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Postmodern emergence

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DOI: 10.1080/09518390601159750

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Postmodern emergence
a
Margaret Somerville
a
Monash University Gippsland , Australia
Published online: 02 Mar 2007.

To cite this article: Margaret Somerville (2007) Postmodern emergence, International Journal of
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 International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education
Vol. 20, No. 2, March-April 2007, pp. 225–243

Postmodern emergence
Margaret Somerville*
Monash University Gippsland, Australia
International
10.1080/09518390601159750
TQSE_A_215905.sgm
0951-8398
Original
Taylor
02007
00
margaret.somerville@education.monash.edu.au
MargaretSomerville
000002007
and
& Article
Francis
(print)/1366-5898
Francis
JournalLtd
of Qualitative
(online)
Studies in Education
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This paper is a work-in-progress in which the author will begin to articulate the elements of a new
methodology that she is calling, for the moment, a methodology of postmodern emergence. She
explores this approach through examples from her own research journals that follow her research-
in-process and from observing student work-in-progress. She argues that emergence is an important
and under-acknowledged quality in all research that proposes to generate new knowledge. A
methodology of postmodern emergence is located at the end of a spectrum of emergence. She distin-
guishes this methodology from the fundamental deconstructive thrust of postmodern/poststructural
research paradigms (Lather, 1991), because it focuses on the creative potential of postmodern emer-
gence to generate new knowledges. She proposes an ontology for postmodern emergence of becom-
ing rather than being (Grosz, 1999) that emphasizes the irrational, messy, embodied and unfolding
of the becoming self in this research. She explores an epistemology of alternative practices of repre-
sentation that extends the concept of writing-as-a-method-of-enquiry (Richardson, 1994) into a new
theory of representation. She does this in order to articulate the common elements of these alterna-
tive approaches to research so that each individual and each research project is not an isolated effort
to break through the unsayable to new knowledge. The point is to articulate the common underpin-
ning elements of these alternative approaches in order then to be able to more clearly articulate meth-
ods and pedagogies of postmodern emergence. She has deliberately allowed the exploratory writing
style to move and open up as the ideas in the paper emerge.

Introduction
This paper is a work-in-progress in which I begin with an act of wondering to bring
together a range of ideas and experiences in qualitative research to propose a new
research methodology. For the moment I am calling this new research methodology
a methodology postmodern emergence. My ideas concerning alternative methodologies
originated from my own master’s and doctoral research, and developed through
subsequent partnership projects with Indigenous communities in Australia. I am also
drawing on ideas that have evolved from supervising higher degree research students
who have chosen alternative methodologies and forms of representation. These

*Monash University, Gippsland Campus, Northways Rd, Churchill, Victoria 3842, Australia.
Email: Margaret.Somerville@education.monash.edu.au
This manuscript was accepted by Bronwyn Davies, QSE’s regional editor for Australia and New
Zealand, in June 2006.

ISSN 0951-8398 (print)/ISSN 1366-5898 (online)/07/020225–19

© 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/09518390601159750
 226 M. Somerville

include Indigenous students, women writing from personal experience, and others
working within an arts-based framework. In all of my own research projects, and
those of my students, the development of alternative methodologies was not a choice
but a fundamental requirement of the nature of the research. One student, for exam-
ple, a member of the Cambodian royal family, came to me with just one crumpled
photo of two small children. It is the only memoir she has of her children, the only
material reminder of her past life, erased by the Pol Pot regime. She has developed a
radical alternative methodology, out of necessity, through which to research her
experience of Cambodia.
My own master’s and doctoral research projects were deeply embedded in the ‘crisis
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of representation’ (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994), working with Aboriginal co-participants

and my own fractured embodiment in the landscapes of the research (Cohen &
Somerville, 1990; Somerville, 1999). I was fortunate in having a supervisor who was
permission-giving, demonstrating unfailing confidence in my ideas and process.
There was excellent and unique pedagogical support but there was no methodology
to tell me how to do it differently, and no models to follow from others who had trod-
den the same path. My first learning was from my Aboriginal co-researcher who
approached the research with her own passionate desires and turned upside down any
preconceived ideas that I might have had about how our research would proceed
(Somerville, 1991). Indigenous epistemologies continue to be a strong influence.
In my doctoral research there were some key feminist writers who were important
in the process and I will briefly touch on two of them here because they were significant
in the development of the ideas in this paper. The first, Laurel Richardson (1994,
p. 520), described ‘experimental representation’ as ‘an emergent and transgressive
phenomena’:
Casting sociology into evocative forms reveals the underlying labour of sociological
production and its rhetoric, as well as its potential as a human endeavour, because evoca-
tive writing touches us where we live, in our bodies. Through it we can experience the self-
reflexive and transformational process of self-creation … we struggle to find a textual place
for ourselves and our doubts and uncertainties. (Richardson, 1994, p. 521)
In ‘Writing: a method of inquiry’ (Richardson, 1994), Richardson claims writing as a
key strategy throughout the research process. For Richardson, writing is data collec-
tion, analysis and representation. For over 10 years Richardson has demonstrated her
commitment to writing-as-a-method-of-inquiry in writing research as ‘drama,
responsive readings, narrative poetry, pagan ritual, lyric poetry, prose poems and
autobiography’ (Richardson, 1997, p. 3). Each time a piece of research is represented
in these ways, new insights emerge. The aim of these transgressive forms is to open
up and disrupt taken-for-granted ways of interpreting the world. This research
writing necessarily opens her self to radical transformations, making spaces for exis-
tential doubts and uncertainties. Students continue to find these articles helpful in
their endeavours to find different forms for their research.
Even more subversive, I was inspired by the disrupted forms of representation
offered by Trinh Minh Ha with stories, quotes and images from her films juxtaposed
with intertextuality in forms that denied easy and conventional meanings. Trinh
 Postmodern emergence 227

