Making the Just: Critical Inquiry for Different Publics

Abstract

I argue that inquiry, ethics, and justice extend a critical and dynamic relation, the force of which might charge an affirmative process of making a difference; productive challenges to normative convention that resonate on ontological levels. When considered within the material processes of crisis and grieving, the productive entanglement of inquiry, ethics, and justice is granted important direction, lending a critical entry point for confecting a difference through challenging the status quo such that it loses repetitious traction.

Introduction

In the midst of writing this article, while I read through Judith Butler’s The Force of Nonviolence (2021) and Precarious Life (2020), Russia invaded Ukraine. ¹ Amid a swirl of thoughts and force of disgust, I continued to return to a haunting question Butler offers in both texts: what makes a life grievable? Hand in hand with such a question is another: what counts as a livable life? These became central questions and, as I layered the invasion of Ukraine with innumerable crises encountered of late, I began to consider the differences between the merits of rights and articulations of justice. Who (or what) has the right to be grieved, to grieve? Under what conditions do we grieve? And, how might our assumed claims of justice inform a felt sense of grievability—that some tragedies warrant grieving while others do not? After all, there are no shortage of things to grieve today, and yet some seem to register more directly than others—our simultaneously individual and collective focus oriented toward these but not those. It would seem that our grieving orientation is, in no small part, a means of enacting our ethics; grieving as ethics-in-practice. And, for me anyway, ethical practices remain directly entangled with governing processes as they animate our sense of refusal and resistance to the normalizing status quo.

Indeed, crises and grieving are intimately tied, both generating a relational connection between a particular and some collective. Through the affective zig-zag among micro and macro locales, crises and grieving become conjoined with processes of governmentality, bound by a resistance to transformation and generative of normative order. As such, our ethical enactments must necessarily attend to an overlay of local and global contexts to generate a working sense of justice.

Conventionally speaking, we perhaps grieve what once was, before a crisis. Or, we might grieve what seems foreclosed as a result of some crisis. There is thus a temporal collapse in grief as past and future enfold upon the present. In many ways, this grieving manifests as a desire for some return to known or predictable order; a way things were or might yet be. Grieving as the anguished sigh of, “if only . . .” In this way, grieving, like crises, remains entangled with the force of governance, providing avenues for both normalization and resistance. This is to say that grieving is inevitably a productive process and one that, as such, requires critical engagement (with how, for example, it functions as both regulatory technology and avenues for resistance). ²

As someone influenced by poststructural theory generally, and the work of Michel Foucault and Rosi Braidotti more specifically, I locate grieving and crises as functions of biopower—extensions of an administration of life and population such that select populations are normalized (as grievable, livable) while others not. In this sense, governance organizes toward generating the conditions necessary for living a life even as some populations are exposed to conditions generative of death (Foucault, 2003). Thus, it is that questions such as, what makes a life grievable/livable?, necessarily invoke concerns of governmentality and biopower. The conditions for becomes an ethical question (infused with concerns for power and force) not a moral one (which substitutes timeless claims of right and wrong that hold truth beyond context). Furthermore, conditions for perhaps articulates as an ordering effect that is an important area for ethical inquiry intent on generating a difference. In this sense, biopolitical practices may serve as both an arena for investigation and an entry point for ethical change.

Certainly, governing processes play a significant role not only in grieving practices but also in the question of what it is that animates grieving—the affective force of it all. Thus, it is that grieving remains stubbornly entangled, dynamic, and layered; exemplary of ethical engagement and imbued with claims of worth. Given this, what happens to inquiry when touched by grieving? Or, perhaps better stated, in what ways do we (might we) inquire with processes of grieving? And, more specific to the focus of this special issue, how might our contemporary circumstance of crises ad infinitum necessitate a different ethical stance, informed by grieving and derived from practices of living simultaneously within our present moment but not becoming of (or fully governed by) them? ³ That is, how might critical inquiry articulate through our immediate now yet not remain confined to the determining present? In this article, I argue that the force of relational ethics helps us to mitigate such challenging circumstance, animating critical practices for change through a confected sense of working justice.

Grieving, of course, is a relational endeavor. We grieve in relation to something (not always someone). And, there remain an unending array of things to grieve today, as there are every day; crises all the way down, it seems. As such, questions concerning the conditions for grieving necessarily call forth a host of relations perhaps imbued with resonant force; the register that signals grief’s potential. As an entangled event, grieving remains ensconced in a host of material relations, a dense skein of assumptions that extend from enacted ethical claims: what is right and what is just. And, if we are to consider a different potential, it is the conditions for that might bear the weight of our critical gaze. Because grieving is an entangled event, transforming the conditions for grieving necessarily impacts other relational practices and processes.

Thus, it is that I come to the writing of this article with a present sense of grieving, not just for something that has been lost, but for the relations that will never register; the potential that stays because unknown (or, perhaps, simplistically known). And, I want to put such grieving force to work, a means to animate a different way of living in this crisis-laden world. Processes and practices of inquiry have a role in such life-creation, granting avenues toward differently ethical engagements.

