Non-Representational Methodologies

Re-Envisioning Research

Phillip Vannini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780415713016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134674268
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Non-representational theory is one of the contemporary moment's most influential theoretical perspectives within social and cultural theory. It is now widely considered to be the logical successor of postmodern theory, the logical development of post-structuralist thought, and the most notable intellectual force behind the turn across the social and cultural sciences away from cognition, meaning, and textuality. And yet, it is often poorly understood. This is in part because of its complexity, but also because of its limited treatment in the few volumes chiefly dedicated to it. Theories must be useful to researchers keen on utilizing concepts and analytical frames for their personal interpretive purposes. How useful non-representational theory is, in this sense, is yet to be understood. This book outlines a variety of ways in which non-representational ideas can influence the research process, the very value of empirical research, the nature of data, the political value of data and evidence, the methods of research, the very notion of method, and the styles, genres, and media of research.

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Non-Representational Research Methodologies

An Introduction

Phillip Vannini

There are, and there will always be, miserable days in the lives of researchers. These are the days when the inevitable realization that our work is utterly inadequate at apprehending the intricate textures of the lifeworld subjects of our analysis and description strikes with its mightiest force. These are the days when reading again one’s writings, playing back one’s video or audio documentaries, staring at one’s photos, or recalling one’s performances pushes an author over the depressing abyss of self-insufficiency and doubt. These are the days when researchers wish they had chosen an art career devoid of the pretensions of accurate representation. For some of us the doldrums of these forlorn days fade away with the next long-awaited book contract or the prospect of a jaunt to an exotic conference destination. But the awareness that our work is invariably partial, simplistic, or even unimaginative and inauthentic is bound to resurface again, and again. Depiction—it seems—is futile.

Should we then surrender? Or perhaps come up with a new scientific method? Or maybe, given the zeitgeist, a cute new “app” for our journals? Maybe we could. But we will not be doing any of that here. This book is not a self-help manual for the sufferer of a midlife epistemological crisis. It does not promise handy solutions, formulas, procedures, or codes for a more accurate representation of disparate lifeworlds. And because it does not aim to offer original laments over the crisis of representation or the death of the author it does not hope to lend a shoulder to cry on either. So, you might wonder: what exactly are these sheets of paper good for? Well, for a more radical solution, really: to quit—hopefully for good—our obsession with representation. Let this volume be a manifesto for the ethos of non-representational research.

Non-representational research—the skeptical reader might immediately react—sounds like the most apropos synonym for non-funded and non-published research. How can, after all, research—which is the very process of describing, understanding, and explaining an empirical reality—deny its very raison d’être? How can people whose job responsibility is to be all but fiction authors pretend to be able to obliterate the single criterion that separates them from the domain of fantasy?

Admittedly, these are not ungrounded, unsympathetic, or merely cynical critiques. And to complicate the picture even further, non-representational authors themselves may even have deep and fundamental doubts about the value of non-representational “research”—and for some the scare quotes here are absolutely obligatory. Some may indeed question the very idea of research and of method, for example, or deny the value of a body of knowledge—epistemology or methodology—exclusively dedicated to doing research more accurately. Yet all of us writing in these pages in the end hold the belief that the research we all do has at least some merit and promise. Is our denial of representionalism the true answer to the crisis of authority and representation then? Non-representational research methodologies—of which this book provides a panoramic gaze—offer, if not definitive, at least compelling responses to this interrogative.

But let us back up for a second. What is all this fuss about non-representational research? Our quest for non-representational methodologies is born out of the growth of non-representational theory. Briefly, non-representational theory (or as it is sometimes referred to, “more-than-representational” theory; see Lorimer, 2005) is one of the contemporary moment’s most influential theoretical perspectives within social and cultural theory. As evidence of this popularity, simply consider Nigel Thrift’s (2008) instant classic Non-Representational Theory: Space/Politics/Affect. Only five years after its publication the book, according to Google Scholar, has been cited 646 times. Non-representational theory is now widely considered to be the successor of postmodern theory, the logical development of post-structuralist thought, and the most notable intellectual force behind the turn away from cognition, symbolic meaning, and textuality.

Non-representational theory is popular and influential, but it is controversial and often poorly understood. This is in part because of its complexity, but in large part also because of its limited application in research practice and because of its many unanswered methodological questions. How actually powerful and useful non-representational research is, in this sense, is yet to be fully appreciated. This book proposes to tackle this very subject by outlining a variety of ways in which non-representational ideas can influence the research process, the very value of empirical research, the nature of data, the political value of evidence, the methods and modes of research, the very notion of method, and the styles, genres, and media of research. The chapters to follow, therefore, aim to serve as a launching point for a diverse non-representational research “agenda.” Such parliament of perspectives, we hope, will spearhead a long-lasting non-representational research tradition across the social and cultural sciences. But let us proceed by outlining first the nature of non-representational theory.