works with the pause, with silence, attempting to articulate the unsayable. From her
I learned that: ‘the heart of the matter is always somewhere else than where it is
supposed to be. To allow it to emerge, people approach it indirectly by postponing
until it matures, by letting it come when it is ready to come’ (Trinh, 1989, p. 1). For
both these guiding researchers, as for myself and my students, these were acts of
necessity, born out of the struggle of representation, the necessity to create new forms
through which to represent alternative knowledges.
In working with students developing alternative methodologies, I quickly learned
that for each one it was a new and individual process and there was little to support
their choice to follow an alternative structure. Once one or two finished their theses
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these became sought-after models, not so much for copying but just to give a sense
of what was possible. I worried, and still do, about the practices that stand in for a
pedagogy through which we teach and practice writing-as-research. At every stage
of the research process the unacknowledged pedagogical processes for doing
research—the structure of the research proposal, ethics applications and the struc-
ture of the thesis—emphasize conventions based on logics and the scientific para-
digm of empiricist research (Burns, 1994). These practices fail to account for
processes of emergence. Laurel Richardson maintains that ‘almost unthinkingly,
qualitative research validates the mechanistic model of writing, even though that
model shuts down the creativity and sensibilities of the individual researcher’
(Richardson, 1994, p. 517).
Qualitative researchers have worked hard and long to develop a range of qualitative
methodologies as alternatives to empiricist research (Lather, 1991). In empiricist
research, ‘quantitative research methods are employed in attempts to establish
general laws or principles’:
The main strengths lie in precision and control. Control is achieved through sampling and
design, precision through quantitative and reliable measurement. Another strength is that
experimentation leads to statements about causation, since the systematic manipulation of
the variables can be shown to have a direct causal effect on another when other variables
have been eliminated or controlled. Furthermore hypotheses are tested through a deduc-
tive approach and the use of quantitative data permits statistical analysis. (Burns, 1994,
pp. 9–10)

These underpinning principles of empiricist research have continued to permeate

generally accepted thinking and writing about qualitative research, especially in the
unacknowledged pedagogical structures mentioned above. They are being reinstated
through the drive in the US and Britain towards regulation and control of research
practice (Lather, 2004; Stronach, 2004). It is important, however, not to set up a
simple dichotomy between scientific or empiricist research and qualitative research.
I am equally interested in how processes of emergence occur in scientific research and
I do not want to underestimate the importance of logic and scientific thinking that is
the fundamental basis of all research. In qualitative research it is equally fundamental
to be able to demonstrate the relationship between our research activities and data
collection and the conclusions we draw. It is precisely for this reason that I believe it
is critical at this point in time and in this political climate to articulate carefully the
 228 M. Somerville

elements of alternative methodologies that facilitate the emergence of alternative

voices and new knowledges.

The quality of emergence

Wondering
Wonder: to think or speculate curiously; to be curious about, be curious to know; some-
thing strange and surprising; a cause of surprise, astonishment, or admiration; the emotion
excited by what is strange and surprising. (Macquarie Dictionary)

I want to focus here on the quality of wonder; opening the mind, expansion, seeking to know
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the unknown, being uncertain; not proving, but wondering.

I was still thinking about these as alternative methodologies when I began to ask
alternative to what? What are the characteristics of this alternative? It was then I
coined the term a methodology of emergence. As soon as I started to think about the
quality of emergence it became apparent that it was not only related to those students
who wanted to develop alternative methodologies and radical forms for their research
but that it was a necessary characteristic of all research. I found I could often pinpoint
a radical turning point in a student’s research process, a point of transformation. An
example of this point of emergence is the moment when a student from a science
background researching teachers’ use of online technologies became aware that she
was also researching her own practices, that she was deeply implicated in the research
process. Or another moment when a visual artist student researching learning to paint
showed me a video he had taken in his studio of himself painting. Watching the video
segment, I followed the appearance of new images on the painting and his reflections
on that process, knowing that I was witnessing the emergence of a new methodology.
Another student wrote a proposal in an objective othering way about researching
displacement and belonging for an Aboriginal and El Salvadorean family in her
community. I witnessed the emergence of a new methodology when I asked her
‘where are you in this research?’. She came back with a radically different piece of
writing in which she examined her own family’s displacement. In workshops I have
read the first proposal and then the new writing and this has stimulated students to
open up their own writing practice. I include a small extract from the new writing to
illustrate something of the change:
My mother and father were isolated, unconnected people in their non-loving, non-
companionable lives. The wedding photo shows her utter gloom and dark desperation.
Neither of my parents made connections to friends, nor did they reach out to extended
family members and so we children had little contact with aunts, uncles or cousins, on
either side. I remember my father having no friends, my mother having only one: a rather
kind, fat, gnomish school-chum we called ‘Auntie’ Dot, whose chin celebrated a dark mole
with a hair lurking as omnipresent danger to small children. I wonder, now, what my
mother thought when her only friend died and slipped out of her life. (Swain, 2003)
In this writing the student could no longer detach herself from the deeper human
issues of longing, belonging and displacement. This new writing changed her whole
approach to her research, to her developing methodology, to how she understood the
 Postmodern emergence 229

research act, and how the self was implicated in it. But the quality of emergence is not
always about inserting the personal: there are many dimensions to emergence. In
scientific research, Latour writes about how laboratories are excellent sites in which
to study ‘the production of certainty’ because one ‘no longer sees science stammer,
making its debut, creating itself from nothing in direct confrontation with the world’
(Latour, 1995, p. 108). It is the ‘stammer’ of emergence that he is interested in, the
moment when the soil is transformed from the ground of the savannah to a coded
sample in a test tube.
At the other end of the spectrum there were students who self-reflexively developed
an entire radical alternative methodology for their work. Chrissiejoy Marshall,1 an
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Indigenous PHD student, offers an example of such radical approaches, consciously

