Ethics and entangled embodiment: Bodies–materialities–organization

Abstract

In this article, we are concerned with the ethical implications of the entanglement of embodiment and non-human materialities. We argue for an approach to embodiment which recognises its inextricable relationship with multiple materialities. From this, three ethical points are made: first, we argue for an ethical relation to ‘things’ not simply as inanimate objects but as the neglected Others of humanity’s (social and material) world. Second, there is a need to recognise different particularities within these entanglements. We draw on the work of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas to think through how the radical alterity of these Others can be acknowledged, whilst also recognising our intercorporeal intertwining with them. Third, we argue that recognition of this interconnectedness and entanglement is a necessary ethical and political position from which the drawing of boundaries and creation of separations that are inherent in social organising can be understood and which contribute to the denigration, discrimination and dismissal of particular forms of embodiment, including those of non-human Others. In order to explore the ethical implications of these entanglements, we draw upon fieldwork in a large UK-based not-for-profit organisation which seeks to provide support for disabled people through a diverse range of services. Examining entanglements in relation to the disabled body makes visible and problematises the multiple differences of embodiments and their various interrelationships with materiality.

Introduction

Two classes of body: the inorganic [is] non-living, inanimate, inert; the organic [is] what breathes, feeds, and reproduces; it [is] ‘inevitably doomed to die’ {Lamarck, Philosophie zoologique}. Organization becomes identified with the living. Beings [are] definitively separated from things (Jacob, 1973: 101). (Stiegler, 1998 [1994]: 1)

In this article, we are concerned with the ethical implications of the organisation of both classes of body, those defined as living and those defined as things. It is our argument that these cannot be separated, although dominant western ¹ academic categories and modes of analysis persist in reproducing this distinction, as do everyday practices in modern western cultures. Organising processes are involved in producing this delineation or ‘cut’ between beings and things (Barad, 2007; Cooper, 2005). On an everyday level, we observe as parents how science education today still perpetuates Lamarck’s distinction, teaching children to recognise the characteristics of ‘living’ beings (respiration, growth, reproduction, etc.) and to distinguish these from categories of ‘things’ (chemical elements; rocks and minerals; solid, liquid, gas). This article presents a different perspective, one which acknowledges the ‘entanglement’ between human embodiment and non-human materialities, ² both ‘living’ and ‘things’, and considers the ethical implications of this complex interrelationship. By ‘entanglement’ we indicate that human and non-human materialities are inescapably and intimately connected, following the work of Karen Barad (2003, 2007). These entanglements are heterogeneous, interdependent, co-constitutive and dynamic; they are not mere assemblages or collections, but neither are they fixed or essential.

We start by arguing for an approach to human embodiment which recognises its inextricable relationship with both its own and other materialities. Within the field of organisation studies (OS), there has been a turn to ontology, which has included studying both embodiment and materiality. However, these have largely developed as parallel strands. This article contributes to this ontological turn, by bringing together embodiment and materiality, and by considering the ethical implications of this for organisation, developing a framework based upon Merleau-Ponty’s argument that our being is embodied, and that in and through this embodiment we are intertwined with the world, such that there is no separable ‘subject’ and ‘object’.

In order to explore the ethical implications of embodied entanglements, we draw upon fieldwork in a large UK-based not-for-profit organisation which provides support for disabled people. This research studied a project called ‘CommunITy’ which aimed to help the social integration of geographically remote, severely disabled people through providing them with computers and Internet access. The assumption was that technology could provide a compensation for or even a liberation from the limitations of the body. However, the entanglements between body, technology and organisation are more complex and ambiguous than this aim suggests, and produce ethical situations that are not easily resolvable. The ethical implications of the embodied researcher necessarily come to the fore here as she is inherently part of the material entanglements, a relationship often downplayed in conventional accounts.

From this, we suggest three ethical implications for OS: first, we argue for an ethical relation to ‘things’ not simply as inanimate objects but as the neglected Others of our (social and material) world. Second, there is a need to recognise different particularities within these entanglements. Studies often portray relations between humans and technology as relatively smooth and unproblematic, presupposing an autonomous human-as-subject interacting with technology-as-object. We examine these entanglements in relation to ‘disabled’ embodiment which makes visible the multiple differences of embodiments and their various social-material entanglements. Third, we argue that recognition of this interconnectedness is a necessary ethical and political position from which we can better understand the drawing of boundaries and creation of separations inherent in social organising and which contribute to the denigration, discrimination and dismissal of particular forms of embodiment, including those of non-human others. Before turning to explore the ethics of entanglement, we look at how OS has but recently come to recognise its relationship with either living bodies or non-living things.

Embodiment and materiality in OS

Despite the statement at the beginning of the article that ‘organization becomes identified with the living’, OS has often ignored the significance of the living human body (Hassard et al., 2000). It has been a taken-for-granted absent presence (Shilling, 1993), with the traditional analytical approach summed up by Weick’s (1979) articulation that ‘an organization is a body of thought thought by thinking thinkers’ (p. 42). The admittance of the forgotten body to OS was prompted by a surge of interest within social theory, emphasising an anti-foundational and malleable view of the body (e.g. Shilling, 1993; Turner, 1996: 5). Social processes previously treated as abstract and disembodied, such as symbolism, interaction, discourse and communication, have been rediscovered as embodied. There have been embodied reconsiderations of key areas such as leadership (e.g. Pullen and Rhodes, 2010), learning (e.g. Kupers, 2005) and teamwork (e.g. Hindmarsh and Pilnick, 2007). Embodiment has also informed new foci of study within organisational life such as emotions and aesthetics.

