4. Literature Review

According to the Spanish poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, you are poetry as you gaze or set your sight on his pupil. This verse illustrates how each one of us has the capacity of seeing poetry in others, and as a consequence become empathic. Yet, the poet herself has to understand the essence of poetry first, i.e. Being Poetry, in order to extend that notion toward others. Thus Lina Ru  illustrates in her book that she is poetry (i.e. poetry), so then we can explore the possibility that each one of us could extend the notion of Being Poetry into own depth through a “methodology of the heart,” i.e. autoethnography.[1]

The autoethnographer Tessa Muncey argues that “the ultimate autoethnographic question” is: Who am I? According to the autoethnography scholars Heewon Chang, Carolyn Ellis, Tony E. Adams, and Arthur P. Bochner, this line of inquiry is introspective but intersubjective, experimental but rigorous, and evocative but ultimately morally concerned. As a result, it attempts to elucidate “muddled, idiosyncratic, flowered eccentricities that makes us unique” in order to empathize with other people’s differences with the objective of changing the world in a positive way.[2]

Furthermore, the Professor in Communications and Sociology Norman K. Denzin suggests that autoethnography is a “methodology of the heart” because it involves self-examination that leads to an awareness and manifestation of emotion. This combination of autobiography and ethnography challenges traditional approaches in qualitative research (e.g. writing analytically and formally) because it acknowledges the researcher’s perspective, emotion, and human depth: “In writing from the heart, we learn how to love, to forgive, to heal, and to move forward.”[3]

Why would one care about healing, forgiving, and loving? According to Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln it is not only about moving forward; qualitative research since 2005 is morally concerned within a discourse toward living in liberty.[4] In fact, Denzin and Lincoln designate the following methodological phases occurring within North America as:

“…traditional (1900-1950); the modernist, or golden age (1950-1970); blurred genres (1970-1986); the crisis of representation (1986-1990); the postmodern, a period of experimental and new ethnographies (1990-1995); postexperimental inquiry (1995-2000); the methodological contested present (2000-2010); and the future, which is now (2010- ).”[5]

The latter movement tries to bring sense to the contemporary methodological fragmentation, but still refusing to aknowledge certain groups and methods due to the previous postmodern and postexperimental inquiry, e.g. autoethnography that allows introspection for data collection from minority groups.[6] In the 2005 edition of The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research rather than a future phase, there is a fractured future phase which is giving rise to an indigenous social science that allows them a self-determination and epistemological and cosmological liberty.[7]

For example in the book Blackfoot Ways of Knowing: The Worldview of the Siksikaitsitapi, member of the Blackfoot Confederacy Betty Bastien and the psychologist Jürgen W. Kremer argue that most western epistemologies operate under an implicit assumption of rationality (e.g. Kantian enlightenment) and objectification (e.g. Cartesian dualism). Consequently, human beings conceive themselves as fragmented particles, i.e. individual subjects, who are independent from the world that surrounds them and even each other. [8] On the other hand, the Indigenous epistemologies reject this objectification and defend the following assumptions:

“The nature of the world is interconnectedness. It is interconnectedness through spiritual intelligence or consciousness, Ihtsipaitapiiyo’pa. It is the nature of the universe to work for balance. The universe has a sacred power and influence; it works in reciprocal ways among all the interdependent parts.” [9]

In other words, the Blackfoot epistemology favors wholeness rather than fragmentation because “knowing is experiential.” This means that experience is a present moment flow of consciousness through an embodiment that leads to a sacred and spiritual epistemology which transcends fragmentation. [10] Hence, the knower becomes one with the known through the spirit of knowledge:

“Following Niitsitapi logic means experiencing the whole, the interconnectedness of an indivisible universe. Rationality, on the other hand, denies the spiritual nature of knowledge and sacrifices the wholeness of human beings (Ani 1994, 32).”[11]

For example, according to Alexandra Gillis informed by the theologian and philosopher Bernard Lonergan, an artist objectifies an aesthetic pattern of experience.[12] This object provokes an embodied but open flow of consciousness that leads to sacred sense of freedom that is a fundamental aspect of art-based research:

“When the artist objectifies in concrete forms (music, painting, drama, poetry, sculpture, and so on) is this ‘purely experiential pattern’ or in my words, my, your, our free flow of consciousness in its open wonder and awe and in its reach for possibilities of being – in its desire and striving for adventure, daring, majesty, for realms of the possible. As both participatory and creative, then, it struck me that art is primarily an experience and invitation to an actuated orientation to openness, daring, adventure, to cherish the sacred wonder at our core: to liberty.”[13]