developing an alternative ontology and epistemology in her research. Marshall is a
Yuwalaray speaker who grew up on the Narran Lake in western NSW, with a deep
knowledge of the culture of the Noongahburrah, the water people. Her grandmother
was Erinbinjori from far north Queensland and her father was a white station owner.
She claims all of these knowledge traditions. Although she was researching the
development of a training package in conflict resolution, in order to make any knowl-
edge claims at all she had to think through the protocols of Country. The necessity to
engage with the development of an alternative methodology that sits between
Western knowledge traditions and her Aboriginal heritage of knowledge and country
meant that she was particularly reflexively aware of this process.
The methodology, evolved directly from her relationship to her birth country, was
developed in visual, oral and written forms. She produced a painting and an accom-
panying oral story that structured and informed each cluster of meanings, or chapters,
based on her knowledge frameworks of Country. She produced a CD of visual images
and oral stories but insisted on keeping it separate from the written document,
although each informed the other. By moving between the paintings, the oral story-
telling and the writing, consciously reflecting on the development of a radical alterna-
tive methodology, Marshall was able to access the unsayable in her writing, thereby
generating new knowledge. I will return to her process later in this paper to further
elaborate these ideas.
So I thought about a continuum of emergence from empiricist paradigms to
alternative radical forms that are characterized by their emergent methodologies.
In searching for emergence I returned to the concept in the early seminal literature
of grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). In elaborating the tenets of grounded
theory Dey (1999) mentions that ideas about emergence appear at least nine times in
the first five pages: ‘data collection can stop when new conceptualizations emerge’
(2); ‘an emerging storyline’ (2); ‘the “emerging” theoretical agenda’ (4); ‘In this
process of emergence, the researcher had to rely on her/his own “theoretical sensitiv-
ity” to generate relevant categories from the data’ (4); ‘“A discovered grounded
theory, then, will tend to combine mostly concepts and hypotheses that have emerged
from the data with some existing ones that are clearly useful” (Glaser & Strauss, 1967,
p. 46)’ (4); ‘Only once some theoretical ideas had emerged could the researcher
determine what further data should be collected’ (5); ‘Theoretical sampling had to be
 230 M. Somerville

flexible, adapting to the emergent theory as it evolved’ (5); which sites could ‘deepen
the emerging conceptualizations’ (5); and ‘comparability of sites … could only
become relevant in the light the emerging theory’ (5). From this exploration of the
quality of emergence in grounded theory I gather that it is only theory that is emer-
gent. The methods are glossed over, the analysis is rigidly prescribed, and processes
of representation are not mentioned. The quality of emergence is nowhere defined.
I believe grounded theory is still a useful place to begin this search for emergence.
I decided to construct provisional understandings of emergence from the definition
of grounded theory: ‘Theory evolves during actual research, and it does this through
continuous interplay between analysis and data collection’ (Dey, 1999, p. 158). A
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possibility for understanding emergence, then, lies in the dynamic inter(play)

between data and theorizing, the idea of play between. Emergence occurs in the space
between data, representing grounded (but unknowable) material reality, and analysis,
as the act of meaning-making. The limitations to a methodology of emergence in
grounded theory, however, relate to the emphasis on verification, the residue of
empiricist research that there is an attainable truth that exists outside representation.
Strauss and Corbin (1994, p. 161) emphasize that in grounded theory there is ‘an
explicit mandate to strive toward verification of its resulting hypotheses’. The quality
of emergence that I was looking for required a postmodern reconceptualization.
Although I could point to examples of emergence in work that my students
produced, it remained an elusive quality that seemed to disappear when I tried to artic-
ulate it. I decided to track it in my own research by reflecting on an exploratory
research trip because this beginning point was a good time to examine the nature of
emergence. I called this trip a ‘holiday’ so I could get away from the university and
think, unencumbered, about a new research project that I was interested in developing
about water in the drylands. During the trip I wrote a journal, noting daily occurrences
with no particular format. On my return I had an email discussion with a colleague
regarding the quality of emergence. He suggested it was about ‘becoming-researcher’.
This suggestion propelled me towards articulating the quality of emergence from my
research journals.
To do the sort of research I associate with emergent methodologies I need to de-
authorize myself each time; it is about a process of undoing. The aim was to undo the
preconceptions, the left-brain habits of logic and order and to respond differently to
the landscapes of the research. There were, of course, aspects of the research act that
provided structures, but these have a certain relationship to the un-doing. For exam-
ple, first stop Moree, searching in the Moree library, following the thread of artesian
water flows and intensities, the eruptions from the invisible body of water, is a very
logical, rational activity. Looking up catalogues, searching the literature, collecting,
sorting, compiling information, were all deeply satisfying. I collected all the papers,
maps, photos, writings, and material artefacts of the research and carried them with
me in a box.
While this box is important to my new research, what holds the experience of
Moree and the artesian water for me was the un-doing I experienced when I left the
university and let go of all of that. The undoing is held in my journals in the image of
 Postmodern emergence 231