The interest in re-embodying social and organisational studies can be described as part of an ‘ontological turn’ (Burrell, 2003)—a concern for the being of the world rather than how it is known, perhaps expressing disquiet with the emphasis on representation and discourse that dominated the field in the 1980s and into the 1990s. Another strand of this ontological turn has been a burgeoning interest in the materiality of social life. However, as far as OS is concerned, these strands have largely developed in parallel.

Academic approaches to materiality have largely maintained the delineation between living beings and material things. Studies of organisational symbolism have tended to see materiality as the object of human agency, providing humans with a rich symbolic and cultural life. Studies of technology also tended to treat materiality as an exogenous force (Orlikowski, 2007): as discrete objects or ‘hardware’ distinct from humans and from (social) organisation. One influential approach, Actor Network Theory (ANT), explicitly re-envisaged an assemblage of human and non-human actants. Nevertheless, for those concerned with corporeality, the symmetry with which ANT treated embodiment and non-human materialities seemed to flatten out their particularities, returning the body to being a mere ‘thing’. More recently, interest in materialities has influenced process OS, inspired by Barad’s work on entanglement (e.g. Carlile et al., 2013), although this too has only given a passing nod to embodiment (Jones, 2013: 204).

In summary, the revitalisation of embodiment in OS has tended to de-emphasise the materiality of the body. And this itself leads to the continued analytical separation of human embodiment from the materiality of the non-human world. This point was made by Parker (2000) in an early contribution on embodiment and organisation, and has been relatively neglected since. In his contention that human embodiment should not be fetishised, he observes that ‘most of the representations of bodies, machines and institutions that circulate in contemporary academic work on organizations still rely on a “common sense” dualism between humans and other things’ (Parker, 2000: 71). Within OS, Parker has been one of the few who has recognised that in re-socialising the body, the organicism and anthropocentrism of the bounded entity of ‘the body’ have been left unquestioned. Instead, he argues, we need to recognise that ‘bodies are only ever given realization through their connection with non-human materials’ (Parker, 2000: 75). In what follows, we take up Parker’s insight and attempt to develop a framework within which we can theorise the entanglement of human and non-human materialities, and the implications of this for rethinking ethical relations.

Ethics and entanglement

… that the things have us, and that it is not we who have the things … (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 194)

The intertwining of embodiment and world

Our starting point for understanding the intertwining of embodiment and world is the work of Merleau-Ponty, which has been inspirational in studies of embodiment in social and organisational theory (e.g. Dale, 2001; Kupers, 2005). Merleau-Ponty’s work enables us to negotiate the complex question of how we recognise that our embodiment is dependent on non-human others, but at the same time that our experience of the world, and our construction of it as ‘other’ than us, comes from that very embodiment. Merleau-Ponty critiqued a phenomenology which started from a foundational ontological category of Being as an isolated subject or abstracted consciousness. In contrast, Merleau-Ponty argues that all subjectivity, all knowledge, comes from the human as a ‘body-subject’, presupposing immersion in a sensuous corporeal world. Whilst there is no human experience external to the corporeality of the lived body (Merleau-Ponty, 1962 [1945]), there is also no embodiment which is not inextricably interwoven with what he comes to call the ‘flesh-of-the-world’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968).

In his final, uncompleted book, The Visible and The Invisible (1968), Merleau-Ponty moves further from the humanistic ‘cut’ between the human body and the non-human world, to enfold them together. Not only is the lived body not reducible to object, but nor is the world merely matter (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 250). Instead there is a ‘reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one in the other’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 138). However, there is a particularity to human embodiment: although it is not separate or separable from the world, it senses the world. Embodiment is sensible and sentient, it sees and is seen, touches and is touched. It is this very ‘reversibility’ of embodiment that constitutes its relationship in-and-of-the-world:

If it [the body] touches them [the things of the world] and sees them, this is only because, being of their family, itself visible and tangible, it uses its own being as a means to participate in theirs … the body belongs to the order of things as the world is universal flesh. (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 137)

A number of writers have taken a similar perspective on the inherently intertwined nature of human and world, including Stiegler (1998 [1994]), who develops a reading of the relationship between humanity and technics which challenges the anthropocentric view that technical objects are merely the creation, the exteriorisation of some prior essential qualities belonging to humanity. Whereas Merleau-Ponty’s (1968) phenomenology seeks to put embodiment at the centre of what had previously been an abstract focus on Being as consciousness, and thus asks: ‘where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?’ (p. 138), Stiegler views the entanglement from the side of the ‘thingness’ of the world.