As Butler’s (2020) title informs, ours is a precarious life. Yet, despite that precarity—felt all the more acutely in the midst of crises—we endure. And, the work of Patricia Clough (2010) and other poststructuralists remind us that the felt cause of individual vulnerability is a strategic effect of neoliberal governance. That is, anxiety can be a product of individuation: an affective extension of a drive to generate contained individuals whose successes and failures—duration and cessation—are the province of a discreet and closed subject. ⁴ In this way, neoliberal values and assumptions collude with capitalism to generate lives unto themselves, registering as grievable (even livable) in relation to markers of economic productivity. Although often unseen or without recognition through the repetitious nature of our daily lives, crises bring such unobtrusive mechanisms of governance to the fore—making space for a degree of visibility and, importantly, interruption.

It is in this interruptive potential that I locate inquiry ⁵ as a means to enact a different ethical future, an affirmative construction not wholly defined by the maelstrom of crises. Inquiry as a mechanism through which differently relational lives might be led. Doing so requires strategies of intervention and experimentation that extend from an ethical determination to simultaneously refuse those governing conditions that maintain the status quo (despite crises too numerous to count) and strive for affirmative relations, the force of which animates a different future. It is a qualitatively different life that we are after.

As such, I begin with the presumption that methodologies both decode and encode. In this way, methodologies serve as a constructing conduit: defining what is there and generating what is in the process of becoming. This is why, of course, we need methodologists who do more than implement methods. Part of methodological work is the critical engagement with the logics and ethics that inform method, the effects of methodological practice, and the conceptual creativity and courage to experimentally generate an otherwise.

Conceptual Overview

Indeed, our contemporary times are imbued with the force of crises. Whether such crises extend from an entangled strata of political, environmental, economic, or viral conditions, they often generate a felt sense of contradiction—a perplexing effect of acceleration and stuckness. That is, crises tend to speed things up (or generate an affect of amplification, a momentum beyond our control), even as they produce experiences of rigid location or placed-ness (a sense of inescapability, a drowning situatedness). This sensed contradiction perhaps extends from the murky way in which time loses its façade of linear progression; the fold of some possible future with an identified past, into an immediate present, referenced earlier as a hallmark of grieving. In response, conventional inquiry work often seeks procedural mechanisms intended to stay or otherwise pause the momentum of enduring crises, as though the only way to knowledgably engage with such contradictory circumstance is to call upon practices of capture and closure. Such presumptions operate upon select ethical claims that remain steeped in principles of liberal humanism: privileging individualism, synthetic declarations of findings, and particular formations of knowledge. Within such circumstances, justice often articulates as espoused practices of resisting institutions already in decline (this is justice in a sovereign sense, more directly understood as the rendering—and unquestioned protection—of individualized rights).

As an alternative, I offer in this article a sense of inquiry as an interventional making—generative acts that short-circuit the status quo such that open-ended alternatives are newly present, though not-yet determined. In this way, I argue for an alignment of critical inquiry work as a practice of “making the just”—an enacted ethical process grounded in relational materialism that orients from Michel Foucault’s sense of justice as an articulation of living resistance differently, according to an ethical determination attuned to (and resistant of) a shared contemporary moment. Here, justice becomes a practiced means of enabling transformation amid a crisis-filled environment normatively invoked to quell transformative potential and fix individualism. To “make the just” we cannot rely on conventional ethical views that derive from discreet rights emanating from particular subjects (some of which are to be grieved, others not). Instead, we need a relational conception of our shared world, one that is generated through an ethical reconsideration of both subjects and publics that, in doing so, disrupts our addiction to liberal humanism.

In short, I argue that inquiry, ethics, and justice extend a critical and dynamic relation, the force of which might charge an affirmative process of making a difference; productive challenges to normative convention that resonate on ontological levels. When considered within the material processes of crisis and grieving, the productive entanglement of inquiry, ethics, and justice is granted important direction, lending a critical entry point for confecting a difference through challenging the status quo such that it loses repetitious traction.

Organizationally, I structure this article according to two overarching parts. Part 1 situates contemporary formations of crises within a liberal justice frame that remains dependent on moral claims of particular identity and individualized rights. This is the province of the liberal humanist subject. Inherent within this conservative frame are assumptions concerning what registers as a crisis worthy of response, the directional properties of such a response, and the moral claims meant to animate both individual and governmental practices of response. Both crisis and response foreground a normative logic that, in turn, frames possible methodological actions and events, what I term conventional qualitative research.

The second part of this article offers inquiry as a means to short-circuit our dependency on liberal humanist rights for conceptions of justice. That is, I strive to use a critique of conventional research orientations examined in Part 1 and do so to generate a different approach to critical inquiry, the focus of Part 2. Here, I suggest that critical qualitative inquiry might usefully intervene within the collusion of sovereign governmentality through a practice of making the just. By refusing governing processes and structures aimed to stay transformation, inquiry strives to alter the conditions for relational change such that normalized individuation stutters and is made less habitual. Inquiry as a practice of making the just offers different ethical entanglements to generate different futures, a potential that extends beyond the conventional logics that inform contemporary crises (and our normalized responses to them). That is, such inquiry is animated by relational ethics and, as such, aligns with a potential that has yet to be known. In this way, inquiry articulates as a type of critical engagement with living such that current conditions and logics can no longer operate smoothly even as alternatives to the crisis-laden status quo are generated as a matter of ethical necessity.

