Slippery Inquiry: Engaging With the Vague and Half-Glimpsed

Slippery Moments

It seems that some moments cannot bear the weight of concepts and categories. They are grasped half-glimpsed from the corner of the eye. But as soon as you turn toward them, with light, with analytical frameworks, with rigorous designs, they fade away, seeming to have been “nothing” really. Yet, they take hold of you, leave you on slippery ground, questioned, less secure.

In fieldnotes and logbooks, these experiences leave only muddled traces, vague words, placed in the margin of an almost blank page as if you waited for something better to write, or didn’t feel you had the right to write in the first place. They become half thoughts and loose ends in papers that are pointed out by reviewers to be lacking a clear claim, eventually rejected or given up. Over time, the traces of your attempt to deal with them, or with the attraction they once exerted on you, sink deeper into the archeological layers of your laptop, and end up in folders that you do not open any more.

But what if these unsure experiences, half-glimpsed, barely grasped, are central rather than marginal? What if, when we encounter these slippery moments, we do not only sense the slipperiness of the researched but also stare into our own slippery condition as researchers? In this article, I pursue this question beginning with a quickly passing moment that I experienced almost a decade ago. Based on process thinkers, I argue that in slippery research moments, we are most open to movement, and hence to the other as other (Introna, 2020). We may engage with these moments through a loosened but highly focused mode of inquiry, where we expose ourselves to the call of the vague. I suggest that this mode is afforded by a simultaneous suspense of the fixed and trust in the event of movement akin to how we bodily respond to the solicitations of the environment (including the human and non-human other) when we walk, dance, or skate.

Inquiring From the Relational Condition

All things that we might study are in movement, coming into being, evolving, always about to become something else than they are presently. This condition has long been acknowledged in the field of process theories giving priority to becoming over being, and founded on a wide variety of process thinkers from Heraklit to Bergson, Heidegger, and Deleuze (Helin et al., 2014). With movement comes multiplicity: every unfolding moment bears a multiplicity of nextness in it, there is always a swarm of beginnings pressing against the actual situation (Massumi, 2002), vaguely sensed, but no less real in their virtuality (Bergson, 2007), questioning the dominant assumption that in our experience of things, they are given to us as fully present and identical with themselves (Chia, 1999).

However, loosening the referent also means loosening the authority of inquiry. If the world is in flux and has multiple becomings, then the authority of methodology founded on techniques for fixing the link between “what is there” on one side and “what is claimed” on the other becomes problematic. Hence, research must not only deal with the slipperiness of the studied but also the slipperiness of the ground on which we stand as researchers. In this article, I build on the premise that this slippery condition is not just a complicating condition that we must overcome; it is that which makes us capable of studying anything in the first place, since it is inherent to our relational condition—our always and already being-withness (Heidegger, 1962) that precedes and conditions any inquiry.

This relational premise is implied in the founding assumption of all kinds of process thinking, emphasizing that there is never a self-contained subject encountering the world; rather subjects and objects are both transient products of processes of relating. In that sense, we are always already touched, affected, invaded by the human and non-human other (Introna, 2020). This infinite entanglement with otherness (Barad, 2012) implies an inevitable giving over our self-possession that is aesthetic (Hancock, 2008) and corporeal (Diprose, 2002): when we encounter other people in space, we have already given ourselves over to become within their senses, and the other we encounter—human or non-human—are already in ours. Hence, this giving over is radical (Diprose, 2002) and non-instrumental, expecting no reciprocation or symmetry of exchange (Hancock, 2008).