Taking issue with a Rousseauean image of humanity as complete-in-itself, a self-regulating entity, self-contained and self-sufficient, Stiegler argues that humanity has no pure nature outside of or prior to our relationship with technics. He thus challenges an approach to materiality based upon the assumption that objects are passive, inert entities which provide functions and symbols for the active human agent. He points to the interconnected nature in which embodiment and materiality cannot be easily disentangled, despite dominant ways of thinking of them as discrete entities. Recognising humanity’s mutual interdependency with the materialities of the world is the first step to developing a different ethical relationship with them. However, non-human objects are typically understood from the point of view of human mastery over and possession of ‘nature’ (Stiegler, 1998 [1994]: 93). As ‘mere’ objects, things are contrasted to the assumed completeness and creativity of humanity. They are seen as ‘outside’ ourselves and as distinct and different from the body. Yet what both Merleau-Ponty and Stiegler challenge us to realise is that there is no essential interior and exterior, that humanity is only humanity in the particular ways that it is through our relationship with a multitude of materialities. The human has always already been ‘prosthetic’:

Man invents, discovers, finds (eurisko), imagines (mekhane), and realizes what he imagines: prostheses, expedients. A pros-thesis is what is placed in front, that is, what is outside, outside what it is placed in front of. However, if what is outside constitutes the very being of what it lies outside of, then this being is outside itself. The being of humankind is to be outside itself. (Stiegler, 1998 [1994]: 193)

These approaches pose problems for a normative moral ordering which, as Parker (2000) describes it, presupposes distinctions between ‘good people, bad people and non-people’ (p. 84). Introna (2009), too, argues that the problem with conventional moral ordering is that it is based upon an anthropocentrism which not only places the human as the measure but assumes that a distinct boundary can be drawn between the human and non-human other. Thus, the approach taken to ethics in this article is not one which considers the possibility of enshrining and effecting ethics through codes and prescriptions, nor one that believes it is possible to define virtues and values which necessarily produce ethical outcomes. These approaches to ethics assume and institutionalise the ‘cut’ between ‘human’ and ‘world’. For example, virtue ethics assumes that ‘character’ is the possession of an autonomous human subject, whilst most ethical theories assume the central importance of human reason and agency in determining ethical behaviour and outcomes. When the ethical consequences of actions are considered in conventional moral theory, these are assumed primarily to be the consequences for other human beings, maybe secondarily for other living beings, but the ‘external’ world is assumed to be the ‘object’ of human activity. Whether this human activity is ‘ethical’ or ‘non-ethical’, the moral impetus is invested in the human.

The challenge, then, is to think through an ethics which recognises the intertwining of embodiment and world, human materialities and non-human materialities, and that questions taken-for-granted separations between self and other, subject and object.

Otherness and difference

In relation to similar concerns, Introna (2009) develops an ‘ethics of things’, and in doing so raises the ethical questions: ‘What otherness is covered over as we make the world in our own image? In what way could our ethos be otherwise?’ (p. 413) and ‘How do we avoid turning the otherness of the other into a “thing-for-me”?’ (p. 410). An ethics of things, and, we would argue, the possibilities for an ethical relation to entangled embodiment, turns on the recognition of otherness and difference even though there is no inherent and essential ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ within the entanglement.

Recognising the intertwining of embodiment and world is not to suggest there is no differentiation between human embodiment and non-human materialities. The intertwining of human and non-human materialities means that we are both in a position of radical alterity from others—that there is a particularity of differences within our entanglements—and at the same time it is that very inter-corporeality that allows the possibility for recognition of, response to and responsibility for the other. It is the shared materiality or corporeality, the flesh-of-the-world, which provides the medium for touching the other:

for Merleau-Ponty, the embodied status of the ‘I’ is precisely that which implicates the ‘I’ in a fleshly world outside of itself, that is, in a world in which the ‘I’ is no longer its own center or ground. (Butler, 2006: 341)

It is this intercorporeality which produces a ‘necessary and unconditional openness towards the other’ (Hancock, 2008: 1367), and which provides a link between Merleau-Ponty’s embodied phenomenology and Levinas’ ethics of the Other. ³

Levinas’ work has influenced a number of writers on ethics in OS (including Byers and Rhodes, 2007; Roberts, 2001). Levinas argues for a response to the Other that recognises that the other is unknowable by the self, not possessed by the self nor reduced to the sameness of the self. But at the same time, the Other makes a demand for responsibility without reciprocity. Thus, for Levinas, the site of ethics is where the self recognises the particularity of the other (Roberts, 2001). Furthermore, the Other is a ‘calling into question’ (Levinas, 1969: 43) of me as a self-contained, autonomous subject. The encounter with the Other is one of ethical disturbance, in decentring the ‘I’ and calling for infinite responsibility. Yet Levinas does not stop at the proximity of the one Other. He also calls for justice for all the ‘other Others’ − the ‘third party’ − a call which has been linked to discussions of organisational justice (e.g. Byers and Rhodes, 2007).

We think it is possible to develop this Levinasian-inspired ethics of organisation to encompass the multiple materialities of the world, not as inanimate ‘objects’ to be used, but as the neglected ‘others’ which are yet integral to our being-in-the-world. ⁴ Two points of connection come from Levinas’ work. First, Levinas (1998) does not ignore embodiment in the relationship between self and other; it is through the vulnerability and sensibility of embodiment that the self can be affected by the Other: ‘The immediacy of the sensibility is the for-the-other of one’s own materiality; it is the immediacy or the proximity of the other’ (p. 74). Second, this proximity is not a place of assimilation or sameness, but of the recognition of the radical alterity of the Other: ‘proximity, difference which is non-indifference, is responsibility’ (p. 139). Thus, Levinas allows a space for both proximity or intertwining and the difference between self and Other. In this, there is a possibility for an ethical approach to the entanglements of bodies—living and non-human—which recognises their different particularities.

