

123 the site’s veracity and maintenance. The bot has an agential role in making a different, unexpected meaning from Magid’s website apparatus. Before the intra-action of the bot or the human on the website apparatus, the phenomena perhaps has meaning and agency, but this meaning and agency is in ongoing negotiation to account for new elements of its intra-action.

Just as meaning is in flux and negotiation, matter too is in process through intra- activity. In Evidence Locker, the boundaries between the phenomena created through the apparatuses of societal norms are disrupted. Through enacting an intra-action with entities like Citywatch, Magid de-stabilizes the previously prescribed and socially agreed upon boundaries of such an organization by attempting to engage with such a phenomenon through artmaking. Thus, artmaking becomes a means by which Magid’s work can both stabilize and de-stabilize the way it materializes. When considering

Magid’s artmaking through agential realism, we recognize that matter is not a property, but shifting relationships in the ongoing materialization the work through intra-action.

Artmaking is an apparatus through which to realize and negotiate phenomena and boundaries as a material-discursive force.

Art, Art Education, and New materialist thinking

Artists and art educators are well aware of the need to interrogate the primacy of human subjectivity in art and artmaking. This discourse is especially useful in troubling the myth of artistic genius, instead offering glimpses into the rigor and work of artmaking practice. Traditional views of artmaking attribute the work to a human agent, but art educators know that while we must acknowledge the artist, we must also acknowledge

124 the entanglements that allow the artist to think, know, discover, and create. Artists and art educators have acknowledged this need by bravely engaging with theoretical developments as they emerge. Perhaps the earliest reference to posthuman themes I could locate is a Garoian and Gaudelius (2001) discussion of the implications of posthumanism and on artmaking by critically discussing various artworks that engage with Haraway’s cyborg concept. Similarly, Paul Carter (2004), an Australian artist and academic, analyzes several projects to describe an idea he terms “material thinking” that circles around the interconnectedness of art practice and theory. This section offers an overview of selected texts from artists and art educators whose research explores theoretical approaches that work with new materialism and/or other closely related theories.

Terri Bird, an artist, and professor, writes from primarily a Deleuzian perspective to explore materiality in art. She is also interested in feminist perspectives drawing on

Elizabeth Grosz and Luce Irigaray to inform her work on materiality in artworks. Bird

(2011) is interested in attending to the effects of matter in artworks. She seeks, “to give an account of the disordering effects of matter made evident through the work of materiality in the context of art” (Bird, 2011, p. 5). This disordering effect refers to the agential forces of matter in the context of artmaking. For Bird, matter and materiality are not just a means to an end in art. Instead, she suggests that we attend to the forces of matter and how it creates difference and apprehend in what way these forces and differences operate in an artwork (Bird, 2011). Also crucial to Bird’s ideas is feminist theory and problematizing dualisms enacted by historical approaches to Western thought.

Additionally, Bird’s ideas are informed by her location in Australia and the associations

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that being on that continent offers. As such she can draw on the work of Australian philosopher Andrew Benjamin whose work discusses the content of artmaking through the materiality of the work of art (Bird, 2011).

In their Arts-Based Research: A Critique and a Proposal jagodzinski and Wallin

(2013) suggest that existing approaches to arts-based research do not go far enough. They

call for “arts-based research that builds on the performative machinic understanding of

the arts, incorporating the view that art should not be theorized as an object but

retheorized as an event that first emerged with the avant -garde but remains suppressed”

(jagodzinski & Wallin, 2013, p. 3). Their ideas are heavily influenced by Deleuzeian thought, and they unfold their call for approaches to arts-based research that accounts for our posthuman condition. They call for art educators to rethink arts-based research through philosophies that continue to explore a Deleuzian materialism. jagodzinski and

Wallin (2013) assert “as artists and art educators we are better off theorizing creativity and art as emerging from the 'gap' or chiasm between nature and culture following a material vitalist or vibrant agency” (p. 31). jagodzinski and Wallin call out a few theorists whose ideas inform this study, namely Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, and William E.

Connolly as examples of scholars who continue the project of poking holes in the primacy of human agency and subjectivity. It should be noted that jagodzinski and Wallin have labeled their list of theorists as supporting object-oriented ontologies (OOO) which is not entirely accurate. While OOO claims that objects are autonomous entities, Barad would argue that any boundary between agents does not pre-exist their entanglement and is co-constituted through entanglement.

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Jennifer Richardson (2015) considers the emotional impact of images of women

mourning their loved ones, in an exposition of her performance and installation artwork

The Women Lament. The project is inspired by a specific act of senseless violence fueled

by anti-Semitism recounted by Richardson. The trauma of this event leads Richardson to

process this violence by turning to Jewish mourning rituals to enact her performative

artwork exploring not only this violence but the construction of the lamenting woman

trope and her role in society (Richardson, 2015). Through the artmaking process,

Richardson explores the implications of destabilizing the primacy of her subjectivity and

thinking about her project as an emergence. Throughout the process of her eight-day

installation and performance, Richardson actively re-centered herself to let the artwork

emerge through a set of material-discursive configurations. Each day she set a place for a

mourning woman and although at the onset she considered herself a host for the

performance, as it progressed this assumption was disrupted (Richardson, 2015). Through

the artmaking process, it became apparent for Richardson that she, “was invited to

participate in the event. It was through our intra-action that the multiplicity of our narratives both overlapping and divergent became apparent” (p. 69). By recognizing the agencies involved, Richardson was able to attend to the material and discursive agential forces enacted and emergent through artmaking. Richardson describes that “the artmaking process revealed how my artistic self-will impacted the artwork and research process; it also provided pathways for unraveling the "I," challenging the central role of my own agency as artist” (p. 71). This de-centering and unraveling the “I” is a tenet of new materialist thought and as such engaging with this theoretical area adds nuance and

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depth to the discussion of agencies already brewing in art education, especially as

evidenced by The Women Lament artwork facilitated by Richardson.

The research enacted by art educators exploring the implications of materiality is

diverse and expanding. Powell and Schulte (2016) write beautifully about their meetings

facilitated through the consumption of tea and coffee. Their narratives provide insights

into how informal conversations turn into significant educational opportunities when there is a shift in meeting place and activity during encounters with their students.

Starting with personal narratives about their transformative experiences through coffee

and tea, Powell and Schulte address the implications of sharing foods on their educational

practices. They write:

We draw from our own pedagogical experiences with the act of sharing food and

drink as an intercultural artistic, pedagogical, and research practice. In doing so,

we open up the concept of interculturality to the sensorial, the material, and the

hospitable, examining intercultural practice as a state of in-betweenness that

remains open and dynamic to reciprocity (Bouchard, 2011) as well as to

difference. (Powell & Schulte, 2016, p. 239)

Here the writers discuss viewing their informal discussions over coffee and tea, not as ad hoc meetings, but as elements of their artistic, educational, and research practices. They explore that what might seem at first to be “just a meeting with a student” may turn out to be a revelatory and transformational moment for both participants. As a part of their discussion, Powell and Schulte discuss an exhibition called Feast: Radical Hospitality in

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Contemporary Art that featured the transformative act of sharing a meal as orchestrated

by over thirty artists (Powell & Schulte, 2016).

In attending to the possibilities of their encounters through coffee and tea, Powell

and Schulte look to new materialist scholars, Karen Barad and Jane Bennett, to develop

their ideas. The new materialist perspectives on these encounters seem to allow the

authors to attend to the material-discursive implications of their meetings facilitated by

the consumption of coffee and tea. An oft-overlooked facet of our lives tends to be the

food and drink we consume, but in attending to this material/matter, it is possible to bring

our attention to what happens as a result of our eating and drinking. This paper attends to

a quotidian aspect of material entanglements and facilitates a renewed view of the

possibilities of meetings facilitated by drinking coffee or tea.

Recently there was an exciting special volume of the International Journal of

Education Through Art (IJETA) that addressed the umbrella topic of Speculative Realism

that sometimes encompasses posthumanism and new materialism. The volume is titled

Speculative Realism(s) objects/matter/entanglements of art and design education.

According to the guest editors, Adetty Pérez de Miles and Nadine M. Kalin, there was

much interest in this topic as evidenced by the number of responses they received (Pérez

de Miles & Kalin, 2018). The articles comprising the volume addressed issues of

materiality, artmaking, and education through a diverse array of theoretical frameworks.

Brooke A. Hofsess (2018) explores Barad’s notion of intra-activity through photography, her poetic exploration of how theory and art teacher education could be

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linked together. In her article “Frottage and Inquiry” Pindyck (2018) explores the

implications of the process of frottage, which she defines as the process of doing a

rubbing from an uneven surface (p. 13). Through an arts-based methodology, her work

explores how the arts-based research through frottage might shake out regarding

pedagogical and research insights. For Pindyck, frottage is a method that allows for the

practitioner to understand the dynamism of matter (Pindyck, 2018). The volume offers

artistic/arts-based research examples that attend to matter and both its material and

theoretical implications. The articles carry a theme of attending to and at times fore-

fronting materiality to create new understandings and avenues for research.

From my survey of the literature to date, there have been two edited volumes that tackle the implications new materialism has for art and artmaking. Carnal Knowledge:

Towards a ‘New Materialism’ through the Arts edited by Barrett and Bolt (2013) offers an array of authors from Australia and Finland who engage with new materialism. Both the editors and the authors included resist defining specifically what new materialism is and instead work with their own understandings of the term. In her introduction to the book, Barbara Bolt (2013) discusses the central characters of the Raphael fresco The

School of Athens. Those characters are of course Plato, pointing up to the sky, and

Aristotle, pointing down at the world. Bolt uses this painting as a metaphor through which to describe how the division between the realm of ideas and the material world may have existed dating back to the Greeks.

For Bolt, art practice is positioned such that it can overcome this rift. Bolt (2013) writes that “whist material feminist theory has struggled to disentangle matter from 130

discourses on matter, it may be argued that art is a material practice and that materiality lies at the core of creative practice” [Emphasis in original] (p. 5). The chapters in the book indeed provide a variety of arts-based approaches to attending to material concerns.

Similarly, the 2016 book Arts, Pedagogy and Cultural Resistance: New materialisms edited by Hickey-Moody and Page (2016) also indicates a growing interesting in connecting the existing linguistic representation that surrounds art and artmaking with the materiality through which it is enacted. Hickey-Moody and Page (2016) write:

Matter can be inherently resistant, but as the works in this collection show us,

matter can often teach us through showing us otherwise. Bodies resist instruction,

ideologies and political boundaries, and in so doing they show the limits of

political, educational and popular discourses and policies. Matter resists

manipulation; it inspires and demands attention, and through engagement with

matter, new modes of practice transpire. (p. 16)

Here Hickey-Moody and Page reconcile that enacting research with attention to materiality is not always easy as it has its own agential properties. It is resistant.

However, by accounting for the agential forces of matter and materiality in artmaking, we can arrive at exciting new ways of knowing in being.

There are myriad implications of new materialist ideas for the realm of art and artmaking. Most importantly this line of inquiry gets us thinking about the creation of artworks not merely as products, but as representations of emergent understandings with and through matter. Traditional views of artmaking would view its material

131 entanglements as merely the supplies through which an image is created. The conventional view is that art is made with products purchased at an art supply store that are waiting to be turned into the next great painting. Moreover, while this seems accurate to many, the concepts presented through new materialism make a compelling argument for the necessity of considering the agency of how the artmaking process materializes work. The materiality of artmaking cannot be reduced to merely the materials with which artworks are created. That in addition to aesthetic and technical considerations, we should also be aware that we are not the only or even primary agents in our artmaking practices.

The materials can and do co-constitute the emergence of artworks through the apparatus of artmaking.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I introduced and discussed emerging approaches to the concept of medium/material/materiality. I drew from thinkers like Benjamin, Baudrillard, and

Greenberg to provide background and situate this chapter while elucidating my thinking through various artists and their artmaking practices to argue for the need for a rethinking of materiality through posthuman/new materialist ideas. I then provided an overview of selected scholars working in the areas of post-human, posthumanist, new materialist/new materialisms. This chapter pays specific attention to the philosophical work of Karen

Barad whose concepts of agential realism and methodology of diffraction heavily inform the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of this dissertation. The next chapter,

Chapter 4, dives deeper into the methods through which this dissertation unfolds and

132 discusses the diffractive methodology through which the understandings and findings of this study are developed.

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“What if we were to recognise that differentiating is a material act that is not about radical separation, but on the contrary, about making connections and commitments?” — Karen Barad (2010) To theorize is not to leave the material world behind and enter the domain of pure ideas where the lofty space of the mind makes objective reflection possible. Theorizing, like experimenting, is a material practice. [Emphasis in original] — Karen Barad (2007, p. 55)

This study aims to unpack the implications of reassessing notions of materiality in and through artmaking practice as informed by new materialist philosophies. However, because of the theoretical lens that informs this research, it is difficult to say that the study will do what I intend. This dissertation attends to the agential enactments of the material, discursive, and material-discursive elements at work in this research process. So while I intend to focus on shifting notions of materiality in this research, I also acknowledge the need to remain open to the agential enactments of the entangled entities involved in this process. Through the philosophical-artmaking-research enacted herein, it is my intention to mind any realizations on materiality that emerge. The theoretical underpinnings of this study, if nothing else, guide me to be open to what emerges through the process.

At first, I had I hoped that I could conduct a qualitative study with coding and data that lead to concrete findings, the theories that guide this research do not support the way many qualitative research methods are articulated. I also hoped that I could depend

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on one of the various existing arts-based research methods to guide this study.

Unfortunately, I found that current descriptions of arts-based research seem mismatched with the ideas that inform this study as well. As such I present this meditation on materiality in artmaking through new materialist philosophies by engaging with post- qualitative approaches (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013), philosophical inquiry (Stubley, 1992) and artmaking-research (Barrett & Bolt, 2010, 2013, 2014; Carter, 2004; Sullivan, 2005) through a diffractive methodology19 (Barad, 2007). A distinguishing feature of the listed methods is that they strive to attend to differences produced through research. It must be noted that diffractive methodology is inherently intended to create and regard insights produced by differences that emerge through the research.

This chapter tackles the ideas guiding the methods and methodological approach to Chapters 5 and 6. In Chapter 1, I provided an overview of the guiding methods of this

study and how my study interprets these approaches through the waves of diffraction and the metaphor of braiding and unbraiding hair. In this chapter, I discuss how the idea of

braiding hair relates to the concept of diffraction waves. I begin by responding to

questions that have come up in reference to the methods I employ and the methodological

direction I have chosen. I address the choices of methods and methodology for this study

and discuss these decisions. I then situate this study as post-qualitative, artmaking-

research, guided by the metaphor of braiding hair that is layered with the idea of

19 I use the term methodology after Sauuko’s (2003) description of methodology versus method “methods refer to practical ‘tools’ to make sense of empirical reality, methodology refers to the wider package of both tools and a philosophical and political commitment that come with a particular research ‘approach’” (p. 9). 135

diffraction and diffractive methodology. I explain these guiding ideas in terms of the artmaking-research attempted in this study.

On arts-based research

Although arts-based research methods touch on many aspects of this research, I

look to jagodzinski and Wallin (2013) who suggest “that qualitative research, from where

some claim arts-based research has its roots, is simply too conservative, repeating the

technicity of science already forewarned by Heidegger” (p. 2). Following jagodinzki and

Wallin, and given the decidedly post human and post-qualitative direction of this research, I am a bit wary of specifically engaging in the kind of arts-based research methods they discuss. Specifically, I want to engage with methods and methodologies that do not solely rely on reflection and reflective practices to develop insights because as

Barad (2007) suggests, “reflection is about mirroring sameness” (p. 29). In their survey of existing modes of research paradigms that involve the arts and artmaking, jagodzinski and Wallin (2013) state:

There are now a number of books out that cover arts-based research; some try to

give the field its due by covering the various approaches (Cahnmann-Taylor and

Siegesmund, 2008; Leavy, 2009; Macleod and Holdridge, 2006). The posthuman

is the absent conversation. Humanism and representation dominate. (p. 53)

Posthuman/new materialist theories deeply inform this study, as such I feel it is important to find methods and methodologies that are attuned to the issues that a new materialist research direction entails. According to jagodzinski and Wallin, while the field of arts-

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based research is expanding, methods engaging with new materialist perspectives are not

yet available.

Additionally, some of the arts-based research to which jagodzinski and Wallin

(2013) refer claim that arts-based research is an offshoot of qualitative inquiry. For

example, Barone and Eisner (2011) argue that arts-based research as a methodology is related to and “a species of qualitative research” (p. 11). For Leavy (2009) arts based research is a qualitative method that extends and disrupts the existing definitions and limitations of what qualitative research entails (p. 9). This acknowledgement of the disruption artmaking offers is encouraging, but as Leavy (2009) continues to describe arts-based research in her book she reifies humanist approaches and describes arts-based research as a representational method. Given the theoretical foundation of this study, it is necessary to attend to research insights through more adaptable and malleable methods and methodologies based on the material enactments of artmaking practice.

New materialism and posthumanism seek to shift the focus to consider both human and nonhuman elements in each situation. This study pursues how insights are

differentially enacted through fundamental engagements through both human and non-

human entities while interrogating the fixity of the boundaries between these concepts.

Interrogating the humanist roots of arts-based research is integral to the project

undertaken by jagodzinski and Wallin (2013). These art education researchers provide a

survey of existing approaches to arts-based research like discipline based art education,

arts-based research, and a/r/t/ography. The authors carefully, and as respectfully as

possible, describe what they feel can be improved on existing modes of arts-based inqiry 137

while making a case for an approach to arts-based research that does not assume that

there is a primary human agent and pursue a humanist project. In their appeal for new approaches to arts-based research jagodzinski and Wallin (2013) argue that:

Arts-based research needs to take this change into account-the world of 2.0

culture: the 'thingness' or 'thing power' of art in its 'performative' mode within an

assemblage where efficacy, trajectory and an emergent nonlinear causality are at

play. This is far from a humanist accounting that leaves out inhuman and

nonhuman agency. (p. 30)

Here jagodzinski and Wallin make a case that arts-based research needs to move beyond

the assumption that the artist or educator as the primary agent and reimagine arts-based research through a consideration of both human and nonhuman agential forces.

Considering materiality and reimagining agency in artmaking practice is central to this study, and as such it is important to identify methods and methodologies that allow us to rethink the primacy of a human agent in arts-based research approaches, while also still being able to conduct and articulate research through artmaking. By acknowledging art/artmaking as a co-constituted method and apparatus for observing and generating insights rather than merely the medium through which the world is told and re-told we start addressing the potential that artmaking-research has. This dissertation intends to focus on the way notions of materiality shift in artmaking-research practice. Noticing these shifts in how materiality is considered, perceived, and regarded by the articulating

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agent (in this study the articulating agent is the researcher) may help in rethinking how

materiality is conceptualized altogether.

On naming: Why call it artmaking-research/artmaking-research-philosophical inquiry?

Naming entities is an intentional act through which boundaries can be enacted. As

Barad (2007) describes, boundaries are enacted through entanglement of material and

discursive entities, so I want to be intentional about the boundaries this discourse enacts

as it will have material, discursive, and ethical consequences. The naming of the research

methods and methodologies in this chapter is primarily done to facilitate the explanation

of the methods and methodology that underly this study. Hopefully, this also makes it

possible to recognize and link the methods employed herein to those used by other

researchers. I bring attention to this enactment of boundaries because I hope that these

research methods ebb and flow, disintegrate and reemerge as the process progresses.