When we move along in our everyday lives, this being already-entangled with otherness continuously calls for our attention, for our response, like when we with a peripheral awareness adjust our movements to things or people we pass on the street. This call is not a “scream-out-loud call” but a “faint, almost indiscernible murmur in the background, almost nothing, easy to miss in the busyness of everyday life” but “quietly unsettling us, even if we mostly ignore it” (Introna, 2020, pp. 208–209). It is unsettling because it reminds us of our entanglement with others as others, that is, beyond what they are for us as tools or orderable categories. For example, when we stumble upon the empty bottle on the pavement, we are adjusting our movement to something that is not there for us. Unless we are thirsty and pick it up to fill water into it, we relate to it in a way where we refrain from imposing a “bottleness” on it; we adjust our movement on basis of being purely receptive and responsive to its size, weight, and way of lying on the tile. In other words, we sense a more foundational condition of being with things in the world before using them. In that sense, it reflects what Heidegger (1971) called a dwelling mode of relating: a relying receptive mode, a non-instrumentality that is not in opposition to our instrumental endeavors, but precedes and conditions them. The Heideggerian notion of dwelling thus implies giving ontological primacy to our relationally belonging to the world before acting on it, before categorizing it from the perspective of our aims and projects. It stresses a call to be with the otherness of the world beyond our instrumental endeavors, a call to respond to our own being always already part of it, already moved, affected.

Research tradition is in many ways built on a technically and materially afforded attempt to limit the researcher’s exposure to this call—from RCT-methods to gloves in the laboratory. Touching the other epistemologically (Introna, 2020, p. 215) is an attempt “to know the stranger by subsuming her into the categories of the same,” to impose “an identity on her that would render her body knowable”. This differs from a tactful touching, which does not have anything to articulate or impose on the situation. It hesitates, “withdraws or steps back in the moment of contact” (Introna, 2020, p. 216). When we touch the human and non-human other tactfully, we expose ourselves to become affected, moved, and thereby open to the interpellations of the other as other.

The slippery moment in research, where we grasp something vaguely and half-glimpsed, happens before we have transformed the other(ness) around us into categories, before we have turned things and people in our empirical contexts into resources for us as researchers. When we feel the slipperiness of the moment, we feel affected by the other as other, we feel our own movement in becoming-other—a moment of uncanny uprooting of our grounding in the identity as researchers. Yet, the slippery moment may exert some attraction on us, precisely because of this; that is, because it lets us feel a fundamental condition of belonging to the world, where we don’t have anything to say or think, where the point is not to come up with a point. However, the criteria that guides analyzing and publishing is mostly a call to define, contain and claim. They are about not hesitating—and therefore our engagement with these slippery moments tend to end up as “waste” on our computers.

In the following, I will engage with a moment that has stayed with me for almost a decade. It takes place in an activity center for citizens who have been in contact with the social psychiatric system; it is a place where users can come as they like, take part in activities or just hang out. In my capacity as a management scholar in becoming and as part of a collaborative research project, I had been invited by the manager of the activity center to make a session relating to the team’s implementation of a new strategy, which emphasizes seeing the “user as resourceful.” As part of preparing the seminar, I visited the activity center several times throughout the next months and spent the day with the team and users. Initially, the idea was to make observations from the side lines and interfere as little as possible in daily life of the center, but since the users quite explicitly invited me to take part in the activities, it became a participative observation from within activities and conversations with users and employees.

A Slippery Moment

Before the moment, I will describe to you if I can, a woman from the staff has been sitting by the computer for some time, talking to an elderly user. The user has got a new apartment that he apparently wants to show her, but it seems that he is not able to remember enough information to find the apartment via Google; he leans back in a surrendering movement. She gets up and goes to the kitchen area, where she starts stirring in a pot while talking to some other users. After a couple of minutes, the user gets up in a sudden move and follows her into the kitchen, where he approaches her, staggering, as if he is losing control of the balance.

Out of the corner of my eye, the difference between their heights becomes visible, and I remember, for some reason that I cannot tell you today, anticipating some kind of change in the situation, perhaps I was expecting her to push him back. It seems like she hesitates in a glimpse, but then she takes a step back, grasps his hand—or perhaps he grasps her. In any case, the movement appears gentle and attuned. They raise their shared arm and she slides under it, saying something about “dancing myself through.” Hesitation, stepping back, grasping, raising, sliding—everything happens in one gliding movement that I don’t know if I saw or rather heard—only that I sensed the energy of his approaching somehow was led into a movement, where the two bodies became indistinguishable for a moment.

