Abstract
This article was presented as a response to Dr. Mirka Koro’s Egon Guba Lecture offered at the 2021 American Educational Research Association Conference.
I would like to begin by thanking Mirka for her provocative Egon Guba Lecture. There is much to engage with in her words and Mirka’s larger body of work more generally. For the sake of time, I here focus on three key notions that are infused throughout Mirka’s lecture: experimentation, plurality, and ethical engagements. In relation to inquiry, experimentation perhaps entails a type of open-ended practice on the outside of convention; plurality might point to a constellation of relations, effects, and meanings-made through an inquiry project; and ethical engagement assumes that inquiry practice is ethical work, a deliberate challenge to the exploitative circumstance of our contemporary moment. I consider such concepts in somewhat entangled order and offer a sense of inquiry as an experimentally plural way of “making the just,” imbued with an ethical force for change.
As a guiding frame for my response, I begin by offering two overarching questions that Mirka’s lecture provoked for me:
What are the problems to which speculative experimentations respond or engage?
What problems are made possible through speculative experimentation; what breakdowns enabled?
These questions arise because problems, practices, and strategies are productively entangled. As Deleuze and Guattari (1994) note, “All concepts are connected to problems without which they would have no meaning” (p. 16). As such, I wonder how speculative experimentation as a concept remains connected to problems and particularly problematic contexts that give them some semblance of meaning. In part, speculative experimentations might seem problematic as an inquiry form or strategy, jolting conventional research contexts through their enacted potential, a productive point that would seem to drive much of Mirka’s own presentation. Often, such issues arise through the tense relations that manufacture governance in some form or another. This is, after all, how inquiry often takes on its political expression.
One example of the problem of governance and inquiry work might have to do with the anxiety-inducing problem of chaos and liberal reflex toward order. In relation to inquiry orientations that do not prescribe order—or ordering practices—there remains the risk that if we have no definitive future (nor defined present), then we live within a chaotic world, and speculative and experimental practices, for example, only amplify that multiplicity. This, then, is a problem that speculative experimentation might make possible—a seeming breakdown of order, or refusal to square perceived disorder in the name of clarity. And yet, importantly, as Elizabeth Grosz (2008) notes, chaos need not be understood as absolute or complete disorder, but, in her words, “rather as a plethora of orders, forms, wills—forces that cannot be distinguished or differentiated from each other” (p. 5). It is the blurring of definition that manifests chaos; the overabundance of order, not its absence. This “plethora of orders” is a different problem, then, generating different responses and animated by different affective forces.
So perhaps this is part of the affective sadness or worry that permeates some work today (and creeps, I think, into Mirka’s own words): that we have too much order, too much form, too much will, the excess of which overwhelms—chaos ensues. As Rosi Braidotti (2019) notes, “too-much-ness is one of the sources of exhaustion, which marks so much of our current predicament” and “ultimately brings about a shrinkage of our ability to take in and on the world that we are in, simply because it hurts too much to take in and on” (p. 178). In the interest of more than making-do, we perhaps turn to experimental engagements with this too-much-ness, this excess that exhausts. Such work brings its own problems of course (and that’s a good thing).
Creative Experimentation
I am not creative, at least not in conventional senses of the term. I can’t sing—or, I can, but my singing does not meet even the most progressive claims of aesthetic worth. I am also not visually artistic. Consequently, things such as experimental inquiry approaches often simultaneously astound me, scare me, move me, and close me off from engagement—a multiplicity of effects, indeed. If I am creative, I suppose, it is through a sense of conceptual creativity that I manifest through an ongoing engagement with philosophy. Again, I turn to Elizabeth Grosz (2008) who considers philosophy the “wayward sibling” of art, a kinship born through a shared emphasis experimentalism as a means to create new relations, new problems; a future not yet created.