While conducting this study, I intend to be open and receptive to the possibilities

of employing a diffractive methodology and the differences created by reading insights

through one another in the artmaking process. I use a dash between artmaking-research

because it offers the visual cue that the compound word is not an either/or as signified by

a slash, but an indication that the previously separate entities of artmaking and research

are considered linked and interdependent in this study. In an ideal situation it would be

unnecessary to articulate a name and thus a boundary for material engagements, but while

working within the boundaries of academia, it is important to articulate a general outline

and limits for this study. I must note that while I draw a boundary, this boundary is

139 porous and open to change and oscillation within the entanglement and material engagements of research.

Post-qualitative, Posthumanism/New Materialism

In Chapter 1, I explained that new materialist and posthuman ideas seem familiar to me because these ideas make sense to me because my worldview was shaped by my exposure to Hindu ideas while growing up as a first-generation Indian-American.

Similarly, the hesitations to existing (traditional) research methods and those that post- qualitative scholars explore also make much sense to me. I have trouble with trying to package research neatly, and I gravitate towards theories that question current research approaches.

In step with my affinity for theories that complicate, I find it interesting that a theoretical approach could also be considered methodological. Ulmer (2017) teases out the implications of considering posthumanism as a research methodology. As posthumanism is often used as a synonym for new materialism, this assertion offers compelling insights into the methodology employed in this study. In a discussion of why we should consider posthumanism as a methodology, Ulmer (2017) states:

Posthumanism rejects that humans are the only species capable of producing

knowledge and instead creates openings for other forms/things/objects/beings

/phenomenon to know. It also problematizes distinctions that are drawn between

and among species. This is significant because when humans are decentered as

the only possible knowers, a wealth of research possibilities emerge.

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Posthumanism thus argues that because we are always already interconnected

with our environments, methodological thinking should respond in kind by

fostering similar interconnections (p. 834).

Rethinking research methodologies through posthumanism and new materialism offers a

way to regard the multiple intra-acting agencies and entanglements at play. Considering other entities as they emerge through research offers a way to decenter the researcher’s subjectivity and imagine unfixed and fluid boundaries drawn between researcher and research. Reaching past the obvious and immediate concerns of research and attending to what is actually happening rather than what the researcher wants to happen is vital to a posthuman research methodology. Ulmer (2017) states that “it is perhaps helpful to suggest that part of what posthuman and post-qualitative inquiries do is diffract (Barad,

2003); they disperse methodologies in several directions at once” (p. 840). Posthuman and post-qualitative research provides opportunities to wander aimlessly and with direction simultaneously, to become lost in order to find one’s way.

Post-qualitative approaches are also invested in the task of developing more flexible methodologies. This umbrella term of post-qualitative research is not so much a specific approach to research as it is a critical look at the assumptions made by qualitative research practices. Lather (2013) states:

To think differently means to work within and beyond the reflexive turn, to

problematize inquiry, to redefine objects as more in networks than in single sites

(Barad, 2007), to trouble identity and experience, and what it means to know and

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to tell. Most importantly, it means “no methodological a priori” (Marcus, 2009, p.

5). (p. 638).

Post-qualitative inquiry can be thought of as a radical reconceptualization of how

research is approached. A priori assumptions and boundaries are questioned, and the

spaces, sites, and methods of inquiry are opened beyond prescriptive notions dictated by

codified qualitative methods. Lather (2013) states that the space of post-qualitative research is involved in experimentation with standard practices and involved in strategies that troubles binaries, envisions nuanced conceptualizations of subjectivity, and envisions theorizing and thinking as creative endeavors (Lather, 2013). Lather and St. Pierre

(2013) see the post-qualitative realm as a way to find out what happens:

If we cease to privilege knowing over being; if we refuse positivist and

phenomenological assumptions about the nature of lived experience and the

world; if we give up representational and binary logics; if we see language, the

human, and the material not as separate entities mixed together but as completely

imbricated. (p. 629-630).

The assumptions listed above are generally taken for granted and almost forgotten in qualitative research. It seems that in an attempt to elevate qualitative findings to those of scientific research, in the constant grab for grants and prestige that qualitative research has, in some ways, calcified. Both Lather and St. Pierre are well-respected qualitative researchers, and even they question how qualitative research moves forward in theoretical stances that question the very foundations on which qualitative research is built. Lather

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and St. Pierre (2013) also ask whether traditional humanist approaches to qualitative

research are even possible if the issues they address are considered.

The research is structured, written, and considered must also be questioned

through a post-qualitative research lens because even the conventional format for a thesis

or dissertation is called into question. Since I am working through new materialist ideas,

it becomes problematic to determine what I want to study or formulate research questions

prior to beginning the research. Lather and St. Pierre (2013) rightly ask “how do we think a “research problem” in the imbrication of an agentic assemblage of diverse elements that are constantly intra-acting, never stable, never same” (p. 630). This question is addressed

through the work of researchers interested in figuring out what post-qualitative

scholarship entails. However, it must be noted that in discussing the why of post-

qualitative methods, theorists are careful not to offer step-by-step instructions.

Because of the theories that apprise this study, the issues brought up through a discussion of post-qualitative are relevant in explaining how this study unfolds. It is also necessary to look beyond the practice of reflection and reflexivity that informs much of

existing qualitative research and embrace chance and emergence as demonstrated by the

conceptual underpinnings of this search. I approach this study with outlooks for both

method and methodology; these methods are informed by and born from the theoretical entanglements that inform this research, keeping in mind, the implications of Barad’s

(2007) agential realism on the way this artmaking-philosophical inquiry-research develops through the next chapters.

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Post-qualitative research as envisioned by St. Pierre (2013) includes

methodologies that rethink humanism and attend to disruptions and diffractions enacted

through research. Ulmer (2017) regards disruptions and diffractions as an opportunity to

think differently and develop alternative and future methodologies and even post-

methodologies. Ulmer explains that “this might involve thinking with, thinking without,

or different approaches to thinking altogether. What is important is that thinking

differently offers a precursor to doing everything in research differently: representation,

writing, theory, ‘data,’ collaboration, and so on and so forth” (p. 842). The methods and

methodology in this study are committed to exploring the implications of thinking

differently and researching differently in the realm of art education. As such, this study is

an attempt at post-qualitative research because it “challenges who you think you are as a

researcher in a way that holds promise for advancing the critical edge of practice”

(Lather, 2016, p. 126).

On reflection, reflexivity, or self-reflection/reflexivity?

In developing the diffractive methodology, Karen Barad (2007) justifies the need to develop new ways of approaching research that differ from reflection and reflexivity.

She draws on Donna Haraway’s (1992) assertion that reflection produces reproductions and sameness which is not useful in generating new insights. Haraway’s answer to the metaphor of reflection is diffraction. Barad (2007) continues Haraway’s thoughts on reflection and diffraction, discussing these phenomena both scientifically and theoretically. Barad (2007) describes reflection and reflexivity as follows:

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Reflexivity is a proposed critical scholarly practice that aims to reflect on, and

systematically take account of, the investigator's role as an instrument in the

constitution of evidence. Reflexivity aims to acknowledge the tripartite

arrangement between objects, representations, and knowers that produces

knowledge, as opposed to less-reflexive modes of investigation that leave the

knower out of the equation, focusing attention narrowly on the relationship

between objects and their representations. (p. 86)

Here Barad describes reflection as something that attempts to account for the arrangement between existing entities such as objects, researchers, research sites. This acknowledgment of the pre-existing arrangement of objects runs counter to the emergence and unfixedness of boundaries central to the new materialist project and particularly in Barad’s theory of agential realism.

Barad discusses how reflexivity assumes that the act of presenting and representing leave the phenomena studied through these means unchanged. However, reflecting and reflexivity “still hold the world at a distance” because they rely on constructed representations of the world rather than acknowledge that the researcher might be involved in the co-constitution of the phenomena they seek to represent (Barad,

2007, p. 87). In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Barad offers a table that articulates the differences between diffraction and reflection. Below in figure 4.1 I have included the contents and information of the table originally presented in Barad (2007) but I have redesigned it for additional clarity.

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Table 4.1: The distinctions between diffraction and reflection (Barad, 2007, p. 89-90)

Diffraction Reflection diffraction pattern mirror image marking differences from within and as reflection of objects held at a distance part of an entangled state

differences, relationalities sameness, mimesis objectivity is about taking account of objectivity is about reflections, copies marks on bodies, that is, the differences that are homologous to originals, materialized, the differences that matter authentic, free of distortion

diffractive methodology reflexivity

performativity representationalism subject and object do not preexist as preexisting determinate boundary such, but emerge through intra-actions between subject and object

entangled ontology separate entities material-discursive phenomena words and things

onto-epistem-ology ontology | epistemology binary knowing is a material practice of knowledge is true beliefs concerning engagement as part of the world in its reflections from a distance differential becoming knower I known binary seeing/observing/knowing from afar

intra-acting within and as part of interacting of separate entities

differences emerge within phenomena inside/outside agential separability absolute separation real material differences but without no difference absolute separation interior/exterior

diffraction/difference pattern words mirror things intra-acting entangled states of nature social | natural binary cultures nature | culture binary

about making a difference in the world about representations about taking responsibility for the fact about finding accurate representations that our practices matter; the world is about the gaze from afar materialized differently through different practices (contingent ontology)

phenomena are objective referents things are objective referents accountability to marks on bodies accountability entails finding an authentic accountability and responsibility taking mirror representation of separate things account of differences that matter

ethico-onto-epistem-ology ethics | ontology | epistemology ethics, ontology, epistemology separate fields of study not separable

reading through (the diffraction grating) reading against (some fixed target/ mirror)

transdisciplinary engagement attends to the privilege one discipline, read other(s) against it fact that boundary production between disciplines is itself a material-discursive practice; how do these practices matter?

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subject, object contingent, not fixed subject | object fixed

respectful engagement that attends to reify, simplify, make the other into a separate detailed patterns of thinking of each; fine- object less attentive to and able to resolve grained details matter important details, dynamics, how boundaries are made

Summary accounting for how practices matter reflecting on representations

For Barad (2007) reflection is erroneously considered as a way of developing knowledge because reflexivity others the world and makes it an object. One of Barad’s contentions is that one cannot know the world from an artificial outside positionality because there is no outside of entanglement. In this sense reflection and reflexivity are deeply problematic.

Post-Coding

Moving from qualitative methods to post-qualitative methods involves taking stock of how we deal with data and the research process. It means questioning whether how we draw boundaries around what the data is and what is theory in research and whether these positions can shift during the research process. By employing a diffractive methodology, it becomes necessary to evaluate elements of the research process as they emerge rather than hold these entities as pre-existing quantities. Jackson and Mazzei

(2013) state:

To plug data and theory into one another in the threshold is to position ourselves

as researchers otherwise than merely always already subject ready to capture and

code the experiences of our participants and their material conditions as always

already object. Such a practice of reading diffractively means that we try to fold

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these texts into one another in a move that flattens our relationship to the

participants, the theory, and the data. (p. 267)

In this understanding of diffractive analysis, Jackson and Mazzei offer the idea of plugging data and theory into one another to disrupt pre-existing subject and object positions we might think we occupy. They suggest that the action of plugging offers a chance for qualitative research to find new footing and level the relationships involved in the research process.

This reevaluation of coding as an accepted and necessary process of qualitative research has emerged along with interest in diffractive analysis in research. Lisa A.

Mazzei (2014) presents an opinion on coding as influenced by her take on diffractive analysis. She suggests that research that is heavily reliant on coding to understand information focuses on mirroring sameness much like reflective practices. Diffractive analysis does not seek to group like quantities, thereby producing sameness. Diffraction focuses on “emphasizes difference by breaking open the data (and the categories inherent in coding) by decentering and destabilizing the tropes of liberal humanist identity work necessary in conventional qualitative research” (Mazzei, 2014, p. 743). Applying a diffractive methodology results in increased ambiguity that can be difficult in research, but by its very nature also produces compelling differences.

Diffraction and Diffractive Methodology as diffracted through artmaking

This study explores conceptions of materiality through artmaking while employing a diffractive methodology. This section begins by providing an overview of the conceptual groundings of the concept of diffraction as developed by Donna Haraway 148

and as articulated by Karen Barad. Reflection and reflexivity represent mirroring and

sameness, whereas the metaphor of diffraction offers an opportunity to create and attend

to difference. Barad’s insights into diffraction are robust due to her training as a physicist.

This section continues by explicating the diffractive methodology by using it; I

understand insights brought forward by scholars of diffractive methodology by reading

the insights presented in their conceptualizations of diffraction through possible

applications for teasing out artmaking as an apparatus through which to diffract.

What is shown here is a thought process and examples that first enter my mind as

I think through diffractive methodology. Understanding diffractive methodology through using it might seem too complicated, but if one follows the approach to this methodology that Karen Barad outlines then using diffraction to understand diffraction makes sense.

The goal is to develop and further existing understandings of this methodology as relates to artmaking. The insights developed through this process will then inform my approach

to diffraction in this study.

What is diffraction?

In classical physics, the term diffraction describes what happens when a wave

meets an obstacle or obstruction. An example of this can be observed when you throw

two rocks in a still pond; the rocks disturb the surface of the water and waves emanate

from the point where each rock hit the water. When the waves from each of the rocks

meet in the pond, you have diffraction. In water, diffraction happens each time the water meets an obstruction that interferes with its flow. When water flows around a rock in a

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river, diffraction patterns can be seen. Although I mention water as an example, it must

be noted that in terms of classical physics, diffraction patterns can be observed in any

entity that produces waves; for example, light and sound can also be diffracted.

Diffraction patterns occur under specific conditions when waves meet, overlap, intersect, and radiate outwards. Barad (2007) explains that in classical physics “diffraction patterns mark an important difference between waves and particles…only waves produce diffraction patterns; particles do not (since they cannot occupy the same place at the same time)” (p. 81).

More recently, the well-known two-slit diffraction/interference experiments in quantum physics expanded the knowledge of what kinds of entities produce diffraction patterns. In classical physics, we understand that waves produce diffraction patterns, but in quantum physics, this idea is upended by the discovery that matter can, under specific circumstances, produce a diffraction pattern (Barad, 2007). In other experimental settings, researchers have observed that light behaves as a particle under some circumstances and waves under other circumstances; this is referred to as the “wave- particle duality paradox” in quantum theory (Barad, 2007). In Meeting the Universe

Halfway, Karen Barad gives a detailed account of just how messy the distinctions between entities becomes in quantum physics, and she asserts that these experiments come together to indicate that Western philosophical assumptions need to be reassessed based on these experimental revelations. This research in quantum physics offers insights into the intrinsic entangled contingencies of phenomena in the world.

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Moreover, Barad (2007) states that “diffraction not only brings the reality of entanglements to light, it is itself an entangled phenomenon” (p. 73). In quantum physics diffraction experiments can be used to learn about the object being diffracted or about the diffraction grating, which represents the experimental setting itself. Barad (2007) explains this further:

So at times diffraction phenomena will be an object of investigation and at other

times it will serve as an apparatus of investigation…as our understanding of the

phenomenon is refined we can enfold these insights into further refinements and

tunings of our instruments to sharpen our investigations and so on. (p. 73)

What Barad intimates is that diffraction experiments are sometimes the apparatus of study, and other times the object of study. As the experiment progresses, what we learn can be applied to the entity we are investigating. Understandings develop through the investigation and also help refine the conditions of our investigation. It is then compelling to extrapolate from what quantum diffraction experiments show us and apply this into other research areas because it allows us to consider that the assumption of fixed positionalities in research may be fleeting or even misguided. Thinking through these diffraction experiments, we see that even the notion of the object of study is a constantly

(re)negotiated entity.

When this idea is carried into a look of materiality through artmaking, it is evident that while the intent of the researcher may be to investigate materiality through artmaking, at times it is the researcher who is the object of the study and at another time,

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other entities emerging through the entangled research process are the objects of study.

What this tells me as a researcher is that although I may set out to do a study as a primary

agential force, I may be confronted by an apparatus of study that shifts during the

research to reveal other entities, quantities, ideas, and realizations as the research is unfolded.

Diffractive Methodology Diffracted

Diffraction is not merely about differences, and certainly not differences in any

absolute sense, but about the entangled nature of differences that

matter…Diffraction is a material practice for making a difference, for

topologically reconfiguring connections. [Emphasis in original] (Barad, 2007, p.

381)

Diffraction apparatuses and methodologies “make evident the entangled structure of the changing and contingent ontology of the world, including the ontology of knowing.

Diffraction not only brings the reality of entanglements to light, but it is itself an entangled phenomenon” (Barad, 2007, p. 73). Diffractive analysis is respectful of entanglements while also examining what it means to be entangled. It is a methodology that allows the reality of shifting boundaries that are realized through the research process. Although I put forward diffraction as a methodology at this time, there may come a time when the methodology or methods become the object of study. This shifting of boundaries and entities may have always existed but been ignored by researchers who were fighting to legitimize their research, especially in the arts.

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A diffractive methodology is one that engages with and enacts productive difference. Creating and attending to difference is central to the task of diffraction and diffractive methodology in research. Lather (2016) describes diffraction and diffractive analysis as an “area of methodological invention…that goes “beyond” performativity as a difference-driven analytic” (p. 126). As a methodology that is driven by difference, diffractive methods are useful in looking at notions of materiality in artmaking because these methodologies help magnify the differences enacted through the artmaking process.

Barad (2007) describes diffraction as both her methodology and a fitting metaphor for describing this methodology because it involves the act of “reading insights through one another in attending to and responding to the details and specificities of relations of difference and how they matter” (p. 71).

This reading of insights through one another is key to diffraction because it suggests that creating interferences/diffractions is a productive way to produce and attend to theoretical, discursive, and material insights. Davies (2014) explains that she employs a diffractive methodology in her research because it “necessarily interferes with the research problem and the questions being asked, and the questions interfere with the analysis. The analysis is emergent and unpredictable, a series of encounters with the new” (p. 735). Diffractive methodologies allow for the interrogation of traditionally disparate quantities that are often held as pre-existing quantities in research practices. For example, in qualitative research, the researcher needs to determine specific research questions to address in the research, but diffraction upends that requirement. Diffraction is meant to trouble this linearity and hierarchy of research and allow for more emergent

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forms of inquiry. In describing their experience working with a diffractive methodology

Ivinson and Renold (2016) explain that “this is a way of doing research in which

knowledge is always in process, always becoming and where transformation emerges in

intra-action” (p. 171).

Diffraction can also “illuminate differences as they emerge: how different

differences get made, what gets excluded, and how those exclusions matter” (Barad,

2007, p. 30). Mazzei (2014) develops this description by adding that diffractive analysis

results in a “reading that spreads thought and meaning in unpredictable and productive

emergences” (p. 742). According to Mazzei, the range of sources and theoretical areas

that Barad engages provides her with the ability to acknowledge the material and

discursive implications of theorizing (Mazzei, p. 742, 2014). Lens-Taguchi and Palmer

(2013) offer that “diffractive analysis can be understood as a wave-like motion that takes

into account that thinking, seeing and knowing are never done in isolation but are always

affected by different forces coming together” (as cited in De Schauwer et al., 2017). So,

diffraction is at the same time a breaking-apart and a coming-together of practices, ideas,

theorizing, and knowing.

Artmaking is a compelling practice and apparatus through which to read insights through one another because the making process entails this activity. An example of this is the notion of color relationships. When one places a yellow hue next to a blue hue,

both colors are changed because they appear more intense than when viewed separately.