Non-Representational Theory

As Lorimer (2005, p. 83) concisely puts it, “Non-representational theory is an umbrella term for diverse work that seeks to better cope with our self-evidently more-than-human, more-than-textual, multisensual worlds.” With roots in the fine and performing arts, solid foundations in human geography, and expansions across cultural studies, the humanities, and the social sciences, non-representational theory is a mosaic of theoretical ideas borrowed from fields as different as performance studies, material culture studies, science and technology studies, contemporary continental philosophy, political ecology, cultural geographies, ecological anthropology, biological philosophy, cultural studies, the sociology of the body and emotions, and the sociology and anthropology of the senses—to name only a few.

Theoretically, non-representational theory stands as a synthesizing effort to amalgamate diverse but interrelated theoretical perspectives, such as actor-network theory, biological philosophy, neomaterialism, process philosophy, speculative realism, social ecology, performance theory, poststructuralist feminism, critical theory, postphenomenology, and pragmatism. Its typical reference lists therefore tend to feature names of philosophers like Michelle Serres, Bruno Latour, Michel de Certeau, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Donna Haraway, Erving Goffman, Alphonso Lingis, Brian Massumi, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Tim Ingold, Emmanuel Levinas, Alfred North Whitehead, Isabelle Stengers, Maurice Blanchot, Jean Luc Nancy, Alain Badiou, Gilbert Simondon, Nigel Thrift, and probably most commonly of all Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

Due to its eclectic character it is quite difficult to summarize non-representational theory’s diverse ideas succinctly. Thrift’s (2008) work is quite helpful in this regard. In a difficult but remarkably clear, well-organized, and contagiously enthusiastic opening chapter to his foundational volume on the topic, Thrift outlines seven core principles, or ideal qualities, of non-representational theory. Thrift is quick to point out that his intent in territorializing non-representational theory is not to systematize it but rather to outline the potentials of a new experimental genre: a hybrid genre for a hybrid world. His seven principles, therefore, are to be understood as a tentative formation of a new intellectual landscape that is liable to enliven—through the “application of a series of procedures and techniques of expression” (p. 2)—a new hybrid: a science/art that works as an interpretive “supplement to the ordinary, a sacrament for the everyday, a hymn to the superfluous” (p. 2). Neither laws nor root images, the principles work as exercises in creative production and as “practices of vocation” (p. 3) meant for an imprecise science concerned more with hope for politico-epistemic renewal than validity. And—opportunistically—the principles very much aid our brief overview.

According to Thrift, non-representational theory’s first program-matic tenet is to “capture the ‘onflow’ … of everyday life” (p. 5). Life is movement—geographic and existential kinesis. Movements of all kinds are profoundly social activities that are both perceptive of the world and generative and transformative of it (Ingold, 2011). Life is a viscous becoming in time-space moved by the “desire to do more than simply squeeze meaning from the world” (Thrift, 2008, p. 5). Existence is marked by an instinctive intentionality—a Deweyan qualitative immediacy of sorts—that transcends consciousness, and by an effervescent energy unharnessed and unprogrammed by thought. Non-representational theory therefore rejects the cognitive tendencies of radical empiricism, representational identity politics, and the post-modern obsession with deconstructing textual meaning (Lorimer, 2005). It emphasizes instead the power of the precognitive as a performative technology for adaptive living, as an instrument of sensation, play, and imagination, and a life force fueling the excesses and the rituals of everyday living.

Second, “non-representational theory is resolutely anti-biographical and preindividual” (Thrift, 2008, p. 7). Autobiography “provide[s] a spurious sense of oneness,” whereas biography offers a “suspect intimacy with the dead” (p. 7). What Thrift—borrowing here from Freud—seems to fear is biography’s ambition to find, as well as construct, an artificial sense of individual wholeness and hermeneutic coherence in the past, whereas non-representational theory is truly anchored in the present of practice. Of all seven principles this is arguably the most obscure, as Thrift fails to specify what precise types of biographical work he is most inimical toward, what further reasons he has—besides the battle cry remarks reported earlier—for conflating biography with humanistic whole-ism, and whether his criticism extends to more contemporary poststructuralist forms of narrative inquiry. In spite of the cryptic meaning of this point, together tenets one and two constitute non-representational theory’s criticism of methodological individualism and a strong incitation for complexity and relationality, a point taken up later in this chapter and in several chapters of this book.

Third, non-representational theory concerns itself with practice, action, and performance. Non-representational theorists are weary of the structuralist heritage of the social sciences and suspicious of all attempts to uncover symbolic meaning where other, more practical forms of meaning or even no meaning at all exist. Relying primarily on performative approaches to relational action and on postphenomenological and Deleuzian philosophy, non-representational work puts a premium on the corporeal rituals and entanglements embedded in embodied action rather than talk or cognitive attitudes. As Lorimer (2005, p. 84) puts it,

The focus falls on how life takes shape and gains expression in shared experiences, everyday routines, fleeting encounters, embodied movements, precognitive triggers, practical skills, affective intensities, enduring urges, unexceptional interactions and sensuous dispositions. Attention to these kinds of expression, it is contended, offers an escape from the established academic habit of striving to uncover meanings and values that apparently await our discovery, interpretation, judgement and ultimate representation. In short, so much ordinary action gives no advance notice of what it will become.