the women drying the washing on racks in the square courtyard of the Dragon and
Phoenix Motel, white towels fluttering in the breeze, herringbone phalanx of white
cars parked outside white motel rooms always moving on their way to somewhere,
nowhere. Water and cleanliness, white hands, blotchy white skin, new black spot,
melanoma? Brother dying. The problem of white skin, too bright sun, and belonging
in this land.
All this is part of a complex pattern that I want to play with, which emerges as a
tickle in my brain and gathers other images as it goes. These images that I am
working with are incredibly resilient; I can call them up whenever I choose, to
focus on each experience. They have a relationship to the material I have collected
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in the box but they are not the box, nor are they in the box. The material in the
box represents the structures, things like a research question, proposal, methods
for data collection and analysis. The images represent the qualities of emergence.
At the moment, these images want to develop into forms. These forms are poetic,
sun-bleached, skeletal, bones stripped of extraneous matter, ideas coming into
form.
If I think they have to be anything, produce anything, they freeze, they die and
lose their alive mobility. The only thing I can do with them is play, and even
playing sometimes seems too serious. It is almost as if I have to visit them with-
out intention, to approach them obliquely, not knowing they are even there.
There are a series of them that hold those experiences. An echidna lying dead on
the road, soft pink palms turned upwards; floating across the Bokhara Plains at
dusk in a luminous golden globe of light; massive sacred carved tree trunks locked
in a wire cage; a river alive with patterns of rocks that make the fish traps; a milky
lake and the empty lake; my body immersed in sulphurous water of a bore tank at
Lightening Ridge watching the Southern Cross appear in an enormous indigo
sky…. Each image gathers up all that went before but each also remains its own
thing.
At the end of the trip I came to thinking about how I wanted to record it, to
hold it all for the time when I would return to work and be taken over. I wanted
to put it all together in a scrapbook, a stage in between ideas-as-images and writ-
ing. But it wouldn’t happen, not that soon. So I looked at a book about writing
that I had brought with me and some exercises for ‘writing naturally’ (Rico,
1983)—what an awful phrase. But that tapped into exactly where my process was
at. They were simple exercises of free association and free association clustering,
repeated in different forms. Beginning with a word, the clusters evolve into
patterns and the patterns evolve into images. I seemed to have begun with the
images but the clustering worked to bring the image into words. Beginning with
the colour white.
white
is not a colour
I usually write
Is this emergence?
 232 M. Somerville

Towards an ontology of a postmodern emergence

Becoming
Become: to come into being; to come or grow to be. (Macquarie Dictionary)
Becoming-other. In this I want to reflect on the twin processes of coming into being and
becoming-other to the self through research engagement.
A precondition for such emergence in my research process, then, is the undoing of
subjectivity. The closest theoretical idea to this undoing of subjectivity that I have
come across is the concept of the liminal. Victor Turner coined the term liminal from
Van Gennep’s limen or threshold, referring to the space of becoming for the initiand in
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initiation rituals: ‘The liminal period is that time and space betwixt and between one
context of meaning and action and another. It is when the initiand is neither what he
has been nor what he will be’ (Turner, 1982, p. 113). While Turner focuses on the
space of the liminal in performance, Metcalfe argues, significantly, that ‘the liminal is
a non-stage … a time and space without narrative’ (A. Metcalfe, 2005, personal
communication). Although a time without narrative is a radical idea in relation to the
production of research through writing, the liminal is theorized as a critical time and
space for emergence. In the liminal new subjectivities emerge simultaneously with
new forms.
In opening herself to the liminal, for example, one student wrote of the effect of the
death of a child and family friend on the emergence of the methodology for her
research on bodies:
The methodology developed as I was attempting to write a literature review on ‘the body’.
As I commenced writing the chapter Gracie died. I wrote Gracie into the text. I wrote my
diabetic body into the text. I wrote the touch and feel of my lovers, children, neighbours,
colleagues into the text. I used different voices—the fictional, the autobiographical, the
authorial, the narrative, the academic, the scientific. I abandoned the disembodied theo-
retical as the central point of thinking, instead anchoring all the writing, theory and
conceptual frameworks to the materiality of the body itself. Bodies became the literature
that I explored. (McConnell-Imbriotis, 2005)

I have observed that all students enter this space of becoming-other for emergence to
happen but the intensity of the liminal varies and does not continue evenly through-
out the research. It is about entering a particular space of creation. There are times
of transformation and times of stability in the research, as in life.
For many other qualitative researchers the liminal space of ‘undoing, redoing and
modifying of this very limit’ is fundamental to the practice of writing-as-research.
Trinh writes: ‘rather than talking about death, I would prefer to talk about threshold,
frontier, limit, exhaustion, and suspension: about void as the very space for an infinite
number of possibilities’ (Trinh, 1989, p. 59). St Pierre describes the mixture of pain
and joy in research when her body ‘pauses, settles and readies itself for another
motionless voyage that always seems to involve painful desubjectification, joyful disar-
ticulation’ (2000, p. 260). She refers to ‘those certain places that provide especially
fertile conditions, exquisitely dynamic intensities that make us available to a transfor-
mation of who we are’ (2000, p. 260). Nor is it necessarily a female preoccupation in
 Postmodern emergence 233

research. Rollings, for example, enters the liminal space with the death of his father:
‘All that was normal, rife with insecurities, is now gone. When the structure of the old
story collapsed, in time, so did I…. Counter intuitively, a new home is regained from
the descent into chaos and loss’ (Rolling, 2004, p. 552).
Chrissiejoy Marshall develops a self-conscious ontology from her different Aborig-
inal knowledge traditions. In order to translate this into her academic research she
represents these ontological traditions visually in painting and storytelling. They are
then incorporated into the process of her research through bringing them into
articulation in this way and reflecting on them:
The swans (Byahmul)—One swan is the Mulgury (Mingin) of my mother, Karrawanna,
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who died within a couple of hours of my birth. The second swan is for Noongahburrah,
my grandfather’s mob who lived around the Narran Lake, Terewah, is where this Mulgury
belongs—to that land and those people. Erinbinjori is the largest and most powerful of the
crocodiles. He was in the Belin of my people and very important to our land and people.
Crocodile is the Mulgury to that land and people.
The dots are all linked to show the continuous connection of everything—depending on the
closeness of the dots as to how connected the object or person is to my being.
Wardook/Bohrah (kangaroo) and Jindi/Dinawan (emu) are both Mulgury to us of the Erin-
binjori mob. The Wwardook is of the men (note the closeness of the dots) and the Jindi is
of the women. These two are also very important to our Belin.
Bandabee (The Kookaburra) is the Mulgury of my grandmother, (Yoon-garlin) Ticalaraw-
illaring—Erinbingori mob.
The Albatross is the Mulgury of my son. (Marshall, 2002)

