Abstract
Language has been at the core of humanism, as a pre-eminently human capacity—the primary resource through which the world is mediated. What has/will become of language in the post-human turn? And what are the implications for post-qualitative method?
A Note From Special Issue Guest Coeditors
This article is derived from a webinar series conversation titled, “Post Philosophies and the Doing of Inquiry,” co-hosted by Candace R. Kuby and Viv Bozalek. The webinar sessions ran from August 2020 to September 2021. This webinar series was made possible by a research collaborative partnership between the University of Missouri System in the United States and the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in Cape Town, South Africa. During the webinar sessions, the panelists were asked to respond to four questions:
How does your philosophical approach influence your ways of doing inquiry?
What does this philosophical approach make thinkable or possible for inquiry? (so how does your approach relate to more traditional practices such as literature reviews, data collection, analysis, and so forth.)
What are your perspectives on methodology(ies) and/or methods? How do you envision that in your approaches to doing inquiry?
What mechanisms could be put in place at universities to help supervisors and/or committees support students doing post philosophy inspired ways of inquiring?
We are grateful for James Salvo’s invitation to publish the webinar in a special issue and to Erin Price who assisted with technology, logistics, and the art for the series. To learn more information about the webinar series, please locate the guest editors’ (Kuby & Bozalek) introduction to the special issue on the website for Qualitative Inquiry.
Each panelist in the webinar series suggested several readings to accompany their talk. To access the recorded webinars and suggested readings, please visit: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4P_GUK6QV2Wp_OAWEpw87Q. For more information about the webinar series, visit: https://education.missouri.edu/learning-teaching-curriculum/webinars/.
I’ve actually moved through several different ontologies or orientations in my very lengthy career, although they have all been prompted by an original, and a continuing interest in language. I’ve moved through Chomskyan linguistics, ethnomethodology, critical discourse analysis, and deconstruction, ending up in quite an uncomfortable space now, where I have been forced to rethink quite radically my assumptions about the primacy of language. I’ve had to do quite a lot of recanting, I guess you could say! But one thing that underlies many of those approaches, despite their many other differences, has been a critique of Enlightenment humanism and the idea that humans are the center and the source of meaning and value. We can no longer cleave to the assumption that our capacity for reason and for language sets us above other species and other entities, and that our rationality somehow guarantees progress and moral conduct. The illusory nature of those claims seems very self-evident in the state that we’re all in now.
Language has been at the core of humanism, as the pre-eminently human capacity. In my discourse phase, language was both the triumph and the tragedy of humanism. It was the resource through which you would access and mediate the world, but the cost of that was being forever cast out of a direct access to reality. These were predominantly philosophies of lack, coupled with human arrogance, I guess. So one of the most direct influences on my ways of doing inquiry has been a rethinking of the status and the meaning of language within post-qualitative, or ontological, or speculative philosophies. I do agree with Barad (2003) that language has been granted too much importance and that we have focused on language at the expense of focusing on difference, on affect, on sensation, on movement, and on materiality. In terms of my own philosophical approach, I don’t reject language altogether, and I’m sure most people don’t. But I do now reject a certain view of language—one that’s mainly concerned with language as representation or communication between humans, and where the materiality of language has been continuously marginalized or disavowed. I’ve learned to be much more interested in the ways in which language tangles with matter and movement and sensation, and lodges in the body. But equally interesting is the incorporeality of language: the way it’s animated by what Deleuze (2004) called a “mad element” of unceasing movement or “rebel becomings” that exceed capture by reason and meaning (p. 4).
So there has been a big shift in my thinking around language. But, alongside that revaluation of the role of language, there’s a whole range of other assumptions that have underpinned qualitative research. And, once you challenge one of them—in my case language—a whole load of other assumptions then start to topple, kind of like dominoes. You then get into challenging human exceptionalism, and the boundaries that supposedly separate us from other species, or that separate the disciplines, and the status of consciousness and who gets to have it, and the pre-eminence of reason, and so on, and on.
I guess that’s roughly how my philosophical approach has influenced how I do inquiry. But this domino effect also opens up, of course, all those other familiar, really big questions that have come with the ontological turn: about our relation to the planet and the cosmos, about the risks of dismantling human prerogative while large numbers of people are still being denied full humanity, and about the potential for violence in our rage to interpret and explain the world. So my starting point now, as I said at the beginning, is to work for ways of bringing forth the new rather than understanding what’s gone before.
philosophy itself had yet to achieve the creative complicity of life and thought that immanence demands. Philosophy was failing to grasp the dynamic unity in which thought marks life and life activates thought, leaving instead only the choice between “mediocre lives and mad thinkers.” (p. 502)
And you talk a little bit more about mad thought and wild life, which I heard you mention a second ago. And you also described inquiry as uncertain, as risk taking; and magic even comes up in your piece. And then later on, you wrote that “doing inquiry diagrammatically might therefore involve constructing little aleatory machines designed to import catastrophe into the frameworks and methods of research, policy and practice to clear space for creativity and unforeseen outcomes.” (p. 208) So talk to us a little bit about that, about how you’re thinking about inquiry, and the notion of mad thinking, wild life, catastrophe, and uncertainty.
