Writing Posthumanist Subjects

Begin

In this article I explore problems of representation in qualitative inquiry, specifically how to think and write about posthumanist human subjects (as objects) who are no longer given as such. I draw on my attempts to represent subjects in my doctoral dissertation, a study of Western teachers in Vietnam, exploring how this process of writing pursued the problem of not representing apparently stable and unified “participants” as they appeared in interview transcripts and field-notes through the experimental and playful piecing together of impressionistic vignettes. However, this process of carefully arranging text also highlights the paradox of artfully fabricating convincingly realistic and natural ethnographic description, disrupting notions of transparency and verisimilitude as indicators of the quality of qualitative research.

Languages

I have begun to pay increasing attention to the prevalence of English signs on the shopfronts of the city. Inevitably, English dominates the landscape of the major tourist areas of Hanoi, but now I notice more and more English encroaching into other areas. In the southwestern suburbs where I stay, the majority of shops retain their Vietnamese nomenclature. But even here, an area where I rarely see another White face, English is spreading: There are Nice Hotels, Lady Shops, Shop Mens [sic], as well as semi-English Biboshops, and Franco-English fusions like the Le Blanc Wedding Studio. To whom, I wonder, do they speak? What do they signify, given the possibility that, despite the triumphant spread of English, they may denote little to the many who cannot read English?

Riding toward the city center, I pass some of the rash of mega real estate developments appearing around Hanoi: Royal City and the Vincom Mega Mall on Nguyễn Trãi, Mandarin Garden on Hoàng Minh Giám, The Manor, and The Garden on Mễ Trì. None, or so it seems, have Vietnamese names. Royal City and its adjoined Vincom Mega Mall stand like a monument to the excessive wealth of Vietnam’s first and only bona fide billionaire, Phạm Nhật Vượng, who made his fortune producing instant noodles in Ukraine. The entrance boasts a triumphal arch in bleached white, with Royal City Vincom Mega Mall embossed on the front in floodlit gold. Behind the arch, a flower garden is surrounded by modestly draped Greco-roman statues—again in white—at the rear of which four rearing bronze horses pull a bronze chariot, the arch and quadriga together evoking the Brandenburger Tor or Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile for reasons, beyond grandiosity, I cannot begin to ascertain.

The site hosts a shopping mall, properly named the Vincom Mega Mall Royal City, which boasts 800 outlets, 170 restaurants, cinemas (Platinum Cineplex Royal City), an entertainment center (Vinpearl Games Royal City), a bowling alley (Royal Bowling), an indoor water park (Vinpearl Water Park Royal City), and the first ever ice rink in Vietnam (Vinpearl Ice Rink Royal City). None of it, I gather, exists in Tiếng Việt—Vietnamese—the official national language of this Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The Royal City housing development comprises 4,500 condominiums, many of which remain unlit when I ride home at night, despite claims that most have been sold (Kroll, 2013). There is also a campus of the new British Vietnamese International School, which promises its “unique world class education model . . . will ensure true bilingual proficiency upon graduation, as well as preparation for leading universities around the world” (British Vietnamese International School, 2012). But I can’t help but find it strange that this enormous and (at least to me) ostentatious expression of . . . (well what, exactly? I’m not sure. Wealth? Success? Status?) here in the southwestern corner of Thanh Xuân by the banks of the filthy Tô Lịch River exists, as far as I can tell, only in English. And I want to know what it all means.

Countries

There are, of course, many Vietnams, and even mine are multiple. For my doctoral dissertation, I decided that I would try to represent in writing a Vietnam I knew of English language, international schools, White teachers, and Vietnamese kids. If you are anything like me, you might conceive of such a study as a process of interviewing and observing teachers and students to document and analyze what said teachers and students say and do to, in-turn, write and say something about who and what such people are. You might, as I did, write a proposal for such a study, secure funding, arrange permissions, recruit participants, fly to Hanoi, and spend eight weeks conducting the interviewing, observing, documenting, and analyzing you wrote about in your proposal. You might also, if you really are anything like me, quickly find yourself being led astray, no longer certain that there is anything certain to say about who or what anyone or anything is or means.

