Practicing Virtue: Philosophical Inquiry as Ethical Enactments for Material Change

• In Event: The Viability of Change: Challenging Established Norms and Structures in Educational Research and Practice

Abstract

Objectives
Throughout this paper I explicate Foucault’s notion of practices as a useful means for philosophical inquiry to generate productive material change. Through an analysis of seemingly mundane practices within the fields of educational research and formal politics, I demonstrate the means by which such actions are animated by a similar adherence to the reason and values of late capitalism. Further, I orient my analyses within a larger project of ethical engagement, one informed by Foucault’s work on philosophical truth-telling.

Theoretical framework and perspectives
As evidenced by his own definition, Foucault’s engagement with practices remains usefully complex. As the above block quotation indicates, Foucault renders practices as active (possessing and articulating reason) and platial (a location where normalizing discourses intersect and collude). Such a dynamic definition aligns Foucauldian practices with the critical tenets of relational materialism (what others have termed new or post materialism) and posthuman theory. However, though scholars have noted that such theoretical approaches produce new ethical possibilities, they are often critiqued for manifesting a space of ethical relativism, one in which every difference matters equally (see, for example, Brinkmann’s 2019 critique of post-qualitative inquiry and posthuman theory). In response, I situate the analysis of Foucauldian practices as an ethically-informed means of philosophical inquiry, one generated in order to produce an oriented-future; a historically-informed claim on what might happen (not prescriptive claims on what will happen or normalizing assertions of what should happen).

Modes of Inquiry
In an interview regarding “questions of method” Foucault (1991) famously insisted that his
target of analysis wasn’t ‘institutions’, ‘theories’ or ‘ideology’, but practices – with the aim of grasping the conditions which make these acceptable at a given moment; the hypothesis being that these types of practice…possess up to a point their own specific regularities, logic, strategy, self-evidence and ‘reason’…practices being understood here as places where what is said and what is done, rules imposed and reasons given, the planned and the taken for granted meet and interconnect (p. 75; original emphasis).
As a critical entry point into the cultivation of a history of the present, practices reveal the larger social processes and rationalities that make them possible. Yet through their appeal to common sense practices most often remain invisible; they escape notice because they remain unquestioned, extending the norms that make them possible.

Scholarly Significance
I situate philosophical inquiry as a type of cartography—mapping how historical practices uniquely manifest in contemporary contexts through an adherence to normalizing reason. Given the enormity of inequity and violence that plagues our contemporary moment, inquiry cannot afford a relativistic stance. Instead, inquiry must be positioned. Foucault’s use of practices as a valuable entry point for analysis is made all the more useful when oriented by a virtuous determination that a potential future, not bound to the rationalities of old, might come to exist..

Author

• Aaron M. Kuntz, Florida International University