p.1 “The notion of intra-action
(in contrast to the usual ‘interaction’, which presumes the prior existence of independent entities/relata)
represents a profound conceptual shift. It is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries
and properties of the ‘components’ of phenomena become determinate and that particular embodied concepts become
meaningful” (Barad, 2003, p.815).
If this is so, then one of the shifts we in fact need
to make is to move away from the idea of exploratory thought as reflection, as being hypothetical thought about an
identifiable ‘thing’.
p.1 As Karen Barad (2003) notes, the notion of intra-action
“represents a profound conceptual shift” (p.815), it means that no ‘things’ exist for
us as fixed and permanent ‘things-in-themselves’ in separation from their surroundings. All ‘things’
exist as ‘doings’, as agential enactments, as focal things attended to from within a larger, ceaselessly
unfolding, unbounded, fluid process. Thus, as beings within (and of) a world that is always in the process of becoming other
than what it was before, we must learn to think ‘while in motion’, so to speak, and to treat our ‘thinkings’
as temporary results within a still continuing process of becoming.
p.2 our ‘seeing’ things, ‘hearing’
things, ‘making sense’ and ‘talking of’ things, are all material practices,
involving the intra-twining, or the entanglement, of certain of our material bodily processes with those
of the material world. To repeat, we are not separate agents, but ‘participant parts’
within and of an indivisible, continually unfolding, stranded, flowing whole, able to set the boundaries that matter
to us within it in one way at one moment and in another way the next.
p.4 But what if, instead of the thin and inert ‘billiard-ball’
world of particles of matter in motion... we live in the midst of a qualitatively rich, still unfolding world of stranded,
intra-mingling, flowing processes, each with their own agentive powers... ? Then we will need – not yet again
to formulate any new theories (for theory formulation is itself process in need of performative articulation) – but
to re-orient or to re-relate ourselves to our surroundings in
ways very different from those into which we have been trained in recent times, a task of an unusual kind for those of us
trained only in accomplishing intellectual tasks of a rational kind.
p.4-5 it is so easy for us to think of the world as being full of
nameable ‘things’ which, once they have been named, stay as the things we take them to be while we are inquiring
into their nature – for, as he says, they “counterfeit immobility so well.” But if we take them –
or records of them – out of their context, out of the currents sustaining their formation as the dynamic stabilities
they were, do they stay the same? If our process approach is correct, they do not.
p.6 Can we think of dynamic stabilities in terms of what Law
and Mol (1994) call “invariant transformations” (p.658)... Like Mol and Law (1994), not only do I think it possible,
but I think that, in practice – in our speech intra-twined activities – much
work is in fact done on the basis of sensing such dynamic
stabilities within such essentially fluid places.
p.7 Elsewhere (Shotter, 2005), I have suggested that these signs
of direction in thought – of which we can have ‘an acutely discriminative sense’ (James) –
can provide us both with “transitory understandings” (that give us a sense of ‘where we
currently stand’), and “action guiding anticipations” (that give us a sense of ‘where next
we might go’).
p.10 I would like to call difficulties of this kind, orientational
or relational difficulties. Overcoming them requires a very different kind of approach from our approach to problems
– which, of course, expresses straightaway the nature of the difficulty we face: What actually is involved in our approaching
a situation or circumstance which at first we find quite bewildering, confusing, or dis-orienting? What is involved
in our moving from bewilderment, to feeling ‘at home’ in such new situations?
p.10 We confront a new situation; at first we are confused,
bewildered, we don’t know our ‘way about’ (Wittgenstein) within it. However, as we ‘dwell
in it’ and begin to ‘move around’ within it, a qualitatively distinct ‘something’ begins to
emerge; it emerges for us in the ‘time contours’ or ‘time shapes’ that become apparent to us in the
dynamic relations, the differences, we can sense between our outgoing exploratory activities and their incoming
results... if we can come to feel confident of knowing our way around within such fields of possibility,
then we can be competent in resolving on different ways of ‘going on’ within them according
to the different ‘ends in view’ we might wish to pursue.
p.11 In all of these noticings, due to their just happening nature,
their spontaneity, there is at work, as Steiner (1989) puts it, an “‘otherness’ which enters us [and] makes
us other” (p.188). And it is in this way that we can overcome the trap of simply returning again and again
to what is already familiar to us. [JLJ - actual quote from Steiner, Real Presences, 1989 "The 'otherness' which enters
into us makes us other."]
p.11 [Merleau-Ponty (1962)] "...the problem being how, to all
appearances, consciousness learns something, the solution cannot consist in saying that it knows everything in advance.
The fact is that we have the power to understand over and above what we may have spontaneously thought” (p.178). But
if we begin with ‘noticings’...then we need not be reliant upon what is already known
p.12 the ‘objects’ of our inquiries do not pre-exist
out in the world awaiting discovery of them; they emerge through and within intra-actions. They exist in terms of the unfolding
differences and similarities that emerge within phenomena, comparisons that come to occur in different ways according
to the different agential cuts we make on the basis of the guiding expectations with which we go out to meet whatever is happening
within our surroundings.
p.12 Taking a performative, rather than a representational
attitude, to the aims of our inquiries, leads us to the realization that their outcomes are not to be measured
in terms of their end points, the results they arrive at, but in terms of what we learn, what we can come
to embody, along the way in making them
p.12 as Barad (2007) points out, “...we do not see merely
with our eyes. Interacting with (or rather, intra-acting ‘with’ and as a part of) the world is part and parcel
of seeing. Objects are not already there; they emerge through specific practices” (p.157).
As she makes clear, ‘things’ come to exist for us, within the flow of intraactivity within which
we have our being, as a result of those ‘doings’ by which we are able to stabilize and reproduce them.