Cities

It starts in the middle, this Vietnam I wrote/write about, in the Phố Cổ or Old Quarter, by Hoàn Kiếm Lake, not far from the banks of the Sông Hồng, the Red River. It’s here, typically, that expatriate teachers arrive and stay in their first days in Hanoi. The streets here, dating back to the 15th century, twist and turn, intersected by multiple alleys and lanes, burrow-like “in all of their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 6-7). Not only thoroughfare, the streets themselves seem to take up whatever identity is needed of them, becoming butchers, kitchens, barber shops, restaurants, playgrounds, spaces of movement, of business, of society, but also always spaces in the process of becoming something else, something different. The houses that open directly onto these streets and alleys seem both ancient and always becoming something new as they are split and supplemented, growing organically to take on new forms and accommodate new generations, new businesses, and new functions. Walls, balconies, and rooftops multiply, breaking out of existing structures, accreting concrete, plastic, and steel, growing upward and outward, sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, spawning tangled tendrils of electronic connectivity.

Beyond the ancient and new entanglements of the Old Quarter, the city continues to move in unpredictable ways. Roads, streets, and lanes spread outward, labyrinthine in their complexity. The French Quarter to the southeast offers a rich colonial nostalgia: an unexpectedly orderly and intelligible grid of wide and tree-lined European boulevards and avenues, imposing villas, Nhà Hát Lớn—the Opera House—inspired by Paris’s Palais Garnier, and the Hotel Metropole, elegant reminders of L’Indochine française, and la mission civilisatrice, and a not-yet-forgotten superiority. To the north, the expat ghetto of Tây Hồ offers home comforts: espresso coffee, burgers, fish and chips, wagyu steaks: foreign tastes at foreign prices. To the south the lively student center of Bách Khoa reveals a more youthful and modern Vietnam, teeming with young people and computer shops and sidewalk cafés. To the west, away from the river, the city grows rapidly; an expanding series of lanes and streets and roads that bifurcate fractally, repeating patterns of complexity at ever increasing scales. And to the east lies the river, no longer the border of the city but still demarcating this side and that side, an inside and an outside.

There seem to be few straight lines and many shifting paths, with all points connected in myriad ways. When traffic on the roads slows, people on motorbikes flow onto sidewalks and down rat runs, the multiplicity of machines and people forming what looks to me like a single whole, like a murmuration of starlings folding and unfolding. Or schooling, as in fish. Here and there, monstrous floodlit developments loom in the haze and smog, cybernetic arrangements of concrete and steel and electricity and information, their metallic skeletons visible beneath the gaping wounds of unfinished walls. This is not fixed space, but constant and perpetual movement and change. Ancient streets are demolished to make way for new. A network of overhead ring roads has begun construction, with supporting structures sprouting like gigantic concrete poplars throughout the city. Parts of the neighboring Hà Tây, Vĩnh Phúc, and Hòa Bình provinces have recently been subsumed into the city—along with their inhabitants—eliminating old territories and absorbing them into new as the city expands and moves and changes.

People

It’s probably important here to confess that I spent four years living and working in Hanoi before undertaking the doctoral study I now write about, which means there is a very good chance that all of this writing, like much writing, is more about me than anything else. I really spent four years living and teaching in Vietnam, working at a university where I was paid five times more than Vietnamese teachers because I was a “native speaker” of English, and in a school that paid English-speaking Indian and Filipino teachers half of what they paid White teachers, and paid English-speaking Vietnamese teachers even less than that. I worked with a young American teacher who used to call Vietnamese people, in general, “ignorant peasants” and an Australian teacher who told me that Vietnamese kids, like “Blackfellas” (he guessed) “couldn’t think freely in reality but could do it in a dream and write it down.” And I also worked with people I considered (for I am nothing if not magnanimous) to be great teachers, Vietnamese and Americans and Australians and so on. I was there, right in the middle, all the way through.

Schools

The school emerges from the surrounding rice paddy on the outskirts of the city. Gray concrete and painted color, it appears at once strange and familiar to me, looking as if some expatriate Western architect had imagined a Vietnamese person imagining a Western school and designed it accordingly. It is new, new, new, unlike the surrounding lanes and houses and lakes and pagodas. A newly paved road edged with newly planted gardens leads into the newly constructed school, watched over by a newly appointed security guard in a newly tailored uniform sitting in a newly erected guardhouse operating a new red and white boom gate. Nothing here resembles the cancerous, flaking, yellow-washed, dusty, stained, decrepit concrete walls and faded, crumbling, mutating structures I have come to recognize as Hanoian.