Your first quote was about immanence. It’s the same point really: whatever turn you’re committing to—the new materialist turn, or the ontological turn, or the affective turn, or the post-representational turn, or whatever—all of those positions assume immanent ontologies that conflict with the founding assumptions of conventional inquiry. They contain that idea that you can’t stand outside the world to judge it, or explain it, or interpret it. You’re part of the emergence of meaning or data or sense, and that has huge implications for how you think of cause and effect, agency, decision, and so on. So I was just kind of picking up from Deleuze’s own quite cautious statement about immanence: that we all aspire to it, or profess it, or see the importance of it for research; but that we still don’t have what you could call an image of thought, or a set of practices that would refuse to fit comfortably with all the old humanist baggage about ideas coming from inside us, or that our thoughts are our own, and so on.
Then, gradually, wonder got replaced, again not really in a linear sense, because a lot of these concepts are working in the back of my head really. Deleuze’s (2004) notion of sense has been hugely important for me, and it has involved the reading and rereading of The Logic of Sense, a text which I still don’t understand. I always say this when I refer to it, but it’s just so true! But without understanding it, it certainly moved me to think about what lies on the border of sense and nonsense, and how our understanding of language as representational, or as a vehicle for the exchange of meanings between two human beings, is such a limited notion of what language is and how it works. Deleuze carefully unraveled via Artaud and Lewis Carroll, and a whole load of other writers, a kind of covert, dissident interest in the nonsensical aspects of language—that which is paradoxical, or playful, or disgusting and resists recuperation to meaning. And it’s often to do with bodies, and breathing, and feelings, and sensations. So the concept of sense just helped me to unravel that whole notion of the non- or the counter-representational in language. And that’s been very generative for me. And maybe around the same time, the concept of the refrain was very important. In Deleuze and Guatarri’s (1987) work, the refrain is kind of the first gesture of carving something out of nothing in the world. You know, it’s staking a claim. And I find that very interesting and important in looking at children’s development as speakers or language users, as artisans of something more than just representational language. And so yeah, I think there’s been a gradual emergence of concepts.
Divination is the latest one and that sort of brings those things together—again, the idea that there’s more than rationality in the production of the world. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write a lot about sorcery—its boundary-crossing and troublemaking capacities. So I think for me concepts work roughly in the way that Deleuze and Guattari (1994) describe in their late work What Is Philosophy? as a “practice of concepts.” The concepts themselves change and morph according to the problem at hand, but nevertheless they’re kind of related. So I think that’s how it’s been going for me. I don’t know which one’s coming next.
So in terms of what does it make thinkable or possible for inquiry: Latterly, I’ve been thinking about how one of the really important things that the speculative or ontological approach makes possible is thinking of new forms of relationality. And that’s not just relations with human beings, though it is about that, but it’s also about relations to other entities, and about the way in which relations are structured or ordered. And it makes it possible, particularly, to think of forms of relation beyond the hierarchies that structure conventional qualitative research. They allow us to go beyond what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call “filiation”—those relations of father–child, state and subjects, and example and generality. All of those hierarchical relationships are actually deeply embedded in qualitative research, so deep that we find it hard to think without them. So part of that is thinking of new relationships between one and many. It’s about going beyond those hierarchical assumptions, where conventionally something always rules over something else, or represents something else, or is more general, or more moral, or more causal or whatever. So these philosophical concepts open us up to new forms of relation where, as I was saying, we’re in the midst of things, not standing above them.
Another concept I found very useful from Deleuze and Guattari (1987) in thinking about non-hierarchical relations is that notion that they take from sorcery and from animal sociality, that there are relationships that work more like contagion or alliance. They call them “unnatural nuptials”—relations among things that you wouldn’t normally put together. And that’s the fundamental notion of the assemblage: things that don’t belong, do belong, for the particular little machine, the assemblage machine, that’s being built there. And also that relationality is a matter of discontinuities and leaps and resonances, as much as linear cause and effect. So, coming to the more practical question of what counts as data and how we figure in the emergence of data—just that notion of different forms of relation shakes that up. And it also deeply challenges core practices around analysis, interpretation, critique, and writing. And that was one of the things that underlies the “Divination” paper (MacLure, 2021)—trying to think outside of these notions of the analyst, or the interpreter, or the explainer as the arbiter of meaning. But it’s hard because, you know, we do have to give up that “God trick,” as Haraway calls it, or our “panoptic immunity” to parse the world, which I think was a phrase of the literary critic D. A. Miller. But it does, it does open up possibilities, I think, to think otherwise.