Often that is where we would leave this idea, however, when diffracting; one should

consider the person who is viewing the color, the materiality of the paint, and the 154

material-discursive boundaries enacted by the process of placing these colors in close

proximity. Although it is often presented as a simple and abstract concept, the perception

of two colors is rather complex when considered as an entangled phenomenon constituted

through intra-action and attended to by a diffractive methodology. It is this level of

nuance that diffraction as a methodology adds to the discussion of how to fundamentally

reshape notions of materiality in/through artmaking.

Diffraction is an adaptable metaphor for a methodological approach because it is attentive to the assertion that boundaries do not pre-exist intra-action. Barad (2007) states

that:

diffraction does not fix what is the object and what is the subject in advance, and

so, unlike methods of reading one text or set of ideas against another where one

set serves as a fixed frame of reference, diffraction involves reading insights

through one another in ways that help illuminate differences as they emerge: how

different differences get made, what gets excluded, and how those exclusions

matter. (p. 30)

As Barad explains here, diffraction does not insist on reading insights through two pre-

existing entities whose boundaries are unchanging. Instead, diffraction allows for the

frame of reference to shift as entities are diffracted, this shifting sometimes entails that the methodology itself becomes the apparatus through which insights are generated. This shifting of perceptions becomes particularly useful when looking at artmaking practice because as one engages in artmaking practice, the boundaries between self/other,

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thing/other-thing shift. Working through a methodology that allows for the shifting and

ongoing negotiation of boundaries is vital to developing understandings where artmaking

practice can serve as both the apparatus through which to notice differences and at other

times as the methodology through which difference is diffracted.

Attending to the differences produced through this methodology itself can offer

insights into how we fundamentally access, engage with/through, and regard material and

materiality through art and artmaking. Thus, conceptualizations of materiality through

artmaking are in flux and (re)negotiation as artists expand and redefine the porous

boundaries of their practices. However, it must be noted that while I may attempt to limit

the scope of this inquiry to art, artmaking, and materiality, these boundaries between

discourses are not presumed to exist prior to their intra-action. Boundaries exist but they

are enacted through entanglement; diffraction and diffractive methodology, as Barad

explains, are “respectful of the entanglement of ideas and other materials in ways that

reflexive methodologies are not” (p. 29).

Using a diffractive methodology does not rule out reflection and reflexivity

categorically because elements that a researcher reflects upon can be diffracted or read

through other materials/discourses/texts. For example, Mitchell (2017) explains how

sharing her student’s reflection assignments through Google Drive “helps the process of

opening up their thinking to/with others” and facilitates a “move beyond an individual

humanist approach by acknowledging the relationships of non-human forces” (p. 172-

173). She suggests that “if reflective texts can be diffracted with/through each other, like waves interfering with each other in the ocean, a new in-between space is opened up, like 156

new patterns that are formed in/through the water” (Mitchell, 2017, p. 173). Following this suggestion, I do not completely discount reflection as a way of recounting and recalling what occurs through artmaking practice, but the goal is to go beyond reflection so as to disrupt the humanist approaches to research as jagodzinski and Wallin (2013) suggest. In the following chapters, reflections and recollections on the process of making may be included, but these insights will be diffracted through both conceptual and material entities to facilitate further understandings.

Thinking that enacts binaries that deals in absolutes is displaced by employing a diffractive methodology. As Barad (2014) asserts that “diffraction is not only a lively affair, but one that troubles dichotomies, including some of the most sedimented and stabilized/stabilizing binaries, such as organic/inorganic and animate/inanimate” (p. 168).

A diffractive methodology enacts the possibility of breaking down and breaking apart

entities with presumed boundaries. Assumptions about the separateness of artist and

material are renegotiated and comprehended through their entangled intra-acting. Barad’s quantum physics-informed approach to diffraction shows that quantum diffraction

“troubles the very notion of dicho-tomy – cutting into two – as a singular act of absolute differentiation, fracturing this from that, now from then” (p. 168). When boundaries are enacted through intra-action and entanglement these boundaries should be understood as

not absolute, but porous and malleable and in keeping with the porosity of these

boundaries diffraction and diffractive methodology itself should not be viewed the

application of a set pattern onto a site, but a “iterative (re)configuring of patterns of differentiating-entangling” (Barad, 2014, p. 168).

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The plasticity of boundaries in this methodological approach importantly includes notions of time and temporality. Temporality, like materiality, is too often not included in discussions of artmaking because it seems too complex. These concepts are integral to artmaking and are understood through the artmaking process. If boundaries are enacted through entanglement and intra-action, it follows that the notions of temporality are as well. Barad (2014) elucidates:

Temporality is constituted through the world's iterative intra-activity. Matter's

dynamism is implicated in its production. Temporality is produced through the

iterative enfolding of phenomena marking the sedimenting historiality of

differential patterns of mattering. As the rings of trees mark the sedimented

history of their intra-actions within and as part of the world, so matter carries

within itself the sedimented historialities of the practices through which it is

produced as part of its ongoing becoming—it is ingrained and enriched in its

becoming (p. 180).

As described, temporality is enacted though intra-activity as are other phenomena, but these phenomena are necessarily implicated in materializing one another. Barad outlines her conceptual connection between time, space, and matter under her idea of spacetimemattering which is presented at the beginning of her article Diffracting

Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart by offering the following “definition”,

“Diffraction/intra-action – cutting together-apart (one move) in the (re)configuring of spacetimemattering; differencing/differing/différancing” (Barad, 2014, p. 168). We see that diffraction and intra-action are conceptualized together and are regarded as both an 158

agential cut and a bringing together in the ongoing negotiation of spacetimemattering

which entails enacting difference. In her book Meeting the Universe Halfway Barad

offers a more robust account of the conflation of entities that are often conceived of as

permanently distinct. Barad (2007) explains:

Space, time, and matter are intra-actively produced in the ongoing differential

articulation of the world. Time is not a succession of evenly spaced intervals

available as a referent for all bodies and space is not a collection of preexisting

points set out as a container for matter to inhabit. Intra-actions are nonarbitrary

nondeterministic causal enactments through which matter-in-the-process-of-

becoming is iteratively enfolded into its ongoing differential materialization; such

a dynamics is not marked by an exterior parameter called time, nor does it take

place in a container called space, but rather iterative intra-actions are the

dynamics through which temporality and spatiality are produced and iteratively

reconfigured in the materialization of phenomena and the (re)making of material-

discursive boundaries and their constitutive exclusions. (p. 234)

Entities that are usually conceived as pre-existing and constant are reassessed as emerging through their entanglements. Barad explains that elements that are often perceived or treated as constants like time, space, matter, and discourse are not. These are emergent phenomenon that are enacted through intra-action. As boundaries of matter and material-discursive phenomena are formed through intra-action so too are space and time.

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In my artmaking practice, this is made evident in the shift of time and space that

emerges when I engage in an action that involves a high degree of concentration, like when I paint straight lines with a liner brush or insert dress pins through jasmine flowers.

While involved in the making process I get lost in these actions that require controlled breathing and precision. As a result, the space of my work area falls away and time slows. I have certainly lost complete track of time and emerge from actually working for a few hours thinking that I worked for maybe thirty minutes until I see a clock. Though this is just one example of the emergent space and time Barad discusses in her work.

Time and space develop in different iterations through entanglement, so in the space of artmaking, how these entities emerge has to do with the particularities of that specific entanglement of entities.

Through diffractive analysis, the researcher need not pretend or assume time as a linear quantity. Instead, bends and shifts in time and space can be attended to through this methodology. As Barad (2014) states, “matter itself is diffracted, dispersed, threaded through with materializing and sedimented effects of iterative reconfigurings of spacetimemattering, traces of what might yet (have) happen(ed)” (p. 168). Diffraction and diffractive analysis occur through the ongoing emergence of spacetimemattering and the negotiation of boundaries that emerge through mattering. Diffractive analysis is not necessarily a methodology that one just applies to a site, but a rather a methodology that emerges through its use and it is not something that truncates with the end of this chapter or at the end of this study. Diffraction is a useful strategy for this study because it offers a

160 way to attend to the insights our research offers while helping to displace humanist tendencies in artmaking-research practice.

Applied Diffractive Methodologies

Bronwyn Davies (2017) applies a diffractive methodology to the project of

“reanimating” her ancestor through one of his letters. She undertakes this task by rethinking her subjectivity and approaching the task of knowing through reading differently and specifically through a diffractive methodology. She describes the act of reading porous subjectivities through one another, namely reading Davies herself through her ancestor Thomas Blomfield. Davies begins by describing why animating her ancestor by thinking through the specific material and discursive configurations that might have been present while her ancestor penned the letter now in Davies’ possession.

Her research carefully picks through phrases of the letter and intertwines and diffracts them through history and theoretical insights that are brought up through various intra-actions. As she writes, the subject and object positions are at times blurred and displaced and then reemerge as at other moments as the diffractive analysis unfolds.

Importantly, Davies is careful not to represent boundaries before the intra-action enacted through research. Davies (2017) provides a useful description of what she attempts to do in her research:

I have not represented him as the unified rational subject of liberal humanism—

the subject assumed and produced in many representationalist accounts. Through

a diffractive analysis, Thomas Blomfield has become someone, like any of us,

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who has permeable boundaries, boundaries that are open to affective flows and

lines of force from outside and inside (the exteriority-within) himself. (p. 273)

By employing a diffractive methodology, she has not assumed that Thomas Blomfield is a solidified entity who existed in merely one time and space. Instead, Davies’ account provides an opportunity to think about what it means to reanimate an ancestor. That through Davies’ engagement with his letter, Thomas Blomfield, can be reimagined and, in some sense, brought back to life. Through her research, Davies explores the implications of the theoretical insights and difference that diffracting subjectivities allows. Davies writes:

He [Thomas Blomfield] has enlarged my capacity to appreciate the complex

entanglement of subjects in relation to each other and to the continuities and

breaks in the onto-epistemological worlds in which we take up our subject-hood.

He has offered me (I might say animated my thinking-being toward) a new

comprehension of diffractive methodology. (p. 274)

Davies diffraction of her subjectivity through Thomas Blomfield’s subjectivity as uncovered and encountered through his letters allowed Davies to gain insights about not only the subjects diffracted but diffractive methodology itself. Through her employment of the diffractive methodology, Davies interrogates the notion of subjectivity itself through the examination of her entanglement with Blomfield. Although Davies’ paper ends, the entanglement between these entities continues, in some way. Because boundaries are enacted through intra-action, these boundaries can dissolve and reassemble in different configurations when Davies engages with Thomas Blomfield

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again. These boundaries are enacted through the apparatus through which these entities are attended. Although not explicitly stated by Davies, I see the apparatus in Davies

(2017) as her attempt to animate her ancestor through the process of reading, researching,

and writing. These activities form the basis through which phenomena and insights

emerge. Diffractive methodology, and the act of reading insights through one another is

the method through which Davies observes and articulates the interferences and

diffractions enacted through the process of animating her ancestor.

Another example of thinking through diffractive methodology is offered by

Melanie Sehgal (2014) who reads Haraway and Barad through Alfred North Whitehead

in order to understand the connection between ontology and epistemology. For Sehgal

Whitehead’s writings are pivotal in understanding early objections to conceptualizations

of matter as a firm, unwavering entity rather than one with becoming (p. 190). Sehgal

(2014) suggests that Modern thought is plagued by the assumption of the concreteness of

matter and this has caused theorizing about matter to be caught by the need to explain

everything that does not fit neatly into Newtonian theories of the nature of matter. The

notion of matter and material as emergent or becoming rather than stable entity “is

defaced as merely illusory, merely subjective, thus instantiating the rift between the

realms of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, subject and object, the human and non-human” (p. 190).

To reconnect these bifurcations, Sehgal diffracts Whitehead through Barad and

Haraway “in order to spell out a possible entanglement between ontology and

epistemology beyond modern strictures and as pointed to in the discussion on diffraction”

(p. 191). Sehgal is quick to point out that this is not merely to read Whitehead’s historical

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insights diffractively, but rather to read Whitehead through our current understandings of

matter. Diffracting Whitehead, Barad, and Haraway is compelling because they have

similar outlooks, so a diffractive methodology brings the potential of difference, instead

of just comparing the similarities of these thinkers. This notion fits Sehgal’s (2014)

explication of diffraction “as process and the result of a process at the same time,

diffraction patterns render both how something became as well as what it is. Being is

becoming” (p. 188-189). Any similarities are noticed, but also immediately interfere as

they are read through one another. Diffractive methodologies then, serve as means

through which entanglements are theorized, but also produce entanglements.

New materialist scholar Iris van der Tuin (2014) provides a final example of

diffraction as a methodology as informed by Donna Haraway and Karen Barad. van der

Tuin provides a thorough description of the rather circuitous path that leads her to re-read and rediscover the work of the French feminist thinker Chantal Chawaf. Admittedly, I have never heard of Chawaf, but van der Tuin assures her readers that this is because

Chawaf has been relegated as a secondary thinker to more well-known French feminists like Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. Diffractively reading Chawaf allows van der Tuin to go beyond a “book report” on the significance of Chawaf’s work, moving towards how re-reading Chawaf fundamentally influenced her take on posthumanism/new materialism.

van der Tuin provides new context by diffracting Chawaf’s work through her own life and approach to feminism and French feminism. Instead of shying away from explicitly including her biographical and historiographical approach to Chawaf’s work van der Tuin’s diffractive reading includes these meanderings. This diffractive reading of

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Chawaf’s text transforms both the author’s understandings of new materialism and

diffraction and how Chawaf’s writing is construed and interpreted as well.

Understandings of Chawaf’s work is changed for van der Tuin and both entities are

reconfigured from the diffractive method employed by van der Tuin. This deployment of diffractive methodology allows van der Tuin and her assessment of Chawaf to change through her writing, reading and rereading of Chawaf through new materialist ideas.

Barad (2007) explains that “entangled practices are productive, and who and what

are excluded through these entangled practices matter: different intra-actions produce

different phenomena” (p. 58). A research process that employs a diffractive methodology

can attend to the difference and interferences enacted through entangled practices.

Engaging with diffraction allows the researcher to question the research process and even

the idea of prescribed methods for research. If there is no outside or exterior position we

can occupy as researchers, then how do we determine research questions before doing

research. Instead, should we not allow questions to emerge throughout the process? This

methodology and process questions the solidity of boundary demarcations between self

and other. As Barad (2012) describes “the self is dispersed/diffracted through time and

being” (p. 6). Additionally, Barad asserts that the only entities that exist are various intra-

active entanglements, entities like self, other, time, and space are realized through intra-

active entanglements (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 66).

Braided Hair and Diffraction

I am bringing a guiding metaphor to the diffractive methodology elucidated by

Barad. Braiding works to guide my specific approach to diffraction as a methodology

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because it undergirds my approach to artmaking in that the elements of my artmaking

practice are often seemingly disparate elements braided together through the artmaking

process. The concept of braiding and a braided approach is inspired by Sullivan (2005).

Braiding as metaphor is useful, but Sullivan’s approach conceptualizes pre-existing

threads of research being braided together. This study envisons the threads of research

emerging during the research process, so pre-exsting strands of research are not possible

with this research. The braid envisoned in this study is messy and lacks finite boundaries.

It looks a lot like the artwork pictured below.

Furthermore, most of this study has evolved in close proximity to this unfinished

artwork hanging in my workspace.

Figure 4.1: Reconstructed Braid (2007) Figure 4.2: Reconstructed braid (detail)

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Though this artwork never developed past a very beginning stage, its construction and

presence offer methodological insights that are articulated here. However, before I

explain how this work adds to my take on diffractive methodology, I should acknowledge

that although I understand that braiding might be considered a visual metaphor, I have

purposely omitted the word “visual” from its discussion in this study. I follow Barad

(2007) in questioning the almost hegemonic quality of visual metaphors in Western thought. For Barad, there is a link between the existing use of reflective and representational modes and methodologies and the description of knowledge through visual analogies (Barad, 2007, p. 86). Keeping in mind Barad’s caution in using a visual metaphor to underpin methodology, I assert that braided hair offers a material-discursive understanding that can be comprehended visually, materially, socially, culturally, sensorially, and tactually.

Braided hair is more than just a way to style my hair, braided hair also elicits memories, is a cultural artifact, has meaning, and it is a required element of Indian dance performance. I know how braids function because I braid my own hair quite often. In what follows I explain how braiding influences my approach to diffractive methodology in this study.

I know that my hair is tangled and knotted. As I pull a comb through it catches and breaks strands of my hair. This describes the beginning stages of this project. Nothing makes sense, as I try to pull the comb through the research, it catches and strands break. I am sent off on a tangent.

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The strands of hair often mix as the beginnings of the braid is sorted out.

When this project began, there was no clear path. Ideas mix together, create confusion,

my mind, like my braided hair, jumped from one thing to the next. As the project continued, it became clearer. Instead of feeling obstructions, there were openings.

I know that when I separate strands for braiding that it is never perfect.

Even when I think I have something neatly separated and ready to go. The research

process is never neat. There is no way to hide the messiness of this research method. As

the braid weaves so do research insights. Understandings emerge and quickly submerge

back into the braid, but these realizations provide crucial momentary clarity.

As I start to braid my hair, it comes together a bit more neatly. However, there are

always strands out of place that I tuck back into braid hoping no one will notice.

Through this project, I have come to the significant realization that research is never

perfect. People often chime in saying things like “a good dissertation is a done

dissertation.” For me, the lesson is that perfection is unattainable, but you gain as much

as you can by continuing the path you have set forth. Other things will tug at your

attention and call you away, but it is important to stay the course, so you can attend to the

insights and differences enacted through the process.

And with every braid comes the eventual moment of unbraiding. When the hair must be

taken out, shaken out and combed. The hair becomes tangled and knotted again. The

cycle continues.

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This methodological approach does not feign completeness. Whatever is learned through this the process of diffractive, braided hair methodology can be reassessed differently.

The research findings are understood and enacted through entangled relations; a different entanglement will produce different findings. The findings of this dissertation are likely the beginnings of something else.

Diffractive artmaking-philosophical inquiry

Artmaking has a reputation as a disruptive, incalculable esoteric practice that operates in the hinterlands of betweenness. As such, it is a prime space and apparatus through which to expand thinking and knowledge, particularly related to issues of materiality as (re)conceptualized through artmaking practice. However, materiality, as related to artmaking, is a difficult concept to define in any concrete way because it is often being redefined or challenged, often through artmaking practice itself. Adding the theoretical foundation of this study through new materialism as informed by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, it becomes evident that the work of this study is to use the methods of philosophical inquiry and artmaking through a diffractive methodology.

Diffractive analysis allows for the reading of insights through one another and attends to the interferences enacted by intersecting waves of diffraction brought together by braided strands. Stubley (1992) describes the method of philosophical inquiry as one that “exposes the concepts, ideas, and assumptions underlying our constructions” (p. 44).

Stubley (1992) also describes that there are many approaches to applying philosophy as a method. The approach to philosophical inquiry in this study is to do philosophy and think through artmaking and to do artmaking through philosophy, like a non-linear feedback 169

loop of inquiry. I call this strategy artmaking-philosophical inquiry to connect these terms and equate these methods.

Furthermore, diffractive methodology creates and facilitates differences shaped

through specific intra-active entanglements. This study positions the research methods of

artmaking-philosophical inquiry as an apparatus through which to produce phenomena. I

expect the phenomena produced in this study will be artistic and theoretical in nature and

shed light on how materiality might be conceptualized differently through the theories

that inform this dissertation. The theoretical underpinnings of this study indicate that the

boundaries are emergent and are enacted through entanglement. This allows for the

boundaries and definitions of material, discursive, subject, and object to emerge through

entanglement rather than pre-exist it. So, the artmaking-philosophical inquiry of this

study involves allowing agential cuts to both break and apart and bring together

boundaries that emerge through entanglement. The boundaries of this study have already

started to take shape as I move through this dissertation. However, these boundaries

should be considered as being formed through the process of theorizing, writing, and

figuring out that has taken place over the last few chapters.