This situation is of course only a very small drop in the constant flow of everyday moments in the center, emerging and sliding away so quickly that one almost cannot grasp it as an observer. It was probably only due to a quickly passing moment of anticipation of escalation that it did stand out as a moment to me at all, perhaps in combination with her selection of a word (dance) that was foreign in the context. Thus, the situation cannot really bear the weight of managerial concepts such as “result” or “strategy.” It is a moment that does not have a clear direction or value that can be elevated to a prescriptive statement. It is slippery in the sense of passing quickly and not lending itself to being fixed in any unambiguous point. But the situation also implies a literal slipperiness of movement (the user is about to lose control of balance and may slide on the floor) that the employee relates to with an attitude (or movement) that she herself characterizes as “dance.” Thus, rather than trying to master the situation, she relates to it in a poetic fashioned way in which she actually refrains from containing or determining its representational content (as she would have done, if she for example had said “I don’t give hugs to users” or “let me help you get back on your feet”).

To take her selection of words seriously, how does one actually relate to the “slippery” in a dance? In dancing with a partner, one continuously works together with the partner on the balance; it is a shared responsibility (Mandalaki & Pérezts, 2022). Balance is a radically relational matter: moving in a dance means continuously unlocking and recreating balance of the “common body” of you and your dance partner. Hence, dance requires a flexible way of standing on the feet; as long you are in the dance you don’t argue with your dance partners on the steps, you have to use your partner’s steps always as material to create your own movement from.

Thus, in a dance, one responds to a dynamic rather than a representational content of the situation. Which also means that you don’t respond to the actual position of your partner but to its becoming, the sense of where it is going. Hence, dancing implies a sense of the nextness of the moment that you can only make active by a letting go of the wish of controlling and knowing precisely what the next step will be. In that sense, performing well-timed dance steps implies a release from accuracy—it implies being grasped as a condition of grasping the emergent rhythm of the joint movements. In order to grasp a dance, you have to be grasped by it (to paraphrase Lefebvre, 2004), it implies a double movement of simultaneously affecting and being affected.

Thus, by relating to the situation as a dance, the space between the user and the employee becomes more than a (negatively defined) distance. Contrary to if she had said “let me help me up,” the employee addresses the middle between them as a relational space of rhythm in which they are looking beyond the actual position of each other. She relates—not to the user, but to his movement, to where he is going. In that sense, “dance” addresses the relationality of this small and quickly passing moment; it addresses “the relational” in a more radical sense than interaction or communicative exchange.

Engaging With the Slippery

For some reason, this moment stayed with me after it happened, but I would probably not have engaged further with it, had it not been for a situation that emerged in the workshop that I had promised the manager to co-facilitate. Before the session, I was in serious doubt about what to do, and felt there was an expectation to me as a management researcher that I could not fulfill. The self-sure and solid concepts of research-based knowledge as well as strategy or management were somehow suddenly in glaring contrast to the vague notes of small everyday details I had in my notebook.

I discussed this with a research colleague, with whom I also shared my experience of this quickly passing moment that had left me unsure. Would it make sense to hold on to such a situation further than just in this passing moment? Clearly, fixing the “dance” in a goal oriented, representative logic (e.g., by seeing “the dance” as an indicator of goal-attainment for example) would be rather meaningless. Were there other ways to highlight and be attentive to small moments like this—not by putting them at a pedestal as “best practice,” but by simply acknowledging that they are what everyday life is made up of?

My colleague joined me at the workshop and we decided to divide the working session into two parts: first a more traditional session where we would reflect on the strategy and discuss situations from interactions with users in daily life, based on their narratives and my observations, and then a second part where we would revisit some of the situations discussed by going to the place where they happened. So, at the day of the session, we (i.e., the manager, the employees and two researchers) started sitting around an oval table in the usual meeting room equipped with a whiteboard and a flip over. Afterward, we walked down the stairs to the activity center in the basement in order to return to everyday details in interaction between employees and users, for example, by paying attention to the architecture, smell and sounds of the activity center.

