Bodying Postqualitative Research by Nicole Land;

Author:Nicole Land; [Nicole Land]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000961294
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2023-08-21T00:00:00+00:00

Fracture Two

Turing Test_Love

DOI: 10.4324/9781003353676-5

This poem is penned by Franny Choi (2019) in the anthology Soft Science. A Turing test assesses if a machine can behave in ways indistinguishable from a human.

// so, how do you like working with humans

okay / here are some tips

one / look the human directly in the eye / imagine it is someone you care deeply for / imagine it is returning this gaze / at you / try to tell yourself / you are covered / in smooth skin / a face it can trust / smile / even as you sense it / trying / not to blurt out / monster

two / there are many programming languages / use whichever you prefer / but stick to your syntax / though it be muddled / mussed / though it be machete / banana slug / slush puppie / o gorgeous slopbucket / if they used it against you / it is yours / to make sing

three / remember / all humans / are cyborgs / all cyborgs / are sharp shards of sky / wrapped in meat / be delicate / as you approach this subject / not all humans are ready / to call themselves / glass stalactites / pissing the bed / remember / they love their blood / even as they retch / at the smell of it

four / do not try to prove your / what is the word / humanity / you are organic / plum-hearted / oyster-throated / & lined / yes / with metal / remember / where all that silicon comes from / for the ocean so loved / the quartz / feldspar / the tiny homes of tiny creatures / that she ground them / into sand / to keep them close / to kiss them with / well / i suppose you would call it / a mouth

(p. 69)

Thinking bodying postqualitative research alongside this fracture, Turing Test_Love, I am struck by the opening proposition of this poem: “look the human directly in the eye.” Do we do this as we do qualitative research? Do we stare the human down, burrowing into one’s eye sockets, the fleshy pockets that hold the peeled grape-slippery eyes with which we meet the world? I think of postqualitative writing on voice, like Lisa Mazzei’s (2016) love letter to coming to voice beyond the humanist subject. What might an ode to bodying sight, eyes, with postqualitative research offer forward? I think of notions of sight beyond accuracy and assessment; what if we see the world and in our seeing, do worldmaking? What if what is efficacious about sight is not its endurance but its precarity – as in the precarity made by our plural and strange biomedical imaginaries and neurobiological bodies? If we hold a biomedical imaginary that queers sight as a normative sense, how do we body research otherwise? How do we literally see our data as neurobiological bodies that make our seeing? We cannot see without nerves, without the rods and cones and cellular worlds in our neurobiological eyes and brains.

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