Given this overview, two key terms require definition within the auspices of this article: governance and justice. Of course, such terms are relationally known and, as such, resist closed and static definition. This is particularly true for governance and justice as they necessarily invoke emergent processes and practices, the repetitions of which are never fully complete. As such, I offer here two provisional and overarching definitions, the articulations of which necessarily change when animated by select ethical engagements. To begin, I borrow from Andrew Culp’s (2019) work the notion that governance is that which stays transformation. That is, governance is a process that seeks to reinscribe conventional norms through concluding transformative potential. In counter distinction, justice articulates as ethically informed practices that generate transformation such that convention no longer holds. In this way, justice is intimately imbued with potential—work generated such that something might yet become. As a result of these provisional definitions, both governance and justice will necessarily articulate differently in parts one and two of this article—different ethical frames necessarily generate alternative conceptualizations of that which maintains normative function (governance) and that which aims for transformative difference (justice).

Part 1: Crisis and Liberal Justice

Building on the work of many scholars (e.g., Braidotti, 2013; Cannella, 2022; Lather, 2016; St. Pierre, 1997), I have previously critiqued conventional qualitative research for a determining reliance on the liberal humanist subject as a means to amplify principles of procedurism, repetition and static replications of method (Kuntz, 2019). I term these approaches “conventional” because they adhere to and reinforce normalizing logics and practices that maintain the status quo (i.e., convention). Through this maintenance, conventional qualitative research colludes with other institutional processes as a repetitious form of governance. In this way, conventional qualitative inquiry works to stem potential, drawing it back into the limits of the possible. A primary way that this occurs is through the reinscription of liberalism and humanism, two formations that also inform the logic of late capitalism and anthropocentrism even as they collude to extend governance and curtail potential justice.

If liberalism presents society as a grouping of individuals with shared interests and desires, neoliberalism links such assumptions with market-based and consumptive senses of empowerment and achievement; hyper-individualism as a capitalistic claim on equality (Braidotti, 2022). The result is not simply uncritical acceptance of the status quo, but an incessant amplification of the very values and assumptive rationales that undergird the exploitative relations of our contemporary moment. In this context, justice articulates as individual liberation within economic markets; the reassertion of stable liberal subjects known through market-based production. As such, justice here maintains the liberal subject, imbued with select rights, the promotion of which informs an underlying rationale for governance.

Humanism, of course, offers claims of universalist and objectivist manifestations of humans that are, in actuality, partial and biased toward Western, Male, and White supremacist claims. Liberal humanism situates the economic market as emancipatory, binding liberation to a capacity to operate freely through the ethical claims of capitalism. One demonstrates one’s liberal humanity through one’s recognition as an (economically) productive citizen, known and seemingly completed through economic activity. Through such dynamic processes, we become addicted to our subjecthood, necessarily legible within processes of late capitalism. And, such practices inevitably extend a series of contradictions, the maintenance of which is the property of convention.

Maintaining the liberal humanist subject (as an object of governance) necessarily calls forth a series of contradictions, often rendered conventionally as an effect of some crisis (whether personally felt as a liberal humanist subject or collectively endured as a symptom of our times). Managing these contradictions thus becomes yet another form of governance—the means by which liberal humanist subjects are generated and, importantly, prevented from transforming into something else. Crises here become the context in which liberal humanist subjects are governed into being—marked and rendered legible in particular ways. Certainly, methodological practice is one mechanism through which such contradictions are managed into useful and economically productive conclusions.

As a result, one key element that charges much of the ethical debate concerning approaches to methodology has to do with how to engage contradiction. Material relations are inherently messy, never smoothly enacted or even theorized without complication. A similar situation arises when we consider the methodological means to engage some phenomenon or event. Of course, there exists a host of methodological practices to overcome or otherwise manage contradiction (these would seem to extend from a felt anxiety that contradiction somehow imposes falsity on research outcomes, and therefore must be resolved or otherwise overcome).

Most often, contradiction is conventionally dealt with through processes of synthesis—allowing difference to drop away in favor of a merged sameness; vestiges of simplistically rendered dialectical thought (Kuntz, 2019). This is contradiction managed away with the simple claim of the Venn diagram—look to the synthesized similarities to generate a way through difference. Of course, feminist theory has taught us that such synthetic moves are both unnecessary and dangerous; an erasure that upholds patriarchal claims of a white male experience as the normalizing square against which all others are considered. Thus, the move to manage away contradiction is one that upholds a legacy of privilege that all too often escapes critical notice: governing contradiction becomes a practice of synthetic norming (rendering us all in relation to the Western White male ideal); an established biopolitical practice.

To complicate matters, it remains important to note that simply engaging with contradiction is not, on the surface, a radical act. Indeed, our material lives (and/or intellectual, emotional, academic lives) are riddled with contradictions—and the anxieties and exhaustions that extend from living them. After all, capitalism offers multiple mechanisms for maintaining contradictions in ways that privilege economic production and accumulation. These are the normalized processes and practices of late capitalism that Rosi Braidotti (2013) situates as principle means through which governance occurs. Late capitalism plays upon the addictions we maintain such that we can continue to operate “productive lives” understood and defined through the lens of capital.