While these ideas are drawn from Aboriginal knowledge traditions, they do not exist
in Aboriginal cultures in this form. Bringing them into articulation in this way is
already to enter the liminal, an act of translation between specific Aboriginal tradi-
tions, contemporary Aboriginal cultures and Western forms of English language and
painting.
This quote from the CD that accompanies Marshall’s written thesis represents a
performance of the in-between. In this quote, Marshall is describing a painting that
represents her own contemporary translation and incorporation of these Aboriginal
traditions for the purposes of her research. She ascribes her sense of herself in the
world as derived from her grandfather’s people and places, the Noongaburrah people
of the Narran Lake, and her grandmother’s people and places, the Erinbinjori people
of far north Queensland. This act places her in relationship to the natural world and
all of its creatures, to her relatives by blood and kinship, and to Country. She does
this in Yuwalaray language and English. This act of translation brings these traditions
into play in her research into the development of a conflict resolution training package
for contemporary Aboriginal communities. It also offers us the possibility of entering
a space where these knowledges can begin to be accessible and meaningful for
contemporary Australia. It opens up new knowledge through a conversation of hope.
The notion of the becoming self is well developed in feminist poststructural theory
(Davies, 2000a). The subject is reconceived from the fixed liberal humanist self to
 234 M. Somerville

one that is in process, coming into being each time he or she is spoken into existence
(Davies, 2004). I want to take up this self that is in a process of becoming, and extend
it into an ontology of emergence as becoming-other, an ontology that is far more
radical. Such an ontology needs to incorporate elements of our past self-history
(ontogeny), who we imagine ourselves to be, and our embodied relationship with
others. It also includes our participation as bodies in the ‘flesh of the world’ (Merleau
Ponty, 1962; Davies, 2000b), a reciprocal relationship with objects and landscapes,
weather, rocks and trees, sand, mud and water, animals and plants, an ontology
founded in the bodies of things. In this ontology, bodies of things are dynamic, exist-
ing in relation to each other, and it is in the dynamic of this relationship that subjec-
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tivities are formed and transformed. And within this there is the relationship with
inanimate objects and technologies, that we, in the process of becoming-other, can
intentionally manipulate—stone, wood and clay, pencils, crayons, brushes and
paints, computers, words and paper, cloth, thread and scissors—among the myriad
other things that we humans have chosen to use to create.
This becoming-other begins with the assumption that as humans we are in a
continual process of becoming. For much of the time we experience our selves as
stable selves produced in continuity with the past and future. To act in the world we
are required to have a belief that, in the next moment, our relationship with the world
will remain to a large extent consistent and predictable. But there are some periods
of time and circumstances when this is not so, when our predictable and known ways
of being in the world are brought under challenge and we are changed forever. This
condition of change can be brought about developmentally, for example at puberty;
or by external natural factors such as the recent Tsunami or Hurricane Katrina; or by
external social factors such as the Iraq war or the London bombings. Or it can be by
intentionally engaging with new experiences, including research, in a fundamental
way. This becoming-other, born of the space in-between, is, I believe, the condition
for generating new knowledge.
Many feminist researchers have theorized the relational space between self and
other as the space where gender and social transformations are generated: ‘I want to
run the risk of speaking within the space between myself and another’s self … my
transgressions are aimed at transforming the representation of relations of alterity; my
limit-attitude can be characterized as the rejection of a binary construction of identity
as horizon’ (Probyn, 1993, p. 145). Similarly, Butler (2005, p. 40), in Giving an
account of oneself, establishes the essential relationality through which we come into
existence as the basis of our continuing emergence as selves: ‘My account of myself
is partial, haunted by that for which I can devise no definitive story. I cannot explain
exactly why I have emerged in this way.’ This liminal becoming-other is seen as the
relational basis for an ontology of the self that acknowledges the significance of the
Other in the constitution of selves, and in the emergence of new knowledges.
Postcolonial writers have similarly theorized the relations between self and other as
a generative space of transformation and new knowledges. The third space (Bhabha,
1994; Soja, 2000) and the contact zone (Pratt, 1992; Carter, 1992) are concepts of
emergent relational spaces between self and Other, in which groups of ‘peoples
 Postmodern emergence 235

geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other’ (Pratt,
1992, p. 7). Carter, drawing on his work on first contact events in Australia, defines
the main function of the in-between space of cultural contact as creating a choreog-
raphy of difference, even to the point of suspending meaning (Carter, 1992). To these
understandings of a liminal space of becoming-other in relationship with other
human beings as individuals and as groups, I want to add ideas represented by
Marshall. This includes an ontology of self becoming-other in the space between self
and the natural world, composed of humans and non-human others, animate and
inanimate; animals and plants, weather, rocks, trees. I also want to include the
materialities and technologies through which we create.
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An ontology of a postmodern emergent methodology then focuses on the undoing

of self; the space of unknowing; the absences, silences and disjunctures of the liminal
space with no narrative; the relational of any coming into being; and the messiness,
unfolding, open-ended and irrational nature of becoming-other through research
engagement.