Although a pattern could be considered a fragment because it implies difference within multifaceted experiences, Lonergan writes about this aesthetic pattern of experience that: “complexity mounts and yet the multiplicity is organized into a whole.”[14] It is the implicit wholeness that has to be revealed within a rigorous introspection in order to encounter with Gillis’ notion of liberty and art that results from responding from the sacred core within. In fact, Gillis describes her experience with the freedom within children as beautiful because “their flow of consciousness was free, exuberant” [15] and that allowed her to realize that:

“…the aesthetic pattern of experience is simply not a response to, but something at the core in me, in us. …What I appreciated and felt in those children was their liberation of being, their openness to the world, to adventure, to greatness and goodness. The majesty was in them, in their orientation to the fullness of being.”[16]

Hence, Gillis’ interpretation of Lonergan’s notion of aesthetic pattern of experience is not a moving or responding toward something but a being within freedom. Furthermore, Gillis’ narration of such essential liberty illustrates the experience of what I define as Being Poetry; i.e. an open process (i.e. flowing wholeness), that implicates (i.e. enfolds) the unconditional love (i.e. agape) from the explicate (i.e. unfolded) eros, philia, and storge, that leads to goodness and liberty. The enfolded agapism could be revealed (i.e. become unfolded) through historical (e.g. remembering your mother’s unconditional and attentive love, Murdoch’s open ended process toward the Good) and unhistorical (e.g. Friedrich Nietzsche’s amor fati, Murdoch’s notion of attention as love) experiences of the fullest love that have the consequence of seeing others and oneself as Being Poetry through unconditional communication (e.g. Charles S. Pierce’s notion of creative love).[17]

This attentive and giving dialogue (e.g. David Bohm’s notion of dialogue) is an orientation toward wholeness, openness, wonder, and awe that culminates in the possibility of seeing others (i.e. human or non-human) as Being Poetry, too.  Thus in Gillis’ interpretation of art, poetry becomes a methodology for exploring the “possibilities of being.”[18] This occurs because arts-based research allows me to “describe, explore or discover” rather than define and assure. In fact, according to Leavy, art-based research’s strength is the emotive and embodied intersubjectivity that results from the combination of aesthetics and method in order to: “challenge stereotypes, build empathy, promote awareness, and stimulate dialogue.”[19]

As a result, rather than describing the self within an autoethnography as essentially fragmented, Lina Ru aimed to take steps toward recognizing that autoethnography does not need to be fundamentally poststructural if the autoethnographer considers wholeness, beauty, goodness, and liberty an intrinsic part of who they are. This is a worthwhile argument to pursue especially if the poststructuralist framework that allowed autoethnography to exist would differ with the statement that wholeness is prior to fragmentation. This disagreement occurs because the rise of poststructuralism allowed the autoethnography to exist within the qualitative research phases of the postmodern and postexperimental inquiry. These latter phases favor particular ontologies, namely minority voices, and thus one cannot assure a fragmented self as exemplified by Blackfoot epistemology, that is to say, minority voices that favor holism and interconnectedness. Thus Lina Ru explains in her book Being Poetry, why autoethnography has assumed a fragmented self due to the poststructural discourse, and as a result she argues that autoethnography should allow a self to be holistic if the particular ontology favors it.[20]

According to the feminist and poststructural theorist Susanne Gannon, autoethnography can be regarded as “inherently poststructuralist” because the discourse disrupts “positivist research practices and disciplinary boundaries” within qualitative research.[21] In particular through the examples of Michel Foucault’s and Jacques Derrida’s autobiographies, Gannon’s interpretation of autoethnography establishes the assumption of a fragmented self:

“These authors write themselves as unreliable and contradictory narrators who speak the self – the multiple selves that each of them is and have been- in discontinuous fragments informed by memory, the body, photographs, other texts, and most importantly, other people.”[22]

For example, according to Gannon, Foucault argues that writing “is not a practice of delving into the depth of the self” because writing is a fragmented process that leads to self-mastery. Gannon also argues that poststructural autoethnography strives toward an ethics of care that implies a development of attention and love. Therefore, poststructural autoethnography[23]:

“…leans toward the ancient imperative to care for the self in a constant practice of attentive reflection of the past, present, and future moments of subjectification within complex and contradictory discursive arenas.”[24]

Gannon is interested in an autoethnography that is fractured but at the same time leads toward love. However, how can one “promote an ethics of care” if the poststructural epistemology assumes a fragmented ontology? Gannon argues that there must be an awareness of the “limits and fragilities of self-knowledge” based on the fragmented and poststructural examples of autobiography. However, one does not need to have the assumption of a fragmented ontology in order to be attentive to difference, “limits and fragilities of self-knowledge.”[25]