Thus, it is that the means to disrupt the reflex of synthesis and maintain a contradictory tension articulates as both a refusal (of misogynistic, white supremacist relations of power) and a generative event (of newly creative relations or events that are in the process of formation). Contradiction thus becomes a location for ethical engagement and action. What are we to do with contradiction? How might we ethically engage with contradiction as a mobilizing force, animating practices of living differently? How might contradiction extend or curtail external practices within a context of crisis?

Perhaps what crises reveal are both the limits and thresholds of our contemporary moment—crises as spaces of felt contradiction that simultaneously reiterate governing processes and generate ways to live beyond them. The limit, of course, in this instance would be the hold of the individualistic liberal humanist subject; a connection from which we most often fail to wean ourselves. This is to situate crisis as a mechanism for governance—a means of reinscribing or maintaining the limits of conventional function. Crisis as threshold, of course, would extend the potential for a difference out of the immediate contradictory-laden context. Here, crisis reveals a potential to be otherwise, to invoke a different means of becoming, the effects of which resonate on ontological levels. As such, thresholds generate alternative potential for justice. ⁶

There remains an ongoing tension between liberal humanism, conceptions of rights, and desires for justice. Of course, this tension has been engaged by feminist theories for some time. ⁷ Yet, as feminist theories often contend, this tension is always newly emergent, articulating through (and with) our contemporary moment. Hence the need for ongoing and incessant practices of critical inquiry. Within the province of liberal humanism, governance might be understood as processes of smoothing over contemporary formations of contradiction such that convention holds, seemingly without fragment. This management of contradiction (synthesizing difference into thematic similarity) is a governing process of conventional justice. That is, conventional articulations of justice reinscribe the ideal of the liberal humanist subject as the object of ethical work. This happens by way of both macro processes (situating some groups of refugees, for example, as imbued with liberal rights and therefore worthy of liberation/justice) and micro practices (establishing methodological rules for clarifying and processing an individual’s voice as emblematic of their liberal sovereignty, for instance).

Liberal humanist subjects often shift discussions for change away from questions of justice and toward a manufactured concern for rights. Part of the issue regarding discourses of rights is the ease with which they are subsumed by individualistic values even as they are transposed into the field of law. The effect is of rights as an articulation of jurisprudence. This capture of rights within the field of law is not without consequence and generates a friction point with considerations of justice. As Buchanan (2020) notes,

it is more important to campaign for justice than human rights because as recent pro-democracy protests have illustrated the law protects property and people first and does not concern itself with justice. It protects the people anti-fascists demonstrate against, not the demonstrators themselves, who are treated as criminals by the law. (p. 163, n. 60)

As such, to invoke justice as an animating force is to disrupt the easy slippage into legal rights that calls forth assumptions of discreet, individual subjects whose legal legibility is primary. More is needed.

To be clear, mine is not an argument to fully abandon consideration of rights in resistive work. Instead, it is my sense that invoking the discourse of rights should be done strategically and with the knowledge of the legal-individualistic force that accompanies such framing. That is, proclamations of rights come with (liberal humanist) baggage. As such, when striving to locate an entry point into our crisis-filled contemporary time—perhaps seeking practices that generate alternatives to the governing status quo—we would do well to turn our attention to the force of justice.

To refuse the normalizing discourse of “rights” in favor of a more relational ethic (perhaps of “just”) is to simultaneously critique the individualizing nature of liberal humanism, a point Butler (2021) makes in relation to the question of equality:

When equality is understood as an individual right . . . it is separated from the social obligations we bear toward one another. To formulate equality on the basis of the relations that define our enduring social existence . . . is to make a social claim, a collective claim on society. (p. 45)

This shift to relational claims necessarily alters notions of vulnerability or precarity: “’vulnerability’ should not be considered as a subjective state, but rather as a feature of our shared or interdependent lives” (p. 45). Thus, vulnerability is no longer an individual characteristic or placement, but rather a shared (and binding) relation that links subjectivities, institutions, practices, and policies.

To follow Butler’s (2020) point, the notion of rights often mistakes or makes empty the very forces that animate practices of living. That is, legal definitions (or, I might add, even liberal humanist claims on possessed rights) miss the mark:

Although this language may well establish our legitimacy within a legal framework ensconced in liberal versions of human ontology, it does not do justice to passion and grief and rage, all of which tear us from ourselves, bind us to others, transport us, undo us, implicate us in lives that are not our own, irreversibly, if not fatally. (p. 25)

That is, the relational stuff of life is removed from claims of rights—thus my interest in shifting to more immanent notions of justice.

As Lemke (2021) notes, part of liberal governance is actually to insinuate which relational elements, processes, and practices are to endure political focus and which, because deemed natural, are outside the purview of political governance altogether (and thus necessarily allowed to operate on their own, without political intervention). Importantly, such divisions render some elements of living as external to political action; an effect of naturally occurring relations that are simply the conditions for existence. This simply results in some relational realities rendered politically illegible, escaping any legitimate focus as opportunities for change. Some lives are grievable (and verifiable locations for intervention); others are, naturally, not.

