Agential realism, social constructionism, and our living relations to our surroundings: Sensing similarities rather than seeing patterns

Abstract

If Barad’s account of agential realism is correct, then the psychological “things” that we name as “thoughts,” “ideas,” “theories,” “knowledge,” or “observations,” and study as the products of processes hidden within the heads of individuals, are better talked of as emerging within material intra-actions occurring in activities out in the world at large. For, in placing the agential cuts, i.e., the distinctions we make between subjective and objective “things,” in different places at different times, we do not uncover pre-existing facts about independently existing things; instead, we ourselves bring such “things” into existence. So, although we might talk in social constructionism of our understandings as being produced by forms of negotiated understanding, such forms of activity can only be seen as having been at work in people’s performances after they have been achieved—and this is the case with many topics of our study in psychological research. Something, somewhere else altogether, guides us in the performance of our actions in relation to our surroundings than the “named things” we claim to have discovered in our research. It is the nature of this “something else,” and how it can be publicly studied, that I want to explore below.

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