Across the river, the school stands not only on the wrong side of town but also a side of town that is undergoing its own rapid development. A few blocks back from the main highway to Hải Phòng, it sits in the shadows of the massive and ancient dyke that holds back the brown silted waters of the Red River, amidst an old town of small alleys, red and green roofed houses, and picturesque green lakes surrounded by outdoor cafés where people apparently sit outside on small plastic stools all day long, apart for a few hours after lunch in the unbearable summer heat when almost everyone in the city disappears. A tall and gray and new concrete wall surrounds the school grounds, demarcating its territory, separating new from old, inside from outside, us from them.

Teachers

And in the school: teachers. There are students too, of course, but I have been and remain wary of representing these young Vietnamese people for mostly unexplored reasons that I don’t doubt have much to do with age, race, coloniality—power, in other words—and that bother me less, but bother me still with regard to representing the White, adult, expatriate teachers who I recognize to be, more or less, like me. The teachers I can describe, writing impressionistic portraits of the ones that I observed, interviewed, documented, and analyzed, reporting what they said and did. Like this: He looked to be thirty-something and friendly, with black hair and teeth white enough to be uncanny. (As an aside: “At the start of it all,” writes Rosi Braidotti (2013, p. 13), “there is He: the classical ideal of ‘Man’.”) Neat steel-rimmed glasses framed his unshaven face, a scruffiness that continued down past his untucked purple shirt to the too-short black trouser legs that revealed a pair of worn and holey black socks. He was relaxed and comfortable with his students, mostly sitting at his desk, smiling often, and laughing easily with the six girls and four boys he referred to collectively as “guys” and individually by the English nicknames he had given them.

Or this: He was a short and scruffy Australian, rough-hewn, his longish unkempt hair and beard a weird kind of indeterminate absence of color. Wearing black trousers and a pair of white trainers, his short-sleeved black shirt strained around his stomach, its neck open, steely chest-hair exploding from within. One time, he walked into the class I was observing, approached me and said, in front of a class of Vietnamese students who may or may not have been listening, “This place is fucking useless. I tried to tell them how to fix it but I’m just the dumb white guy. That’s how things work around here unfortunately.” I nodded, speechless, unsure how to respond. Who was this guy? I thought. How do I respond to that? I thought. And while I was slowly thinking, he turned and walked back out the same way he came in.

I could go on.

But here’s the thing: Part of me wants to want to write that there are no teachers, there are only memories, recollections, notes, images, descriptions, caricatures, characters, impressions, utterances; a version of reality written to be read, always already diverging from the reality of what happened, always becoming something other than that which happened. Even though they were real, and what happened really did happen, no act of writing can return us to what happened, then and there. No paragraph can account for the myriad confluence of particles and relations culminating in the moment, the event, the individual, the utterance, nor the infinite possibilities of what comes next. There is, in the end, just this writing, this paragraph, this sentence, this clause, this phrase, here and now: An entanglement of “romanticized and oversimplified narratives that attempt to veil the fragmented subject that speaks with a voice that can never bear the burden of its weight” (Mazzei & Jackson, 2012, p. 742). And even this is not quite fully determined (How is this working for you? Is anything coming through?). And so, this part of this me thinks, maybe there is or was, in fact, no need to really interview and observe and document and analyze describe any particular, real, actual, individual teachers-in-the-world. After all, what difference does it make? Just write and write and write. Write teachers into being, the ones you know are there, the ones you encountered, the ones you knew, the ones you worked with, the ones you experienced when it was just a day at school, not research, even though you didn’t record the words, or take the notes. But that, of course, would be ridiculous. Invalid. Unreliable. Fiction. Fake. Alternative facts. It is my job is to interview, observe, document, analyze. To offer “thick description” (Geertz, 1973) of what really happened, sitting in classes, taking notes, recording interviews, being there and documenting my findings, theorizing words and behaviors, representing these terribly human subjects as objects so that you can be confident that what I say happened really happened.