In short, discussions of rights that assume the liberal humanist subject extend a biopolitical force of norming, one that informs the conditions for select crises (and legible responses) as important and worthy of recognition; other contexts and relations fail to register as such. Far from a simple theoretical distinction, such governing processes hit home: they inform those lives, relations, and events we grieve, and those lives deemed livable (and those not). Our affective responses (of disgust, grief) are never wholly our own (even if neoliberalism posits that the responsibility for such responses is held individually); they remain, in part, imbued by the force of biopower. As a result, if productive changes to the status quo (those conditions for) are what we are after, we must operate from a different ethical orientation, motivated by a sense of justice that does not assume the liberal humanist subject as the sole object of our critical work.

In sum, though often registered as a relic of some distant past, we remain addicted to the comforts of liberal humanism and espoused principles of individual discreet subjects, synthetic conclusions that manage difference, and particular knowledge formations that generate closed, static claims on living. Through an incessant barrage of crises, liberal humanism colludes with capitalism in the interest of governance. The result of such circumstance is a sense of “stuck justice,” resistances to institutions already in decline; the lumbering institutional behemoths of modern society. ⁸ Inquiry practices all too often play a role in such relations, generating the very static, closed subjects that they claim to critique. Here, justice articulates as a reclamation of sorts—clamoring to bring back or make legible the visible, governed, and closed subject. Inquiry thus participates in processes of governance through pre-empting transformative potential—reinscribing limits and obscuring thresholds to an otherwise. As Golder (2011) articulates, “political mobilisations of rights discourse appear . . . performatively to reinforce the very sovereignty which they claim to limit, contest or displace” (p. 285). Even through practices of critique, conventional inquiry might well have a hand in generating that which it seeks to challenge. Thus, what is needed is a means to work with and through that which we critique, not imagining our critical engagements or practices as wholly from without or fully divorced from, that which we critique.

In response, critical inquiry that seeks to generate a difference would do well to short-circuit conventional governing processes through the force of relational ethics. In this scenario, ethical transformation dispels “stuck justice” in favor of an immanent justice—one that is a making of transformative difference. This begins by utilizing inquiry to confect the conditions for relational change; generating different futures through ethical inquiry. To be clear, working on the conditions for difference is not a “new” perspective or challenge. It is, instead, a challenge to see critical inquiry through toward its productive potential—generating with the limits of our shared contemporary moment such that different thresholds for change mobilize.

I now turn to a reconsideration of our contemporary moment generated through a relational sense of making the just through immanent inquiry practices. This renewed sense of inquiry takes seriously the productive entanglement of experience (in excess of the liberal humanist subject) and experimentation such that critical practice becomes engagements with what we might yet become, rather than deliberations upon the statically governing status quo. Such work begins with a mapping of our contemporary moment such that assumed operating practices no longer hold—thresholds manufactured through the very stuff of limits.

Part 2: Making the Just Through Inquiry

Through his engagement with ethical requirements for discomfort Foucault (2000) asks a disarmingly simple question: “What is it that has happened to us?” (p. 443). Indeed, given the numerous crises encountered each and every day, one wonders about our own role in complementing the momentous force of crisis upon crisis, concern upon concern, injustice within injustice. Responding to Foucault’s question requires a critical ontological investigation of our relational selves, motivated by an ethical determination to generate a different potential. Herein lies a renewed role for critical inquiry, one that necessitates engagements with justice that are not dependent on liberal formations for articulation.

Strategically, Foucault suggests that we respond to his question through a generative orientation of experiencing with our contemporary moment yet refusing to be fully defined by the governing relations of our day: “to take part and take sides without letting oneself be taken in. Experience with, rather than engagement in” (p. 445). Notice here that Foucault does not offer a full separation from convention (as though we could just ignore or divorce ourselves from the governing status quo) but instead suggests that resistances might generate through our immediate now; thresholds developed with the very stuff of limits. Importantly, Foucault suggests we do so through the collusion of experience. There is a doubleness, for Foucault, underlying the notion of experience—one that recognizes both its governing and transforming potential (the problematics of being “taken in” and generative political practices of “taking part” or “taking sides”).

This notion of experiencing with might well point to an experimental role for critical inquiry, one that emerges through refusing to be subsumed by the seeming totality of our contemporary moment, the effects of which are claimed with governing force as sensible and consistent, even as we experiment with the status quo such that difference is possible. In this way, there remains an ethical component to experimentation: “What is good, is something that comes through innovation” (Foucault, 1988, p. 13). Furthermore, there lies a relational component to “the good” as an immanent creation: “The good is defined by us, it is practiced, it is invented. And this is a collective work” (Foucault, 1988, p. 13). “The good” thus becomes an experimental way of living in relation. And, this invented good might well be informed by critical inquiry oriented by a relational ethics, an ongoing practice of making the just.

Through critical inquiry we work to distance ourselves from the governing assumptions and practices that generate our contemporary moment, the force of which we cannot abide, yet never situating ourselves as fully distinct from that which we critique. In this way, we perhaps take on Braidotti’s (2019a) assertion that we can act, “step by step, by distancing ourselves . . . It is like an exercise in detoxification. We have to detoxify our bad habits, our way of consuming, of thinking, and of relating with others” (n.p.). As such, we might detoxify ourselves from our addiction to individualism and concomitant claims of rights that extend from liberal humanism as a biopolitical force. This detoxification is politically material work and might generatively reimagine the conditions for justice in our contemporary moment as well as the means by which critical inquiry practices inform such work.

