Assemblages of Violence in Education

Everyday Trajectories of Oppression

Boni Wozolek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000333398
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Waves & Wave Mechanics

Assemblages of Violence: Everyday Trajectories of Oppression brings together fields including new materialisms, anthropology, curriculum theory, and educational foundations to examine how violence is intertwined with everyday events and ideas. Artfully weaving participant narratives in two contexts that exist a literal world apart—queer middle school youth of color in an urban context and Indian women who have survived domestic violence—Assemblages of Violence conceptualizes how social justice functions in opposition to normalized aggressions. Often overlooked, these deeply significant connections document how multiplicities of aggression operate as business-as-usual in a variety of spaces and places, including those that are often thought of as helpful. To these ends, this book introduces pathologies to theoretically and methodologically trace affects in order to more clearly perceive both where and how violence is embedded in and between sociopolitical and cultural ways of being, knowing, and doing. In so doing, Assemblages of Violence argues that pathologizing trajectories of violence can provide theoretical and methodological tools for those seeking to engage in a pedagogy of equity, access, and care to help people and communities in ways they wish to be helped.

2021 Winner of the AESA Critics' Choice Book Award.

1

WHEN THINGS ATTRACT…OR DON'T: INTRA-RELATIONS AND QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENTS

“You know what the [talent] show did for me? It made me feel good. Like real good. Not

just about school but about me. People clapped. For me. For us. Did you see that? I gotta

admit, maybe there is hope for this place. For us. If people could see us that way then

maybe they can see us that way all the time…”

—Dominique, Grade 7

We lead entangled lives. One only needs to reflect on a moment when they felt at one with another body, when art evoked extreme and perhaps unexpected emotion, or how the sensation of sun-kissed skin lingers long after sunset. It has been well documented that twins regularly experience such entanglements through an awareness of each other's affects, most notably through sensing pain and crisis across great distances (Anderson, 2019; Kubis & Kouke, 1937; Parker & Jensen, 2013). The very fibers of twins' “being” seem impossibly entwined in ways that psychologists and medical professionals still have yet to fully grasp.

While those who study this phenomenon tend to focus on the narratives of twins, people who have experienced deep emotions for others, whether positive or negative, have also reported knotted ways of being that are inextricable from their counterpart. One example is Derrida's (1988) enigmatic essay in which he seeks to disrupt the notion that identity is stable in terms of an “I” that is separate from the “other”. While anthropologists and sociologists have well-trodden dialogues on how one's identity is layered with how they are identified in and through local and less local communities (e.g., Coffey, 1999; Goffman, 1963; Rahder, 2020; Varenne & McDermott, 1998), Derrida was arguing for a much more entangled understanding of how one “is” in the world, a way of being that is enmeshed with others.

This chapter addresses how everyday affects are not only knotted between nearby bodies, both human and nonhuman, but also are sometimes entangled so deeply that these affects effectively communicate across distances, or through quantum entanglements. Throughout, I refer to “bodies” quite a bit to express their movements, agencies, and coconstituted subjectivities. For clarity, it is important to tease apart the many bodies being discussed. Similar to Hultman and Lenz-Taguchi (2010), I employ the notion that bodies are “forces that overlap and relate to each other” (p. 529). This relational materialism will be further explained below using Barad's (2007) discussion of intra-action. What is important at this point is that humans do not exist in a silo; they are constantly in intra-action with things like other animals,¹ objects, affects, and cultures. The human body is therefore as significant as the bodies of cultures with which it regularly intra-acts.

By culture, I mean the ideas and ideals that are normalized and valued within and between groups of people, which manifest in a multiplicity of expressions (Page, 2000; Visweswaran, 2010). By using “body of culture”, however, I turn to a relational understanding of bodies, one in which culture is agential (Hultman & Lenz-Taguchi, 2010). As I argue throughout this chapter, this means that culture has the ability to act in ways that form and inform other bodies that are in relation to it. While the bodies themselves are significant, I primarily focus on their relations and relationships that render them agential. Following Puar (2013), my primary focus is not just on what bodies are, but on what they do.

While the next chapter focuses on the assemblage as a whole, this chapter theorizes what happens within an assemblage, attending specifically to the intra-actions that are central to an assemblage's entanglements. I begin by explaining several facets of quantum entanglements, starting with how bodies become entangled. I then use this theory to think about New Horizons, specifically discussing the details of the school's talent show. It was at that show, as the epigraph above hints that I observed how hope can move and spread in and between groups of people. Following this discussion, I share the narrative of Prisha, one of the women I met in India. Her narrative exemplifies questions of entanglement, showing how people become enmeshed and moved by broader cultural norms and values. Together, these stories help us better understand how affects like hope or despair move—theorization that is deeply necessary. While on the surface this might seem straightforward, ask yourself: how does an affect like hope move? Tacking back and forth between theory and participant narratives, I produce a complex understanding of how affects move, and how human animals and ecologies affect and are affected by one another. The complexity of such movements is explored in the following section.