Ethics, organisation and the ‘cut’

This perspective on human−material entanglements has implications for the ways in which organisation is understood, as well as embodiment. Following Stiegler and Merleau-Ponty, there is no necessary or essential inside or outside between human and non-human bodies, and thus no essential object or subject. What this implies is that when the ‘human subject’ or ‘material object’ (or vice versa) are depicted, assumed, discussed, that a ‘cut’ is being performed that creates these boundaries. Organising processes routinely make and reinforce this ‘cut’ between human and non-human, living being and thing, subject and object. Organisations proceed on a particular view of human agency and corporations foster this belief in the possibility of purposive human intention, translated into actions, which can effect desired objectives, through the manipulation of bodies (human and non-human; see Roberts, 2001: 111). As the cases below show, it is these presumptions, produced through dominant relations of power, which result in the construction of boundaries (both of values and materialities) which cut between that to be included and that to be excluded, that to be counted and that to be dis-counted. These include organisational ‘cuts’ which produce inequalities and hierarchies, relations of domination and exploitation amongst non-human bodies as well as human bodies, and thereby connects to questions of ethics. Barad’s (2003) concept of ‘intra-action’ is useful for understanding these organising processes:

The notion of intra-action (in contrast to the usual ‘interaction’, which presumes the prior existence of independent entities/relata) represents a profound conceptual shift. It is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the ‘components’ of phenomena become determinate and that particular embodied concepts become meaningful. A specific intra-action (involving a specific material configuration of the ‘apparatus of observation’) enacts an agential cut (in contrast to the Cartesian cut—an inherent distinction—between subject and object) effecting a separation between ‘subject’ and ‘object’. That is, the agential cut enacts a local resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological indeterminacy. (p. 815)

The distinctions that are ‘cut’ between ‘human’ and ‘non-human’, ‘living’ and ‘thing’ become fraught with danger for the identity of the self/‘subject’. There is a fragility in the organised distinctions humans make, and when these clear-cut orderings are threatened, the play of differences—and potential indifference in our relations with others—comes to the fore.

Indifference is a closedness to the others’ otherness, their difference. It is also a refusal of the responsibility for our proximity and our intertwined materialities. Barad (2007) describes this indifference as a ‘fantasy of distance’ (p. 396). Organisational processes which fix and stabilise differences and categories, and apply rules and procedures to maintain these, can produce this indifference.

The cases below analyse the ethical implications of entangled embodiment and how different particularities are constructed, reproduced or challenged. In the ethical situations discussed, there are aporia: undecidable moments that indicate ethical disturbance. We consider how the entanglements of human and non-human materialities relate to these moments.

CommunITy: entangled disabled bodies and materialities

Potential ethical and political possibilities emerge from the literal contact zone between human corporeality and more-than-human nature. (Alaimo, 2010: 2)

Our case study is of an organisation which aimed to increase the social inclusion of disabled people through the provision of computing technology. This gives a complex case of the entangled interrelations of multiple humans and technologies, including the different particularities of: those bodies socially designated as ‘disabled’; the researcher, organisation staff and carers who were designated as ‘able-bodied’; and the various materialities of computers, forms, beds, catheter bags and so on.

As noted in the introduction, the use of these examples makes more visible the entanglements between human and non-human bodies which co-constitute all human embodiment. Disability highlights the intertwining of the so-defined impaired body with other materialities of the world (e.g. Winance, 2006). Indeed, these materialities and the ways in which they have come to be constituted as phenomena (Barad, 2007) produce the disabled body, since although it is the individual human body which is perceived as not being able to do certain things, it is the sedimented, taken-for-granted sociomaterial arrangements that produce the effects of disabling the particular human body in that particular entanglement. But entanglements of humans and non-human materialities also produce abilities ‘beyond’ those of the individuated human body. In the case of disabled people, this can also change particular embodied and intercorporeal experiences. Again, because of the assumptions of the able-bodied norm (see McRuer, 2006: 2 on ‘compulsory able-bodiedness’) and the self-sufficient human subject, these become more visible in discussions of disability. As Leder (1990) has pointed out, the ‘normal’ body is commonly experienced through its absence or disappearance. Embodiment is taken for granted much of the time, unless we are in pain, or unable to do something specific. Entanglement with non-human materialities is also largely taken for granted, and it is little recognised how human embodiment is constantly co-constituted with these. For the disabled person, the extensions of embodiment through entanglements are more overtly perceptible. For example, accounts of the lived embodied experience of people who have cochlear implants show how whilst people who can hear ‘normally’ do so without any effort or awareness of it, the technological ‘solution’ of implants requires a great deal of ‘learning to hear’ amongst a cacophony of noises (Finlay and Molano-Fisher, 2008), but can also produce the effect of integration between technology and embodiment such that the individual feels ‘super human’ (Christie and Bloustien, 2010: 495).

The fieldwork discussed below stems from research into ‘CommunITy’, a project that aimed to improve social inclusion for 25 severely disabled people, through installing computers in their homes. The assumption was that access to the Internet would reduce their social and geographical isolation. The data were generated as a result of the involvement with the project of one of the co-authors (Yvonne) between 2006 and 2010. Yvonne was a doctoral researcher during her involvement with the project; she was and is socially and self-defined as ‘able-bodied’ (as is her co-author) and at the time she had had very little direct contact with or experience of ‘disabled’ people, and this was something that was to play a key role in her subsequent and embodied entanglements with the project. The methods used were participant observation recorded through a detailed research diary, and semi-structured interviews with users, digitally recorded (with permission). Informed consent was obtained from users, their carers/relatives and co-workers on the project. The organisation and the participants have been anonymised in order to maintain confidentiality.