How do you do this?

Excursions

The Camp is an activity park and campsite located about 50 km outside Hanoi on the shores of a freshwater lake beneath the Ba Vì mountains. I presume it caters mostly to Vietnamese tourists, offering lakeside tent accommodation, barbeques, a café of sorts, and various mildly adventure-type outdoorsy activities such as rope climbing and gentle hiking. It occupies a small peninsula that extends into the lake, so that you are surrounding by water on three sides. Wooden platforms are elevated on brick piles as campsites, and modern, clean, toilet blocks are also built on elevated platforms that appear to drain directly into the lake. The coarse grass, like all grass I have encountered in Vietnam, seems to be coated with a thin layer of dust or dirt.

The truth is I have come along today, as I have done on all the other days, to observe the He at the start of it all, the “White, European, handsome and able-bodied” Humanist man indelibly tied to European racism and colonialism (Braidotti, 2013, p. 24). I’m not actually thinking about it in those terms right now, though. In fact, I won’t read Braidotti’s book for another couple of years. I’m not even really sure what to do with myself while I’m here. I’m here to “research.” To collect “data.” Or maybe generate “data”? I’m no longer a teacher. I’m not paid to be here. I don’t have any professional responsibility to supervise the chaos of children hopped-up on excursion excitement, even though I fear mildly outdoorsy-adventure-type accidents and injuries are imminent. As a researcher, I’m not too sure how useful the day will be, but the chance to go for a motorcycle ride in the country sounded too good to pass up.

After wandering around the campsite for a while, I decide to leave the teachers and kids to their activities and sit in the café, a paved, roofed, but open-sided affair on a small grassy rise with several wooden tables and a small bar selling vodka, beer, Coca-Cola, water, and Vietnamese tea and coffee. Soon after sitting and ordering a coffee, I am joined by four White, European, able-bodied, male teachers who order a round of beers. At 10:30 a.m. On a school excursion.

We were all there at the start. We are all of us Man: White, European, handsome (more or less), able-bodied. We find ourselves the measure of all things. Vitruvian in proportion. We are imperious. Nothing exceeds the remit of our knowledge, or the common and good sense of our judgment, which is absolute and unequivocal. Raise any topic, as far as I can figure, and we will tell you what you need to or ought to know about it. Or don’t raise a topic at all. There is no need to solicit our advice. Let us volunteer a topic for you. Let us tell you what it is you need to know, and how to know it.

And yet . . . we are anxious, too, though we will never admit it. Not even to ourselves. Though, I suspect, our anxiety shows. We find ourselves in a numerical minority, as the measure of all things must be. We discuss the ways we are ill-treated, as we sit and drink beer outside at this little table on a small grassy rise in the middle of Vietnam, us Imperial men. Our fear, I fear, is Kurtz’s horror: that “empire and all its institutions might prove to be not merely mortal, but sadly all too human as well” (Buchanan, 2008, p. 88). That we are not Ideal. Merely human. And bound, like Kurtz, to die. My immediate response to all of this is an innate and silent and paradoxical sense of superiority as I meekly acquiesce without challenge to whatever superior truths we Men share, confident they are true, confident in the preferability of my own relative doubt and uncertainty about all things. I find superiority in my silent insistence that I am not superior. I smile and nod politely. I may even laugh audibly at the joke.

Wandering around the campsite later, I watch another teacher, a different man, this one supervising the kids climbing a six-meter rope ladder roughly nailed high to tree trunk. On his own, he earnestly ensures that only one child is on the ladder at a time. Glancing toward the café, I decide to ask him his feelings about working with other teachers, many of whom are not, in fact, trained or certified teachers, but are rather employed in-country on the basis of their nationality, native English-speaking status, or perhaps White faces (it depends who you ask). He looks at me knowingly and says, “Oh yeah, there’s a difference!”

Later, we all have lunch together, the Western teachers sitting together at two tables apart from the Vietnamese teachers and students. Only one of the Vietnamese English teachers joins us. We eat, or rather poke at our excursion food: sticky rice, fried chicken wings, sausages on sticks, and a sandwich on white bread with a piece of lettuce and an unidentifiable brown paste that appears to be finely ground meat. We joke about food on sticks, and compete to come up with increasingly ridiculous items of food to be served on a stick.