For Foucault (1988), this type of detoxification extends to the ethical work of generating a history of the present. Through this work Foucault notes a strikingly simple charge: “I try to figure out what’s at stake” (p. 12). Such discernment aims to make possible critical ways of being that inform change through three critical inquiry practices: “refusal, curiosity, innovation” (Foucault, 1988, p. 12). This ontological positioning may only occur through experiencing with but not becoming of governing relations. And, as we detoxify ourselves from the habits and reflex of liberalism, we must necessarily take sides. To do so, we perhaps need an immanent sense of justice, one that extends from not only the conditions for injustice but also figuring out what’s at stake, refusing conventional claims on what matters, and investigating ways of living differently in these times. Merging explications of the conditions for and what’s at stake entangles cartographic work with ethical discernment, an important element of critical inquiry as a making of the just. Similarly, in her explication of non-violence as ethical force, Butler (2021) offers a rationale for the necessary mapping of our contemporary moment along both descriptive and ethical lines: “Without an understanding of the conditions of life and livability, and their relative difference, we can know neither what violence destroys nor why we should care” (p. 18). In this sense, Butler offers mapping engaged for the purposes of discernment (“what violence destroys”) and ethical force (“why we should care”).

The maps we create through inquiry are not objective, nor arbitrary, but make known the very relations that mark our grief. Thus, cartographic work is fueled with ethical charge—not just how things relate, but what’s at stake in such relation. Perhaps through such practice we might learn to grieve differently, locating transformative potential even amid the governing crises that reinforce stasis, reinscribing conventional ways of being.

To invoke the processes examined earlier in this article, through critical inquiry we might generate new senses of the grievable, different practices of grieving not dependent on the status quo for articulation or recognition. This is deeply affective work engaged to generate a difference. After all, as Rosi Braidotti (2019b) has noted, taking care of the pain of the world is ethical work even as it is a necessary function of critical practice. Through critical work we take care of our relational world, allowing it to endure through transformative potential. Yet, this alternative practice is endlessly difficult given our affective responses to governing convention.

As I have written elsewhere (Kuntz, 2020) there lies a tension, perhaps even an affective disconnect among “the materialist philosophy that challenges possibility; the felt experience of living with (not in) these times; the disorienting balance of stasis . . .; and the political project of manifesting difference” (P#; original emphases). This tension is only exacerbated in contexts of crises. As noted above, crises may extend an affective contradiction of acceleration and stuckness, the negotiations of which play a significant role in governance. That is, it remains easy to feel as though one cannot keep up with the pace of crises even as one perhaps feels like there is no escaping an apparent stasis of location; materially situated yet forever behind. In such circumstances, much effort is expanded to simultaneously “keep up” (with constant streams of information, multiple strands of anxiety, etc.) and break out (of the mundane repetitions of reliving crises ad infinitum). This is turbulent movement amid stasis. As Thomas Nail (2020) writes, “By slowing down . . . we recognize how entangled we are in a sea of turbulent flux” (p. 892).

Given this, it strikes me as important to note the affective processes that impact our ways of living our contemporary moment that might, in fact, counter emergent theorizations regarding material (and relational) existence. As Baraitser (2017) eloquently notes, despite important claims of flows and unending movement, our crisis-filled lives may often be felt differently, foregrounding a stuckness, an inability to do more than repeat what has been; a depressive feedback loop. Sarah Ahmed (2019) makes a similar claim, and deliberately situates such felt experiences within an institutional setting that privileges some with the capacity to “go with the flow” over and above others. The normalization of such trends, of course, is the very stuff of privilege, the repetitious tragedy of institutionally sanctioned marginalization.

As Foucault (1982) aptly muses,

“Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are. We have to imagine and to build up what we could be to get rid of this kind of political ‘double bind,’ which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures” (p. 785).

This is the triumvirate of practices entailing, “refusal, curiosity, innovation” that Foucault earlier noted as a means for discerning “what’s at stake.” Herein lies an important role for critical inquiry that is informed by a relational sense of justice generated through the productive orientations of relational materialism. I suggest critical inquiry might usefully participate in such curiously imaginative refusal through a practice of making the just. By refusing governing processes and structures aimed to stay transformation, inquiry strives to alter the conditions for relational change such that normalized individuation stutters and is made less habitual. Inquiry as a practice of making the just offers different ethical entanglements to generate different futures, a potential that extends beyond the conventional logics that inform contemporary crises (and our normalized responses to them). That is, such inquiry is animated by relational ethics and, as such, aligns with a potential that has yet to be known. In this way, inquiry articulates as a type of critical engagement with living such that current conditions and logics can no longer operate smoothly even as alternatives to the crisis-laden status quo are generated as a matter of ethical necessity.

Relational Materialism

As a first step toward understanding interactions among relational materialism and critical inquiry, we would do well to consider the implications of engaging in ethical inquiry as a generative practice of making a difference. This begins by locating an immanent sense of ethics (and justice). Braidotti (2019c) differentiates morality from ethics by noting, “The former deals with rules and regulations, while the latter poses questions of power” (p. 1185). Because ethics asks questions of power (and relations), it affords one the capacity to critically engage with the contradictions that are an ongoing effect of governance: “ethics is a transversal concern that exposes the contradictions of the moralization of public life . . . under neo-liberal governance” (p. 1185). And, as Braidotti goes on to note, it is an effect of neoliberalism that the governed are prodded to take on the weight of moral responsibility for select elements of living (such as health concerns, or economic outcomes) without addressing questions of power or even social justice.