Towards an epistemology of postmodern emergence

Generating
Generate: to bring into existence; give rise to; produce; cause to be; to beget; to procreate.
(Macquarie Dictionary)

I choose generating rather than knowing because the definition of knowing is ‘to perceive or
understand as fact or truth, or to apprehend with clearness and certainty’. I want to focus on
the makings, the creation of products and assemblages, in an iterative process of representa-
tion and reflection through which we come to know in research.
In ‘Writing: a method of inquiry’ Richardson has proposed writing as the tool, the
means of opening up the process of the research. She suggests that a range of alter-
native forms of writing—‘drama, responsive readings, narrative poetry, pagan ritual,
lyric poetry, prose poems and autobiography’—open up taken-for-granted meanings
so that new knowledges can emerge in the writing process (Richardson, 1997, p. 3).
It is possible to track, through a number of successive publications, how the
changing meanings generated from each of these different forms can be seen as an
iterative process of representation and reflection. It is on such iterative processes of
representation and reflection in postmodern/poststructural research that I wish to
focus here.
Both St Pierre (1997) and Lather (in St Pierre & Pillow, 2000) offer examples of
poststructural deconstructive texts that reflect on iterative processes of representation
and writing. St Pierre takes up the metaphor of the field to open up a space for deter-
ritorialization by the nomadic ethnographer. The ‘smooth spaces of the field’ give
birth to the aside, described as the ultimate space of the in-between in writing—
between inside and out, a space of excess and play, a transgressive space, a space for
nomads where meaning is constantly under erasure. ‘The aside’, writes St Pierre, ‘is
the field’. Lather uses the metaphor of angels in her writing about women living with
 236 M. Somerville

HIV-Aids to articulate an epistemology of the in-between at the same time as gener-

ating new forms:

My investment is, rather, to work towards innovations leading to new forms…. Positioned
on the line of demarcation between materialism and idealism, the angels mark the
incomplete rupture with philosophies of the subject and consciousness that undergird the
continued dream of doing history’s work. (Lather, 2000, p. 307)

I want to take up these ideas of making provisional new forms that deconstruct the
binary constructions of self and of knowledge. I support the goal of deconstructing
binary oppositions, the necessity ‘to keep things in process, to disrupt, to keep the
system in play, to set up procedures to demystify continuously the realities we create,
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to fight the tendency for our categories to congeal’ (Lather 1991, p. 5). In my own
area of postcolonial place pedagogy research in Australia, however, it is also critically
important to ‘find a way to move forward’ (Dundas in Somerville et al., 1994) through
‘a conversation of hope’.
Marie Dundas, a wonderful oral storyteller, thrived on her partnership with me as
her writer in our research. In response to ongoing flagrant racism and the consequent
trauma in her Aboriginal community, she expressed the urgent need to find ‘a way to
move forward’. She found this in working the space in-between ‘the pen and the
mouth’ (Somerville et al., 1994), her metaphor for the relationship between me as
writer and herself as oral storyteller, finding a way to move forward together. Mark
McKenna a non-Indigenous Australian, expressed a similar need for ‘a conversation
of hope’ about ‘who we are and who we have become as a nation and as a people’
(McKenna, 2003, p. 134). Both Dundas and McKenna want to generate new subjec-
tivities and new knowledges from the space in between the binary (op)positions of
black and white. In trying to conceptualize this as an epistemology of postmodern
emergence I need to open up my writing.
So I am sitting up in my bed trying to think about an epistemology of postmodern emer-
gence. Reading. It is a holiday, Anzac Day, and in some recesses of my mind is the fact that
my father will march and all that means in terms of what I have written about in the past,
the inglorious war. But even this is another return. The pain of my father’s mortality. The
father who I have railed against, suffered from, loved. The father towards whom I feel such
painful ambivalence. Memories hover uninvited in this space between body and language. It
is this space that I access to write emergence.
Lacan, following on from Freud, offers a possible way of theorizing the emergence
of the embodied subject into language in the ‘mirror stage’. He uses the metaphor of
the mirror to describe the moment when the infant child first becomes aware of itself
as a separate being-in-the-world (Lacan, 1977). In this moment the child is still
connected to the non-language space of the mother, but also simultaneously emerg-
ing as an identity in the symbolic order. Focusing on this moment of becoming, the
French feminists variously theorize it as a generative space for writing and theorizing
difference, especially the different languages of gendered bodies. The in-between of
this space that has been so fertile for theorizing is also theorized as a generative space
of production. Irigaray generates a different language, Cixous produces lines of flight,
 Postmodern emergence 237