Humans

The human of Humanism . . . spells out a systematized standard of recognisability—of Sameness—by which all others can be assessed, regulated and allotted to a designated social location . . . replace it with a more complex and relational subject framed by embodiment, sexuality, affectivity, empathy and desire as core qualities. (Braidotti, 2013, pp. 26-27)

In the end, I figure, it is in the milieu of the city that teachers become, in encounters with schools and classrooms and students and food on sticks and callow researchers and all sorts of things. Individuals are caught up in ebbs and flows, movements in space and time, lines of flight, coming and going, producing “phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 4), losing and finding themselves, producing, or rather contracting their Selves, in contact with their Others, producing “double becomings” that change both the teacher and that which the teachers encounter (Sutton & Martin-Jones, 2008, p. 6), forming rhizomes, like an Orchid and Wasp, because “How could movements of deterritorialization and processes of reterritorialization not be relative, always connected, caught up in one another?” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 10). Which is to say that all encounters are becomings, or better still, double becomings in which each heterogeneous element is becoming something-other, “not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 10). We are not Man, but merely men in relation. Perhaps not even handsome ones at that. Not Ideal. Not immortal, Not identical even to ourselves. There is no Man to represent, only men, or only people, or only singularities of people produced as minute events in relation to others, appearing and disappearing in a moment—becoming and unbecoming people. Or not even people, but something else entirely, because even “person” is too deterministic, too real, meaning too much. We’re something, certainly, in our brief encounters. Something happens, but we’re not even sure it’s persons, anymore (Deleuze, 1995).

Could I say that teachers in Vietnam, like rats “in their pack form” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 6) are rhizomes, an image of identity that “has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and overspills” (p. 21)? Could the body of teachers form a singular multiplicity or rhizome, each connected to the other, no longer individual teachers, but both one and many? A single shape, fluid and moving, like a school of fish continually forming and reforming, coming and going, folding and unfolding. Could the network of White, Western English-speaking teachers, expatriate, disparate, but connected by something shared be considered a rhizome? And could the teacher and the city (and the school, and the classroom, and the student, and et cetera) in encounter form another rhizome in which the city becomes teacher and the teacher becomes city, pushing each other further in a “circulation of intensities” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 10), producing teachers, and students, and classrooms, and schools, and entire cities that create further encounters, an infinite becoming that never ends, that never is, but that is nevertheless always returned and reduced to representation and meaning? Why? Because, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, “even those who are best at ‘leaving,’ . . . stake out a far-off territoriality that still forms an anthropomorphic and phallic representation: the Orient, Mexico, or Peru” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 315). Because we can never really leave. Because we always return to representation and meaning, no matter how hard we try not to, because we can’t imagine what cannot be foreseen as a possibility.

Yes: teachers, in their pack form, form a rhizome. The city, the school, the classroom, the student, the parent, the teacher, as heterogeneous elements, all kinds of bodies, together forming rhizomes, in which “each of these becomings brings about the deterritorialization of one term and the reterritorialization of the other; the two becomings interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever further” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 10). Could I say that there isn’t even a teacher or a student? How would we think about the unspeakable complexities of classrooms then? Could I say that there is only becoming-teacher and becoming-student in a becoming-city as each element is continuously de- and reterritorializing, as the circulation of intensities continues even as the rhizome(s) mutates and changes, folding in and out like a flight of birds, in constant motion both relative and absolute, constituting encounters, creating events, producing something beyond recognition, beyond representation? Something beyond knowing, that can’t be answered by asking “what does it mean?” (Buchanan, 2008, p. 121), or, rather, that renders the question itself unaskable.

How do I do this? How do I write about these subjects?