Agentic Entanglements

Generally defined as a state of being wrapped or twisted in a relational mass—often in ways that make it difficult to extricate one part of the knot—entanglements are one way to understand the relationships and onto epistemologies born from experiences. Discussions of entanglement are often based in the complexity of relations, frequently turning to the study of causes and effects within the intricate imbrications of bodies. Across disciplines, the study of entanglements and the “causes” for such effects has become common. For example, affect theorists have discussed the “forces of encounter that transpire within and across the subtlest of intensities… [that become] a palimpsest of force-encounters traversing the ebbs and swells of intensities that pass between ‘bodies'” (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010, p. 2). Qualitative researchers have similarly thought about the complex relationships between bodies that are central to meaning-making processes (e.g., Tsing, 2005), and educational theorists have attended to the knot of relations that is central to schooling (e.g., Nespor, 1997; Varenne & McDermott, 1998). In short, what it means to be and to become through entanglement continues to incite imagination across fields of research.

One way to theorize entanglements and, by extension, assemblages, is through Karen Barad's (2007) framing of intra-action. Barad distinguishes between inter- and intra-action, noting that during interactions, both human and nonhuman bodies maintain a level of independence. Each entity exists and, in many ways, will continue to exit with separate identities and agencies that remain intact before and after an interaction. In intra-action, individuals materialize through encounters. This is not to say that bodies do not have agency or ways of being and knowing prior to intra-action but, rather, that bodies engage in coconstitutive ways that allow agency and a new sense of being to emerge from the relationship, not from outside of it.

Take, for example, the Stonewall uprising of 1969. One can say that Stonewall was not just an event but an intra-action of human and nonhuman parts. This includes human bodies, discourses on queerness, homo- and transphobia, politics, news coverage on civil rights, and other such factors. Stonewall was therefore a phenomenon made and unmade through intra-actions between the event, culture, and the dissemination of information about the event. Through intra-actions, people were brought together through the phenomenon of Stonewall, yet these intra-actions also separated actors into new coconstituted subjects: people became, at least temporarily, those rioting and those choosing not to join the demonstrations, those impacted through physical proximity and those not affected, and those exposed or not exposed to queerness, to name a few.

In this way, everyone in the country could be considered entangled in Stonewall, although, certainly, not everyone directly interacted with the riots in any fashion they would recognize. While I placed the above categories of being into false binaries to illustrate the point, there are infinite points between each of these positions and a multiplicity of ways that these positions can collapse on themselves. It is quite possible that a queer body might not have been in physical proximity to Stonewall but still intra-acted with the national media coverage. Although an individual might choose to remain absent from and silent within conversations surrounding events like the riots, intra-action occurs regardless of awareness or participation.

Even before it was a national touchstone, whether people were aware or not of Stonewall and its place in understanding queer identities and rights, these understandings were nonetheless part of local and less-local constructions about what it might mean to be human in relation to national politics and intimate partner relationships. Or, in Barad's terms, regardless of whether one interacted with or was aware of intra-actions with the event, the ecology of the United States intra-acted with Stonewall, therefore distributing responsibility for the matter produced within these intra-actions—namely discourses, materials, and subject positions. This is not unlike the intra-actions of the #MeToo movement, the recent COVID-19 pandemic, or the way that hopes emerged from the New Horizons talent show. Regardless of the event, through intra-actions, agency and ways of being, knowing, and doing are emergent.

This is where agency comes into play. To date, there have been many ways to think about agency (e.g., Bourdieu, 1973; Foucault, 1978; Goffman, 1961; Ortner, 2006). The long history of discussing agency across fields has created many important contributions to our understanding of how bodies move and act within and against systems of power. Here, I focus on two particular conceptualizations of agency through the respective scholarship of Sherry Ortner (2006) and Karen Barad (2007). While both Ortner and Barad argue for an agency that is produced through relationships, they diverge in their arguments about how that agency is constructed.

As an anthropologist, Ortner frames her discussion of agency within human interactions and with attention to intentionality and power. She begins with intentionality, a concept that she defines as being on a continuum of levels of consciousness that are “directed toward some end that might include highly conscious plots and plans [to] somewhat more nebulous goals [to] desires, wants, and needs” (Ortner, 2006, p. 134). Ortner explicates that some conversations about agency miss intentionality while others make intentionality too central. She instead argues that, while intention is important to agency, there is a need to recognize the “strong role of active (though not necessarily fully ‘conscious') intentionality in agency that differentiates agency from routine practices” (Ortner, 2006, p. 138). In other words, there is a difference between what one does daily and what one does with a sense of intention, however unconscious that intention may be. Or, conversely, one can enact their agency regardless of their awareness about their own intentions toward particular ends.