During the research Yvonne’s role continually moved from that of academic researcher, brought in to evaluate disabled people’s experience of being a user of the project, to active participant in the selection of potential users and installation of equipment in their homes, to friend of co-workers, disabled people and carers. Her role therefore was never static throughout this process and this constant movement produced further awareness of entanglements (her own and others), through the level of her own immersion within the various interconnections of bodies and materialities. This immersion can be seen as constituting what Strati (1999) describes as ‘imaginative participant observation’ (p. 14), whereby the researcher’s own sensory experiences are brought into the research situation. Thus, Strati (1999) comments that ‘we become valid sources of data in ourselves via our own aesthetic experiences; refining our capacity to empathize with others and imagining what it might be like for them’. This is especially relevant for understanding the embodied, physical, material negotiation of the situations which are being analysed, but of course also has the danger that we are offering our own privileged interpretation, both as human and as those socially defined as ‘able bodied’.

Nevertheless, Stoller (1997) has emphasised the need for ethnographers to be sensually immersed in a setting:

Comprehension demands the presence, not the absence, of the ethnographer … It demands … that ethnographers open themselves to others and absorb their worlds. Such is the meaning of embodiment. For ethnographers embodiment is … the realization that … we too are consumed by the sensual world, that ethnographic things capture us through our bodies. (p. 23)

This description resonates with the argument being made about embodied-material intra-actions, and a relationship of openness to the otherness of both human and non-human bodies. It also relates to the need to rethink the ethical implications of these entanglements, but accepting that this recognition can only come from our own embodied particularities. Thus, in our analysis, we are not trying to ‘speak for’ the disabled participants nor for the other materialities, but to make a space to discuss the ethical implications of the entanglement of human embodiment and multiple materialities. With the preceding discussion in mind, this discussion is an exploration of an ethics of reflective practice, an ethics that problematises the very idea of ethical ‘codes’ and which instead stresses ‘our connections with nature, with others (and we would add other Others), with that which is denied through foregrounding a particular form of ethical life’ (Parker, 1998: 6). In these reflections, Yvonne opens herself and her actions up to reader scrutiny and judgement. Reviewers of the paper have asked: ‘Why did Yvonne do such/not do such?’ We are not presenting Yvonne’s actions here as exemplars of ‘ethical behaviour’, but offering these situations as instances of ethical disturbance and undecidability due to their intercorporeal and entangled relations. In this way, they provide us with a way of working through the implications of the discussion above on the intertwining of human and non-human materialities.

The form: organisation, materiality and disembodiment

Our first example concerns a situation where organisational processes are set up to preclude the need for any ethical consideration by trying to programme the response to potential participants in the CommunITy project. This programmed response was embedded and materialised into a ‘form’. This can be described in Barad’s (2007) terms as a process of ‘mattering’, both making material and giving significance to. The form ‘enacts what matters and what is excluded from mattering’ (p. 148). However, in the intra-action discussed below, a different process of ‘mattering’ takes place, one embedded in the proximity of embodied differences and their local entanglements. This shows that ‘matter(ing) is a dynamic articulation/configuration of the world’ (Barad, 2007: 151). These dynamic processes of mattering produce different entanglements of boundaries and connections which themselves produce different subjects and objects, Otherings and differences. Mattering, therefore, is inextricably bound up with ethics.

This example, then, concerns the initial assessment of one potential user of the project: Chloe. An assessment form had been designed to ensure that prospective participants ‘fit’ the criteria for the project: that they were disabled and lived on their own in geographically remote areas. Potential users were asked the questions in an interview. Their answers needed to show a match between their particular experience of disability and the equipment available, and to demonstrate that they would use the computer for social interaction. The form itself constituted a material enactment and encapsulation of these aims. The imaginaries of embodiment, technologies and social goals were gathered and organised into a standard instrument through which they could be assessed and compared. In doing so, the particularities of these lived entanglements, human and non-human materialities—which have already been seen to be complex and undecidable—were effectively de-materialised and written out, then rematerialised in a different, organised and decisive form. The form therefore is an instrument of organ-isation—it confines embodiment into a particular set of categories: it decides the undecidable. These categories are not abstract, social or discursive alone, but are enacted, embodied and material.

This assessment was undertaken by the original project co-ordinator, Jack, and Yvonne, at the home of Chloe, who was 25. Chloe had had leukaemia when she was 7 years old and as a result of medical treatment was paralysed down the right-hand side of her body, including one side of her brain. She lived in a supported living scheme, used a wheelchair and needed constant attendance from carers. This immediately problematised one of the categorisations of fit for the project: social and geographical isolation.

As Chloe had difficulty communicating, her mother, her main carer, responded to most of the interview questions. At one point Chloe was asked whether she would use the computer for online shopping. Chloe’s mother quickly responded that she liked to take her out in the car as much as possible to do her shopping. Chloe was also taken by her mother several times each week to meet friends at day-centres. This account provided another problem in terms of fit for the project.

Following the interview, Chloe’s suitability for the project was discussed by Jack and Yvonne. Although Chloe did not necessarily fit the criteria, they responded to what they saw as her situation of dependence and believed the computer would give her some control over aspects of her own life. The organisation of values and objectives embedded in the form did not sit easily with the embodied experience of Chloe, nor those of Jack and Yvonne in meeting her. Following their discussion, the form was completed in such a way as to match Chloe with the requirements of the organisation, and she was offered a computer.