One such example of contradictory and entangled challenges that arise when working through ethics may be found in Butler’s (2021) seemingly devastating question regarding proximity: “Are we more ethically obligated to preserve the lives of those who are close to us than to stand for the lives of those who are considered far away, whether in a geographical, economic, or cultural sense?” (p. 52). Butler rightly situates “proximity” as more than simple questions of geographical distance. After all, the invasion of Ukraine perhaps resonates with many in the Global North because it is proximate in more than geographic ways: the closeness of a democratic nation overrun by violent means; the reality of citizens going to gym workouts one day and becoming refugees the next; the whiteness of skin and fashion of dress nearly mirroring normalized representations of the West. In this way, proximity and relationality raise ethical questions.

And yet, as Butler (2021) recognizes, relationality is not inherently liberatory (or even positive):

“relationality is not by itself a good thing, a sign of connectedness, an ethical norm to be posited over and against destruction: rather relationality is a vexed and ambivalent field in which the question of ethical obligation has to be worked out in light of a persistent and constitutive destructive potential” (p. 10).

Contrary to some articulations within my field of Educational Research, relationality is not, a priori, an ethic or an implied good. Instead, relationality might usefully be understood as a field and, as such, remains buffeted by the force of innumerable challenges, practices, and processes. In response, when we foreground relationality through our generative inquiry, we must necessarily align such work with specifically articulated ethical intent. That is, we would do well to situate relationality as a political project for transformation that orients through material processes and practices. This orienting is informed by a radical ethic ⁹ for transformation (thus countering governing strategies of maintenance and stability that quell transformative potential). This is an ethical determination to intervene through the conditions for our contemporary moment (of crises all the way down) such that alternative ways of living might generate.

Furthermore, as Lemke (2021) suggests, relationality as a form of materialism requires “a mobile and material understanding of relationality” that refuses normative moves to fix relations as somehow stable and meaningfully constant (p. 152). From this perspective, the point of emphasis is not on particular entities (those that are relating) but the links that constitute and connect them. These constituting bonds are themselves mechanisms (and effects of governance) (Lemke, 2021) even as such limits house generative potential; relational thresholds manufactured through the very stuff of limits. Such a materialist perspective on relationality affords a series of important questions: “how do particular entities emerge, in what contexts do they operate, what effects do they (co-) produce?” (Lemke, 2021, p. 152). And, I might add, what is at stake in such production? Herein lies an important potential for critical inquiry motivated by relationally material critique, one that shifts tendencies for stasis toward a moving difference.

As Butler (2020) eloquently writes, relationality disrupts any conventional claims of stasis through inferring a shift toward unfinished (open-ended) claims:

“I cannot muster the ‘we’ except by finding the way in which I am tied to ‘you,’ by trying to translate but finding that my own language must break up and yield if I am to know you. You are what I gain through this disorientation and loss. This is how the human comes into being, again and again, as that which we have yet to know” (p. 49).

Here, we become—being as a horizon—and that emergence is necessarily incomplete and productively disorienting. Trying to link with another disrupts normative ways of being—habitualized languages “must break up and yield”—and we perhaps mourn the loss of definitive claims on the self (or other) even as we are emboldened by who we might newly become, in relation. This is relational inquiry without conclusion; inquiry itself as a way of becoming differently.

Such open-ended processes necessarily raise a type of methodological conundrum—how are we to formulate an inquiry out of step with learned values of capture, claim, and definitive ends? In what ways can we break up with the implied individuation of method such that we come to know one another differently, experiencing productive disorientation through relational connection? Somewhat in response, Butler (2021) points to the importance of imagination as a resistive facility as “we are at this moment ethically obliged and incited to think beyond what are treated as the realistic limits of the possible” (p. 29). Thinking beyond the limits of the real (or the possible) is required if we are to ever enact a resistance to the present. And, generating thresholds within normative limits requires a hopeful and ethically informed contingency for a future not yet.

As Butler (2021) articulates, there remains an open-ended future—a potential, not yet realized—that leaves the grievable life unencumbered by present definition:

“the potentially grievable life is one that deserves a future, a future whose form cannot be predicted and prescribed in advance. To safeguard the future of a life is not to impose the form that such a life will take, the path that such a life will follow: it is a way of holding open the contingent and unpredictable forms that lives may take” (p. 146).

What, then, must we do to “hold open the contingent and unpredictable forms” of some future life? How might we do so to refuse the capture of individualism or the erasure of the calculated ungrievable lives that remain somehow severed from our relations? That is, how might our critical inquiries generate conditions for material difference, the potential that is experiencing with a life; taking sides without being taken in? This is relationally materialist work invoked as a political project for making a difference. To do so, we perhaps need inquiry practices that register and disrupt the governing effects of the conventional milieu, those material relations through which “living a life” manifest.

