Betraying our best intentions: on the need to interrogate how we relate and what it produces

Abstract

In this paper, I start from a posthumanist understanding of subjectivity to stress how our ways of relating do not follow from previously formed intentions but emerge in assemblages. The fact that we hold certain theoretical ascriptions does not assure that we will relate in ways that are consistent with them. We might intend to embrace diffractive, decentring and performative perspectives, and effectively do so at a content level. However, we might unwittingly reproduce representational, dichotomous, centring and identitarian ways of relating to ourselves, others, our work and so on. These ways of relating are often unacknowledged. I offer my concept of performative meta-reflexivity to interrogate which ways of relating are implicitly operating and to think about what they are producing. I suggest that this practice can be helpful to become response-able for the ways of relating that we find ourselves engaged in and what they generate.

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