Ethical disturbance and the unruliness of things

The second case is taken from a visit by Yvonne and Anne, a relatively new project co-ordinator, to the home of Ron. Ron was in his 50s and suffered from multiple sclerosis. He was unable to move from his neck downwards and bedridden. He already used electronic assistive technology in the form of a ‘Possum’ ⁵ which enabled him to ‘operate’ things such as his TV, the door and his telephone by blowing into a tube, producing a relationship between his embodiment and various non-human materialities. The visit was to install the computer equipment. This was the first installation that Anne had been involved in, but Yvonne had met Ron before, so she took charge of installing the equipment whilst Anne talked to Ron.

A work-station with wheels had been bought by Ron on which he wanted the computer to be installed. This was placed next to Ron’s metal-framed hospital bed, with very little room between them. As a consequence, the installation process proved physically difficult, with Yvonne crouching in this tiny space as she attempted to install the printer. Yvonne felt something knocking against her back and looking around found Ron’s catheter bag. It was swinging like a pendulum and leaking slightly. She was unsure as to whether this was due to her knocking it, but a decision had to be made at that moment as to what to do or indeed what was the ‘right’ thing to do. As indicated earlier, Yvonne, prior to this research, had had little contact with disabled people and was uncertain/inexperienced in dealing with situations such as this. She had visited Ron before alongside the previous project co-ordinator who had introduced her as an external researcher; thus, her role had been clear and the co-ordinator was very much in control of the situation. This time things were very different. Yvonne was an active participant, installing the equipment, but also a doctoral researcher—her relationship within the situation was ambiguous. Yvonne felt that the ‘right’ thing to do might be to mention to Ron what had happened so that his carers could be alerted to change the bag. However, she could hear Anne and Ron talking and was uncomfortable with the idea of telling Ron about the leaky bag. She was acutely aware that the bag was part of Ron’s bodily functions and bodily functions for many people, Yvonne included, cause a certain amount of embarrassment/discomfort. She felt awkward and in the end she said nothing, carrying on with the installation. She justified her actions, at that specific time, in that specific place, by telling herself that as the bag was only leaking slightly, the likelihood was that it would not be a problem and that Ron’s carers would notice when they came in and sort it out then. She felt that ‘letting be’ was the most humane and least embarrassing action for herself, Ron and Anne.

Yvonne has since reflected on this particular event on a number of occasions. Having gained more experience on the project, she feels she has a different embodied experience of disability now and would deal with a similar incident differently. Whether this is because of experiences with other users of the project, or a result of her getting to know Ron quite well, or something else she is not sure. However, what we can see is when you are part of an embodied entanglement such as this, the setting and people’s reactions to it are often different than anticipated; the responses that we make within it are often made reactively rather than proactively; and the nature of people’s roles and identities within these settings, in addition to other subjects and objects involved, are multifaceted, temporal, embodied and entangled.

Discussion: ethics and embodied practice

In these examples of moments of ethical disturbance, we can see there are no clear-cut orderings between what should and what should not be done, or between human and non-human connections: both are fragile and lead to what might be termed a play of differences. The ethical implications involved in the ordering and reordering of these particular sociomaterial entanglements are not easily decided. In the first example, the materialisation of values into the assessment form in the first place involved an enfolding of certain ideas such as a fair comparison between potential participants, and an allocation of limited resources on the basis of greatest need determined by fit with established criteria. Whilst the form did not allow for particular local entanglements between the various people involved, the arrangements of material equipment, housing, technologies and embodiments, it was involved in a different set of embedded values. In some ways, the form can be seen as an attempt to achieve justice: fair treatment for all the ‘other Others’, in Levinas’ terms, who all demand the responsibility of a response. However, the form is also a certain sort of managerial practice which starts with a category and obscures the particularity of the Other. It makes the Other only knowable as an object within that category, reducing them to the same. As Byers and Rhodes (2007: 249) argue, for Levinas justice should not become an excuse for blinding one to the demands of the Other. The decision by Jack and Yvonne was as a response to the proximity of Chloe as a particular Other. They bypassed the form in a desire to help Chloe, since they were now entangled with her particular sociomaterial relations and felt responsibility for her as Other. At the same time, the assumptions they embodied perhaps helped to reinforce the ideal of the separate and independent human, emphasising self-sufficiency as a measure of adulthood, and the desire to separate Chloe’s (impaired) embodiment from her social relations (which were judged as controlling). The different entanglements indicated different organised ethics from those materialised in the form, none of which can be prejudged as ‘right’ in the way that conventional ethical approaches would presuppose.

What can be seen here is the play of the ‘agential cut’ (Barad, 2003: 815). Through the shifting materialisations of what counts as a suitable ‘body’ for CommunITy, different boundaries of embodiment and materiality around Chloe become enacted. The organisation of the form seeks to produce a fixed and stabilised resolution of what Barad (2003) describes as the ‘inherent ontological indeterminacy’ (p. 815) of these entanglements. The project co-ordinator and Yvonne enact a different material configuration, materialising different embodied concepts. Their intra-actions come from an unwillingness to be bound by the ‘fantasy of distance’ which the form materialises, but rather from the proximity of their own entangled embodiment in relation to Chloe’s Otherness: from their non-indifference to her differences.