Teachers (Redux)

I sit at a small desk, opposite the teacher, face-to-face, moments apart. It is warm outside, and morning, and a strange clarity affects the usually thick Hanoian air, as if after a storm, when the thick and filthy atmosphere is momentarily washed away revealing the beautiful but normally invisible mountains that ring the city to the North and West. The small room is typically Vietnamese, hard concrete walls, and tiled floors that lend an uncanny and amplified reverberation to every sound, hard on the ears, at least for the unaccustomed. I sit equipped with pen, paper, digital recorder, theory, hypotheses, analysis, memory, recollection, interest, desire, concern, and ask prefabricated questions like “Can you tell me a little about your background and qualifications?“ or “Tell me the story of how you ended up teaching English in Vietnam?” or “Why is English important to these kids?” because these seem like the kinds of questions I should and am supposed to ask, always assuming that recording the answers is critical, always assuming that “language begins with individuated statements and determined subjects,” and never understanding that “the statement is individuated, and enunciation subjectified, only to the extent that an impersonal collective assemblage requires it and determines it to be so” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 80).

The teacher tells me about life before Vietnam: school, study, a career as scientist, or as a lawyer, or as a teacher, or in travel, or technology, or teaching in Australia, or the United States, or Korea. About a redundancy, an economy, or a divorce. About not wanting to be in Hanoi, about not liking the city, about not liking Vietnam. Or liking it all. Or only some of it. About how it was strange. And different. And exotic. Or normal. Or normalized. About only being there because of a partner, or a friend, or an adventure, or an opportunity, or a job. About moving on, sooner or later, here or there. Or staying. About enjoying teaching English. About enjoying time with students. Or not very much liking teaching English. About how Vietnamese students were hard-working, and not real serious, and smart, and ill-disciplined, and very intelligent, and how they don’t know how to learn, or couldn’t think freely, or creatively (Bright, 2017). About the differences between real teachers and unqualified teachers and Western teachers and Vietnamese teachers. About how they didn’t like coming to a place and insisting that their way was the best way, even though it was, and that there are some cultures that are superior to others.

Writing

Only there wasn’t one teacher, there were many, and each of them was already several. But at the beginning of it all, or the end, stood He, the world, “the outcome of taking an infinite and open array of difference and reducing it to manageable identities” (Colebrook, 2002, p. 38). Reporting what this or that “person” said—data, in other words—seems academic once we accept the radical decentering of the humanist subject (MacLure, 2013). How, then, to write about the assemblage of forces and intensities giving rise to the event, the utterance, the production of a way of existing, and the mistaken ways in which events themselves are represented as something stable and sedentary? I don’t know. MacLure (2013) writes of a “materially engaged language . . . non-representational, non-interpretative, a-signifying, a-subjective, paradoxical and embroiled with matter” (p. 663). But I cannot escape the “I,” even though I’ve read all about Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) “collective assemblages of enunciation.” I remain hopelessly representational, interpretative, signifying, subjective, making use of what has been given to me as a speaking (and writing) subject (Foucault, 1972). I remained bound to data, even though I resist, still dependent on “words spoken by participants in interviews and then transcribed into words in interview transcripts as data” (Mazzei, 2013, p. 732) even as I sense their inadequacies and insufficiencies, even as I attempt to abandon a humanist methodology that “begins with the humanist subject and is obsessed with what people say they think and know” (St. Pierre, 2017, p. 3).

But my job, of course, as I have defined it (with what has been given to me), is to write about teachers, those individual entities; people, comprising body and mind, who are teachers because they teach someone something. Subjects predicated on common sense that, as Bogue (2004) writes,

grasps the world in terms of stable entities and fixed relations, thereby misunderstanding difference in two ways, both as it manifests itself in the metamorphic process of becoming (the passage of the virtual into the actual) and as it exists in itself, as a virtual immanent within the actual. (p. 331)

How do we write and represent subjects when “subjectification isn’t even anything to do with a ‘person’” (Deleuze, 1995, pp. 98-99)? Can our writing be “independent of subjective intent or meaning” (Vivian, 2005, p. 258)? Can we “mean more than one thing at a time” (MacLure, 2009, p. 98)? Do we accept that our writing can only ever approach the truth, even as we decry the posttruth world we might be complicit in creating? I have attempted to write not to re-present a reality of “persons” but to “undermine the ontological status of the very times, places, and people [I] portray” (Vivian, 2005, p. 252). They are an invention, an illusion. Inasmuch as a paragraph of language reduces the complexity of subjectification to a person, an entity, a set of relations, I made them all up, contracting difference in language, even though they all really happened, more or less. Movement, relations, becoming, distance, speed, and slowness, all undermine the ontological status of teachers, students, classrooms, and events observed and reported on and reduced to language and writing. Of course such writing fails. Movement is natural and unpredictable. The pretense of narrative flow and interpreted meaning is undermined. The logic is that of “creative stammering (and . . . and . . . and)” (Verevis, 2010, p. 170).