As Lemke (2021) shows, the milieu is not a priori, but instead generates through governing practices, articulating as “the material conditions and the technical medium of government” (p. 132). A milieu thus manifests immanently as a context for intervention (the conditions for described above). If we turn our attention to crisis, for example, neoliberalism might be seen to insinuate that crises not to be avoided, but instead remain recognized as the material conditions for “a creative resource and essential precondition of innovation and change” that propels us to “prepare for a future where crisis is ubiquitous and catastrophic outcomes are to be confronted” (p. 175). Crisis as milieu, then, makes possible the conditions for such preparation and necessary modulation (of population, for example). This is crisis as a field of governing practices that informs possibilities for living; the very material conditions generated through, and manifested by, governance.

As Lemke (2021) also notes, liberal governmentality serves as a means of regulating a contextual milieu through the “epistemic figure of population” (p. 133). In this case, population extends not as a collection of discreet individuals (as liberal humanism might have it), but rather a series of processes to be regulated through the force of political economy. In this way, population continues its relational development—never a static object, population shifts and changes depending on the modulating effects of governance.

One useful example for the impact of a milieu on living is the very nature of cause-and-effect, a series of relationships that often form the basis for legible responsive actions: “what is a cause and what is an effect depends on the mobile and relational network of circulations that makes up a milieu” (Lemke, 2021, p. 131). Thus, it is that causal links (rather than being simply discarded as a result of governmental processes) might well serve as useful entry points into mapping and ethically intervening within the conditions for living through our contemporary moment. In this sense, the milieu articulates as the material conditions generative of governing processes and practices.

Furthermore, this notion of the milieu usefully foregrounds the ways in which relationality implies a generative sense of simultaneously constituting and being impacted by governing forces. As Lemke (2021) articulates, “Organisms do not simply inhabit or adapt to their milieu but rather constitute and modify it—thereby transforming themselves, too” (p. 134). We are all, as a consequence, implicated in the very relations we perhaps assert as problematic. As such, inquiry might well discern, refuse, and experiment with the very milieu of our conventional public—the contexts with which our relations generate—such that alternative potential is newly made. As such, I conclude this article with a call for critical inquiry to reconstitute notions of a public, motivated by the force of relational ethics; engaging with open publics as a practice of making the just. We need a welcoming public to pause and think, as part of the conditions for necessary change.

Conclusion: Toward a Relational Publics

Concisely stated, for justice to articulate with material effects perhaps we need a different sense of the public. After all, if we are to take grieving as relational, we would need to recognize a public component to grieving practices. A similar thing must be said of justice. As such, I want to conclude by reconsidering the role of a public as a means to not simply “hold” citizens (or even as a means to define who is “in” or “out” of the citizenry) but rather as a relational means through which new subjectivities might emerge. This is to consider publics as more thresholds (or relays) than containers. As Golder (2011) writes, “Community itself must be understood as an unstable affective assemblage” (p. 300). In this way, community resists the staying power of normalization and the governing tendency to quell transformation.

Such a contingent publics remains imbued with relational ethics, extending a differently charged sense of justice. Thus, I want to offer a sense that part of the work of critical inquiry is to, “construct alternative communities beyond those currently envisioned” (Golder, 2011) and do so animated by the force of relational justice. Necessarily, this is experimental work that speculates on what might yet become, together. This notion of “what might become” infuses relational justice with conceptions of virtue: the refusal of moralistic claims on what should be—a resistance to pragmatic assertions of what is—in favor of a speculative sense that we might be otherwise.

Like Braidotti (who often states, “we are all in this together but we are not the same”), Butler (2020) points to a necessary shift away from individuation (as isolation and distinct containment) and toward a shared relation built on difference, asking if we might imagine a community “in which we are alike only in having this condition separately and so having in common a condition that cannot be thought without difference” (p. 27). This is, it seems, a type of relational difference that binds us but does not require the blurred sameness that remains a hallmark of synthesis.

Specifically, I want to end with a consideration of a contingent and immanent publics to take seriously a call to examine the conditions for our present moment as well as the potential for critical inquiry to, in some ways, intervene with the relational milieu. That is, if we consider a publics inevitably plural, contingent, and generated through the very relational practices it works to shape—publics as imbued with biopower—we might usefully locate entry points for critical inquiry projects that make a difference. To do so, we might follow Foucault’s call to “consider what’s at stake” through practices of refusal, curiosity, and innovation. In this sense, critical inquiry projects begin by refusing the constraining norms that constitute our conventional public, exhibiting an ethical curiosity to generate a relational otherwise. Through our inquiry, we innovate, using the stuff of conventional governance, to experimentally constitute a difference. More than relativistic shots in the dark, such creative work remains animated by the force of immanent justice—refusing the governing stasis of our times to manifest the conditions for transformation. Ethical work defined as generating the conditions for relational difference. This perhaps begins with a deliberately cartographic engagement with publics to understand what, in fact, has happened to us and how we might work toward different relations. To return toward where this article began, we can use our grievability to motivate alternative potential.

A different public makes different things, different relations, grievable; shifting the conditions for grieving. Rather than grieving some irredeemable past or some foreclosed future, we might strive to grieve the present such that new relations generate. Through our inquiry we might grieve with this moment, a type of experimental experience, such that a different potential manifest. Experiencing—grieving—with a publics through critical inquiry. “Making the just” as generating a difference within our relational present.