The "New" in New Approaches to 21st Century Inquiry

• In Event: 21st Century Inquiry After Methodology

Abstract

Objectives or purposes: This paper describes what is “new” in 21st century approaches in inquiry, focusing on (1) the return to the “old,” (2) immanence, and (3) experimentation and creation.

Perspectives or theoretical frameworks: Poststructural philosophy that informs the new empiricism, new materialism, affect theory, the posthuman, and so on.

Mode of inquiry: Methodological/theoretical

Data sources, evidence, warrants: This paper is enabled by the onto-epistemological arrangement of poststructural philosophy.

Results and significance: It is difficult to think the “new,” especially when embedded in normalized structures like the big three conventional humanist social science research methodologies—qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods methodologies. Within those structures, only certain ways of thinking and being are possible, though the limits of the structures can become apparent as one struggles to make her research fit into the structure’s categories. Indeed, it is often the lack of fit between fieldwork (the real) and methodology that forces a researcher to think something different. And it is also the lack of fit between philosophy and methodology that forces one to do something different from the beginning, to refuse methodology upfront and begin with philosophical concepts (e.g., refrain, haecceity) instead of the concepts of a pre-determined methodology (e.g., data, coding, member checks, triangulation, representation). This means one begins to inquire with no pre-determined research methodologies or practices except, perhaps, studying one’s philosophy to learn its concepts. Those who have taken on this challenge have learned that some very useful philosophical concepts are not new at all but are old, for example, affect (Spinoza) and matter (Aristotle, Whitehead). So a return to the “old” may be necessary in the “new” inquiry. In addition, much of the new work in the new empiricisms, new materialisms, and posthuman use an ontology of immanence which focuses on the “not yet,” what has not yet been captured and closed off into a structure. Deleuze, for example, invented a plane of immanence that is pre-personal, pre-individual, pre-conceptual, pre-philosophical, and composed of pure variation, intensities, forces, and formless matter. The “new” work often focuses, then, on what is not yet but is coming into being rather than on what is, what exists. Given immanence, inquiry cannot be determined in advance but must be invented as one inquires. Thus, there are no pre-determined processes for the “new” inquiry. Each project will always be different from others because each is immanent and necessarily different. Finally, the “new” work requires experimentation, which hegemonic methodologies constrain in favor of practices and processes that have been “proven” and determined legitimate over time. Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) described “experimentation in contact with the real” (p. 12), and Deleuze wrote about a “shock to thought” (1985/1989, p. 156), a crisis in thought, “engendering the act of thinking within thought” (Deleuze, 1968/1994, p. 114), which can come from anywhere and demands experimentation and creation. In this sense, the inquirer is, indeed, making it up as she goes, experimenting, creating, pushing through the familiar toward what she cannot yet think and do—the “new.”

Author

• Elizabeth A. St. Pierre, University of Georgia