and Kristeva theorizes the ‘thetic’ moment when the semiotic irrupts into the
symbolic in madness, holiness and poetry (Grosz, 1989).
I read ‘How does paying attention to bodies change what we look at, how we look,
what we ask, and what we choose to represent? (Pillow, 1997, p. 349). I write in
response on the margins, in pencil, ‘I return again and again to the body, my bodies, other
human bodies, the body of the world, as one powerful tool of disruption and emergence’.
Body/place journal writing is the first pause for me in an iterative process of repre-
sentation and reflection. It has become a habit in all my research from aged care
homes, to coal mines, to wildflower wilderness, to the childhood house of my memo-
ries. This body/place writing arose from a crisis of left-brain overload. I began to work
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with a massage practitioner who believed that massage—the touch of skin on skin by
another—could surface awareness of body-in-place embedded in bodily tissue. This
tissue awareness surfaced in images spoken during the massage, and recalled later to
write them down (Somerville, 2004). I then started to respond with this body/place
writing as an immediate sensory response to the landscapes of my research.
In this first early morning awakening ideas irrupt, merge and blend in images and words.
The words are conversations in my head, not yet formed on the page so they are more fluid,
there is an excitement and an anticipation. Each day I have been sitting at the desk and
trying to proceed through this paper from beginning to end, logically, step by step in linear
formation because of my consciousness of a deadline, dead in a line, dead to emergence. Then
this morning I moved into a different space. Completely unpredictably, by chance, or maybe
only by immersion. Three days, on the third day He rose from the dead. What happened in
the other two?
In Becomings (1999), Grosz addresses the question of the relationship between time
and emergence. She proposes a radical ‘ontology of becoming rather than an ontology
of being’ (Grosz, 1999, p. 7), which relates to alternative conceptions of time. These
alternative conceptions of time challenge the idea of time as causation, the logic of
cause and effect. They rethink temporality ‘in terms of the surprise of the new, the
inherent capacity of time to link, in extraordinarily complex ways, the past and
present to a future that is uncontained by them and has the capacity to rewrite and
transform them’ (Grosz, 1999, p. 7). In this argument new knowledge cannot be
generated in the logic of cause and effect.
I read this as an epistemology rather than an ontology because it fundamentally
addresses the question of causation, profoundly challenging the empiricist model of
the linked determinism of cause and effect. The time of becoming is expressed in
the work of Darwin, Nietzsche, Bergson and Deleuze in concepts of chance,
randomness and open-endedness: ‘the endless unfolding of the new, restless trans-
formation, upheaval, redirection and digression, which ensures the impossibility of
the same even through the modes of repetition that each of these thinkers sees as
central to the surprise and unpredictability of difference’ (Grosz, 1999, p. 5). It is
through these ‘modes of repetition’, the iterative processes of representation and
reflection then, that the new emerges. It is linked to ecological ideas about emer-
gence, and emergence from the space in between elements in complex dynamic
systems (Davis & Sumara, 1997).
 238 M. Somerville

I continue typing notes from my reading, ‘we shy away from attention to the corporeal
body …’, when there is another (inter)ruption, creating another in-between space. I hear the
insistent barking of my two dogs from a distance. Leaving my desk I walk across the
paddock, through the little valley and up the rocky hill following the sound of the barking.
Dry grass spongy under my feel, sun on my back and rhythm of movement. While I am walk-
ing I think again of the pause, of time that is circular and disrupted. A lot of this fermentation
is about disturbing linearity as the most basic requirement of emergence and how linearity is
such a strong imperative in pedagogies of research-as-writing. Linearity is underpinned by
cause and effect, an epistemological determinism that Grosz counteracts in her ontology of
becoming (Grosz, 1999, p. 7). An insistent phrase keeps coming to me: A pause, however
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brief, in an iterative process of representation.

I begin to think about the necessity of a new theory of representation and return to
Chrissiejoy Marshall’s performance of her research methodology. In her performance
she presents a series of computer-generated digital images of her paintings and
explains how the stories of the paintings articulate elements of her research. She
begins by describing the meaning of her paintings in her research process:
There is no one word in any Aboriginal language that I can find for the term ‘art’, which
is lucky for me, who, not for one moment considers myself an artist. That these paintings
may be seen as unremarkable art by Anglicised standards, is of no consequence, it is far
more important that the paintings actually describe to the viewer the information that I am
telling.

For Marshall the paintings do not exist as Art but as a medium through which she can
express and communicate information, as much for herself as for her viewers.
Aboriginal Art has only become Art in the last 200 plus years. What anthropologists and
others have described as crude and unsophisticated art, was actually Aboriginal pictorial
reflections simply for the passing on of knowledge, so that the listener or learner could
visually grasp the concept or subject matter being given. Similarly, that which is now
described as dance, song and ceremony was (simplistically put) much more a way of pass-
ing on information including history, lore and laws, than the recreational pursuits that are
presently ascribed. The symbols and drawings described by those anthropologists and
historians actually constitute a complex code of interaction that continually reflects on
Aboriginal cosmology, philosophies, spirituality, history and laws that have been used for
thousands and thousands of years. (Marshall, 2002)

Marshall claims her art as ‘crude and unsophisticated’—what I have described else-
where as ‘naïve representation’ (Somerville, 2004). It is created for a purpose other
than what we understand as Art in a Western epistemology. These paintings belong
in a tradition where a complex of art forms including dance, song and ceremony inter-
sect in the ongoing creation of self and country. It draws on ancient cosmology, spir-
ituality, history and laws, while simultaneously being a contemporary form with
contemporary meanings: ‘Aboriginal art has only become art in the last 200 years’.
Marshall is self-reflexively aware that she is generating knowledge in the context of
a Western academic institution and her paintings and stories are reconceptualized in
the contact zone between these two knowledge traditions. They are an example of
new knowledge emerging rather than old knowledge being re-told. She creates a
 Postmodern emergence 239