Diffraction patterns radiate outwards, eventually dissipating and this is how I

envision this study. As I continue this process, the project should unravel like a braid

being undone. The process of diffraction should leave its mark on all entities involved in

this process. This can be understood as the strand of hair curling and becoming different because of the braid. Braiding brings elements together, undoing a braid and looking at the curl of the hair is what diffraction and diffractive analysis means to me. Allowing me 170

to attend to the way the braided elements are different and changed as a result of their intra-active entanglements. This act of bringing together and cutting apart is a function of a diffractive methodology and one that guides this project. As Lather (2016) writes,

“suspicious as I am of efforts to codify and discipline the “beyond” of qualitative work, I want to endorse the incalculable, the messy, and the responsibilities of not knowing (p.

129). This project is productively messy and untidy, but it also has the potential to produce compelling insights into artmaking and materiality that perhaps are unavailable to neater methods and methodologies.

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“Summer breeze, makes me feel fine, blowing through the jasmine in my mind. Sweet days of summer, the jasmine's in bloom.” – Seals & Crofts (1972)

This chapter examines a facet of my artmaking practice that involves an ongoing

engagement with jasmine plants and flowers. In order to examine the phenomena brought

forward through the diffractive analysis employed herein I observe a boundary that is enacted through the apparatus of my artmaking practice. Barad (2007) states:

phenomena are differential patterns of mattering ("diffraction patterns") produced

through complex agential intra-actions of multiple material-discursive practices or

apparatuses of bodily production, where apparatuses are not mere observing

instruments but boundary-drawing practices—specific material (re)conjigurings

of the world—which come to matter. [Emphasis in original] (p. 140)

For Barad apparatuses are instruments through which boundaries are constructed and in this study boundaries are enacted through artmaking, so I envision artmaking as the apparatus through which I can attend to the phenomena that emerge through the diffractive methodology; diffraction, as previously discussed, is a way to become more aware of intra-actions and entanglements of material-discursive practices. Phenomena are what Barad (2007) presents as the “primary ontological unit” which are “dynamic

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topological reconfigurings/entanglements/ relationalities/(re)articulations of the world”

(p. 141). In this chapter, I present the phenomena or “differential patterns of mattering”

produced by diffracting jasmine flowers, material, philosophy, other contemporary

artists, and the research process through the apparatus of artmaking. The boundaries

drawn around each of these diffracted quantities are porous and in the process of being

negotiated and renegotiated as the artmaking-research-philosophical inquiry unfolds.

Of particular interest are any entanglements or articulations of phenomena that

expand current assumptions of material and materiality in artmaking by employing a

research method that combines artmaking, research, biographical narrative, and

philosophical inquiry. I work through a diffractive methodology that allows me to read these insights through one another to create differences and build new and perhaps unexpected understandings. A feature of a diffractive methodology is that it is respectful of entanglements and attends to differences produced by reading insights through one another. As discussed in Chapter 3, materiality is a phenomenon that while central to artmaking, has rarely been theorized through artmaking. Scholars have circled the notions of matter, material, and materiality, but have rarely directly engaged with the issues that arise through this discussion.

By employing a diffractive methodology and using artmaking as an apparatus to enact boundaries, I can attend to any emerging understandings of materiality as a concept and how it functions in artmaking practice. This also enables a more dynamic look at the material-discursive forces at work because, through diffraction, insights are read through one another to produce interferences and difference. In this chapter, I begin by

173 introducing how this facet of my research started and I give a biographical account of where I think my interest in jasmine emerged. I then discursively braid in strands of the theoretical, philosophical, material, discursive, and material-discursive elements involved in this process. This manifests as a series of vignettes about jasmine flowers, the artmaking process, and images of the artworks that have emerged through the apparatus of artmaking. As the chapter progresses, the strands of the braid are unraveled and read through one another creating interferences, difference, and understandings as they emerge through the method of artmaking-research-philosophical inquiry. At times diffraction works as planned, as the methodology that informs how this research is enacted, at other times diffraction is itself the subject of inquiry.

Jasmine, Biographical Strand

My encounter with jasmine flowers and plants began as a child during visits to

Chennai, India. Even though I had short, bobbed hair, I would beg my grandmother to let me wear jasmine flowers in my hair as all the ladies did. She would carefully affix a small strand of flowers to my hair using an old metal bobby pin. The smell of the flowers wafted everywhere. Even as a child I was struck by the beautiful contrast of the white flowers on the long black braided hairstyle worn by most women in Chennai. Every subsequent trip to visit family in India involved jasmine; the flower holds a significant place in cultural observances and religious rituals. In the evenings, my cousin and I would pick jasmine flowers from a large thicket of flowers that grew on the open rooftop.

Those flowers were reserved as offerings for the gods. I remember being told that even

174 though we picked the flowers, we shouldn’t smell them because it would taint the flowers as offerings. I confess that I smelled a lot of those offerings.

For special occasions, my cousins and I each got the chance to wear our own strand of jasmine flowers to wear in our hair. On her head the flower lady carried a large, shallow basket with the flowers she strung for sale that day while she walked down the street calling out her inventory. Several varieties of jasmine grow in India, so my aunt would yell down to ask if she had “jaathi malli” which is a conical variety of jasmine that has purplish pink petals on the outside while it is a bud, and reveals a white interior as it blooms. Sometimes the flower lady had these unique flowers, and other times she made excuses as to why she did not have them. I used to eagerly await the flower transaction each day. My aunt carefully measured the strands of knotted together jasmine flowers after the flower lady already measured them to make sure the flower lady gave us the right amount. Knotted flower stands are measured from the tips of the flower lady’s finger to her elbow. After she handed over the flowers, the flower lady would tell us she would see us tomorrow and resumed loudly yelling her inventory for the day.

These were daily occurrences, they were so regular and unspecial that no one else in my family would likely remember, but these moments were magical to me as I knew they were not going to last forever for me. I knew that my time in Chennai would end and

I would have to return to the United States where the sensory experiences just could not compare to the overwhelming aroma of a basket of flower strands being coiled and uncoiled. Around the time I decided to study art, I must have started saving some of these

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jasmine flower strands in my sketchbooks. These strands of jasmine have stayed in my

books until now. This project lead to their uncovering and a rethinking of what these

strands of dried flowers meant regarding my current involvement with jasmine flowers.

Figures 5.1 and 5.2 below are examples of the pressed strands that I found in my old sketchbooks. These strands of flowers are around five years old. Pressed Jasmine

Garland 2 shows stray hairs that were caught in the flowers while I wore them. These are some of the earliest seeds of my artmaking enacted through jasmine flowers. When I saved these, I had no idea that this could develop a project that serves as a prime example of the way I approach artmaking-research-philosophical inquiry. I know that I could not bring myself to throw these flowers away like the rest of my family did after they wilted.

So, I pressed them in my sketchbook and forgot about them. These flowers are from a trip to India and Nepal in the summer of 2014.

Figure 5.1: Pressed Jasmine Garland 1 (2014) Figure 5.2: Pressed Jasmine Garland 2 (2014)

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Growing Jasmine

On and off for the past few years, I have tried to keep and grow jasmine plants.

Some of these plants I purchased from local nurseries, and other plants I ordered through

a specialty plant catalog for professional gardeners. I prune, fertilize and fortify the soil

for these acid-loving plants. They are especially finicky during the winter months as the

amount of sun and humidity decreases. Keeping them alive in their dormant state is

challenging. On a few occasions, I thought I killed them. When jasmine are stressed, they drop their leaves. Sometimes, just a few, but other times all the leaves drop. There is a heart-sinking feeling when I start noticing piles of leaves on the floor. This feeling is accompanied by a feeling resembling remorse or grief; I think, “how could I do this to

them?” I have a deep sense of responsibility for them, and I have mostly managed to

nurse the jasmine back to health when they feel stressed. I am giddy and elated when the

plants start to sprout tiny new leaves and tendrils.

My care for these plants may seem one-sided. After all, I am doing a lot of work to keep the jasmine alive, but there is something in it for me as well. During the summer months in Ohio, the jasmine seems to thrive, probably because the weather resembles their tropical hot and humid native climate. It is in these months that the plants start to flower abundantly, and I enact a daily ritual of picking jasmine flowers, just as I do when

I am in India. Just after dusk when the sun is low in the sky, the jasmine flowers are at the perfect state to be picked. They are in loosened buds that are just about to open into flowers. This is a decent time to pick them because if you wait too long, the flowers bloom fully, making them more difficult to string together. Fighting the mosquitos, I pick

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the flowers from the plants. I try to grow anywhere from two to three separate plants at a

time, so I get a handful of flowers a few times each summer. The thing about jasmine

plants is that you need to pick them to encourage new growth. I collect the buds that are ready, but I also collect any flowers I missed the day before. I also make sure to pinch off

the flower stems to help the plant grow.

After I collect the flowers, I do a couple of things: one, if there are only a few

flowers, I dry them on the kitchen counter. The second option, with a collection of least

ten or so flowers, is to string them together with thread so I can hang the strung flowers

in my kitchen and enjoy their sweet, intoxicating aroma for a few days. The fragrance almost transports me back to India and elicits memories of my visits and experiences in my ancestral homeland. My grandmother would show me how to string jasmine flowers together using a rather elaborate method of knotting that results in a garland of flowers, like the garlands we would buy from the flower lady. Stringing the flowers somehow created a cloud of jasmine scent around the garlands. Even though I try to catch all the

jasmine flowers in bud form, I think the jasmine flowers know they are in Ohio, and I can never seem to catch them in their perfect bud state for making a garland. And although I have been taught how to string flower garlands, I never get it right when I try. My consolation to achieve a similar effect is to use a needle and thread to string my jasmine flowers together. My grandmother would not approve.

I try to augment the “authenticity” of my endeavor by incorporating turmeric. I create a basic dye using turmeric from my collection of spices and water. In India, we use

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turmeric as a healing salve to cool our bodies and add a golden undertone to our skin.

Turmeric dyed thread is also used in many religious capacities in Hinduism, such as

marriage ceremonies. Turmeric, like jasmine, is a smell that transports me back to my

childhood and back to walking to the open-air market in Chennai to buy vegetables with

my grandmother. This combination of material, turmeric, and jasmine is one that recalls

so many vivid memories. It brings back the warmth and color of my childhood.

When I run my hands over the string dying it yellow, my hands too are stained.

The gritty feeling of the powder is comforting, and the slightly nutty aroma is one that

elicits many memories. As I run my hands over the string dying it yellow my hands too are stained. I recall that at times we took large amounts of turmeric, mixed it with water and slathered it all over our arms and legs as a means of purification. Perhaps this application has a purifying quality as well.

I take the newly yellowed string and sit at my desk and create a garland of

flowers. Sometimes I choose to include the older flowers that have become purple and died off on the plant. Sometimes I do not. On one occasion the purple flower I tried to

string fell out of my hand, so I decided that perhaps the older flowers would stay out of

this particular string of flowers because the plant decided to jump out of my hand. I tend to let the jasmine flowers decide where they want to go. I place the strings of flowers on my kitchen counter, so I can smell them as I walk by. They stay there until they dry out completely, turning purple and then brown. I take the dry brown flowers and put them in a kitchen drawer.

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Below are images of my hand with turmeric powder on the left and on the right,

my hand is stained with the golden turmeric due as it turns my white thread to gold.

Figure 5.3: Hand with turmeric powder (2015) Figure 5.4: Hand with turmeric dyed string (2015)

At the end of the summer, I had dozens of flowers in the kitchen drawer, and I did not know what to do with them. However, I did have many questions about this odd self- developed ritual, but the central question was why do I carry on this ritual of tending,

growing, stringing, smelling, drying and storing these jasmine flowers? I wondered if it

was an attempt to reconnect with memories, or maybe create a sense of home and

belonging in Ohio. It never occurred to me that this could be a facet of my artmaking and

research practice. Although I started saving jasmine garlands many years ago, I had not

grown jasmine with such vigor as I did during my graduate studies at Ohio State. One

day, almost at random, I decided to clean the kitchen and found dozens of dried jasmine

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flowers. Some strung together and others alone. I took everything out of the drawer, forgot about cleaning the kitchen and started to look at the collection of flowers.

Jasmine, Biographical-Theoretical Strand

As I started reading the post-human/new materialist theory that undergirds this study, I began to think about the collection of jasmine flowers differently. I examined this

ritual through a consideration of agential forces involved, and I saw an opportunity to rethink the jasmine flowers and plants through new materialist thought, informed mainly through Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism. Do the plants enact a kind of agential force on me and make me tend them as carefully as I do? Furthermore, I wondered how conceptions of this ritual would change by viewing it as a part of my artmaking practice.

I began by cleaning and decluttering a table, I took the dried jasmine flowers out of the kitchen drawer and carefully placed them onto a large piece of drawing paper and placed that paper on the table, careful not to damage the fragile flowers in transit. I was then able to take stock of the collection and ask myself, how did this happen, why did I keep these flowers and what do I do with it? I had dozens of individual dried flowers and four strings of sewn-together flowers from the summer of 2015. When I put the paper on the table, I noticed that different configurations and groupings of flowers emerged. These flowers, both individually and in groups, had a sculptural quality to them. It was exciting, but I was unsure of what to do next.

I began placing the flowers on various shades of white paper (cream, bisque, off-

white, white) and arranged them in various combinations. As soon as I started working

with the dried flowers, I noticed that they were challenging to handle. The flowers would 181

jump out of my hand while I attempted to sort through them. Perhaps it was because I

was reading new materialist texts at the time, but I thought that these might be the

emergence of boundaries through the developing material-discursive practice of working

with these flowers through artmaking. I thought perhaps the flowers were participating in this “ongoing reconfigurings of the world.” (Barad, 2007, p. 141). Once I started to attend

to these reconfigurings of the jasmine flowers, I wanted to keep being open to moments

when the jasmine would configure itself. This openness does not entail inaction as the

artist; rather it involves being mindful of where and when the jasmine flowers fall, how they arrange on the paper, how they rearrange when I accidentally nudge them. Instead of

treating these incidents as accidents in need of correction I became more aware of the

reconfiguring and shifting elements of the entanglement through which this jasmine-

based practice formed boundaries.

As I continued to work with the dried jasmine flowers, I realized that as I started to acknowledge and accept that the jasmine flowers were capable of agential dynamism, I was also decentering my primacy in entanglement through which this artmaking unfolded. Richardson (2015) uses a process of “unraveling the “I,” which focuses on highlighting the artmaking process as integral to art research and destabilizing the narrating subject through an ongoing process of critical inquiry in the writing of arts research” (p. 65). I realized that as I read the insights elucidated by my intra-action with the jasmine, that the flowers not only enact material agency over my actions through the apparatus of artmaking, but they also influence how I recall, remember, and write this research. This reminds me “how the material is always already discursively produced,

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and the discursive is always already materially produced” (Jackon & Mazzei, 2012, p.

111). Barad’s fundamental linking of material and discursive to material-discursive enacts a continuum rather than a binary approach between these two previously separately conceptualized entities and practices. In looking to material-discursivity Barad

(2007) asserts that “materialization is a matter not only of how discourse comes to matter but of how matter comes to matter” (p. 210).

From the beginning stages of this jasmine-based artmaking practice, I realized that the material qualities of the jasmine were specific and would have compelling implications as I viewed artmaking as a “material-discursive apparatus of bodily production” (Barad, 2007, p. 230). The term apparatus might seem like it should refer to something that makes measurements or laboratory equipment, but Barad explains that this is short-sighted. “Apparatuses are not mere instruments serving as a system of lenses that magnify and focus our attention on the object world; instead they are laborers that help constitute and are an integral part of the phenomena being investigated” (p. 232).

This view of apparatuses looks beyond instrumentality and sees an apparatus as an integral part of the object of study. As I worked through the jasmine, I realized that artmaking was fundamental to the way I understood the flowers more intimately, but also more broadly I saw the way materiality and matter are fundamental to the thinking, knowing, and writing occurring.

I noticed that the matter, materiality, material elements involved were not merely limited to the obvious material elements involved in my artmaking practice. As I became

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more familiar with the jasmine flowers, I began photographing the flowers on the various

drawing papers on which I surveyed and took stock of the flowers. In this process, I

realized that if I attended to the visual and physical shapes and weights of each flower, it

became clear how the flower needed to be photographed. Some flowers seemed to need

to be photographed in groups, while other flowers needed to be on their own.

Figure 5.5: Belle of India (2015) Figure 5.6: Twisted Jasmine (2015)

Figure 5.5 and Figure 5.6 show two compositions of photographed flowers. Belle

of India shows a group of flowers of the Jasminum sambac species of double jasmine

flowers. The shape and fragrance of the Belle of India double jasmine plants is intoxicating in their fresh state, even in their dried state they have a subtle musky aroma that I find pleasant. I dropped these flowers on the paper and let chance dictate how they are arranged and then photographed them where they landed. When grouped the flowers take on a pattern-like quality because the shades of brown and red that emerge while they

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dry creates a rather compelling composition. Twisted Jasmine shows a single, flattened

flower of the Jasminum tortuosum species that I pressed in a book. Until I found it in the

kitchen drawer, I forgot that I placed an old sketchbook with handmade paper, so I could

press some of the jasmine flowers I picked from the plants I grew.

The flowers in Belle of India enact a pattern and movement that contrast with the

elegant, twisting shape of the Twisted Jasmine. I often think about my work as stage

direction because of the influence of Indian dance on the way I approach artmaking.

Immediately, these images reminded me of a group of dancers versus a solo performer.

Belle of India shows a flurry of activity while Twisted Jasmine shows a single flower posing as if it were a solo dancer. In the context of artmaking practice, I play around with the compositions, arrangements, and configurations of these flowers quite a bit, but it is always evident that the flowers participate in these reconfigurations. At times, it feels as if I am conducting rather than a primary agent in my artmaking practice. My interactions with these flowers is reminiscent of Heidegger’s (1977) discussion of the co-

responsibility of matter and maker in the production of an object; the example Heidegger

uses is a silver chalice which I discussed in Chapter 2. As I interacted with the flowers, I

became increasingly aware of the agency of the materiality through which this artmaking

practice is enacted.

Even though I began attending to various agents at play in this practice, I began

noticing just how much materiality asserted itself. An example of this is the photographic

process through which I recorded images of the flowers. Taking pictures of the flowers

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led to their inevitable flattening into information, pixels, and data, which I realized had

the potential to take away the material qualities of the flowers to which I was so drawn.

However, thankfully the flowers retained aspects of their presence in the photographs,

and even though the photographs are comprised of data and information, they still have

an animated quality, which is available when the flowers are viewed in person.

The process of photography allowed me to zoom in on details and notice the minute details of these flowers as a group. The camera also became an apparatus through which I could view the material. As the camera occupied the position of apparatus in the artmaking entanglement, I was able to think about how the process of making art is never

static, instead artmaking is a dynamic shifting process that adapts to the needs of the

entanglement. Artmaking can, at times serve as a means through which diffractive

analysis is enacted. An artist can read insights from seemingly disparate areas of inquiry

through their artmaking practice, and that act feels like it is enacting a diffractive

methodology. Artmaking as a practice and as an apparatus is attuned to and appreciative

of the differences and interferences made apparent through diffraction because at times it

is an apparatus of diffraction itself.