In the second example, there are different material configurations in the entanglement of embodiments and non-human materialities, and where the ‘cuts’ are drawn between them is dynamic and unpredictable, producing ethical disturbance. Ron’s embodiment is entwined with the ‘object’ of the catheter bag. There is a relationship of interdependency here, since Ron is reliant on the bag to perform bodily functions that he can no longer control for himself. And the bag is dependent on its insertion in this relationship to act as a reservoir and on its place in wider sociomaterial networks to be changed and maintained. In these wider entanglements, the bag is not only dependent on human materialities, but on other objects such as the polyurethane it is made of, the machines that made it, the liquidity of urine and kinks in the catheter tube. It is no longer clear who or what has agency within this entanglement. The bag is not a mere function or thing for Ron. It has an unruliness in relation to human agency. As Hodder (2012) says of things, ‘they have lives that follow their own paths’ (p. 13). In this case, the bag swings and leaks.

But the entanglement also had ‘viscous porosity’, to draw on Tuana’s (2008) term. The entanglements of Ron, the catheter bag, the bed, the printer, the Possum, Yvonne and so on, are not just about material and embodied functionalities. Tuana (2008) talks of the other ‘prejudgements and symbolic imaginaries, habits and embodiments’ (p. 200) that are part of these intra-actions. This is helpful in exploring the different particularities of embodiment that are being co-constituted in this example.

Differences in embodiment (including those of race, gender, age and intersex as well as disability) are frequently the source of social denigration or discrimination. In relation to disability, this often manifests in a reduction of the person to their physicality, in such a way that associates them with mere biological matter, and faulty matter at that. The inert, passive ‘body’ is foregrounded and the ‘subject’ backgrounded, as in the classic ‘does he take sugar?’ attitude where the disabled person is treated as unable to possess or express their own preferences and needs, such that an-other subject or ‘expert’ is presumed to speak for them. This process completes their ‘objectification’ into mere ‘body’. Not only is the dis-abled person reduced to mere physicality, but they are denigrated through their reliance on others, whether human or non-human.

The very idea of ‘able-bodied’ suggests something which is complete and capable in itself, reminding us of Stiegler’s critique. Dis-abled people are often more overtly interdependent with non-human materialities such as wheelchairs, sticks, hearing aids and so on. Yet, as has been argued, all humans have these intertwined relationships with other materialities (see also Garland-Thompson, 2005). However the ‘cut’ between self-sufficient human and functional object presents itself such that these everyday entanglements are commonly seen as ‘choices’, and increasingly as consumer choices between technologies. In contrast, disabled entanglements appear as necessities rather than choice; hence, they reduce human agency and self-sufficiency. The dis-abled body makes visible the interdependence with the world and others that is indeed, as we have argued, the condition of all humans. When this dependence becomes visible, embodiment is defined as flawed because it contradicts the imaginary self-sufficiency of the human. Yet as Breckenridge and Vogler (2001) tellingly remind us: ‘No one is ever more than temporarily able-bodied’ (p. 349).

Ron’s embodiment no longer fits with the imaginary of the enclosed and self-sufficient body so valued in western culture. Its reliance on ‘external’ technology is visible. Yet, the technology itself is no longer external, but has become part of Ron’s embodiment. Ron cannot rely on his childhood-learnt control over his sphincter muscles, which provided accepted social control over the bodily functions of excretion. Instead, there is a different particularity to his embodiment. Yvonne becomes entwined with this reconstitution of the embodied self and its reordered boundaries. Different cultures have different norms as to whether one touches or mentions particular parts of the body. Excretion and its associated bodily parts tend not to be referred to in British culture in the sort of social interaction described here. Thus, Yvonne could be said to have responded to the catheter bag as if it were a part of Ron’s body in these circumstances, by tactfully (she felt at that particular time) ignoring her contact with Ron’s entangled embodiment.

Yet, taken-for-granted western assumptions about the integrity of the body mean that there may be ambivalence here. The ‘leaky body’ is commonly problematised (Shildrick, 1997) and disgust is often felt at the externalising of something which ‘should’ be internal. Here the catheter bag is doubly stigmatised: it is associated with hidden parts of the body and embodied activities that culturally should be carried out privately, and it is a ‘thing’, not actually ‘human’. Yvonne, by touching it however momentarily, becomes herself ‘contaminated’ by this contact. She is also matter-out-of-place, by being on the floor under the bed as a doctoral researcher. It is possible that in ignoring the leaky bag, Yvonne is ‘objectifying’ Ron along with the bag, despite her best intentions. For example, if Ron was bleeding, and no one had noticed, Yvonne might be less likely to leave that particular leaking of bodily fluids to be attended to later. The need for the catheter bag underlines the notion of the sovereign subject, and thus Yvonne’s non-response may be linked to a ‘zone of indifference’ (Ten Bos, 2005), in which Ron/the catheter bag cross a threshold from human to less-than-human, because of the difficulty of maintaining clear-cut distinctions between human and non-human materialities. Indeed, the leaking urine poses the question of whether it itself is ‘human’ or a ‘non-human’ materiality, and how its status changes dependent on the local ‘agential cuts’ (Barad, 2007) that are performed.