carefully orchestrated performance of emergence in conversation with her non-

Indigenous audience using her paintings, oral storytelling, Yuwalarayi language, and
the self-conscious act of translation. Each of these elements creates meaning in rela-
tion to each other part of the performance. Meaning is created from an assemblage of
representations.
An epistemology of postmodern emergence, then, requires a new theory of repre-
sentation. This new theory of representation embraces multiple modes of expression,
such as stories, song, dance and paintings, as well as interviews, academic prose and
so on. The focus is on creation of meaning from the relationship between the parts.
These multiple creations are naïve in the sense that although they may be subject to
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the erasure of deconstruction, they are produced and valued in and of the moment, a
pause in an iterative process of representation, engagement and reflexivity. These
naïve forms are the means by which we display and engage with the ongoing products
of our research. A tape-recorded interview, for example, can be regarded as such a
pause, a relational artefact of the interaction between researcher and researched, a
recorded oral performance. This recorded oral performance retains its own integrity
in the pause but it can be transcribed and reinterpreted at any time by its inclusion in
an assemblage of other representations. Digital technologies have made all this more
possible and may even be integral to this new theory of representation.
These forms enable us and our participants to engage with the research and to
perform it for others outside the research act. Meaning is dynamic and constituted
intertextually between the various elements of the performance or representation. In
looking back over my research there is a proliferation of representations in journal
notes, interviews and transcripts, new and old photographs, paintings, drawings,
storytellings and maps. These are dismantled and re-assembled, each time I create a
new product from the research, each time working between the logics and poetics of
the research, between what is in the box, and the images that have become represen-
tations.
I remember making a series of five books with a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous
researchers. It was a very in-between making, a provisional making on butcher’s paper that
was the design template, the materializing of all of our desires in the rough. I collected up the
A5 sheets of butcher’s paper afterwards, an artefact of our collective emergence. Circular, we
began in the middle, an inside; material, visual—we began with a collage of landscape photos
to construct an image of the place. We moved from the centre back and forwards to the outer
edges. There are stories, photos, maps, graphs and poems, including all of the forms of our
various desires and disciplines. We made repetitions, landscape language words repeated at
the bottom of each page. Breaking the inevitability of the linear, breaking causality and
determinism the major achievement. Opening up to the fold, to the circular, to the return.
Foucault (1988), Probyn (1993), Richardson (1997), and St Pierre (2000), all write
about the pleat and the fold, the space of the outside folded in to the inside, time as circular,
disrupted, the pause, repetition. This generation as assemblage draws on many other
representational pauses and forms.
In an epistemology of postmodern emergent methodologies the focus is on creation
from working the space in between. It is not about producing a more authentic
 240 M. Somerville

version of reality, of writing up qualitative research as fiction, or producing artworks,

as such. These forms were essential in the process of our research but each of these
elements, or artefacts of the research, is a pause in an iterative process of representa-
tion and reflection.

Conclusion
In Material thinking: the theory and practice of creative research, Paul Carter says that
‘When research is synonymous with problem-solving and crisis management, criteria
of success are simplification, resolution, closure’. Creative research has a different
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object: ‘It explores the irreducible heterogeneity of cultural identity, the always
unfinished process of making and remaking ourselves through our symbolic forms
(Carter, 2004, p. 13).
In this paper I have taken a stance of wondering to gather together some examples,
strategies, ideas and theories in order to understand emergence in research. I argue
that our unacknowledged pedagogies of writing-as-research focus on the logics and
fail to account for processes of emergence that are fundamental to the generation of
new knowledge. Drawing on my own master’s and doctoral research, observations of
my students and a series of partnership projects with Indigenous communities, I
explore radical alternative methodologies and representations as one end of a contin-
uum of emergence. Such radical alternatives have been developed because there is no
other way for that research to be undertaken or represented.
In wondering about the quality of emergence, I explore radical turning points of
transformation in students’ work and decide that emergence is an important and
under-recognized quality in all research that aims to generate new knowledge. I look
to grounded theory and decide that it requires a postmodern reconceptualization. My
reflections on a recent exploratory research trip track the elusive quality of emergence
in my own processes. In considering a postmodern emergent methodology I propose
that a stance of undoing subjectivity is a necessary precondition for the eruption of
images that begin as a fluid and shape-shifting coming-into-being.
From this tracking I move into considering a postmodern emergent ontology,
beginning with theories of the liminal, a space of becoming in between one state of
being and another, acknowledged by researchers as working at the limit, the edge of
self. I move from feminist poststructural concepts of the subject coming into being
through language towards a more radical notion of becoming-other that includes the
coming into being of bodies in relation to other bodies and the ‘flesh of the world’.
An ontology of becoming in postmodern emergence focuses on the irrational, the
unfolding, the embodied and the messiness of research engagement.
In moving towards an epistemology of postmodern emergent methodologies, I
argue for a methodology that moves from deconstruction to creation and conditional
representation. I allow a different sort of writing to enable me to begin to articulate
intangible concepts that are not quite there. This writing enacts the process of these
concepts coming into being. I explore the origins of body/place writing underpinned
by theories of the in-between of body and language arising from French feminist work
 Postmodern emergence 241

around Lacan’s mirror stage. I draw on Grosz’s ideas of reconceiving temporality

from the logics of causal determinism to include chance, open-endedness, random-
ness and becoming. An idea begins to emerge in which an epistemology of postmod-
ern emergence conceptualizes research as an assemblage of representations, each
element of which is a pause in an iterative and cyclical process of representation,
engagement and reflection. In this conceptualization, time is disrupted and circular
and the linear determinism of causation is seen in relationship to other modes of
becoming. A strategy of writing as assemblage using multiple forms is suggested as a
means to enact this circular time of coming into being.
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge Professor Bill Green for the initial conversa-
tions that brought this paper into being and the anonymous reviewer of this paper for
stimulating a clearer articulation of what she is trying to say.

Notes
1. I hesitated in choosing Marshall’s work as an example because it is so embedded in her
Indigenous knowledge traditions and will possibly suffer from the danger of being dismissed as
exotic, as an Indigenous methodology. However, it illustrates something irreducible and funda-
mental about the development of a methodology of postmodern emergence because it is at the
extreme end of the spectrum of emergence.

Margaret Somerville is a newly appointed Professor of Education (Learning and

Development) of the Gippsland campus of Monash University. She has a long-
term interest in alternative methodologies in her research practice and research
supervision.

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