Some of these differences are made aware through unintentional aspects of the

making process. While working many flowers are broken because they are fragile and

brittle. If I fail to handle some of the more fragile flowers gingerly, they disintegrate into

powdery nothingness. Fragments and specks of flowers can be seen in most of the

photographs I have taken thus far. These specks are reminders that even though I may try

186 to master these flowers, they push back with their own agential enactments. It is a co- constitutive making that evolves from continued engagement with this material element as diffractively read through the apparatus of artmaking.

At first, I was upset by this because I thought it meant that I was doing something wrong, but over time I came to view these broken elements differently. When I would lose a flower or a petal in the process of arranging and rearranging flowers, I gathered these pieces in a small container and left them on my table. As I got better at working with the flowers and they broke less, I forgot about my container of flower pieces.

However, while working on something else, I remembered an exhibition I saw at Hauser

& Wirth entitled “Dieter Roth, Björn Roth: Work Tables and Tischmatten.” These work tables and tischmatten (the German word for table covering) are the large grey pieces cardboard that covered the artist Dieter Roth’s work table. The exhibition’s accompanying essay describes that the table mats:

Became cumulative diaries of his innovative, inspired, chaotic and ultimately

lucid process, an approach that favored collaboration and the seamless melding of

art and life. With his son Björn, who joined his father in daily artmaking at age

15, Dieter fearlessly recorded a world of creation and wayward ideas through

these working documents-cum-paintings. (“Dieter Roth, Björn Roth: Work tables

& tischmatten,” 2010, para. 3)

The exhibition displayed artworks that were both intentionally and unintentionally created through his artmaking process; they show elements of his process

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and these table mats serve as diaries of his process. It reminded me that most often only

the result of human-centered intentionality is considered an artwork or a proper output of

the artmaking practice. It is also compelling that Dieter Roth’s son Björn is also a co- artist in the creation of these mats. It is an acknowledgement that both Björn and Dieter

Roth contributed to the development of these mats as they both made art on them. The table mats offer a look at the unintentional consequences of artmaking by culling from the stray marks and the remnants of the process of one’s artmaking practice.

Figure 5.7: Image of my table mat entangled with an image of one of Dieter and Bjorn Roth’s table mats

After Roth realized and attended to the potential of these unintentional works, he

deliberately set up mats in order to capture more traces of this daily life. Some of the

mats and tables recorded stains from the kitchen to which Roth affixed leftover food,

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photographs, collage, and painting (“Dieter Roth, Björn Roth: Work tables &

tischmatten,” 2010). For Roth, these mats became a meaningful way to look into his

artmaking process while simultaneously creating art. These tischmatten and tables allowed Roth to leave behind is early works, that were more organized and controlled to explore something completely different (“Dieter Roth, Björn Roth: Work tables & tischmatten,” 2010). When speaking about his early versions of the tables and tischmatten, Roth (2010) mentioned that he felt ashamed that he showed his messy work habits at first. But as he continued to work, he began recognizing the importance in owning up to the material through which his artmaking unfolded. In discussing his later approach to artmaking, he stated, “today I leave such crap the way it is. When I have the courage” (para.1).

Upon revisiting Roth’s tischmatten and work tables, I am interested in how he was able to recognize that these splatterings, traces, and afterthoughts of his artmaking process were also vital components in his making process. The table mat started as nothing more than a means to protect Roth’s work surface to make other art, but somehow these mats became their own, compelling works that are paradoxically simultaneously art and artmaking at once. I mean that they feel processual as if someone will sit down and continue to work them, and yet in the context of a gallery they also feel like finished works. I wonder if part of Roth’s process involved cultivating a recognition of this unique precipice between process and finish. These Tischmatten were a constant in both Dieter and Björn Roth’s lives and this project became a facet of not only the material/materiality of their artmaking practice but their everyday lives as well.

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Part of the artmaking process seems to be the cultivation of the ability to

recognize that the making process is not enacted simply through intentionality. I might sit

down at my work table today with the intention of producing a work of art, but nothing will happen without cooperation and willingness to engage from the matter and

materiality through which the practice is enacted. In the matter and materiality of

artmaking practice, I include the artist's body, my own body, as one of the elements that is entangled and attended to through diffraction using artmaking as an apparatus.

Remembering the Tischmatten and Table mats by Dieter and Björn Roth and

visiting the Hauser & Wirth website to see images of these works of art had a profound

impact on my jasmine-based project. I realized that boundaries emerged between the actions I intended and those that were consequences of my intended actions. I sought to

rethink this boundary and see what could emerge by intentionally took the jasmine scraps

I collected throughout the making process and put these elements on a piece of white

paper. The collected scraps were tiny and more fragile than the whole jasmine flowers. I

liked the idea of culling from the scrap pile of this process to inform a new set of

boundaries that could emerge. I thought about gluing or pinning these elements to attempt

to reconstruct a flower, but that had a distinctly Dr. Frankenstein feel that I did not feel

respected the matter and materiality through which this project emerges.

Because reconstructing the flowers felt like a betrayal to the matter through which

this inquiry unfolded, I thought for days about how to acknowledge this inadvertent

collection as Roth was able to do through his table mats. Looking back at how the table

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mats were displayed, I recalled that they were removed from the tables where they were

made and moved to the wall. Moving the mats helped recontextualize them and provided a venue through which new boundaries could materialize through the intra-action of the mats and the space of the gallery. As Barad (1998) describes, “materialization is an

iteratively intra-active process whereby material-discursive bodies are sedimented out of

the intra-action of multiple material-discursive apparatuses through which these

phenomena (bodies) become intelligible” (p. 108). In this case, the material-discursive apparatuses are the tables and table mats and the gallery space. When the table mats are presented inside the space of Hauser & Wirth gallery, the boundaries of these objects become more intelligible. Prior to their placement in such a codified space of art viewing, they may still have felt connected to the process of making. In this context, they look like

Cy Twombly paintings. However, in the space of the gallery, the hand-wrought quality of the artwork takes a backseat to its objecthood. The same material has a different materiality because of the contextual, spatial, and discursive connotations of removing these works from their origin.

Even though different boundaries emerge as a result of viewing these works in a gallery space, I found the works compelling because when you viewed them carefully, the materiality and process emerged once more. Closely inspecting Roth’s works allowed me to imagine how these artworks emerged. One of the mats has an ad hoc chess board on it; another has an outline of a banana. The table mats worked because they did not try so hard. They were unselfconscious about revealing how and what they are made of.

There is no attempt by the artist(s) to obfuscate the process of the mats and it is obvious

191 soon after you start looking at them that they operate as a record of the passage of time in the studio. The marks are so identifiable and familiar. There are spills of gesso, varnish, and ink. There are doodles, scribbles, notes, and coffee cup rings that occur at my own desk.

Figure 5.8: Fragments 1 (2017)

After working with the flower fragments and reading them through my recollections of Roth’s Tischmatten, I decided to place some of them in a small glass bottle with a cork lid for safekeeping, this is shown in Figure 5.8. I intended this as a temporary measure until I could get a sense of what to do with this set of flower fragments. However, on a second look at the bottle, I appreciated the simplicity of this approach to interrogate the question of whether, like Roth, I could attend to both the

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intended and unintended consequences of the inquiry taking place through these flowers.

Placing these flower fragments in a bottle let me collect them without trying to

reconstruct them completely. In its simplicity, this solution felt like it could be adequate

in allowing these remnants to have a chance to reemerge as elements through which understandings on the way the matter and materiality of artmaking not only facilitates the artmaking-philosophical-research of this flower-based inquiry.

Another iteration of the Roth-inspired thinking materialized when I decided to

apply the straightforward approach to attending to another set of flower fragments. Figure

5.9 shows the petals of a double jasmine flower that I saved in another small bowl next to

the contents of the glass jar. These petals must have been on my work table for a few

years, but I ignored them until I thought about them through Roth’s table mats and the

glass jar of flower fragments. I took the petals from their bowl and placed them on a

piece of clean, creamy white paper that I had been using to keep and sort through the

jasmine flowers as I worked with them. I realized quickly that these flower pieces created a flower-like composition as if they were approaching their flower-like state. After reminding myself to stop overthinking things, I simply photographed the flowers as they fell and cropped them in a square composition to augment the way the flower fragments fell onto the paper.

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Figure 5.9: Fragments 2 (2017)

What I understood through reengaging with these fragments and reading them through Roth’s table mats is that intentionality is an overrated element of artmaking practice. Attending to matter and materiality opened unplanned and often exciting avenues for further inquiry. In this case, I am not sure if this bottle is compelling, but it offers a chance to attend to insights that emerge through the intra-action of material- discursive apparatuses and specifically attend to the insights and phenomena that emerge.

Interestingly, as this engagement through jasmine continued, I also realized that although I conceptualized that artmaking, research, and philosophical inquiry were articulated as methods for gathering insights I could diffract, these methods kept shifting and their boundaries were porous. The diffractive methodology I outlined in Chapter 4

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has altered the way I approach artmaking practice. Prior to this study, I viewed artmaking

as a means through which to make art and maybe develop more observational skill or

way of seeing. Employing diffraction has turned artmaking practice into a site through which I understand the material phenomena around me. Diffraction is described by Barad

(2007) as “reading insights through one another in ways that help illuminate differences as they emerge…” (p. 30). In this process, artmaking serves both as an apparatus for research and as a method through which I can attend to the differences illuminated by reading insights through one another while depending on artmaking to serve as an

apparatus through which I develop and attend to differences that matter. I continued this

jasmine-based project by diffracting the insights garnered from the materiality of the

jasmine to understand how the new materialist theoretical underpinnings of my research

could be further developed.

Additionally, this project has become a way for me to view artmaking as an

entanglement of agential forces while dismantling the trope that artmaking is an inquiry

directed by a sole human agent. Diffraction as a methodology is useful in generating

understandings from reading the material-discursive phenomena of my artmaking practice through concepts of new materialism; this process connects both areas and braids them together to create additional material and discursive insights to which I can attend.

Using diffraction is described by Dolphijn and van der Tuin (2012) as:

A method of diffractively reading insights through one another, building new

insights, and attentively and carefully reading for differences that matter in their

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fine details, together with the recognition that there intrinsic to this analysis is an

ethics that is not predicated on externality but rather entanglement. (p. 50)

Diffraction, as understood through artmaking practice, research, and philosophical

inquiry, is understood as a way to develop insights by not just reflecting on theories and

artists who influence this study but reading the insights from many areas of inquiry

through one another and attending to the differences that emerge. Differences could relate

to an understanding of how boundaries are enacted through the intra-action of two

material-discursive apparatuses as occurred with the reading of Roth’s table mats through

my flower fragment-based inquiry.

Barad makes a distinction between the concepts of reflection and diffraction, and

she feels that going beyond reflection is a necessary step in a new materialist

methodology. Diffraction is this attempt to transcend reflection. Barad (2007) states, “To

theorize is not to leave the material world behind and enter the domain of pure ideas

makes objective reflection possible. Theorizing, like experimenting, is a material

practice” (p. 17). By anchoring this inquiry through both material and discursive

elements, this study is able to root the insights of this study in materiality. Because they are diffracted, the material and conceptual insights are both brought forward by a

necessary engagement with and through materiality based in artmaking practice.

Barad (2007) describes how the notion of objectivity through reflection is perhaps

misguided; we must recognize the real material and physical consequences that emerge

through our discourses. To do this, we must attempt to set aside the urge to view the

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world without considering our presence in it and the influence of the world on us. By

considering my jasmine ritual through artmaking and diffractively reading this ritual

through the concepts of Barad’s agential realism and new materialism I attempt to look

beyond reflections on artmaking and attempt to assess the real material engagements

enacted through our entanglements with the material of artmaking.

As explained previously in this chapter, Barad’s concept of agential realism is

central to this inquiry because it outlines an approach to attending to material/non-human

agencies found in the theoretical explorations of new materialism that are helpful to

advancing this study.

Barad (2007) states:

I propose “agential realism” as an epistemological-ontological-ethical framework

that provides an understanding of the role of human and nonhuman, material and

discursive, and natural and cultural factors in scientific and other social-material

practices, thereby moving such considerations beyond the well-worn debates that

pit constructivism against realism, agency against structure, and idealism against

materialism. (p. 26)

Barad puts forward agential realism as a way to trouble the history of separation of epistemological, ontological and ethical concerns that undergird the way we view the agential roles. Agential realism, for Barad, becomes a way to move beyond whether we can attribute agency to human and nonhuman entities and she posits that the relationship between these entities is co-constitutive. Furthermore, she states that agency should not

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be viewed as an asset or an entity that is held by an agent. For Barad (2007) “agency is not an attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world” (p. 103). Defining agency as

a continually emergent phenomenon rather than a static, unchanging entity allows for the

constant re-negotiation of agential forces in artmaking. The co-constitutive entanglement

of shifting agencies between artist and material in artmaking allows for a unique dance to

occur. The artist manipulates the material, but the material may have other ideas. This

notion is articulated in a rather compelling manner by Sara Ahmed in her examination of

her relationship to tables, particularly her table.

Ahmed (as cited in Coole & Frost, 2010) writes:

As I type, I face the table, and it is what I am working on. I am touching the

object as well as the keyboard and am aware of it as a sensuous given that is

available for me. In repeating the work of typing, my body comes to feel a certain

way. My neck gets sore, and I stretch to ease the discomfort. I pull my shoulders

back every now and then as the posture I assume (a bad posture I am sure) is a

huddle: I huddle over the table as I repeat the action (the banging of keys with the

tips of my fingers); the action shapes me, and it leaves its impression through

bodily sensations, prickly feelings on the skin surface, and the more intense

experience of discomfort. (p. 246-247)

In this passage, Ahmed recognizes and admits that her table exerts agency over her body

and explores this notion by attending to her senses. The scene is familiar to most of us as

we write more than we should at tables that contort our bodies and make our necks sore.

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The same soreness is indeed present in most of my artmaking endeavors, the material of

my artmaking shapes me, and so do the objects in my studio—my table, chair, computer,

and so forth. These understandings brought to light by reading Ahmed’s account through

my own experiences with the jasmine flowers, I recall that she brings forward a

significant element of artmaking—the body of the artist.

Considering matter, to me, requires attending to issues of the body, even if it is just to acknowledge the body of the artist. Merleau-Ponty (1962) explains that it is

necessary to consider corporeality as a way to bring meaning to matter and material

agency; for Merleau-Ponty and through new materialist scholarship, meaning and

discourses are always already interwoven and entangled. Elizabeth Grosz (1994)

explains:

If for Merleau-Ponty it is corporeality that introduces meaning or structure into

matter, this is because the body literally incarnates material capacities for agency.

Existence is for him an internally productive, formative process wherein meaning

and matter are irreducibly interwoven. (p. 15)

Here Grosz articulates an underlying element to Merleau-Ponty’s theories of

embodiment. Merleau-Ponty identifies that the body is agential, and it is related to

material/materiality. Furthermore, she articulates that Merleau-Ponty sees that matter and

meaning are intrinsically connected.

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This linking of the body to material and meaning feels very familiar to me as it is a facet of Indian conceptualizations of non-dualism discussed in Chapter 3. Koller (1993) describes the way the Indian philosophical tradition regards the body:

That is, the human body is really a body-mind, rather than a mere body or a body

to which a mind is somehow attached. And this body-mind is not viewed

statically, as an ontologically completed being capable of undergoing various

accidental changes, but is seen as a karmic process, a continuing process of

making and unmaking, a process which has no beginning and which is never

completed. Furthermore, it is a process constituted by interaction with other

processes in an ever-widening sphere that extends ultimately to the whole world,

linking each person to other persons and beings in a web of interconnections that

extends to all times and places. Indeed, what we think of as individual persons or

beings are viewed within the tradition as junctures within the karmic network,

analogous to the knots in a ﬁshnet. (p. 45)

Above Koller describes the inextricably connected conceptualization of the body and mind in Indian philosophical traditions. Although I did not explicitly know the extent of the connectedness while growing up, I always knew that the way bodies and minds were regarded in my culture was different from most Western approaches. Koller describes a net-like connectivity between bodies and minds that rings true to my experience of Indian philosophy in practice. I wonder whether the practice of weaving jasmine flowers that the flowers sellers do in India is a metaphor for how seemingly separate entities can be

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knotted together to create an extensive network that queers time, space, and matter

through its entangled becoming.

This acknowledgment of the entanglement of entities is why new materialist

ideas are so compelling to me and for this study. Many new materialist scholars contend

that the objects with which the body interacts have agencies. This is where the notion of

entanglement comes into play. Karen Barad sees entanglements as a way to recognize

that things, particles, people and entities are created through their entangled states and as

such are linked inextricably.

Barad (2007) states:

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 is

not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather,

individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating. (p. ix)

Barad asserts that not only are agential forces at play in an entanglement, but the boundaries we construct between entities is not as finite as we may think. If we envision artmaking as an entanglement, then we must also consider what it means to consider ourselves inextricably linked to the entanglement to which we belong. Whether it is in the studio or the world, our existence is shaped by both the human and non-human entities, and both emerge through entanglement. An entanglement, as it pertains to artmaking, can perhaps be visualized as a cloud in which the artist, their medium/material, concept, and space, time, various other material-discursive phenomena are all entities which do not

201 preexist their intra-action. These elements through agential realism, emerge through intra- actions and enactments of various agential forces. A discussion of artmaking that diffracts theories of new materialism should interrogate existing understandings of agency and materiality in artmaking practice.

As I continued this project of viewing these flowers by using artmaking as a material-discursive apparatus, I realized that this project, this obsession of preserving flowers was more extensive than I previously thought. After excavating the multitude of dried flowers in the kitchen cabinet, I discovered that I had more flowers pressed inside various books in my studio. Pressed flowers have shapes and tendencies that differ from the other flowers. Figure 5.10 shows one of the pressed flowers I found when I looked through the books in my studio. Although the flower in Figure 5.10 shows a dried Indian magnolia flower, it became part of this project because of its proximity to the jasmine flowers.

Figure 5.10: Pressed Magnolia (2014)

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It became clear that this activity of preserving jasmine flowers was one that I engaged with for a long time, at least the last fifteen years. As I began finding more dried flowers all over my studio, I realized that there was something about this material that held a profound significance for me. I began thinking about my engagement with the jasmine plants as well—was my attempt to nurse them through the winter a way to somehow reconnect with a different time? In rethinking the agential realities of this practice, I realize that the jasmine plants and flowers enacted agency over my actions. I even let the flowers decide their inclusion in my activity of stringing them together. It seemed essential to attend to the will of the plant, flowers, and the collection of dried flowers in my studio.

Reading this engagement through my evolving notions and definitions of artmaking and new materialism has led me to question assumptions we make when doing, teaching, and learning art. Perhaps we are not considering enough when we study artmaking practice because in practice artmaking is still taught as a pursuit that relies solely on the artist. However, this assumption closes off the possibilities of attending to the other agential forces at play in artmaking practice. In my ongoing reconfigurings with the jasmine plants, I realize that I was never in complete control of the situation; any control I had in the process was enacted through entanglement with jasmine. The more I

worked with it and thought through the material, the more I was able to know the specific

material capacities it entailed. The more entangled I become in this project the more I

question assumptions we make about the solidity of boundaries, particularly the boundary

between maker and material in artmaking.