Furthermore, if one assumes an ontological (i.e. what is as experienced through being?) and epistemological (i.e. how do we know?) fragmentation in order to emphasize plurality, difference and uniqueness, then what happens with those who wish to experience wholeness beyond the structure of language exemplified with the aesthetic patterns of experience as a free flow of consciousness? Indeed, poststructuralism could be considered an example of Bastien and Kremer’s claim that states that most western epistemologies do not allow us to visualize ourselves holistically and interconnected due to an acceptance of an implicit fragmentation.[26]

In fact, according to Gannon, poststructuralism challenges the presumption that one can actually know about oneself because there is an “impossibility of a coherent self.” Gannon argues that Derrida offers a “fragmented text” as an autobiography in order to exemplify how thought is an open process rather than fixed identities.[27] Yet, there still is an assumption that a fragmented self is necessary in order to experience openness. Whereas Gillis argues that liberty is an aesthetic pattern of experience that exceeds intellect through wonder, Gannon argues that freedom is a result of a fragmented epistemology that leads us to an ethics of love.[28]

Nonetheless, the importance of the linguistic turn through a fragmented epistemology has been highly relevant in order to disrupt the detached and analytical discourse. Subsequently, autoethnography was allowed to be considered a form of qualitative research within the social sciences because it differs from the positivist stance that favors a minimized and apparently impartial subjectivity. For that reason, poststructuralism as a sub-genre of postmodernism is responsible for the establishment of “a context of doubt” where “all methods are subject to critique but are not automatically rejected as false.” [29]

According to Pushkala Prasad, postmodernism is a current of thought that “focuses on language itself”[30] to define ‘what is true’ in the same way as poststructuralism does. Postmodernism distrusts grand narratives, and therefore adopts fragmentation and plurality as key aspects of their discourse. Also, postmodernism also shares other characteristics with poststructuralism such as the “disenchantment with Enlightenment thinking”[31], being “in favor of multiplicity, plurality, fragmentation, and indeterminacy” [32], and also the rejection of meta-narratives that attempt to silence the epistemology of minorities such as indigenous people.[33]

Hence, if both poststructuralism and postmodernism support silenced voices, then why haven’t these discourses listened ontologically to the voices they seek to support such as the Blackfoot people and their ways of knowing? According to Gannon, the post­structural perspective assumes the self as “a fractured and fragmented subject”[34] that cannot actually know holistically about the world. This assumption has led poststructuralism to argue that the self can be characterized in terms of: “particular bodies with particular feelings, flesh and thoughts that become possible in particular sociocultural-spatial contexts.”[35]

If indigenous epistemologies are assuming an ontological holism and interconnectedness, then that does not imply a categorical rejection of differences, processes, openness, and uniqueness. On the contrary, a holistic discourse acknowledges difference as a state within a complex of interrelations or process that leads to growth and healing. In fact, according to Bastien and Kremer, the word wholeness refers to both “a state and process” [36] that is constantly being healed:

“‘To heal’ is etymologically connected with the German heilen, and the IndoEuropean root *kailo, referring to the state and process of wholeness (“whole” also being related to this root). But “to heal” is also connected to “holy” (as heilen to heilig), which gives an ancient root to the reemergent holistic and transpersonal perspectives on healing.”[37]

According to Ellis, Adams, and Bochner, autoethnography has been both criticized and applauded for its emphasis on healing and emotivism. However if one considers autoethnography as part of this current of qualitative research that challenges western epistemologies through personal ontologies, then healing and emotion is intrinsically important for empathy through interconnectedness to flourish such exemplified through Blackfoot’s notion of wholeness.[38]

Furthermore, the creation of personal ontologies does not imply that society is trapped within fragmentation. According to Bohm, flowing wholeness (i.e. open ended process of movement that is constantly unfolding and enfolding) is an implicate order, i.e. a fundamental order in the universe.[39] In view of that, Bohm argues that fluid language (e.g. Bohm’s notion of rheomode which is a mode of language that values processes over objects) allows us to transcend fragmentation because it reveals the continuous flowing process of an implicate order that is constantly hiding (i.e. enfolding) and revealing (i.e. unfolding) information (e.g. light, quantum fields) and therefore, even possibly our physical reality![40] The process of explicating (i.e. unfolding) and implicating (i.e. enfolding) in a broader sense is defined as the holomovement. An example of this movement is a colored drop of ink that becomes enfolded (i.e. invisible) as it dilutes in a cylinder glycerin but as one rotates the cylinder in the opposite direction the colored drop becomes unfolded (i.e. visible) again.[41]