As Grosz (2008) so eloquently writes, Twin rafts over chaos, philosophy and art, along with their more serious sibling, the sciences, enframe chaos, each in its own way, in order to extend something consistent, composed, immanent, which it uses for its own ordering (and also deranging) resources. (p. 9)
There is a doubleness here, of course, that calls forth both the productive potential and reduction of philosophy, art, and science. In one sense, each allows for a means to encounter chaos in meaningful ways. In another sense, such processes of ordering might well lead to a taming of difference—a closing off of potential to allow for things to “make sense.” And so, as we engage with Mirka’s provocations, wondering what methodologies become possible when we dim the lights, I wonder, “What might orient us?” and “How might we enact an immanent positioning that is not dependent on the prolific ordering of a past, yet does not reinscribe pure relativism through derangements either?” These are questions, I think, of ethics. And I wonder about the potential for our inquiry work to think the just (as Michel Foucault, 2015, termed it) or, more deliberately, inquiry as a means to make the just. 1
Ethical Engagements
For Foucault (2015), thinking the just requires an overt political stance that begins with an ethical positioning and manifests through a determination that normalized governing processes are untenable. Furthermore, thinking, as Deleuze (1986) notes, “means to experiment and to problematize” (p. 116). Thus, thinking the just begins with an act of experimental refusal, no longer abiding by the claims of convention, and entails an immanent making. Thinking the just might thus be better understood as making the just. And, “making the just” might articulate as a process of entangling an ethical determination to produce a difference with an orienting faith in another potential that has yet to materialize—a belief that we might become differently, through different relations, animated by different forces, within a materially generative world.
I remain interested in inquiry as “making the just” because I sense within Mirka’s work an ethical commitment—one that emphasizes an affirmative ethical engagement with potential—and a determination to experiment with that potential, to speculate on what might yet become. So hers would seem to be more than a neutral stance on what is to be done. For me, this raises an important consideration for contemporary work that merges a sense of plurality with a political desire to manufacture flattened hierarchies—how does one enact an ethical engagement with the world amid such flattening?
Indeed, a flattened hierarchical perspective certainly may be critiqued as politically naïve and extending from a refusal to acknowledge histories of asymmetrical relations of power that uphold the very hierarchies the inquirer perhaps seeks to level. That is, some would argue that the very practice of flattening traditional hierarchies through inquiry conveniently erases historical contexts that disproportionally govern some groups and privilege others. Such a practice risks conveniently overlooking a legacy of exploitative relations that are only extended through a dislocation of material hierarchy. As I have noted previously, it is quite possible that the rush to lay claim to rhizomatic expressions of flattened hierarchies extends from the privilege of not experiencing a legacy of power claims on one’s person. As such, this theoretical embrace of a dispersed system stems from privileges gained from conventional hierarchies and systems of power. Such context situates even the most-well-intentioned critique as reformist in order, born from and reinscribing the very exploitative relations they claim to disrupt. (Kuntz, 2021, p. 12)
As an alternative, a materialist critique that recognizes a history of exploitative relations might complicate any smoothing of conventional hierarchies through recognizing what Thomas Nail (2020), borrowing from Marx, terms, “a twisted ontology in which different regions of matter are unevenly developed and circulated” (p. 15). Importantly, this “twisted ontology” remains vital to engagements with exploitation and material inequity that seem to have fallen out of theoretical favor of late, despite an espoused renewal of theoretical engagements with materialism. 2 Our contemporary context is rampant with historically developed “uneven material agencies” and such unevenness certainly matters. Furthermore, it remains possible—even probable—that our inquiry work has a generative role in twisting ontologies, as it often entails registering some ways of living as worthy of recognition—even critique—while excluding others. Consequently, it strikes me as important to locate those uneven and exploitative relations, map their intersections and exclusions, and consider their ontological effects. Furthermore, we might do so without assuming that the hierarchies that shape and are shaped by them can be immediately brought level. To do so, we might benefit from engaged transgressive practices that manifest through the very unequal relations we perhaps desire to change.