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Continuing to think about rethinking assumptions, I also wanted to see if I could develop further insights into Barad’s notion of spacetimemattering through my jasmine- based inquiry. I thought about ways I could reconsider space and time as more than “a succession of evenly spaced moments or as an external parameter that tracks the motion of matter in some preexisting space” (Barad, 2007, p. 180). Looking at the piles of jasmine flowers on my table, I realized that I was grouping each batch of flowers by the day they were picked when I strung them together. The first set of strings were done prior

to recognizing this fact, I strung the flowers together merely, so I could have a place to

put them. As these strings of flowers began to dry and turn brown, I put them in the

kitchen drawer and forgot about them. However, in recognizing their ability to facilitate

different conceptualizations of space, time, and matter, I looked at these strings again. I

realized that these strings of jasmine represented a week of flowers that I picked in July

of 2015. Figure 5.11 shows each strand of July photographed and presented together.

Figure 5.11: July 2015, jasmine garlands

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Immediately, the strands reminded me of the Incan Quipu I used to walk past each

day on my way to work at the Brooklyn Museum. It looked like an unraveled knitting

project; the Quipu is a collection of threads that are woven into a primary thread that

resembled a braided string. Before researching the Quipu, I thought the braid looked like

where the keeper of this object would hold it. It was so compelling that I eventually

researched it and discovered so much more than I expected. Through various knot

patterns and sequences, Quipus were used to record things, indicate the passage of time,

and keep stories through a complex system of knots.

Strangely, recalling the Quipu and how it reminds me of my jasmine project

shows that Barad’s assertion that space, time, and matter are enacted through

entanglement and do not preexist it. The material configuration of the jasmine flowers

brought forward a distant memory thereby enacting a scenario where memory can

reemerge and assert significance. This bending of time is possible because the boundaries

enacted by the diffraction of material-discursive apparatuses involved in this study. As

Barad (2007) writes:

Apparatuses are not merely about us. And they are not merely assemblages that

include nonhumans as well as humans. Rather, apparatuses are specific material

reconfigurings of the world that do not merely emerge in time but iteratively

reconfigure spacetimematter as part of the ongoing dynamism of becoming. (p.

142)

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Apparatuses allow space, time, and matter to emerge through their intra-actions.

Engaging with and attending to various intra-actions of material, discursive, and material- discursive entities are not merely about attending to how these entities come together, but how the world shapes these entities, and how they shape the world.

Similarly, allowing the flowers to act as a marker of time, rather than an external measure of time allows me to recall so many vivid details. I can remember that the summer of 2015 was a hot summer, but that I was not able to grow many jasmine flowers, so the ones that are strung became extra special. I see on the second string from the left that I grew four sizeable double jasmine flowers and that these flowers have an extra potent aroma that I would smell each time I walked by. Space, time, and matter are then reconfigured through the materiality of the jasmine flowers. Taking the memory of the Quipu and the jasmine flowers, I wanted to see what a material consequence of might be thinking these two recollections through one another.

I started the jasmine collection in Figure 5.12 without a plan. I merely picked

flowers each day after waking up and strung them together end to end on this paper. The

jasmine strings are sewn directly on the paper with yellow, turmeric-stained thread. I

suppose then the marker of time that emerged through entanglement was when I woke up

each day, but I do not recall what day of the week I started or stopped. I looked to the

jasmine plant to inform when I would stop, and on the ninth day, the plant produced no

flowers. I saw that juncture as a natural end to this idea, and that is how the boundary of this artwork was enacted. However, the artwork itself does not need to read as a kind of

206 time keeping entity. When I encountered the Quipu, I had no idea what they were, and yet I was still intrigued by them. Whether or not the artwork reads as an exploration of time, is non-consequential. What is more compelling is that the work was enacted by engagement with both material and discursive implications of time, space, and matter.

Barad (2007) writes, “the point is that the past was never simply there to begin with and the future is not simply what will unfold; the "past" and the "future" are iteratively reworked and enfolded through the iterative practices of spacetimemattering” (p. 315).

By reworking the notion of time through jasmine flowers, this too is enfolded through spacetimemattering. Not because it represents any one time, but because it represents a week of growth for a jasmine plant and then continually worked and reworked as a past and future of what this object might bring up as it is enfolded in ongoing practices of spacetimemattering.

Figure 5.12: one week, 2018

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By employing a diffractive methodology and reading insights from my artmaking

practice and post-human/new materialist theories, I slowly move toward further

understandings and articulations of the co-constitutive, entangled, on-going negotiations of artmaking and materiality. Acknowledging the agency of the material in intra-action and the pivotal role of both human and non-human in entanglements is vital to examining contemporary artmaking. Artists work with a variety of materials and media, and to develop an artmaking process that is productive and generative, it is essential that artists acknowledge that both there are no passive agents in artmaking and that various elements including human, non-human, space, time, matter, and materiality are essential to enacting the artmaking process.

As I diffractively read the physical material of the jasmine flowers and the insights they offer through new materialism and attend to the differences produced through artmaking, it brings new avenues for exploration and further complicates my relationship with these entities.

Figure 5.13: Thinking in Making sketch (2017)

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On scraps of paper, Moleskine notebooks, and post-it notes I keep jotting down

thoughts that come up during the making process. As I was worked with the bits of

jasmine and diffracted them through Roth’s table mats I had a thought that I felt

compelled to write. This note page of notes is what is shown in Figure 5.13. I realized that I was starting to enact a form of thinking-in-making that felt like a moving meditation. As I attending to insights that emerge through the artmaking-research- philosophical inquiry of this study I kept following a familiar path. The best way to describe it is a “thinking in making-making in thinking-thinking-making.” Figure 5.13

does a better job of showing this emergent insight as it developed. I thought about it as a

mantra, akin to yoga, a cycle, and a palindrome. I knew that this process had an

undulating, cyclical quality that I could not quite articulate at the time.

At the time this seemed like a revelation about the kind of inquiry that is possible

through the convergence of several methods of inquiry that need only have realized

boundaries when they form through the research process or through entanglement. I

thought about this idea again, much after the first notation of it and realized that what I

was trying to articulate is the braided waive idea that I described in Chapter 4. I realized,

however, that due to the multi-layered methods I was employing that the waves and

braids of this research are more complicated. They are often iterative and cyclical, like an

intricate knot that is often tied and untied and sometimes gets so tangled that it needs to

be tangled further. There is no way to draw a picture or clearly articulate the kind of

making in thinking—thinking in making that is enacted through an artmaking practice that is based in research and philosophically informed. When layering a diffractive

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methodology on top of that, only one certainty emerges about the nature of this research,

and that is that it is अिन�� or “anirukta” which is something that is not well-explained

or defined because it is already explained.

Which is not to say that it is not worth pursuing an explanation, but rather that at

any given time an explanation arising through entangled entities may change as their

intra-actions change, as phenomena emerge through material-discursive apparatuses, as

the entities become further entangled, as boundaries are enacted, and as boundaries

dissolve. Barad (2014) describes the process of endings and understandings as

sedimentation, but not a closure. “Matter is a sedimented intra-acting, an open field.

Sedimenting does not entail closure. (Mountain ranges in their liveliness attest to this

fact) (p. 168). One of the jasmine plants I have been caring for during this artmaking-

research-philosophical inquiry, will unfortunately no longer be so actively entangled in

this research as it has died. However, this sedimentation does not entail a definite end. I took the remnants of the plant brushed off the excess dirt and photographed and scanned the plant as it is now. Figure 5.14 shows the jasmine plant as it is now. The plant, although no longer able to grow, has transformed into a sculpture that serves as a reminder to care for my remaining plants so this project might continue.

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Figure 5.14: Jasmine carcass (2017)

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“The dance of creation and destruction is the basis of the very existence of matter, since all material particles ‘self-interact’ by emitting and reabsorbing virtual particles. Modern physics has thus revealed that every subatomic particle not only performs an energy dance but also is an energy dance; a pulsating process of creation and destruction.” [Emphasis in original]

– Fritjof Capra (2010, p. 244)

This chapter extends the discussion of the material/materiality of artmaking

practice introduced in Chapter 5 through a discussion of another series of artworks. This series was enacted through the artmaking-philosophical inquiry-research methods central to the inquiry in this study as it manifests through artmaking and theoretical insights enacted and attended to through a diffractive methodology. The artworks and understandings in this chapter are developed through a critical engagement with elements and materials traditionally considered discursive having to do with discourse and/or text.

The boundaries of this textual provocation emerged through the process of reading and diffracting this reading through artmaking to produce text-based art. I did not begin this line of inquiry with the intention of creating and attending to discourse-based elements; instead, this boundary emerged through my intra-actions. The material, discursive, and material-discursive phenomena that emerged through the diffraction of these elements are explored in this chapter, as are insights that emerged by diffracting the textual provocations/text/discursive artmaking through the process of writing this chapter.

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Diffraction as knowing through, seemingly circuitously

As artists, we are often told that we need to get “critical distance” from our work,

but by looking to diffraction as a methodology to guide my artmaking-research-

philosophical inquiry it becomes unnecessary to create distance because one is always

already entangled. Engaging with the notion of entanglement through Karen Barad’s

theory of agential realism requires rethinking the notion of critical distance. It brings

forth the question of whether it is possible to be distantly entangled. The notion of

distance in artmaking represents the ability to reflect on one’s work and process. Instead

of reflecting on artmaking, as one is taught to do, employing a diffractive methodology

requires us to become more entangled while we work through the practice in order to

mitigate any sticking points, troubles or stoppages. Even the act of stepping away from

one’s artmaking practice involves a stepping towards something else. Dealing with

phenomena that seem outside of the immediate process of making has the potential to

offer insights and add nuance to the artmaking-research practice. Working and thinking

through diffraction in artmaking practice is an acknowledgment that one is never simply

carrying out the act of making. A diffractive method recognizes that even when we think

we are “taking a break” or attempting to distance ourselves from this work, or reflecting,

we remain very much connected to the work, we are always already entangled.

Diffraction as a methodological direction was first proposed in Donna Haraway’s

1992 article “The Promise of Monsters.” Kaiser and Thiele (2014) explain that Haraway looks to diffraction to move from “oppositional to differential, from static to productive, and [comprehend] our ideas of scientific knowledge from reflective, disinterested

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judgment to mattering, embedded involvement” (p. 165). The “embedded involvement”

enabled through diffraction is one that displaces the notion of critical distance because it

troubles the assumption that to create, we need to cultivate the ability to detach from the

artmaking process. Both Haraway and Barad describe diffraction as a methodology that

allows for the processing of differences through one another, rather than feign that it is

possible to consider the elements in artmaking practice individually or separately.

Diffraction as a concept and methodology recognizes that while we may focus on a

specific element, this act is merely a temporary boundary constructed through the making

process.

Diffraction contrasts with existing methodologies, particularly exiting qualitative

and reflective methods and methodologies because they rely on an oppositional approach and at times make claims that objectivity or detachedness in research is possible. A diffractive methodology is built on the premise that the researcher fundamentally changes the research through their involvement in it. This is evidenced by Barad’s discussion of quantum experiments where the act of observing an experiment changes the outcome.

Through diffraction, the notion of a limited and defined research subject is reevaluated to acknowledge the researcher’s effect on the research process. From this perspective, the act of conducting research influences the intended subject of research. As such the research process is not neutral; it is transformational. Distance or exteriority from one’s work could then entail an extreme closeness, insights ebb and flow as they are read through one another during research. Employing a diffractive methodology allows for

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flexible engagement in one’s artmaking-research practice and considers the multiple

agential qualities of spaces, places, and temporalities.

While Haraway and Barad’s conceptualizations of diffraction are primarily used to elucidate their respective research areas, taking up their thinking and diffracting it through artmaking practice produces patterns of difference, insights, and avenues for further exploration that allow the work to remain open and generative. Instead of thinking about artmaking and artwork as “finished” or “complete” this treats the products of practice as the sedimentations of artmaking practice. For example, when I begin a new project, I often think of it as a clean break or fresh start from my previous work, but

through this study, I realize that this is never the case. By acknowledging that the work I

make is always already entangled in the artmaking process, and therefore connected to

any future endeavors allows freedom to explore new avenues because the pressure to

create “new” works ceases. Instead, the work is a diffractive enactment and reconfiguring of theoretical-discursive-material.

Barad’s take on diffraction develops through the various examples she discusses in her texts. These examples are drawn from her areas of research and interest and include quantum physics/mechanics, ultrasound technology, brittlestar (a relative of the starfish), and ethnographic studies. In each example, Barad works through the nuances and complexities of the entanglements of the material-discursive apparatuses and phenomena that intra-act and co-constitute phenomena and meanings. As Barad diffracted her theory of agential realism through these areas, her understanding of agential realism expanded. The potential of diffraction to both complicate ideas and

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develop insights is appealing, both as a methodology and as a general mindset to

approach artmaking practice. As I read Barad’s exposition of diffraction and her theory of agential realism, I began to wonder how my understandings of new materialism and diffraction might expand if I diffracted it through another facet of my artmaking practice.

Heaps of Language

As this dissertation project progressed, I found myself reading posthumanist and new materialist writings for a review of literature to inform this study. When I began

reading an article entitled “On Touching— The Inhuman That Therefore I Am” I

encountered a block. Barad’s writing, her words, and meanings kept leaping off the page.

The characters animated, they broke off and re-arranged themselves as I read. Many of the texts I had been reading are quite demanding, but I grappled with this article differently. Because I was struggling so much, I knew I had to come up with a different way to contend with the text.

Instead of trudging through the article, again and again, I decided to take a break

and make some tea. While the tea was steeping, I began leafing through books on my

bookshelf. I picked up a few art history books and exhibition catalogs to see whether

there might be a way through my troubles with Barad’s “On Touching” through art. After

leafing through several books like an old copy of Janson’s Art History and a catalog from

the Genesis P-Orridge exhibition at the Rubin Museum. I spotted a catalog from a

Museum of Modern Art exhibition called Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language. The

exhibition’s catalog was a commissioned work for the exhibition, so the catalog is

simultaneously about the exhibition and in/of the exhibition. It is also issue #3 of a series

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of Bulletins of the Serving Library published by David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey under the name Dexter Sinister (Hugendubel, 2012). I saw the exhibition at the MoMA in 2012 and bought a catalog, but I had not given it much thought since then.

As I opened the catalog to the last few pages, an excerpt from the curator’s essay

struck me as a strategy to tackle my difficulties reading the Barad article. In her essay,

“This Language is Ecstatic Because,” the curator Laura Hoptman (in Dexter Sinister,

2012) states “THIS LANGUAGE IS A THING IN ITSELF. It is not a delivery system or a pronouncement, or a reinforcement of authority. It is not even a subject. It just is”

[Emphasis in original] (This language is ecstatic because, para. 1). As I perused the rest of the catalog and exhibition artwork, it elucidated some of the issues I had encountered while reading Barad. I wanted the text to behave as other texts had in my previous reading experiences; I wanted it to deliver information to me as I read easily. However, much of the philosophical work that informs this dissertation does not easily deliver anything. Particularly, I was getting used to the way Barad’s concepts unfurled in a nonlinear and poetic manner and that the written words and linguistic elements exerted agency over the way these ideas were expressed. My thinking on the agential qualities of language was furthered by Hoptman’s (in Dexter Sinister, 2012) assertion that language is a thing and not a delivery system. Viewing language as an agential thing changed my view of Barad’s “On Touching” because it allowed me to view the words on a page as only a way to understand Barad’s ideas, but as an active and co-constitutive element in the text’s becoming.

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As I continued to read the catalog, I spotted the various text-based artworks by

artists like Carl Andre, Dieter Roth, and Lawrence Weiner. I realized that these works

addressed the physical, psychical, semantic, and other qualities of text that the everyday

obscures. Through their artwork, these artists were able to see the “thingly character” of

language that had been obscured (Heidegger, 1962, p. 98). In Chapter 2, I reference

Heidegger’s discussion of things being present-at-hand; he describes presentness-at-hand

as an inert object waiting for its time to be used. Although I agree with the new

materialist rejection of this reductive look at objects as inert and non-agential,

Heidegger’s concept of things as present-at-hand helps to name what happens as things or

ideas become so ubiquitous that their active role in co-constituting the world is forgotten

or taken for granted.

Heidegger also mentions that when an object or tool ceases to function that it

makes its use known to us (Heidegger, 1962). Heidegger uses the example of a hammer

to explain the readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) concept; he states that we learn about the

hammer through our use and manipulation of the tool (Heidegger, 1962). As I mentioned

before, the reason for my perusal of the Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language catalog was due to my inability to read and comprehend an article written by Karen Barad linearly. In this example, language can be considered as the tool that ceased to function in a manner to which I was accustomed. The jumbled characters on the page necessitated another path to understanding the text. It is curious, however, that the action of using language as merely a tool is what brought me to my current dilemma.

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By the time I started reading Barad’s “On Touching,” my view of language had

ceased to appreciate the active and co-constitutive role it has in the understandings that are developing in this dissertation. Through repeated use and acclimation, I began viewing language as merely a communicative entity, but this view broke down while I read Barad’s article. I misguidedly encountered the words as “standing reserve” which is a term that Heidegger uses to describe the instrumental or utilitarian orientation we can

have with the world (Heidegger, 1977). Heidegger (1977) argues that technology has an instrumental orientation to the world because technological advancement enables us to think about things as explicitly defined by human use. It is compelling to consider that the technology that enables the writing of this dissertation also enabled the transformation of Barad’s article and words as mere standing reserve. It is only through the breakdown of my ability to parse and comprehend Barad’s article that I recognized that my approach to language had become so limited.

This breakdown enabled my realization that discourse, text, and language are

never passive. The notion of passively absorbing information through language is an idea

that is often assumed, but passivity is problematic because it denies that there are active

agents involved in the emergence of learning, reading, and artmaking. Instead, if we

consider artmaking practice as a “knowledge-making practice” as elaborated by Barad

(2007), then artmaking can serve as a robust apparatus through which to attend to

entanglements. Referring to Niels Bohr’s discussion of how to understand scientific

practices, Barad (2007) states that the “ability to understand the world hinges on our

taking account of the fact that our knowledge-making practices are social-material

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enactments that contribute to, and are a part of, the phenomena we describe” (p. 26). The

ability to understand any knowledge-making practices social-material enactments helps in reassessing our orientation towards how we conceptualize practices, and in the case of this dissertation, specifically artmaking practice.

It is especially compelling to reconceptualize artmaking practices through new materialist philosophies because these ideas continue this notion that there is more at play than one active agent creating knowledge out of thin air. New materialists (Barad, 2007;

Bennett, 2010; Coole & Frost, 2010; Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012; Lenz Taguchi,

2013) posit that human, non-human, social, political, ethical entities are factors in co-

constituting the world. Moreover, through the flower-based artwork discussed in Chapter

5 and the text-based work detailed in this chapter, it is evident that in considering the

materiality of these practices I recognized that the materiality is not limited merely to

medium or the specific materials that constitute the artwork. Instead, the practice is

enacted through various social, cultural, material-discursive, human, non-human entities that enable the knowledge-making practice to unfold and emerge.

As I continued reading and looking through the Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of

Language catalog, the awareness of language and text as more than a mere communicative entity began developing clarity, and the utilitarian orientation I had developed towards language started to fall away. I started thinking the work being enacted through this dissertation differently and I needed to think about the writing process, artmaking process, all the processes enabling this dissertation differently. As I

read the rest of Hoptman’s essay, it continued to present images of artwork from the

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exhibition that used text and language as communicative, semantic entity, and as material

— interspersed through the images Hoptman, as if building from these images, developed some provocations about the nature of language, writing, and text. Hoptman (in Dexter

Sinister, 2012) writes “this language is malleable. It can be pulverized into words,

vivisected into phonemes, atomized into what Georges Perec called “motivated letters.” It

is form that is not part of, or related to any structure” (This language is ecstatic because, para. 3). Hoptman continues by stating that “this language is hypergraphic” and “this language is impractical” then “this language is synesthetic” and “this language works against reading” (Dexter Sinister, 2012). Lastly, Hoptman writes, “This language is not descriptive of reality but is reality itself. Because it has equal stature with the tangible, it can be found in the world. Or created ex nihilo” (Dexter Sinister, 2012, This language is ecstatic because, para. 13).