I will not here go into the working session as such, only the moment where we returned to “the dance” situation. As prepared, I asked the participants at some point if we could go to the kitchen area where I had observed “the dance.” I tried to show the situation by partly demonstrating the half-glimpsed movement with another participant who picked up the movement. By some quickly passing impulse, I suggested that the other did the movement too; after a moment of hesitation, others followed and in the end several variations of leading energy into new movements popped up (e.g., holding gently on the over arms or giving high five), some of them rather crazy, and a playful atmosphere developed. Some ironic versions (elegant and violent at the same time) also emerged during lots of laughter. During these last versions, I remember having a double feeling: on one hand there was a lifted atmosphere, a running energy in the room. The situation became very “light on its feet” and I felt relieved that the team picked up the idea of this non-traditional part of the working session. On the other hand, as a facilitator of the situation, I felt the ground becoming slippery underneath me. I was casting sidelong glances to the manager of the team: Were things running a bit off track now? Was it becoming a bit too unserious?

Suspension of Categorial Suspense

However, given that humoristic playful expressions are, like poetic expressions, typical examples of the kind of expressions that open up the experience of the situation and expose us to the vagueness of it (Massumi, 2002, p. 25), we may dwell on these “crazy versions” a little longer. In a way the “crazy versions” were foregrounding the gap between the employees’ multiple experience of users on one hand and what can be captured in a strategic concept of “the resourceful user” on the other: Hence, the playful, humoristic versions enabled a suspense of the category “the resourceful user” in which relating to something unsayable became possible. In the violently elegant versions, as well as in the “dance” that I vaguely glimpsed, there was some sort of stepping back from the category of the “user.”

Massumi (2002) has reminded us that using categories itself implies a suspense; when the individual person, who is entering the center, is made equivalent to the category “the user,” this implies a suspension of invariance, that is, “a looking away” from the fact that the individual user is not everything within that category, because the people using the center of course covers an inexhaustible multiplicity of variations. However, relating flexibly to the other, that is, with a readiness for movement as one does in playing or dancing, implies a suspension of that categorial suspense—an expectant opening into the qualitative multiplicity of the user. Since we are already threaded by this otherness, this also implies an openness to our own “corporal multiplicity” (Helin, 2019; Valtonen et al., 2017); touching the other as other also implies touching all others including the strangers within (Barad, 2012, p. 214).

Remarkably, the playful “variations of the dance” did not only allow a suspension of the category of the user but also of the manager category: the manager reflects afterward on the situation:

It was a very lifted sensation. It is like that when situations become funny, hilarious, then it gives this lifted bodily sensation. . . (. . .) It becomes liberated from some kind of role that I have taken, but also been given. Physically, I become 10 kilos lighter, because I can sometimes feel it as a yoke on my shoulders that I have to keep myself up at another level, so I feel like relaxed in my body. Relief, lightness. And then I can be. Then I just am, if you understand.

So, the playful atmosphere creates a lightness that suspends the fixed role of the manager, the identity conferred on her. She can step aside from the role—and that (paradoxically) enables her to be at peace in what she is: manager of the team.

What also struck me was that in the reflecting part of the session my presentation of the observation of “the dance” was immediately bringing us into a generalized discussion, while the situation where we performed the movement was overfloating with bodily variations of this everyday detail. Hence, in the humorous, playful variations it became possible to relate to the situation without fixing it, for example, by putting it at a pedestal as some kind of best practice. Instead, it opened up a path into the innumerable embodied variations of the encounter with the user, which are always vaguely present in daily life of the team.

Trust in Movement

Research tradition teaches us to fasten that which we engage with in clear definitions, to fix relations in causal relationships, to seek logically coherent conceptual frameworks that we can stand on firmly; it teaches us to seek that which gives us firm ground underfoot, ultimately to separate inquiry from the sense of the slippery that comes with being present. My own research topic, management, is intimately connected to this tradition of epistemological touch (Introna, 2020), already implied in its etymological origins from the Italian maneggiare “to handle, touch” from the Latin manus “hand.” It concerns the hand that touches to know and control, as also reflected in todays’ managerial technologies.

However, in “dancing,” there is another kind of “knowing” at play: In the improvised “dance with the user,” one could say that the employee doesn’t know what is going to happen in the next moment. But of course, that is not entirely the case: there is a “knowing what is going to happen” at play, but it takes another form as an attentiveness to movement, a looking beyond the actual position of the user which is afforded by literally having a loose grounding, a readiness for response in the feet. Again, the employee uses the word “dance” about what she is doing—and one could say that the kind of knowing she activates is precisely comparable to the kind of “knowing what is going to happen” that unfolds in a dance, where you also don’t know what is going to happen—but you carry with you a sense of the multiple nextness of the moment that you can only make active by a letting go of the wish of controlling and knowing precisely what the next step will be.