Finally, Ortner argues that agency exists is in relation to power, which, in turn, can be understood as strongly controlling but never complete. While enacting agency is an act of power, Ortner writes, actors still live within politically and culturally controlled local contexts. Take for example an intimate partner violence counseling center like the one in India, which exists in a context where reporting abuse is not a cultural norm. The center might have been organized with a sense of purpose for that particular place, with clear attention to the issues that survivors of abuse might face in the community and an intention to disrupt cycles of violence. Those who work in the center are operating to disrupt violence on both local and less-local levels. However, the ability for counselors and survivors to enact agency is predicated not only on the immediate context but also on broader norms and values that are implicit and explicit across communities. Such norms might dampen the center's ability to be helpful, as well as survivors' ability to participate in services at the shelter.

The relationship between power and agency exists within what I call agentic contingencies, or the circumstances that impact a person's ability to use her agency. Agentic contingencies are fluid and, like Ortner's power or Bourdieu's (1973) fields, controlling but not all-encompassing. While the center for intimate partner violence in the example above may be concerned with survivors, counselors may be situated within agentic contingencies that include time, their power within and around the community, and their own relationships to the context. Counselors may additionally be limited or supported by factors like state and federal funding. An attention to agentic contingencies is important to understanding how some practices are normalized and how one might be able to resist or refuse (McGranahan, 2016; Ortner, 2006; Simpson, 2014) cultural values that allow violence to propagate.

Similar to McGranahan (2016) and Simpson (2014), I acknowledge that although resistance and refusal are linked, they are not synonymous. As a term, resistance tends to be fraught with binaries, such as domination versus resistance (Ortner, 2006) or hidden and indirect versus public engagement with power (Scott, 1990). Refusal can similarly fall into these binaries, but while resistance can be understood as an opposition to power, refusal is an explicit rejection of one political project for another (Graeber, 2013). Refusal, McGranahan (2016) writes, “marks the point of a limit having been reached: we refuse to continue on this way” (p. 320).

As I have written elsewhere (Wozolek, 2020), agentic contingencies often underscore how resistance and/or refusal are tied to questions of power. A woman working at a center might have fewer agentic contingencies than her clients. The ability to refuse a patriarchal system of violence in ways that are “generative and strategic, mov[ing] toward one thing, belief, practice or community and away from another” (McGranahan, 2016, p. 319) might be far more possible for a center director than it is for a woman still living with/in a violent context. The client can, perhaps, actively resist systems of oppression, but she might not have the power to completely reject them in her life, a power that might be afforded to her abuser who is able to refuse her humanity.

Barad (2007) similarly discusses issues of power and agency as she uses intra-actions to think about how agency is produced through entanglements. Unlike Ortner, Barad emphasizes that the interdependence of bodies in a phenomenon produces agency while arguing that nonhuman bodies also have agency. In his work on racism, Jerry Rosiek (2018) reminds us that this conceptualization of agency “is not a claim that things have consciousness or make plans. It is, instead, a claim that reality of phenomena lies in the relations established through a process of intra-action” (p. 81). Rosiek attends to the ways that racism has agency in its movements and ability to shape sociocultural norms and phenomena. Returning to the example of Stonewall, Rosiek might argue that homo- and transphobias have agency and therefore moved through the context, shaping the phenomena created within and by the uprising.

At the intersection of Ortner's and Barad's scholarship is a sense that agency encompasses the intention and attention of bodies—human and nonhuman alike—as they intra-act within and against lines of power. Braiding these two conceptualizations together is important for at least two reasons. First, affects like racism do have agency, but that agency still exists within broader systems of power and their related agentic contingencies, which are carried out with a sense of intention. The same can be said for antiracist agency, which can move against normalized bodies of bias despite deep-seated histories of racism. Second, within intra-actions, agency is coconstituted but also, to borrow from Ortner, heavily dependent on the cultural ideas and ide...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• अतिथिदेवो भव: Atithi Devo Bhava
• Introduction
• 1 When things attract…or don’t: Intra-relations and 
quantum entanglements
• 2 Gordian knots: Grasping at the impossibly intertwined
• 3 Pathology as method: Tracing trajectories
• 4 Curricula of violence: Learning in and 
through the assemblage
• Conclusion: Reflecting on the assemblage
• Index