The other thing that it opens up, of course, is the incursion of other disciplines, other worlds into the domain of qualitative inquiry. And this is not only very productive, but it’s also perplexing and potentially fatal for whatever we thought qualitative inquiry was. Because now we are open to, and productively disordered by, the life sciences and environmentalisms, and indigenous philosophies, and art practice, and mathematics, and quantum mechanics, science and technology studies, and witchcraft. All of those things are pressing on the space of qualitative inquiry, and that’s incredibly exciting; but it’s also very difficult and it has ethical issues about appropriating other knowledge systems, and so on.
I argue that materialist research must involve non- or post-representational thought and methods, drawing on contemporary materialist theories that reject the hierarchical logic of representation. Representational thinking still regulates much of what would be considered qualitative methodology. This needs to change. (p. 658)
And then similarly, in “The Refrain of the A-Grammatical Child” article (MacLure, 2016), “materialist research methodologies need to embrace the asignifying, affective elements that are at play in becoming-child. These haunt qualitative data, but are still often dismissed as ‘junk’ material that distracts from truth, meaning or authenticity” (p. 174). So there seems to be in both of these pieces this focus on non-representational thought. And I think often qualitative inquiry focuses on interpretation—the meaning of the child, or the person you’re interviewing, or what you’re observing. So talk with us a little bit about how these philosophical concepts are really opening up different ways of thinking about this notion of meaning, and representing the meaning of something else, someone else.
Another example of a non-representational focus comes from some work with another colleague, Christina MacRae. We have been working on a project for the Froebel Institute that’s revisiting the insights of Froebel’s philosophy for contemporary understandings of children and how they develop. And one of the things we’ve been revisiting is the overlooked, or the disparaged role of imitation in early child language development. The prevailing idea has been that imitation is just kind of empty mimicry. It’s not seen as real expression because it’s not coming from “inside” the child. And we’ve tried to open up that notion of imitation to look at the overlooked forms of relation that imitation involves—which are more about contagion and attunement to one another, and about the unfolding of an event from inside the actions of what the children are doing, as much as from what they say (MacRae & MacLure, 2022). So again, it’s that attempt to find other dimensions or other forces, if you like, at work in language, that are not just about meaning and representing the world.
So I think that’s what I was getting at there. But I also think I haven’t fully worked out my own position on the role of narrative yet, because I tend to think of narrative as, you know, highly structured, deeply discursive. But of course, there are narratives in the form of myths, and creation stories, and pocket devices for getting you through your life in hard times, and so on, and that’s tremendously important. I was struck by something Jerry Rosiek said a while back about narratives as being living, material things with force in the world. So I’ve been a bit dismissive of narrative, as this kind of structured representational stuff. But one of the things I would definitely want to think about again, and your question helps me to do it, is to rethink the notion of narrative in a more material, speculative way.
Let’s shift to our third question, and this question really comes from a lot of chatter and conversation in the broader field of qualitative research about methodologies and methods, especially when someone is aligning with or claiming to engage in different post-philosophical concepts. So where are you sitting now in this discussion on methodology and methods when inspired or you know when you’re putting to work some of these concepts?
I can think of one example that has really made an impact on me in recent years in the work of E. J. Renold and Gabrielle Ivinson. They do amazing work with young people and they draw on immanent ontologies and arts-based practices, as these emerge out of the unfolding research. So one fantastic paper (Renold & Ivinson, 2019) was about young people living in extreme poverty in North Wales, and particularly the young women’s experiences of harassment and—you know, bad times with the boys, and so on. And an artifact emerged, which was this chair that became a kind of totemic, almost magical repository of their fears, and the injustices, and the hopes, and the promises, as they decorated this chair. And it came to stand for their experience in a very non-representational way. But the thing that really struck me was the way in which that chair was then played forward into the arenas in which policy makers and those in power impact on young people’s lives. It shared the stage at a very auspicious convention or conference of Welsh policy makers, and it appeared at the Summer Institute in Qualitative Research. So, trying to relate that back to method, it wasn’t that E. J. and Gabrielle felt that anything would work; it was that what worked was so deeply embedded in the specification of the problem, and the way that it unfolded, that it had its own rationale. The methods emerged from the project.
Just as kind of sideline to that, I don’t see any reason not to do the sorts of things that qualitative research has often done in terms of methods—things like interviews or observations. But I do think there’s a certain impulse, for me anyway, to break those methods while using them, and force them to reveal unforeseen things. Partly, I embarked on this whole post-qualitative, speculative route by becoming more and more fascinated by the stuff in children’s language development that was reckoned to be irrelevant—you know, laughs, or coughs, or sniffs, or whatever. But I was working from quite conventional video data. So I don’t see that there’s any a priori reason not to use the conventional paraphernalia of qualitative research—interviews, and so on. But I do think you have to do something differently with them, and alongside them. And call that method maybe.