Why do we see these situations as moments of ‘ethical’ disturbance—when they could easily be seen by the reader to be trivial incidents? It is because the circumstances call forth the need to respond to, to take responsibility for (in Levinas’ terms) the Other (both the human others of Ron and Chloe and the non-human others of the leaking catheter bag and the form). Thus, the particularities of entangled embodiment produce particular ethical situations. There was the undecidability within the emergent situations whereby ‘morality’ (as prescribed or inscribed in society and in Yvonne’s mind) was unclear. Ethical disturbance is produced through undecidability due to the recognition of the alterity of the Other. Diprose (2002) relates this to Merleau-Ponty’s view of intercorporeality, suggesting that this disturbance decentres the self to allow the imaginary of the Other’s embodiment to enter, permitting the transformation of these social imaginaries which favour ‘bodies and modes of being that dominate the social and political sphere’ (p. 179). It is undecidability, in the face of the entanglement of other bodies and materialities, that can produce the conditions of possibility for an ethical shift from indifference, to responsibility towards difference.

These examples suggest that embodied-material entanglements are emergent and ongoing; they link to processes of differencing and Othering. They are bound up in processes of organising and boundary-making. So, differences and boundaries get made and indeed un-made in these entanglements. However, it should be noted that this making/stabilisation ‘when it occurred, was a local, perhaps temporary, and often fragile, accomplishment’ (Bloomfield et al., 2010: 428). Thus, the ethical relations that emerge within these examples come out of dynamic intra-actions between different and ongoing embodied entanglements.

Conclusion

In this article, we have sought to recognise the ethical implications of entangled embodiments, where human embodiment is seen as both materialised and as inextricably bound up with the other multiple materialities of the world. From this perspective, there is no discrete being which forms the human subject, nor an external entity which is a non-human object. The human is not self-producing, self-contained and bounded but is co-constituted within dynamic processes of entanglement.

This approach is indeed an entangled web, and one which goes against the warp and weft of dominant western forms of knowledge, both scientific and humanistic. This knowledge presumes a separation of human from world, and a human agency that can act upon this world. These distinctions encourage us to see human knowledge as somehow reflecting the world, but, as Barad (2007) and others have noted, reflection is a form of distancing. Conceptual and materialised divisions are drawn between observer and observed, between human and world, society and environment, and this has ethical consequences for the way that humans live within the world.

We have therefore sought in this article to argue for a different way of being-in-the-world. Human embodiment is not the be-all and end-all of who we are, so we call for an ethics which goes beyond the individuated human body. In this ethics of entangled embodiment, we hope to open up a space to consider the multiple materialities of the world, not as inanimate objects, but as the neglected Others that are yet integral to human ethos. This ethics is based upon a responsibility for the Otherness of our entangled world, through recognising both the corporeal sensuous intertwining that we are inextricably part of and its various different particularities. As Barad (2003) puts it,

… ethics is not simply about the subsequent consequences of our ways of interacting with the world, as if effect followed cause in a linear chain of events. Ethics is about mattering, about taking account of the entangled materializations of which we are a part, including new configurations, new subjectivities, new possibilities. (p. 384)

Thus, we need to explore how organisational processes are involved in the ‘cuts’ that form (both material and social) boundaries and differences, and produce inclusions and exclusions, inequalities and hierarchies, subjects and objects. This opens up a dialogue of ethical possibilities, whilst recognising that ‘it is easier to posit an ontology than to practice it’ (Tuana, 2008: 209). And this is where the significance of our empirical examples comes in.

The empirical cases explore the ethical implications of entangled embodiment and how different particularities were constructed, reproduced or challenged. What came to the fore were the organisational processes or ‘agential cuts’ that produced the embodied and disembodied phenomena. Furthermore, in both situations, the undecidable moments of ethical disturbance highlighted the inextricable entanglement of human and non-human materialities.

So, in relationship to these examples, we might interpose Barad’s (2007) questions about how ethics might look different from the perspective of entanglements. Specifically in relation to disability, she asks,

What would it mean to acknowledge that the ‘able-bodied’ depend on the ‘disabled’ for their very existence? What would it mean to take on that responsibility? (p. 158)

We believe that in discussing our cases we have shown that these are not easy questions to answer. How do we determine what is meant by taking on this responsibility? When Yvonne decides not to tell Ron about the leaking bag, is she failing to take responsibility for the Other or is she acknowledging the integral entanglement of the embodiment of Ron and his bag by keeping quiet and saving his face? When Yvonne and Jack decide to include Chloe in the project, are they taking responsibility for her difference, or are they imposing their own category of the independent, self-sufficient adult on her?

Introna (2003) tells us that, within a Levinasian framework of infinite responsibility for the other, ‘ethics is impossible’ (p. 213). We want to emphasise a different aspect to this impossible undecidability, which stems from the intertwining of embodiment and flesh-of-the-world. Each possible ethical response co-constructs the entanglements in different ways—and this is not to imply that a human ‘subject’ in the entanglements has therefore some autonomous control over those entanglements through their actions. ⁶ Despite this undecidability, we hope that in moments of ethical disturbance, there will be room for situated ethical practices that include the vitality of non-human others that emerge from the multiple materialisations that humans are entangled in, and that take into account the consequences for those different Others.

Through this article, and by using two empirical examples which might appear quite minor and mundane, we have attempted to put flesh on the bones of an ethical consideration of what it means to be entangled within co-constitutive relations of human and non-human materialities. It is possible to produce a theoretical account of these relations, and the alterity within them that calls us to responsibility for the Other(s). But when we discuss the embodied situations themselves, it is possible to better understand that this cannot produce a definitive ethics. An ethics of embodied entanglements is not, and could never be, a case of ‘adding in’ the non-human materialities of the world to a previously humanistic ethics. Instead, it changes the nature of the relations and understandings: our situated moments tell us that these entanglements are dynamic and undecidable.