That said, one must also become aware that although Bohm’s position is based on a philosophical and physical interpretation of quantum physics. Bohm was a renowned scientist who the physicist Albert Einstein “once spoke of as his intellectual successor.” [42] Bohm is also known for his discovery of the fourth state of matter, i.e. plasma, in 1945.[43]  Initially, Bohm argued in favor of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics. This interpretation is considered to be the orthodox version because it follows the quantum physicist Niels Bohr’s line of thinking that assumes quantum processes are exclusively indeterministic. However, this interpretation left Bohm unsatisfied because, according to the philosopher Paavo Pylkkänen, Bohm believed that there:

“…was no need to assume a fundamental level, and thus the question whether the fundamental is deterministic or indeterminisitic would not even arise.”[44]

This ontological interpretation of quantum physics that assumes no deterministic or indeterminisitic fundamental level has paradigm shifting implications within quantum physics. Still, it was not enough to bridge the macro- (i.e. general relativity) and micro- (i.e. quantum) theories of the universe. In order to do so, the physicist Basil Hiley and Bohm began in the 1960s to develop a more general approach that could actually bridge the macro- and micro- perspectives called the Implicate Order.[45] The latter concept was the culmination of a philosophical quest that started during Bohm’s stay at Princeton during the latter part of the 1940s where Bohm realized that: “physics was an inner journey grounded in the conviction that his own body was a microcosm of the universe.”[46]

As a result, Bohm began to search for a relationship between consciousness and physics. Lamentably, Bohm became persecuted due to the McCarthyism era, i.e. the era in the United States during the Cold War where Americans who were believed to be associated with the Soviet Union were considered traitors, and was eventually driven to exile.[47] Therefore, Bohm’s theories were rejected without a thoughtful critique from his colleges for sociological reasons due to his politics and interest in eastern philosophy. A renewed interest in Bohm’s work occurred when Peat published Bohm’s biography Infinite Potential.[48] Bohm has also influenced a wide range of scientists and philosophers who became interested in the implications of quantum physics such as B.J. Hiley (e.g. undivided universe), J.S. Bell (e.g. entanglement), Robert Rosen, Ilya Prigogine, Gordon G. Globus, and Paavo T.I. Pylkkänen.[49] Furthermore, in the preface of On Creativity, the former Director of Native American Studies in Harvard University Leroy Little Bear argues that Bohm’s interpretation of quantum physics is similar to Blackfoot epistemology. However, it was Bohm’s notions of creativity and dialogue that most captivated him because[50]:

“I have come to greatly appreciate David Bohm’s openness to the “new”, to “difference”, and to “possibilities” arising out of boundaries crossing into different disciplines, cultures, and ways of knowing, as well for his appreciation of science as art and beauty.”[51]

For these reasons,  poetic inquiry should explore the possibility of an ontological holism within myself as Being Poetry using fluid language as a medium to express an aesthetic pattern of experience that could lead to goodness, openness, beauty, and love. Although fluid language can appear fragmented, such an assumption is the consequence of a dualist mindset that presupposes a contradiction between wholeness and difference. There is no need of fragmentation in order to favor difference as it occurs in Blackfoot’s and Bohm’s ontology. If one considers Bohm’s Implicate Order, then one could argue that through the use of fluid language one can overcome fragmentation while still favoring difference. Difference would be enfolded, but still be present. The emphasis on the verb rather than an emphasis on objects and subjects would unfold difference into wholeness within the mundane through a fluid and flexible language such as it is illustrated by Leroy Little Bear’s notion of mind:

“The Blackfoot mind is a repository of creativity because of the notion of constant flux. … The constant flux results in a view of constant change and constant transformations. …The Blackfoot mind is a repository of creativity because it eschews boundaries and because, where there are boundaries, it can readily transcend them. …Lastly, the Blackfoot mind is a repository of creativity because of the Blackfoot language used to communicate.”[52]

For example, Leroy Little Bear argues that one can find more than 300,000 forms to express the verb ‘to be’ due to its creative use of morphology. It is difficult to understand such framework of thought if one is part of those who speak solely European languages such as English. This occurs because one is constrained to a determined grammatical construction (subject-predicate) to communicate a complete thought.[53] In contrast, the philosophy behind Blackfoot challenges this notion of communication and language. Whereas European languages “stress the notion of syntax”, Blackfoot language “stresses morphology”, and in the same way Bohm’s mode of language called Rheomode stresses the verb rather than the object-subject.[54]

As a result, Lina Ru reinterpreted Bohm’s mode of language through her book to suggest that she is poetry, and explores the possibility that you, the reader, can Be Poetry too. And although Gannon argues autoethnography is intrinsically trapped within a poststructuralist context,  Muncey argues that autoethnography’s task is to expose unexamined assumptions.[55]

Our fundamental task as art-based researchers is to expose unexamined assumptions.