Can we write, then, not to represent some definitive truth, nor as the representation of a questioning of this truth, but rather as an enactment of questioning itself (Vivian, 2005)? Writing to complicate voice (Mazzei & Jackson, 2012), or whatever else needs complicating. Saying (or writing) becoming doing, a dubious undermining of the pretenses of objective and verisimilar representation that obscures and subjugates difference to identity. Whereas traditional humanist qualitative inquiry seems to work, like much traditional films do, to “obscure evidence of their artifice in the presentation of coherent and natural narratives” (Vivian, 2005, p. 252), such a writing might question the taken-for-granted ontological and epistemological assumptions that ground humanist research (a researcher, a participant, an observation, an interview) and disparage “the big, risky, question . . . the one that enables all the rest. If we give up ‘human’ as separate from non-human, how do we exist?” (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013, p. 631; St. Pierre, 2011).

Here, perhaps, lies the irony of writing about posthumanist subjects: A realistic ethnographic account, all rich “thick description” (Geertz, 1973), must be artfully contrived in writing. By way of analogy, Vivian (2005) comments on the irony of cinema: “films appear natural or realistic because they have been fabricated . . . convincingly natural or realistic films are, like all others, exquisitely fabricated . . . the more dramatically lifelike a film appears to be, the more artificial it is” (p. 255). What to do? The more realistic and coherent my represented subjects appear, the more dramatically lifelike I can craft them, the more artificial the representation becomes. Paradoxically, then, would it be closer to the real if crafted less exquisitely? If the doubts, inconsistencies, contradictions, and failures were represented accurately? And what would it mean if I was craftily fabricating the incoherent real only to appear as if I hadn’t exquisitely fashioned an artificial text in order to appear real? Writing, one feels (I feel), must be verisimilar; it must appear to be real or true, authentic, valid, reliable; whereas the real, only sometimes substantiated, is often accepted to be stranger than fiction. And so where does this leaves us? The truth is I’m not sure. Back at the beginning, probably. Or better: still right here in the middle. Right back here in the middle of representation, where, if you’re like most people, “you say ‘me, I’m a person,’ just as you say ‘the sun’s rising’” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 141). I doubt there is anything “new” to be found here.

But in the end you’ve got to write, because in the end you’re “always writing to bring something to life, to free life from where it’s trapped” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 141). Writing in sentences, necessarily in language, I guess, even as you feel it’s no longer enough to think that “careful, precise, accurate language can replicate, represent, the world” (St. Pierre, Jackson, & Mazzei, 2016, p. 103). Even as you know that language “ought to be so fundamentally changed as to become almost unrecognizable” (MacLure, 2013, p. 663). Don’t think of representing the world. Think, instead, of “a correspondence with the world” (Ulmer, 2017, p. 7). Of experimenting, in contact with the world (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 12).

There’s probably nothing useful to be said about how. So I just wrote. And I write, flowing, part of a flow, an element of flow. A particle. It feels smooth, rhythmic, as if I belong here, as if I have always belonged here. Writing. Just writing. Writing justly? I turn to my right, subtly shifting onto my elbow, dropping my shoulder and straightening my arm. My left knee leans slightly outward as I begin a graceful curve, cutting out of the flow and onto the page. I imagine myself to be a chimeric melding of man and pen and ink and paper, all power and precision as I weave across the page, inscribing my thoughts for the ages. Keep writing. I write routinely. I work. I write hesitantly. Awkwardly. Stopping. And starting again as I nurse my half-formed thoughts onto the page. I read about writing. I follow instructions. Each new sentence induces a minor panic, a leap of faith as I embark out into the next, neither yielding nor being yielded to, but simply hoping I will make it to the other side intact.