As a practice of transgression, inquiry might articulate as a type of “challenge from within” (Foucault, 1977): one inhabits a limit to manifest a transgression. Because limits always hold the material for transgressive potential, experimental inquiry necessarily uses the condition of a limit to manifest its rupture and enact a future yet unknown. When the symbiotically productive relation of limits and transgressions is recognized, the intention and practice of the inquirer change: it is not enough to simply strive to break a limit: one must use the material of the limit to generate something else. This is a creative or experimental relation to limits, one that manufactures difference where once was only repetition. (Kuntz, 2020, p. 6)
Such it is that inquiry becomes decidedly materialist to manifest transgressions through the very governing limits one seeks to short-circuit: One must discern and intervene within the material conditions that make governance possible. Furthermore, this work necessarily begins from an ethical determination that current exploitative relations are untenable and we cannot bear the weight of them anymore. In this way, transgressive change extends from the uneasy sensation of living through the material world.
In her provocative book, What Comes After Entanglement? Eva Giraud (2019) advocates for an ethical engagement with exclusion, recognizing “the entities, practices, and ways of being that are foreclosed when other entangled realities are materialized” (p. 2, emphasis in original). This perspective aligns with Nail’s notion of twisted ontologies I referenced earlier and begets a resistive practice wherein one locates becomings that are truncated by the layered buildup that manifests when some ontological formations twist together, becoming governed into relation, whereas others remain necessarily excluded. Twisted ontologies generate a landscape of uneven development and ubiquitous exclusion. As a result, some relations register as mattering more than others and are indexed as such. This process of “mattering” thus requires ethical deliberation and an emergent sense of responsibility on behalf of the inquirer. As Giraud goes on to write, “Attention also needs to be paid to the frictions, foreclosures, and exclusions that play a constitutive role in the composition of lived reality. Centralizing and politicizing these exclusions . . . is vital in carving out space for intervention” (p. 3). For Giraud, interrogating such exclusions as constitutive of our current context is an ethical process that perhaps generates the conditions necessary for intervention. And, those animating “frictions, foreclosures, and exclusions” remain an important entry point for material analyses. This, it seems to me, is the beginning of ethical inquiry practiced to generate the conditions necessary for change. Beyond simply documenting their density, it is the limits of such entanglements—intersections where normalized relations fade into governed exclusions—that provide opportunities for experimental engagement, ethical deliberation, and contingent action.
Thus, it is that experimental inquiry necessarily entails acts of difficult recognition (we are bound by and responsible for exploitative relations and effects), faith (we might become otherwise), and virtue (we must become differently). Experimental inquiry is, in short, an ethically laden process of making the just. This might bring us to a series of provocative questions that Colin Koopman (2016) asks and, I think, extend from Mirka’s work: “What are the problems we cannot but feel the force of? Over what, and why, are we constantly anxious and inevitably distraught? What are the problems with which we wrap and warp our lives in burning intensities?” (p. 106).
In many ways, I remain emboldened by Rosi Braidotti’s (2019) insistence that we enact a “pragmatic engagement with the present . . . to collectively construct conditions that transform and empower our capacity to act ethically and produce social horizons of hope, or sustainable futures” (p. 173). For me, inquiry is part-and-parcel of such experimentally resistive practice. This is inquiry as an ontological way of living, motivated by ethical force—a way of “reading the future into the present” (to borrow the phrasing of J. K. Gibson-Graham, 2014). And, as Mirka’s work reminds us, this can be joyful experimentation—an exuberant experimental engagement with the not-yet. Similarly, as Foucault (1983) admonished, “do not think that one has to be sad to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable” (p. xiii).
Through inquiry, we might engage with the present as a Deleuzian amnesic witness, blurring the processes and practices of exploitative governance such that they lose their precise purpose and working to create the relational conditions through which forms of resistive potential become anew. Through inquiry, we might interrogate the present to short-circuit its determined hold on our very being. Through inquiry, we might utilize the circumstances that enforce our exhaustion such that we might become otherwise. Through inquiry, we stand vigil, on the lookout for potential, refusing the governing limitations of our contemporary moment and using the material of our present circumstance to generate a transformative difference. Thank you.
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.
