Beyond Development and Morality 155elements all engage in the creation of the worlds of which we are a part
and only a part. As Frost (2011) notes:
Fausto-Sterling, Elizabeth Grosz, and Karen Barad have begun to try
to include ... the movements, forces, and processes peculiar to matter and
biology. These ‘new materialists’ consider matter or the body not only as
they are formed by the forces of language, culture, and politics but also as
they are formative. That is, they conceive of matter or the body as having
a peculiar and distinctive kind of agency, one that is neither a direct nor
an incidental outgrowth of human intentionality but rather one with its
own impetus and trajectory. (p. 70)To reposition matter and the body in this way is a radical repudiation
of Cartesian duality. The mind is no longer the arbiter of reality through its
access to the universal abstract fields of reason and rationality. Agency is
not driven by intellect and the decision-making capacities of cognitive
processes. Instead, there is, as in Spinoza (1677/2000), a parallel process of
mutual agentic force within which the body or matter is engaged with
thought in “complex interactions through which the social, the biological,
and the physical emerge, persist, and transform” (Frost, 2011, p. 69). In
this reading, all things have agency, not just human individuals. The
body’s movement across its lifespan is a negotiation of these sets of
agentic relations. One does not develop so much as one is composed by a
very nearly infinite field of interactions with the agentic capacities of other
bodies encountered across time and space. This model of development
resets psychological concepts of the self, cognition, and behavior in an
entirely new light. There is no capacity to isolate and differentiate
taxonomies or hierarchies of development. Instead, our ability to think and
act is premised in profoundly complex, recursive, and multilinear systems.
While psychology has nodded in this direction, it has always centered
human agency in its relation to the world outside the self. To go beyond
development as a teleological imperative generated by human individuals
implies the adoption of what Taylor, Pacini-Ketchabaw, and Blaise (2012)
refer to as a “more-than-human” network of entangled relations that
operate on a radically altered understanding of time, space, and matter.