Fourth, non-representational theory is built on the principle—borrowed primarily from actor-network theory—of relational materialism. Material objects are no mere props for performance but parts and parcel of hybrid assemblages endowed with diffused personhood and relational agency. “The human body”—Thrift tells us—“is what it is because of its unparalleled ability to co-evolve with things” (p. 10). In this sense material objects are to be given the same conceptual and empirical weight that is warranted to their human companions. Things form a “technological anteconscious” (p. 10) with the human body’s nervous system, and therefore non-representational theory ought to reject any separation between corporeality, materiality, and sociality. Going even farther than Thrift, Ingold (2011) argues that materiality is a useless abstraction: it is a concept we impute to things because we do not bother to hold them in sufficient regard for what they are and what they do. The actual “materials, it seems, have gone missing” (ibid., p. 20) from social scientific analysis because the symbolic qualities of the “objects” they make up unduly take precedence. But upon close examination non-representational writers realize that materials are active: “they circulate, mix with one another, solidify and dissolve in the formation of more or less enduring things” (ibid., p. 16). Materials are their doing and it is through their qualities, movements, and force that they exert their life.

Fifth, non-representational theory is meant to be experimental. Non-representational theorists feel a deep antipathy for the hyper-empirical conservative tendencies of the traditional social sciences, for the conventions of realism, and—obviously—for any manifestation of positivism. By invoking the expressive power of the performance arts, Thrift calls on social scientists-cum-artists to “crawl out to the edge of the cliff of the conceptual” (Vendler, 1995, p. 79, cited in Thrift, 2008, p. 12) and to engage in a battle against methodological fetishism and in a “poetics of the release of energy that might be thought to resemble play” (p. 12). By refusing a social science obsessed with control, prediction, and the will to explain and understand everything, Thrift calls for a sense of wonder to be injected back into the social sciences (also see Ingold, 2011b). Non-representational work tries to be restless and willfully immature. It seeks to push limits and strives for renewal. Indeed, as we will discuss throughout this entire book, non-representational work aims to rupture, unsettle, animate, and reverberate rather than report and represent.

Sixth, non-representational theory stresses the importance of bodies. Thrift (2008) views bodies not as subjects for microsociological empirical attention but as the engines of political regeneration, driving the new politics and ethics of hope that he proposes. Bodies are especially important because of their affective capacities. Affects are “properties, competencies, modalities, energies, attunements, arrangements and intensities of differing texture, temporality, velocity and spatiality, that act on bodies, are produced through bodies and transmitted by bodies” (Lorimer, 2008, p. 552). Non-representational theory’s attention to affect and its derivatives—moods, passions, emotions, intensities, and feelings (Anderson, 2006)—transcends the human, focusing on relations amid inanimate objects, living, non-human matter, place, ephemeral phenomena, events, technologies, and much more (McCormack, 2006). Thus non-representational theorists posit affect as an uncircumscribed force unbounded to a whole self and unanchored in human subjectivity (McCormack, 2006).

At last, the seventh tenet of non-representational theory stresses an ethic of novelty suggesting “a particular form of boosting aliveness” (p. 14) and a promissory, regenerating Jamesian potentiality: a “jump to another world” (p. 15). Traditional ethical systems will not suffice for non-representational thinkers, built as they are on traditional humanistic principles of a univocal human subject, “transparent, rational, and continuous” (p. 14). A new ethics built on the craftsmanship of everyday life and existing on the “inter-stices of interaction” (p. 15) is liable to “build new forms of life” in which “strangeness itself [is] the locus of new forms of neighborliness and community” (Santner, 2001, p. 6, cited in Thrift, 2008, p. 14).

Non-representational theory’s seven tenets are meant to sensitize social scientists to the fact that “they are there to hear the world and make sure that it can speak back, just as much as they are there to produce wild ideas,” “to render the world problematic by elaborating questions,” and to open research and theorizing to “more action, more imagination, more light, more fun, even” (Thrift, 2008, pp. 18–20). These tenets are points not only of theoretical departure but also of methodological inspiration, as we will see next.

Non-Representational Research

Representation is a tricky affair. Doel (2010, p. 117) explains,

Ordinarily, representation is bound to a specific form of repetition: the repetition of the same. Through representation, what has already been given will come to have been given again. Such is its fidelity: to give again, and again, what has already been given, without deviation or departure. Such is its fidelity to an original that is fated to return through a profusion of dutiful copies; an original whose identity is secured and re-secured through a perpetual return of the same and whose identity is threatened by the inherent capacity of the copy to be a deviant or degraded repetition, a repetition that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1 Non-Representational Research Methodologies: An Introduction
• 2 New England Red
• 3 Atmospheric Methods
• 4 Against Method
• 5 Listening to Fish: More-Than-Human Politics of Food
• 6 Devices for Doing Atmospheric Things
• 7 Enlivening Ethnography Through the Irrealis Mood: In Search of a More-Than-Representational Style
• 8 Vital Methodologies: Live Methods, Mobile Art, and Research-Creation
• 9 The Datalogical Turn
• 10 Irrevocable Loss
• Afterword: Non-Representational Theory and Me Too
• Contributors
• Index