Hence, the word “dance” reflects another kind of knowing, which is rather a trust in the event of becoming itself—an openness to its movement. Thus, relating to the situation as “dance” opens up a space for rendering the situation in its own life: Rather than being about implementing a strategic concept of “the user as resourceful,” it becomes a moment of not imposing specific externally defined ideas of the user on the event—a being in the relational midst of the event rather than being in the idea of what it is or what it should produce.

While literature on embodied knowing has expanded in recent years, and stressed the role of the senses in knowing (Beyes et al., 2022; Strati, 2007; Willems, 2018), the embodied knowing at play here concerns rather the barely sensed, the relational capacity of our bodies that is activated when we move around in the world—central to dancing. Mandalaki and Pérezts (2022) describe how they in tangoing combined bodily and sensual awareness with dancing partners, “coordinated balance, energy, strength and the moving space we both occupied while dancing,” being ‘attentive to each other’s moves to avoid colliding with other couples and to the other’s emotional engagement during the dance, to establish and maintain the connection” (p. 608). I would suggest that all this is about the capacity to relate to what we barely see, that which we synaesthetically glimpse out of the corner of our eyes. It is afforded by a relying receptive mode that embraces the genuinely relational of the situation. Rather than drawing on a detached knowledge, the latter activates a “knowing from within being present” that is connected to an openness toward the other’s otherness, afforded by a trust in the event of becoming itself—an openness to its movement.

However, the slippery moment also puts us at risk, we become aware of our condition as exposed and vulnerable; we may fall when we find ourselves on slippery ground (which was what I literally felt during the playful versions: I was losing the sense of solid ground as a facilitator of the session). However, one could say that moving is falling for a moment (Massumi & Zournazi, 2003): When we walk, each step is the body’s movement against falling. If gravity were not drawing us to the ground, walking would be impossible. In order to take a step, I have to let go—to be open to the possibility that I might fall. However, inspired by the playful “lightness” in the working session (put into words by the manager), we may here think of a bodily activity that brings together the slippery and the feeling of lightness, like skating for example. In skating one works with the slipperiness to let the ice give impetus to the moves. Skating is allowing the body to feel the slippery in order to create propulsion. In this way, the activity of skating figures a form of relating to the slippery, afforded by a trust in the event of movement: it involves a sense of how you can go with the constraints that the slippery gives you, to make use of it to create momentum rather than letting it leave you trembling with no courage to make any move at all. It requires what Austin and Devin call “control by release,” which they identify as a basic quality of artful work (Austin & Devin, 2003, p. 86ff): a delicate control of movements by thought or body that must be free of any restraint, however highly focused.

Slippery Playground

Before finishing, let me take you to a series of events that has been absently present in my writing while working with the text on the previous pages, and in an odd way prepared its theme in the first place: In the village, where I grew up, there was a bog, in cold winters turning into a marvelous playground for us children, running, sliding, skating in circles of scared and joyful pursuit of each other, forgetting to look out for the slightly darker spots of thin ice that our parents had warned us against. In the gray winter twilight, there was something insidious yet hugely appealing about the bog, captured in the name that the children of the village had given this area: “the wild meadow.” I remember, after all the work with getting cold, senseless feet into skates they had outgrown, the contrast in the feeling of free movement in an exalted moment of high speed, knowing that the fall had already begun.

The night before I started observations at the activity center, the wild meadow comes back to me in my dreams. A few days before, I had been impatiently waiting at a senior academic’s office to discuss the project that the observations in the activity center would be part of. We had made an appointment at 10 o clock, but he is not there. I wait 10, 15, 30 min, 1hr, but he still doesn’t show up. I check my phone for messages and start to get irritated. This is typically senior academics! No respect for other people’s time, particularly not junior academics.’ A few days later, we finally meet at his office. It appears that in the evening before our original appointment, he had fallen during skating and broken a rib. This day however, the meeting on the project is focused and efficient. It is not until I am on my way out that I briefly notice the troubled movements of his tall body. Sitting by the meeting table, I had been impatiently focused on getting the answers I needed, so that I would be able to go on with the project—a few days delayed. But now, standing up, facing each other for a hesitating handshake that never materializes, one body in pain, my proud reproach erodes and leaves only a fragile middle.