Encountering this essay and the artwork in the exhibition made me see that I needed to approach the Barad article and its text as a tangible, material entity. I wondered whether a new tactic inspired by Hoptman’s essay could help in a radical rethinking of what it means to read a text. I recognized that I needed to work through the discomfort of this article, rather than ignoring it. Before reading Hoptman’s essay, I considered trudging through the article and attempt to ignore its assertions. I even considered putting the Barad article aside and perhaps coming back to it later. However, I became obsessed with working towards a solution on how to mitigate the trouble Barad’s article was giving me. I heeded the reminder of the materiality and agency of language, text, and discourse from the Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language exhibition catalog and diffracted it

221 through the Barad essay. I had a renewed outlook on the article, so instead of feeling frustrated at the jumble that occurred as I read previously, I looked at Barad’s article “On

Touching—The inhuman That Therefore I am” again. I realized that I could attend to insights and differences created by employing a diffractive methodology. Barad (2007) describes:

the diffractive methodology that I use in thinking insights from different

disciplines…through one another is attentive to the relational ontology that is at

the core of agential realism. It does not take the boundaries of any of the objects

or subjects of these studies for granted but rather investigates the material-

discursive boundary-making practices that produce "objects" and "subjects" and

other differences out of, and in terms of, a changing relationality. (p. 93)

Barad enacts her diffractive methodology to attend to the insights produced by attending to a diffractive reading of science studies through various philosophical ideas. In the same way, I seek to trouble the boundaries of Barad and her ideas by grappling with her article “On Touching” by diffracting it through the exhibition and catalog for Ecstatic

Alphabets/Heaps of Language and attend to the insights through the apparatus and material-discursive boundary-making practice of artmaking. As I continued, I looked at another article by Barad (2010) titled “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological

Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come” where she discusses her approach to writing:

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An experiment…I aim to provide the reader with an opportunity to engage in

an imaginative journey that is akin to how electrons experience the world: that

is, a dis/orienting experience of the dis/jointedness of time and space,

entanglements of here and there, now and then, a ghostly sense of

dis/continuity, a quantum dis/continuity, which is neither fully discontinuous

with continuity or even fully continuous with discontinuity, and in any case,

surely not one with itself. [Emphasis in original] (p. 244)

The details of the art and artmaking diffracted through Barad’s article and through the aforementioned exhibition/catalog presented here are also an experiment. Here, I delve into my background and interest in language and linguistics while attempting to upend everything I know about discourse and language. I also hope that the readers of this work feel the disjointedness and unsteadiness I felt as I experimented with this way of working.

On Touching Heaps of Language

As I began, words again began to break their arrangements and realign; it was as if by reading I was animating the text. Even though this made it difficult to read the article, I decided to “drive into the skid” and work with this discomfort. Flipping through the pages of Barad’s article, I had a strange thought to dissect the text and pull out the words that jumped out. I followed this impulse and started cutting the words from my copy of “On Touching.” The article itself is ten pages of printed text with an additional six pages of acknowledgments, endnotes, and references; I felt a natural stopping point after page ten, so my project of cutting words from the article stopped there. I read, cut,

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and repeated until I reached page ten. After I cut the troublesome text from the first few

pages, I decided to stop and look at the words and phrases I had excised from the original

text. I glued the cut text on a piece of paper ripped out of a small sketchbook I have on

my desk. The result of this action is the arrangement of individual words, sentences, and

passages from Barad’s text that turned into a strange kind of poem. As I continued to cut

words from this article, I began calling the new arrangements of the words “Barad

poems.” Cutting the text helped me see it differently, and this reconfiguration was the

way I imagined it as I read. In rearranging and cutting the desk to make these poems, I was able to understand Barad’s article more thoroughly. The image below is the first version of the “Barad Poems.” In this iteration I cut individual words and phrases and glued them to the article in almost the same order they appeared in Barad’s “On

Touching” article. The act of taking these phrases from their original article and reconfiguring them allowed the words to take on mass in a way that I did not experience from the article in its original format.

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Figure 6.1: Touching (2017)

As I have read more of Barad’s writing, I find that it is so densely saturated with loads of meaningful information that she builds as her writing progresses. When I read her work, and any challenging writing, it feels like I am sponge fully saturated with water and I am being asked to keep absorbing more water. The result is an oversaturated fog 225 that must be mitigated in some way. The strategy of cutting phrases out helped get a handle on this fog. It brought me back to linguistics class when I was assigned syntactic sentence diagrams for homework, and I was required to find the syntactic head of the sentence. The syntactic head is the word in each sentence that determined what syntactic and semantic categories the sentence occupied. The head of a sentence determined the direction for the sentence diagram, and it allowed you to understand the sentence’s construction. In the same way, cutting out phrases from Barad’s article was an attempt to break apart the saturating feeling of her ideas and crystalize them through cutting to find the bits that were the most meaningful to me.

The material qualities of the text became increasingly pronounced as I manipulated the cuttings from Barad’s article. Alternately, I may have become more aware or attune to the material qualities of the text. Even though I was reconfiguring

Barad’s document, and making new material configurations and meanings, I kept calling these works “Barad Poems” because it felt more like a collaborative effort, rather than an appropriative one. These poems took cues from a lecture given by the poet Susan Howe at Columbus College of Art & Design (CCAD) in 2015. Howe is an experimental Avant

Garde poet whose work relies on research, quotations, and marginalia, and other found elements of text an image through which she shapes her poems (Chiasson, 2017). Her work recalls the artwork included in the Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language exhibition, particularly because “Howe is interested in the accidents, smudges, and tears that fasten works of literature to their material embodiments on the page” (Chiasson,

2017). Although her work exists in the literary sphere, it transcends categorization

226 because it deals with the materiality of the text. This is likely because “Howe studied painting, and she is a visual as well as a verbal artist of the page. The page, not the line, is her unit” (McLane, 2012). During the lecture, Howe described her process, her research, and her readings. As I listened to her speak, I wrote down a note to myself to “look up the definition of text” and of course I never did.

As I worked with through this “Barad Poem” form, I thought of Howe’s lecture and remembered my notebook. I looked up the definition of text and, at the same time, I found a recording of Howe’s (2015) lecture at CCAD on YouTube. I hoped the recording would be helpful because the definition of the word “text” did not yield any fascinating insights. I listened to Howe’s lecture again to uncover why I left myself such a note.

Howe interspersed her research through her poetry and criticism, and as she speaks, these strains of thought do not feel at all separate. Her research involves culling archives which informs her research, and her research transforms into poems in a way that feels full of effort, but also effortless.

Interestingly, the way she delivered her lecture and described her work sounded diffractive because she reads insights from various streams of thought and arenas through one another and attends to the insights produced through her writing, poetry, and research. As I continued listening to the lecture on YouTube back to feelings of awe and jealousy at her nimble adeptness with words, and suddenly I am reminded why I left myself a note to “look up the definition of text.” Howe states “the English word text comes from the medieval Latin textus, style or texture of a work. Literally, thing woven from the past participle stem of texĕre to weave, to join, fit together, construct”

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(CCADedu, 2015). The weaving together of language, words, sentences the action that

Howe enacts through her work, and hopefully the same thing that is occurring in through

the process of this artmaking-research.

Keeping in mind Howe’s explanation of the etymology of the word “text,” I continued these Barad Poems as a weaver and a cutter. I weaved and cut not just pages of text but this process as well, envisioning it as a combined effort that took place at different, but familiar and similar, spaces and times. Barad (2007) describes that “the point is that the past was never simply there to begin with and the future is not simply what will unfold; the "past" and the "future" are iteratively reworked and enfolded through the iterative practices of spacetimemattering” (p. 315). My collaboration with

Barad is one that I enact currently, but these temporal markers, past, present, future, become reconfigured through artmaking practice, which is an “iterative practice of spacetimemattering” as Barad describes. My collaboration with/through Barad and her words is through their materiality; specifically the article she published in 2012 and I printed out in 2016.

The act of printing the article enacted a practice of spacetimemattering that bridged the temporal gap between 2012, 2016, and present day as I write about these poems. By looking at this project through Barad’s ideas, I realized that the idea of our collaborating on this artwork is not as strange as I had imagined. I decided to continue to calling these works Barad Poems, but not Barad’s poems as the possessive term seemed to connote a one-directional, single sense of authorship. The author/maker of these works is somewhere in the middle between Barad, myself, and the material-discursive agents at

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play. The act of not quite defining authorship or ownership feels like a compelling

gesture, so I will resist the urge to binarize and codify a strict boundary between co-

conspirators in this iteration of my artmaking practice.

Barad Poems: Continuing to touch heaps of language

Even though the first “Barad poem” was a bit clunky, I was eager to press on with this line of inquiry to see how this collaboration developed. I made several photocopies of the “On Touching” article so I could pull out phrases and reenact this process of reading through destruction to facilitate reconfiguration. I repeated the process of cutting the words, phrases, and sentences that jumped out as I attempted to read. Through my second and third cuttings of the article, specific rules began emerging. Without hesitation,

I instinctively constrained my cutting and collecting of the words to these emergent rules that developed through the iterative process of cutting and arranging. However, the rules shifted and changed each time I read/cut through the article. The first time I constrained the poems to include phrases from a single page of the text and I glued the text in the order it appeared in Barad’s article, but as evidenced by the previous image shown on page 235, the poem is clunky and did not help me read Barad’s text differently. If anything, through this poem I was merely reconstituting Barad’s text because I cut out too much text.

Below is an example from the second cutting through “On Touching.” I developed a sense for the article through cutting that I was able to apply through this iteration. I was beginning to have a deeper connection with Barad’s text, and I was beginning to anticipate the phrase and words that I needed to have in these poems.

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Throughout the “On Touching” article, Barad discusses the consequences of touch and touching, from a macro level to a quantum level. As such the theme of touching emerged as one that is central to many of the poems that emerged from the practice of cutting and excising Barad’s article. I would turn the pages of the text and have my exacto knife ready to excise the necessary elements to construct these poems.

Figure 6.2: Touch is never pure or innocent (1), (2017)

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As I continued, I found that I was continually acting with and reacting to the knife

as it cut through Barad’s article. I rarely, if ever, did I achieve a clean cut of the line with

the exacto knife and I kept noticing that due to my imprecision with the knife, the lines of text were wobbly, this is evident in figure 6.2 shown above. I considered starting over, with a new copy of the text and using a straight edge to guide the exacto knife but I decided to embrace the variations and slip-ups that accompanied cutting the text. These wobbles were remnants of my body’s action through this tool and it is through the wobbly, unsteady cuts I produced that I came to appreciate the exacto knife with which I excised the text from Barad’s article. Furthermore, I noticed that attending to the material qualities of the act of cutting helped me see this process as a part of my artmaking practice, rather than a strange exercise. In her discussion of Heidegger’s concept of handlability, Bolt (2004) states that “art can be seen to emerge in the involvement with materials. Methods, tools, and ideas of practice. It is not just a representation of an already formed idea” (p. 2). My handling of the exacto knife shifted from being a means to an end to a co-constitutive and vital element in this practice.

Additionally, my wobbly cutting speaks to Merleau-Ponty’s (2007b) assertion of the intertwining and fluctuating quality of subjects and objects. Merleau-Ponty questions the notion of discrete and definite boundaries and this question is interrogated further by new materialist scholars as they radically rethink notions of subjectivity, objectivity, and boundaries. I felt that these wobbly and unsteady moments should be treated as moments that reveal the agential assertions of the material in the artmaking process. Instead of continually mitigating the material and trying to hide or mask its qualities, the unsteady

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cuts show the cuts of thinking and excision while reading this text. This decision helped

me realize that the material/materiality of artmaking practice is not what comprises an

artwork, but rather the material-discursive enactments that come together to enact the artmaking process.

It is in the jagged edges, unintentional tears, and wobbly cuts where the agential qualities of the knife and paper asserted themselves as this work unfolded. An example of this assertion is evident in the penultimate line of the poem in figure 6.2. The final line reads, “the liminality of no/thingness—” and it has an askew “the” at the beginning. The reason for this imperfection is simple; I did not cut the “the” with the line originally because I wanted to limit my cuts to the linguistically most relevant parts of the text to avoid excising large blocks of text as I had in previous iterations. However, as the poem came together, I realized that the poem needed a definite article as I placed it next to the previously cut line and glued it down the “the” tilted and dried before I could fix it.

Instead of attempting to fix this, I embraced this event as an agential assertion and left it in the poem.

The last line of the poem shown in figure 6.2 broke apart in my hands as I tried to glue it down. Again, my first impulse was to turn to another photocopy of Barad’s article and “fix” this error by trying to cut this line again. I took another copy of “On Touching” out and sat there staring at it with exacto knife in hand, but I did not want to cut a new line. I realized again, that once I started to attend to the agencies and assertions of the material in the artmaking process, it was difficult not to sustain and even expand this attention to the materiality of the artmaking process. Alternatively, I realized that

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attending to and accepting the agential assertions occurring through this artmaking

entanglement were becoming integral and necessary to my artmaking practice.

I left the poem to dry for the night and came back the next day. I found myself

wanting to inspect the error more closely. I recalled in Chapter 5 I discussed that during the jasmine-based making practice I encountered a realization that photographing the material may have a flattening quality, and that I was wary of turning material into pixels and digital information. The process of the photographic brought new and unexpected dimension to the jasmine-based artmaking so I decided, why not try it with this line of inquiry as well. I had my mobile phone close by, so I affixed a clip-on macro lens for the phone’s camera and decided to look through it.

I put the macro lens almost close enough to the paper to touch it. What I saw through the macro lens on my phone display was incredible. I was able to see some of the

individual fibers of the paper and the sheen of the ink on the paper. It was surprising that

this mistake yielded such beautiful and delicate results when observed through a different

apparatus. It was compelling that even though the image/photograph of the text strayed

further away from the actual material of the cut-out words glued on the paper that the texture and fibers of the paper in the macro photograph actually allowed me to recognize that paper is a bunch of tangled, enmeshed fibers on which we print words for communication.

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Figure 6.3: at (2017)

Even though I was becoming more aware of the materiality of this text, the

photographic apparatus was the element that really solidified for me that even though we often think of discourse and material as two different realms, they are in fact intertwined.

Instead of being averse to using a photographic apparatus, I should have viewed such a device as a different way of seeing. In her discussion of quantum theory, particularly the concept of complementarity Barad (2007) explains that “the nature of the observed phenomenon changes with corresponding changes in the apparatus” (p. 106). Although this is a vastly different scenario than quantum theory, the idea of changing an apparatus to see differently is compelling in artmaking as well. Indeed, the way I observed the

Barad poem did indeed change as a result of augmenting my eyes with the camera and

234 macro lens. Though I was still wary of straying too far from what I thought was the actual material of the artmaking process.

To help me understand and process the use of technological apparatuses in my process, I looked to the new materialist/posthuman theories that inform this research and in a recent book called the Posthuman Glossary, I found a concept called the “postimage” that the glossary names and defines. The concept of postimage refers to the posthuman take on the digitalization of the world, and especially in the production of images (Hoelzl,

2018). In her discussion of what comprises an images through posthuman philosophies,

Hoelzl (2018) states that “the image, then, is not only the relation between data and algorithms in an operation involving visual data or data visualization but also the relationship between human and non-human agents of a process involving an element of

‘vision’” (p. 362). Thinking about my phone camera as not just the flattening or compression of material into a digital realm, but also various agents involving vision helped me realize that I am not straying from the materiality of artmaking practice.

Rethinking and diffracting artmaking practice through new materialism/posthumanism allows me to reconsider the exiting and limited notions of materiality as only being specific media through which my artmaking practice unfolds. Instead, artmaking itself can be thought of as the “relation between human and non-human agents of a process”

(Hoelzl, 2018, p. 362). Hoelzl (2018) writes:

Yet there is another, more optimistic way of envisioning the future of the image, a

future that I will call the postimage and that can be formulated only in the

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framework of posthuman(ist) theory where humans, technologies and nature are

no longer seen as separate (or even antagonistic) but as coevolving. (p. 362)

Envisioning the coevolution, co-constitution, and co-production of not only the

postimage, but artmaking too allows for a dynamic rethinking of what it means to be entangled and without pre-existing boundary in one’s thinking. Instead of seeing my

mobile phone camera as separate or in opposition to material, I can think of it as an

ongoing negation of the material-discursivity through artmaking practice.

Instead of running away from digitization and technology, I became more deeply

entangled. Since the image shown in figure 6.3 was taken with my mobile phone camera,

I decided that it might be interesting to crowdsource feedback on the work, so I posted

the image to Instagram. Because Instagram constrains the proportions of an image to fit

within a square format, I decided to zoom into the most crucial elements of the image.

This act of finding the area of an image that contained the most content felt much like

finding the syntactic head of a sentence while diagramming as I mentioned previously in

this chapter. Without stressing over how the new format would affect my work, I posted

it to my Instagram account and forgot about it. Although I have a public Instagram

account, I rarely go to the trouble to use hashtags to help my images reach people outside

those who choose to follow me, so the responses I receive are from people I know or

those who find my pictures of art, dogs, and my backyard compelling. Below in figure

6.4, I have included a screen grab from Instagram of the image and the likes, and

feedback I received. The thirty-three likes I received on the post may not seem like that

many compared to other, more active users of Instagram, but it helped me realize that

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maybe these macro images of text were worth pursuing further. So it is because of

Instagram that I started to read the lines of the Barad poems through the macro lens I attached to my phone’s camera.

Figure 6.4: at (from Instagram) (2017)

At first, I merely used the still camera on my mobile phone to capture compelling

facets of the text as a read the poems through the camera, but I realized that the act of

reading certain lines through the camera was a compelling act by itself. I decided to try

the video camera with the macro lens to see what results that yielded. Reading through

the mobile phone with the macro lens was slow and meditative. It reminded me of the

“thinking in making-making in thinking-thinking-making” process that I discussed in

Chapter 5. As I continued this facet of my artmaking practice, I realized that my

notebook sketch of the process through which the work materialized was not entirely

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accurate. The artmaking-research-philosophical inquiry of this study is more of an onto- epistemological-artmaking. Barad (2007) describes:

Onto-epistem-ology—the study of practices of knowing in being—is probably a

better way to think about the kind of understandings that we need to come to

terms with how specific intra-actions matter. Or, for that matter, what we need is

something like an ethico-onto-epistem-ology—an appreciation of the intertwining

of ethics, knowing, and being—since each intra-action matters, since the

possibilities for what the world may become call out in the pause that precedes

each breath before a moment comes into being and the world is remade again,

because the becoming of the world is a deeply ethical matter. (p. 185)

The description of this process as meditative is an attempt to describes the feeling of

knowing in being that emerged through the artmaking-research process and the feeling of

entanglement and intra-action with materiality, with making, with knowing/thinking as

the process continued.

