Inquiry After Methodology: Virtuous Inquiry and the Not-Possible

• In Event: 21st Century Inquiry After Methodology

Abstract

Objectives or purposes:
In this paper I offer a critique of possibility, interrogating its intimate connection to the conventional practice of method. I then emphasize potentiality and an excessively becoming future (the not-yet that refuses the constraints of both causation and prescription). I assert that working through the possible towards potential is a resistively philosophical practice. I claim this through presenting inquiry as cartographic work: mapping our contemporary moment towards the blurry edges of a potential future—one animated through virtuous claims on what might happen. In the end, mine is a call for virtuous inquiry as enactments of becoming not possible.

Perspectives or theoretical frameworks:
In response to the challenge of convention, Foucault offers his ethics of discomfort, what he terms a “treatise on moveable thought” (p. 444) and sets forth three key problems: 1) the challenge of mapping “the convention of today”; 2) enacting a resistance without being subsumed by a resisted; 3) an ethical obligation to refuse to prescribe for others. I offer virtuous inquiry as an “after-methodology”—a means of productively enacting Foucault’s ethics of discomfort. Virtuous inquiry articulates as a type of indeterminate yet ethically-oriented philosophical practice. Like Braidotti’s (2012) articulation of philosophical work, virtuous inquiry takes place in an interstice of time: “somewhere between the no longer and the not yet” (203). This, then, is a connective sphere of indeterminacy: “’We’ are in this together” (ibid; original emphasis). Thus, virtuous inquiry necessarily begins from an affirmative ethical positioning, mapping our contemporary landscape to locate those spaces that remain unfulfilled, not yet foreclosed. Through inquiry we enact an ethical charge to short-circuit the conventionally possible. In my turn towards virtue, I seek an ethical force that provokes a dynamically materialist project of resistance, one animated by the affirmation/belief that we exceed our constraints—we endure—through the power of our relations.

Mode of inquiry: Theoretical/Philosophical

Materials: Throughout this paper I use philosophical texts, concepts, and experimentation to animate my conclusions.

Results and significance:
For Butler (2001), virtue challenges the existing patterns of “regulation and order” (3). Virtue is a critical relation to the governing practices through which conventional methodological practice occurs. Additionally, Braidotti (2013) situates theory as “a form of organized estrangement from dominant values” that affords the actualization of “new concepts, affects and planetary subject formations” (p. 104). This takes “conceptual creativity and intellectual courage…as there is no going back” (p. 178). Such creativity comes through a resistive sense of theory and philosophy. And, I find courage in a refusal to reside in the what-is, a determination that the world might be differently enacted. Philosophically, this is a virtuous positioning—a challenge to become not possible in the belief that we might be different, we just might have a future ahead of us that is not prescribed by the norms of the status quo.

Author

• Aaron M. Kuntz, Florida International University