The following night, the wild meadow returns in my dreams. It just stretches out infinitely in front of me, ice underneath my feet and dark sky above. Unlike many dreams, this one does not have a plot I remember, only an atmosphere left in the gray morning light, a twofold sensation of “loss and strange alertness, of failure and wonder” (Steyaert, 2022).

Slippery Inquiry

In moments of feeling the slipperiness of the world, we allow ourselves to be exposed to that which cannot be held tight. To take seriously those things we do not fully see or grasp means to acknowledge our relational condition, our always being threaded by otherness (Barad, 2012): In these unsure experiences, we sense the world as other, that is, not the world as being at our disposal, illuminated by our interests, concepts or practical endeavors, but the world that we always already belong to. In research inquiry we can ignore or respond to this relational condition. I suggest that the latter takes a loosened, yet highly focused, mode of inquiry quite different from the one taught in methodology courses. In this loosened mode we become capable of relating to the slippery through a simultaneous suspension of the fixed, a stepping back from fixing the other in categories, and a trust in the emerging event of becoming, a readiness for multiple nextness—for being moved and thereby for response to movement.

The research inquiry emerging from this mode can take many forms, but always implies exposure, to put ourselves at risk. In the research process described in this article, a loosened but focused mode of inquiry was pursued, first through a trustful conversation sharing the slippery and unsure experience and starting to co-imagine other ways forward from that. Second, it was pursued through bodily co-movement and play with the people in the empirical context, being simultaneously amused and at risk. Third, in the writing, the dreaming experience connected to childhood skating and to the hesitant stepping back from the category of the “typical senior academic,” was allowed into the text. What am I suggesting by including the latter in the text? Surely not any one-way causal connections (e.g., from the seniors’ fall to the skating dream to the sensing of slippery moments in empirical research), leading to a track of rather absurd recommendations for research inquiry (supervisors should be skating). Rather, like in dreams, the text was allowed to connect things and events that we normally do not connect without trying to explain what follows from what (without “overexplaining,” Helin, 2019). The attempt was to search for bodily experiences of the slippery in multiple times and spaces, and to recognize their entangledness in movement, our being “threaded by otherness”—also in the activity of academic writing.

After writing the previous section, I am starting to think that dreaming has a more direct connection to that which this article has reasoned around: Things that we have passed with peripheral awareness during the day, often come back to us in dreams. It can be things or events that moved us for a second, or carried a link to silent memories that we did not pursue further in daylight thinking, perhaps because it was not useful for the endeavor in focus of the situation. In that sense, dreams help us listen to the vague call in the background (as Introna, 2020 calls it), to dwell at the half-glimpsed. More broadly, stressing the vague and half-glimpsed questions the academic norm of knowledge as that which is fully illuminated, fully present and clearly seen in wakeful, daylight rationality (Helin, 2019; Valtonen et al., 2017). It follows a processual call to stray from the ontology of presence that dominates research tradition. In that way, it is in sympathy with the growing stream on doing differently in the academy (Pullen et al., 2020), including also re-thinking and re-doing academic traditions of writing, reviewing and editing, dominated by an inherited (masculine) culture (Helin, 2019; Lindsay, 1986) that encourages and rewards the conclusive, assertive and unambiguous.

In taking up this call, I have here experimentally pursued the unsure, slippery experiences that are often excluded during publication processes, demanding clarity and disposing our writing to run in front of the reader and confidently point out contributions. I have not aimed to invoke “the slippery” as a defined, contained concept, but rather as a leitmotif that enables variations akin to the way a musical theme allows the composer to play around it. A theme that could always be different however. It was my attempt to respond in writing to the call of the vague, to enter the middle of the “almost-touch” (Introna, 2020), where we hesitantly step back from categorizing the other(ness) of the world for a moment. It was my way not claimed to be the way, but offered as an invitation to others searching for other ways.