As I became further and further entangled into the practice and diffracted the

mobile phone camera through the Barad poems, I discovered that it complicated my

process, but also brought more insights than if I had been resistant to embracing the use

of technological mediation. I decided to post the videos on Instagram as well to see

whether my friends had any feedback on these. At this point in the making process, I

thought the videos were a bit weird. A link to one of the videos is available at this link:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BaSnbm7lki8/. I received one comment from a friend

238 telling me that the video was meditative. I was excited to hear that because it echoed the artmaking-research-philosophical inquiry that informs this study and enacted what I described in Chapter 5 as “thinking in making-making in thinking-thinking-making.” I found that the insights that emerged through the artmaking-research process in this chapter were very similar to the process recognized in Chapter 5. In both strains of thought, I realized that it was imperative that I remain open to possibilities instead of creating artificial barriers to the evolution of the process of thinking in making-making in thinking.

Figure 6.5: gg (2017) Figure 6.6: gg (from Instagram) (2017)

After I created and posted videos of reading through the macro lens on Instagram

I realized that the slowness and repetition of these videos reminded me of a performance/installation piece by the artist Ann Hamilton called tropos that was originally performed at the Dia Center for the Arts in 1993 (“Ann Hamilton: tropos,”

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1993). In a large warehouse with a dense covering of horse hair on the floor, Hamilton

placed a single reader at a table burned the lines of a book as they read it while a

recording of a man struggling to speak and communicate played on speakers placed

outside of the warehouse (“Ann Hamilton: tropos,” 1993). Hamilton’s project dealt with

issues of the loss of language after aphasia, which is also discussed by Merleau-Ponty

(1962) in Phenomenology of Perception through the case of Schneider, who also had aphasia. What struck me was that Hamilton’s work addresses the dissolution of language through destruction; Hamilton’s work burns a book as it is read. In the case of these

Barad poems, I began cutting the pages of Karen Barad’s article “On Touching” and creating poems from it in an attempt to come to a better understanding of the text. In the end, I pulled out and abstracted the text that I excised. Did I comprehend the text better?

A little. Slowly and deliberately reading and rereading Barad’s article did help me comprehend the intimacy of touch, as well as the notion of quantum touch, explained in her article. The practice that ensued went in a vastly different direction than expected and abstracted individual elements from the text and, in some ways, brought forward the material qualities of the text.

The act of cutting and pulling out phrases enabled a closeness with the text enacted through this creative, yet destructive method of reading through cutting- artmaking. I realized that I was remaking it through the apparatus of artmaking. After a while, I came to think of this process as reading through destruction. The notion of making through destruction is one that is familiar to me as it echoes the mythology associated with the Hindu god Shiva. When I studied Bharatha Natyam dance and read

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comic books about gods and goddesses from the Hindu pantheon as a child, I learned

about Shiva’s dance of destruction called Tāndava. Even though this dance can be regarded as a destructive element, it also facilitated creation. As Zimmer (1972) explains:

The Tāndava-dance, the violent, phrenetic effusion of divine energies, bears traits

suggesting some cosmic war-dance, designed to arouse destructive energies and

to work havoc on the foe; at the same time, it is the triumphant dance of the

victor. (p. 172)

Although my first introduction to the Tāndava concept was by learning about as one of the more difficult dance routines in the Bharatha Natyam dance canon, I now appreciate this idea on a more conceptual basis. The concept of Tāndava and of the destructive capabilities of Shiva are described Indian mythology as epic disasters (like the end of the world), minor perturbances (like the ground shaking), and a dance of victory. The same dance can be expressed as destructive, triumphant, and generative.

Shiva the deity is described as “the substance of knowledge, [who] is identified with the meaning of words. The word itself, the instrument through which we grasp the meaning, is a form of energy and is thus assimilated to the power of Śiva” (Daniélou,

1991, p. 200). It is compelling that Shiva, who enacts violent and destructive energy through dance is the same deity who is also ascribed as being the substance of knowledge and the meaning of words. It is also fascinating that there is a parallel drawn between words and energy; in other words, the distinction between material (energy) and the

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discursive (words) becomes blurred. This is reminiscent of Barad’s (2007) discussion of agential separability and exteriority:

Agential separability presents an alternative to these unsatisfactory options. It

rejects the geometries of absolute exteriority or absolute interiority and opens up a

much larger space that is more appropriately thought of as a dynamic and ever-

changing topology. More specifically, agential separability is a matter of

exteriority within phenomena. Note that since phenomena are material-discursive,

no priority is given to either materiality or discursivity; neither one stands outside

the other. [Emphasis in original] (p. 176-177)

Here Barad describes the way boundaries are enacted through her theory of agential realism. Boundaries are enacted through their entanglements so the separation of agents in entanglement does not necessitate thinking in terms of absolutes; there is no absolute interiority or exteriority; there is merely the separation enacted through entanglement.

Material and discursive are not separate entities, but their boundaries are realized within various phenomena. By reading Barad through the Hindu stories that shaped my worldview, I realize that the case for separation within phenomena can be evidenced through both. The Shiva mythology is multi-layered, he can describe destruction and knowledge, and sometimes both at the same time. Boundaries between destruction and creation are not necessarily as distinct as we might assume.

At various points in this process, I felt guilty for cutting Barad’s article into fragments that I rearranged to my own end, but as I conclude this chapter, I feel

242 differently. Instead of thinking of creation and destruction as opposed forces, I see them as entangled ideas. Through my artmaking practice, I reinterpreted Barad’s article by diffracting it through a different apparatus that is attuned to the entanglements I seek to investigate. In that respect, it is destructive, but like Shiva’s dance, without destruction, creation is impossible. This is a collaborative project between various material, discursive, human, and non-human entangled elements. The result is an enmeshed artmaking-research practice that necessarily diffracts philosophical ideas through artmaking practice.

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“What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. And every phrase And sentence that is right (where every word is at home, Taking its place to support the others, The word neither diffident nor ostentatious, An easy commerce of the old and the new, The common word exact without vulgarity, The formal word precise but not pedantic, The complete consort dancing together) Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, Every poem an epitaph.”

– T.S. Eliot (1943, p. 38)

It is evident from the review of literature in this study that many art educators are

interested in new materialist philosophies and ideas. However, to my knowledge, there

has been a dearth of research in the field that deeply engages with the specific conceptual

implications that new materialism has for art, artmaking, research, and philosophical

inquiry. This dissertation seeks to begin filling that gap in the existing literature. To this

end, this study focused not only on the artwork but the process and specific material- discursive configurations through which art and artmaking practice emerges. Even if the

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result of artmaking practice enacts an artwork lacking material qualities, like some

conceptual art, the artmaking process necessitates an artist and various material and

discursive practices and understandings to enact and facilitate artmaking.

One objective of this study was to stretch the field and offer ways of looking at existing issues through emerging methodological and theoretical spheres. Throughout the artmaking-research process, new materialist philosophies, and diffractive methodologies contributed ways of thinking that could fulfill the task of stretching existing notions of artmaking and materiality while offering new ways of thinking as well. Artmaking and philosophical inquiry served as methods through which insights were enabled and attended to during the research process. Through these methods, it was possible to think and rethink the way matter and materiality is conceptualized. In this study, artmaking serves as a knowledge-making practice which Karen Barad details in her theory of agential realism. Barad (2007) states that “knowing, thinking, measuring, theorizing, and observing are material practices of intra-acting within and as a part of the world” (p. 90).

For Barad knowledge-making practices are also material practices that are entangled with

the world. Attending to notions of materiality through a fundamentally material and

knowledge-making practice leads to insights about the nature of the materiality of

artmaking practice itself.

Additionally, this study offers a re-orientation to how we theorize our position

within research and entanglement. Instead of relying solely on artists and/or researchers

to reflect on their experiences during their artmaking practice, this study sought to

discover whether it is possible to consider artmaking from a posthumanist perspective

245 rather than a humanist perspective. Humanism involves reflective accounts of artmaking that assume that the artist is the only active agent involved in the making of art. A posthumanist or new materialist approach to artmaking involves being mindful of both human and nonhuman agents at work in artmaking practice.

Reflection and reflexivity have been dominant practices used in qualitative research by art education researchers, but they reify humanist tropes. The images conjured up when one imagines reflections often entail mirrors and mirroring. Reflection can be useful, but when employed by itself, it produces sameness, rather than offering new insights. Relying on reflection also often assumes that boundaries are permanent.

Entities such as objects, researchers, research sites, and research subjects are assumed to have fixed boundaries for both qualitative researchers and those who employ reflexivity as part of their research methods or methodology. Reflection and reflexivity keep the knower, the researcher, at the center of the inquiry; the findings of a study depend on the researcher’s account and investigative process.

A unique example is found in scientific research; it is common to hear that an experiment needs to have reproducible results. It often seems like in an attempt to legitimize research based in artmaking and art education; we feel the need to meet the standards imposed by the broader research community. Interestingly, many scientific discoveries emerge from phenomena that could not be replicated by another research team or was the result of an accident. Penicillin was famously produced by chance. The cells of Henrietta Lacks are now the life-saving HeLa cells that are used in countless clinical studies because no other cells would react the same way. Broadly, art, art

246 education, and scientific researchers alike could benefit from new approaches to research that goes beyond stilted assumptions that focus on validity and measurables. There should also be a focus on developing new ideas and ways of thinking that stretch the field in directions that may feel uncomfortable, but ultimately move the field forward by offering new ways of knowing and being.

The artmaking-research enacted in this study serves as an apparatus through which to attend to insights brought to light during the research process. According to

Barad (2007), an apparatus enacts boundaries and objects of research. The boundaries of the research do not pre-exist the process. The way this materialized in this study is that the artmaking process described in Chapters 5 and 6 included details about the process and progress that other humanist researchers might have disregarded. In Chapter 6, I discuss stopping to make a cup of tea. Through a new materialist lens, the act of making tea played a significant role in the course the study ended up taking. The research apparatus of artmaking allows us to observe how boundaries emerge and change as the research process progresses. The apparatus creates boundaries and specific material- discursive phenomena that informed the progress and practice of artmaking-research in this study. If artmaking itself is facilitated through material/materiality then the practice of artmaking is fundamentally a materially engaged practice, whether or not the actual artwork produced is matter-based. Material, discursive, and material-discursive phenomena are enacted by and comprise artmaking practice. The ways in which artmaking practice is theorized is influenced not only by contemplating expanded notions of materiality, but by the consideration of the agential realities of artmaking.

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While artmaking served as an apparatus through which insights were attended, I also employed a metaphor of “braided hair” to help the reader understand how this study incorporated Barad’s (2007) theory of agential realism and her diffractive methodology. I introduced this approach to the research in Chapter 1 and detailed it in Chapter 4. When one is ready to braid hair, the hair is separated into strands and braided into one another, through this act the hair comes together. When you take your hair out of the braid, the strands of hair are curly because they have been affected by the act of being braided.

When these strands are combed, hair becomes messy and recombines, but the traces and curl of the braid remain. Through the artmaking-research enacted in this study the strands of theory, art, artmaking, methods, methodology, and personal narrative/recollections are brought together through a conceptual braid. At times these strands become unraveled and loosen from the braid as the research process progressed. As the artmaking-research process continued, each area that informed this study changed as a result of being brought together. These changes offer new pathways for the possibilities of artmaking, art education, and research practices.

A primary strand of this study is its theoretical underpinnings which included the ideas of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and new materialist philosophies. As such, it was necessary to conduct this research within and through a multi-faceted diffractive artmaking-research practice wherein artmaking-research serves as a site and apparatus through which insights emerge. Both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty offer a discussion and reassessment of Descartes’ separation of mind, body, and the world around us. Both philosophers offer strategies through which we can rethink how we know the world and

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the objects that inhabit the world. For example, Heidegger’s discussion of handlability

and tool-use is especially useful in thinking about the way we come to know the tools we

use; this discussion is especially relevant when applied to artmaking. Similarly, Merleau-

Ponty’s discussion of the body’s role in perception is also compelling to consider as he

describes the body as an active agent in perception, rather than a passive and inert entity.

It is important to note that this study does not seek to dismantle or remove the human

from artmaking practice completely. Making is a human activity and has been so since

the Prehistoric era. I even chose to use the term “new materialism” as opposed to

“posthumanism” because the latter seems to conjure images of robot overlords and

cyborgs. While these notions are compelling theoretical ideas, they are not central to the

project of new materialism. A key agenda of new materialism is to give matter and

material its due. When we start acknowledging the role that matter and materiality plays

in materializing and co-constituting our world, the more robust our understandings of

artmaking practice will be. This study aims to attend to the consequences of de-centering

the artist as the sole or primary agent. The trope of the artist as a primary agent then was radically re-assessed throughout this study because of the theoretical and methodological

direction through which insights emerged.

Using artmaking-research-philosophical inquiry as a site and apparatus through which to generate and attend to insights on the nature of material and materiality proved challenging, yet fruitful. Before this study, my notions of what comprise the material elements and qualities of artmaking practice were limited to my own reflections.

However, having navigated this study, it has become clear that artmaking-research-

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philosophical inquiry as a practice is necessitated through materiality. When observed

through the apparatus of artmaking-research through a diffractive methodology that is

attentive and respectful of entanglements, materiality was iterative. At times

understandings of materiality through artmaking had to do with the physical qualities of

the process, but at other times the distinction between materiality and discursivity became

material-discursive where the boundaries between these entities dissolved and re-

emerged in different configurations.

Barad’s (2007) theory of agential realism also posits the term onto-epistemology

to rethink the division between ontology and epistemology that has been so fundamental

to Western philosophy. Barad proposes that these realms of being and knowing are

inseparable through the term “onto-epistemology.” For Barad (2007), onto-epistemology

describes “the study of practices of knowing in being” (p 185). As this study unfolded, it

became clear that the artmaking process is onto-epistemological because it is a practice of

knowing in being that emerges through matter. The idea of undoing the boundary

between the ontological and epistemological is a radical move that asks us to rethink a

division that has been in place since the beginnings of Western philosophy. The

connection between knowing and being is useful for the field of art education because it

allows us to think about artmaking as an entanglement. Insights emerging through the

artmaking process cannot precisely be described as either ontological or epistemological.

Instead, the boundaries between knowing and being are emergent and negotiated through

their intra-action. Thinking of knowledge as fundamentally linked to being allows artists and educators to reassess current approaches to research in art and art education. If artists

250 and art educators can understand how knowing and being and knowing in being is fundamentally connected to their Being and being-in-the-world, then artmaking practice can serve as a prime site for research and a strategy through which to develop and attend to insights about art and art education as a field.

Additionally, Barad’s theory of agential realism discusses entanglements and intra-actions through which boundaries are constructed. As the research in this study progressed, boundaries and delineations were in flux and continually being co-constituted through their entangled relationship. Working through entanglement ensured that even if

I emerged as a central agent, this positionality was temporary as the boundaries between entities, both human and non-human, were emergent. Acknowledging both human and nonhuman agencies in artmaking practice creates possibilities. As artists, if we can acknowledge that we are not the only, primary component in the artmaking process, then we realize a practice that is an ongoing negotiation rather than a means to an end. By attending to nonhuman and human agencies, artmaking practice is opened up because it no longer relies on a single agent to activate it. Instead, it is sustained by both human and nonhuman agents.

Working through a diffractive methodology also facilitated the task of de- centering the artist as a primary agent in artmaking. Enacting the diffractive artmaking- research-philosophical inquiry carried out in this study opened the flood gates and allowed for a myriad of possibilities for the direction of the research. As I detailed in

Chapter 4, a diffractive methodology is different from reflective practices because it enables reading insights through one another. Diffraction generates and attends to new

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insights and divergent paths that emerge through the research process. Solely relying on

reflection and reflexivity may have led researchers to depend on their own interpretations

rather than look outward. Diffraction is complicated and does not generate insights that

can be categorized neatly. While working through a diffractive methodology in this

dissertation, it became abundantly clear that the findings of this study may be poetic,

ephemeral, and difficult to pin down.

Diffraction also allows and accounts for the materialization of boundaries through

their entanglement. The notion of entanglements is central to this study as it is also

central to much of Karen Barad’s approach to new materialism. As a concept and methodology, diffraction is respectful of entanglements because it is mindful of complexity. This study followed Barad’s (2007) assertion that boundaries emerge through intra-action and entanglement. Employing a diffractive methodology emerged as a direction that allowed for boundaries to develop through the artmaking-research rather than pre-exist the process. For Barad, diffraction helped to open avenues for the research that did not fall into prescribed outcomes. Instead, diffraction allowed for findings to emerge through entanglement. This methodology allowed the work of this study to do more than reflecting on insights because diffraction entails reading insights through one another in order to attend to new understandings that emerged. Diffraction offers artists and art educators another path through which to facilitate research.

Necessitated by the differences produced through diffraction, this study also requires a rethinking of the siloed and stratified notions of medium (painting, drawing, sculpture) as separate forms of inquiry. If artmaking is an ineludibly materially-involved,

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knowledge-making practice, then the definition of how art and artmaking materializes

should be discussed in art education. The rigidity that so many artist and educators feel

when they think about the material elements of their artmaking practices is limiting and

unnecessary. As discussed in Chapter 3, the Modernist Greenbergian understandings of

art and artmaking still prevail in the way studio art and art education classes are offered,

structured, and discussed. Medium-specific boundaries are central to Greenberg’s

formalist ideas; these understandings have shaped the way art and artmaking are

approached, especially in studio art and art education. Vestiges of Greenbergian formalism hang on to undergraduate and graduate studio art programs, especially pertaining to the names and content of courses. I currently teach medium-specific courses

with course titles like life drawing, design, and digital art. The insights generated in this

study have opened up the possibilities of a blurring of these boundaries. In practice, many

contemporary artists, especially those cited in this study, do not adhere to the medium-

specific boundaries they encountered in their artistic training. Instead, these artists allow

boundaries to emerge through their artmaking practices. Although it would present

challenges to the industrialized education available at most institutions of higher

education, it would be compelling to radically rethink the structure of the learning and

teaching of art and artmaking practice.

Similarly, the static boundary between entities like subject/object and body/mind

seems to form an indomitable point from which much of artmaking is taught. The

formalist medium-aligned boundaries play heavily into the structure of thinking and

approach to teaching. In higher education, and especially in undergraduate studio art, I

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find that most of the instruction I do as an educator is primarily concerned with the

acquisition of skills. These skills are focused on separate mediums rather than helping

young artists develop the ability to develop a process of inquiry in conjunction with

material rather than a course positioned as a way to gain “mastery.” Instead of discussing

art and artmaking as the acquisition of skills and mastery over material, the possibilities

of asking students to work through the material and allow themselves to notice their

entangled states would be far more compelling. It would link thought and practice in a

way that allows students to understand that artmaking is more than the acquisition of tips

and tricks in one particular material. Being mindful of the entanglement through which

artmaking is enacted allows the artist and student to view everything as part of their

practices of knowing, thinking, and artmaking. Furthermore, the future of artmaking

practice as a course of study may benefit from employing diffraction as a guiding

methodology in order to produce differences and facilitate a move from medium-specific boundaries to a focus on the materiality and materialization of artmaking practice.

This study attempts to theorize and rethink the materiality of art and artmaking practice. It begins by considering Heidegger’s conceptualizations of being, being-in-the- world, and handlability and allows these notions to inform an understanding of Merleau-

Ponty’s philosophies of embodiment. Onto this foundation, a new materialist theoretical lens was applied which allowed for the discussion to delve beyond reflective accounts of the experience. By employing a diffractive methodology in this study, differences were produced and attended to through the apparatus of artmaking. Through diffraction, as insights are read through one another, the process produces more differences and avenues

254 for exploration. In the end, it is evident that this study is merely a beginning and that there are differences that need to be processed through artmaking viewed as entanglement.

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