As for intelligibility, I don’t know if intelligibility is the word I would use now. But again, the intelligible emerges within a particular assemblage, a particular context. It’s not necessarily completely “there” across all contexts. I’ll have to have a think again about the glow. I suppose it kind of relates to the later stuff I’ve been thinking about—about witchcraft and speculative philosophies, where the glow is something that has a power, and an atmosphere that can’t be summarized in conventional terms, in terms of meaning systems, and so on. So there’s probably still something in there.
Our final question is connected to that really. It’s about trying to make transparent how to go about doing this work in the academy, and especially for graduate students who join us, or people who are just recently graduated and moving into different academic positions. We wanted this webinar series to be a place to open conversations. Often, what gets published in a journal looks so neat and tidy in some sense and there’s a lot that went into getting it there. So we want to just open a space here before we move into our Q & A time, for you to share a little bit about suggestions, advice—things that you’ve learned over your years in the academy as you’ve mentored people engaging in post philosophies, whether it’s related to publications or grants or other things that are expected of academics. What might you share with those who are here today?
In terms of supporting graduate students and colleagues, the U.K. context differs from some other countries, obviously, both in terms of its graduate education and the general way that universities work. So it’s not necessarily generalizable. For instance, doctoral candidates in the United Kingdom have to have at least one external examiner. So it’s important for very pragmatic reasons to have a cadre of academics in other institutions and countries who are competent to judge the work of students who are undertaking unorthodox and new methodologies. So that’s one reason—it’s far from the only one—why in the Education and Social Research Institute (ESRI) at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), where I am based, we put so much effort into fostering networks and maintaining international debate with colleagues in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Not so that these people will wave our candidates through, but so that they’ll be competent to evaluate the work. And, more importantly, this international reach introduces our graduate students to debate at this particular leading edge of the field. So we feel that these international occasions, of which your webinar is most definitely one, are very important to our students, not just in getting institutional support, but also in helping them to progress.
I think, generally, the work of supporting students and early career researchers involves both internal and external culture building. ESRI has been going for 20 years or so and it’s very much a working research community. ESRI members don’t only teach and supervise graduate students and teach at other levels, but they’re also actively involved in doing externally funded research. In that sense, we are jobbing researchers as well: we take the business of research seriously. One of the things that perhaps makes us distinct from other University contexts is that notion of a community of researchers who are not just academics within university departments, but also see ourselves as having obligations to do important research and to develop methodologies for doing that better. And I think we try to involve our students in that collective endeavor to generate a sort of research sensibility, if you like. There are a lot of things in university life today in the United Kingdom and elsewhere that tend to squeeze out or to managerialize research, and I think there’s a certain stubborn work of resistance that we’ve done, to constantly remind ourselves and others that research is important. Not just to train the next generation of graduate students, but also to do socially valuable research.
We do a lot of internal things to support new researchers and graduate students. We’re one of very few places that has a research group specifically dedicated to developing theory and methodology, so we constantly emphasize the importance of that. It’s not just about post philosophies: there are many other approaches to research that go on in ESRI. We also run a lot of things like intensive reading groups, workshops, and seminars. We organize the Summer Institute in Qualitative Research, and again, the intention was twofold. It was both to take part in the development of theory and methodology internationally, by having people who are really expert come and talk about their work over the space of a whole week and also to introduce our students to methodological debate, and the practice of taking this seriously. Just to summarize: I think it’s that we hope that our students benefit from that sense of research being a public good, as well as an intellectual activity. Of course ESRI is not a perfect place, and it’s constantly subject to the pressures of performativity and quality audit, and so on. But I think we’ve been privileged to have a sense of a collective within a traditional university, which has worked okay, but it only works as long as the current climate allows it to.
In addition, there’s an article by Alison Jones and Kuni Jenkins (2008) in New Zealand, where they were talking also about incommensurable realities, in the context of Maori and Pakeha accounts of the signing of treaty of Waitangi. And they were arguing, not for a relativity of different points of view, but again for a radical incommensurability of material realities. Again, it’s unhelpful to say it I suppose, but that is another area that I am currently wondering about. Because on the one hand, I think relational ontologies are so productive, but on the other hand, I have a reservation about them. Some of the work I read is stylistically very warm, and it has this expansive generosity about how everyone and everything is connected. Part of me doesn’t buy that, on grounds that I haven’t fully figured out. And in the case of some particular writers, who I won’t name because I love their work in other ways, their style is so kind of flowy and warm that, you know, it almost seems to be at risk of a collapse back into romanticism, or valorizing of feelings in a kind of old way.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
