non-human worlds so we can see that all matter is dynamic, agentive and communicative.
New materialist thinkers encourage us to deconstruct the language of animate/living, and inanimate/dead (Bennett, 2010; Chen, 2012), viewing this as a social construction which has served to teach communities and their colonisers a disconnection between their immediate local and their remote global environments. Jane Bennett discourages the term ‘environment’ in order to highlight ‘vital materiality’ (Bennett, 2010: 112). She points out that ‘We are vital materiality and we are surrounded by it, though we do not always see it that way. The ethical task at hand here is to cultivate the ability to discern nonhuman vitality, to become perceptually open to it’ (Bennett, 2010: 14). Donna Haraway says:
It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. (Haraway, 2016: 12)
A consequence of the anthropocentric narrative is to categorise matter as either animate or inanimate (Bennett, 2010). Rock is not inanimate, it is alive, and it hosts life, it protects life. It provides a platform for life. In terms of the time frame in which plants, animals and humans live, rock offers stability. We humans have a short life span compared to rock. Rock grows or changes in a relational world in mostly a much slower time frame to the life spans of humans, flora and fauna. We don't notice the parallel time worlds. We think rock and glaciers are dead because they are not moving in ways we can perceive with our eyes. We tell ourselves simple stories. We say they are frozen, immobile, inanimate. But it is we who are frozen in time. Our own time frame. A human time frame (Simon and Salter, 2019).
The Social Construction of Matter and Human Agency
We humans have come to think of the material world as made up of matter to consume. Rosi Braidotti says that ‘Nature is more than the sum of its marketable appropriations: it is also an agent that remains beyond the reach of domestication and commodification’ (Braidotti, 2006: 47). Performance-researcher, Jodie Allinson similarly challenges the advanced capitalist metaphor of environment as ‘consumable resource’ (Allinson, 2014). When natural resources become scarce, they become commodified. Indeed, the very language of natural resources speaks to an advanced capitalist view of nature as a resource to be utilised/colonised by humans – including those humans Anthropos deems to be inferior. People are forcibly moved or murdered, land is systematically stolen by those with special power, rain forests are left to burn to access rich materials that lie beneath the ground, mountains are physically deconstructed to produce material for building houses or roads. Sand dunes, with their own ecologies hosting interdependent communities of creatures, plants and other dwellers, are disappearing with rising sea levels, tramping tourists and the need for sand to build tower blocks and new islands for economic purposes.
This disappearance of matter – wait, no, let's not use a passive term as it promotes dissociation from our responsibilities for these actions – let's talk of matter being disappeared by human activity, directly (for example, cutting down forests, shooting migrating birds) and indirectly (for example, increases in greenhouse gasses causing temperature increases and glaciers to melt). And yet technology has adopted the language of nature to naturalise itself: twitter, web, stream, cloud, amazon, apple, for example. The large corporations who own the mouthpieces of social media both facilitate and obstruct bridging between local communities and the global materiality; the storying of the materiality of lives can build or destroy community investment in sustainability beyond what counts as ‘now’ or ‘here’ or ‘me’ or ‘you’. Barad says, ‘it is possible for entangled relationalities to make connections between entities that do not appear to be proximate in space and time’ (2007: 74).
Braidotti argues that we cannot use the same language to create solutions that has been used to create the problems we face (Braidotti, 2013). But what language do we use? Climate activists have used the language of ‘climate emergency’ to jolt people into an awareness that time is running out for effectively protecting the earth's ravaged ecology. However, language in itself is not enough. Urgent messages about the environment are frequently refuted by those whose short-term interests are served by, for example, deforestation. There are many examples of how language is used against activists to undermine their campaigns, often using pathologising mental health discourses to dismiss powerful speakers especially when from oppressed groups. We need to understand how those not concerned with social justice are using language to maintain an imbalance of power and appropriating the language of the ‘natural’ to continue with their endeavours.
There is a challenge then in social constructionist inquiry to include a presence of other contexts which offer a broader context for the smaller, immediate issues to make visible the implicative influences of changes within our environment on human life. What characterises the movement in and between these levels of context is local reflexivity which asks, ‘What is happening here?’ and global reflexivity which asks, ‘How does our experience here connect with what else is going on out there?’ (Simon, 1998, 2012, 2014).
Transmaterial Research Questions
Transmaterial worlding as inquiry asks investigative questions such as:
‘How can we show what matters, how it matters, and to whom it matters?’
‘How can we show others what is being constructed, how and with whom?’
‘How can we use our understanding of communication to show how relations in the world are being created?’
The how can we show questions are not innocent or decontextualised research questions. They reflect some anxiety that facts and findings alone will not be accepted as evidence. They anticipate an increasingly sceptical audience. Members of the public see politicians fighting with scientists over who is telling the truth. Black and indigenous communities struggle to have their realities of systematic and institutionalised abuse taken seriously by those in positions of influence. Evidence using what was traditionally considered robust research methods is no longer enough. On the one hand, methods often reproduce colonising values that serve to reproduce material which does not reflect lived experience, for example, of oppressed and minority peoples. On the other hand, approaches that do reflect experiences of minority or oppressed peoples are often critiqued for being too subjective and insufficiently rigorous.
These questions then also need including to address the voices of human and also of non-human life forms.
‘How is material being defined?’
‘Which voices are being included or excluded?’
‘How are they represented?’
‘What negotiations are involved in the process of knowledge generation and knowledge sharing?’
There are different kinds of power to consider in transmaterial worlding as a method of inquiry:
1 The power to influence how people configure realities through discourse and narrative;
2 The power to create structures which solidify and embody those realities;
3 The power to deconstruct and reconstruct material and linguistic structures;
4 The power to recognise that truths are not representative of one's own, other people's or the material environment's experience;
5 The power
