Affirming the visual-material: taking (theoretical) stock, finding an argument that works

Progress. This post was NOT written at 2.30am. It’s a rehearsal for a series of papers-in-development, about “the visual” and social research, and it builds on the crisis-induced stocktake that was my previous post. This post gets down to the job of constructing a workable theoretical framing, by considering what visual-material methods are, and how I can affirm their substantial position (my) social research (and why I’m feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the label “methods” as a result).

Note: I use the term “visual-material” methods instead of simply visual methods because I am talking about images and things, drawing and materials, ‘artefacts’ that have substance.

1. Much work with “visual methods” is (both intentionally and unintentionally) decorative, instrumental or focused exclusively on novelty. People often ‘like’ visual methods because they are ‘nice’ or make things more interesting. If we mean harmless, pleasant, decorative, then nice is not good. The next step up is to take a more instrumental view, along the lines of ‘visual methods are good for eliciting qualitative data’. I have a little more time for this view, but my PROBLEM is the relegation of methods as a tool, something that gets the “real” work done, i.e. the “data collected”. We might say that we don’t really take a positivist view of data, that we know methods are not invisible, but do we/I practice what we/I preach?

2. Visual-material methods are not neutral. I say that visual-material methods are active, generative materials, not window dressing, or a style for some other substance. I say that they have an interesting, multi-dimensional status - they can “be” several things at the same time and can connect diverse things in new ways (e.g. including, but also beyond logical-rational relationships). I still like (existential) phenomenologists (e.g. Hans-Georg Gadamer, or  Jean-Luc Marion’s) ideas that the arts (including painting) are something to be ‘encountered’ in an active sense, are work with us to cause is to see (ourselves) through strangeness, analogy, metaphor and so on. However, I’m not sure the existential argument goes far enough. Encounters, yes, hermeneutics also, but I’m not sure the visual-material as mimesis of something else, towards something else is much more than method, even if - granted - it’s a much more acceptable, active method.

3. We need an affirmative and substantial view of visual-material “methods”. What’s the alternative to decoration, or even space for encounter? My line of thinking is as follows. If visual-material methods are to be “more than method”, this requires - ultimately - to challenge the subject-object relationship between method and data. We might accept that methods ‘influence’ the data in a social constructionist sense, but I’m wondering if that’s not much of an (epistemological) shift. Instead, what if we challenged the artificial separation of methods-methodology-theory-data that we are keen to segregate in our desire for ‘rigour’ and so on? What if we took seriously that each ‘contact’ with the data changed the data? What if data only becomes accessible to us in and through our means of seeing?

4. The time has come for methods ‘like’ the visual-material. I suspect I will have to refine this argument, but this grand statement is my way of saying that the characteristics of advanced capitalism produce some messy effects. Human life is entangled with technologies and their metrics and global issues such as climate change and stateless people are issues that cross boundaries. These things (and more) drive complex, contradictory scenarios in which people become new, fractured, hybrid  subjects, and specific groups experience marginalisation, and inequality. In the face of complexity, ambiguity, multi-speed and multi-scale issues all at play together, leaving traditional research methods appearing ill-equipped. I’m going to suggest that visual-material methods represent a type of method that have the potential to speak to this situation. Given my last blog post about my theoretical nomadism and the journey I have been on to find a home for my research practice, I therefore am ‘trying out’ PostHumanism as a conceptual frame to argue this.

5. PostHumanism is an ideal ground for the future of visual-material methods. I admit, I have resisted reading much about PostHumanism, as I assumed it was a pendulum swing against the human, and given that all my work is about relationships, I didn’t have time for (what I saw as) theoretical pretentiousness and first world / middle class anxieties which might be hard to apply in working class communities. I’m shifting my position now. Without giving a lengthy summary of PostHumanism here (which I’m not qualified to write, being new to the game) I will point out a few simplified features, as I understand them, which make it an ideal ground for (my) visual-material methods:

• Restricting our ‘unit of analysis’ to the individual human, community or society is a flawed decision. Human activity is not “solely” human. ‘Human’ identity, activity and agency is intimately connected to, and co-constituted by much that is not ‘human’: computers, algorithms, objects, spaces, cartographic lines and more.
• ‘Human’ projects are more-than-human projects: global warming, income inequality, what and how we eat, mental health...the list goes on. Unfamiliar as it may seem, a key to moving towards connected solutions is to refine the relatedness of the world through a complex, diverse, but single immanent-material system. This is not simple monism; a single, unified, homogeneous unit, but a messy entanglements and patterns of people and (many) things. 
• We see things less as individual ‘units’ (as markets require) than lines, processes, collectives, patterns: things that emerge and become. ‘Becoming’ replaces the individual human as an ethical and productive unit of enquiry. We could say: relationships, not things. 
• Affect is something shared, passed through, transmitted, and the opposite to individual autonomy. Once we take affect seriously, we can take up Braidotti’s (2019) call for “an intensive form of trans-disciplinarity and boundary-crossing among a range of discourses” (p.28), or, I say, a concern with following lines into all the places they go. [For more on this, see my previous post on Deleuze, diagrams, mapping, stacking and folding.]
• The consequence of all these points can be heightened anxiety, but more importantly, can be a desire to affirm that which is different, affective and relational (Braidotti, 2019: 11, 34) through a desire to act; an ethical praxis. Humans and their relationships are not lost, but enhanced, viewed with a concern for diversity, relatedness and ethics, rather than commodification and exploitation.

6. If we take these points seriously, the purpose, status and substance of methods must be revised to be relevant. I focus on the connected, the in-between, the processes of becoming, and start with some of Braidotti’s (2019) calls for action, responding to her call for “conceptual creativity” (p.34) and to develop a material (practical) “plane of encounter for multiple differentiated positions” (p.38). I note some principles in a move towards an affirmative view of the visual-material:

• Visual-material methods are not some neutral ‘other’ relegated to the role of novel decoration, illustration or even way of elicitation. They materialise the flow and connection of forces that connect as we engage. 
• They come loaded with potential, and offer to re-imagine, rather than represent. They are part of the act of relating: a generative, productive act, affirming the human-with.
• Visual-material methods achieve this by making strange and turning the traditional subject, and by (re)animating situations, (think of ethnographic study or performance, rather than a still life study). 
• They can fore-ground that which is excluded, marginalised, edited out and prohibited under homogenous and oppressive regimes of power. 
• Visual-material methods therefore become active in the research site, acting back on situations and co-producing ‘data’. Their persistence allows for different sorts of encounters, work-with, and new forms to emerge. They can be challenging and insistent. 
• Their ambiguity allows for exploration and holding of tensions, contradictions, negative spaces and give form to what is traditionally not described in research.