Dancing with the Chinese “Wind” as a Post-Foundational Inquiry

• In Event: Tracing the “ghosts” of (modern) schooling and exposing its limits in non-formal spaces: Transnational and translational studies in education

Proposal

Overview
This paper develops “wind” into a philosophical concept with implications for doing post-foundational inquiries. It revisits and scaffolds my previous research projects along the below three questions: where/how to start, what to overturn and displace, and how agency functions, in post-foundational approach. In so doing, it demonstrates how foundations like modern grammar, representational language, and anthropocentrism are exposed, displaced, and overturned. Furthermore, it unpacks how this “wind” approach has re-shaped my agency as a Daoist researcher-un-learner along the way, already folded into an immanently entangled “winding” field.


Relevance
Comparative and international educational studies are witnessing a de-colonial ontological turn toward explicating non-Western onto-epistemes as alternative starting points to expose and suspend the colonial yoke of (modern) Western systems of knowledge (Zhao, Popkewitz, and Tero, 2022). To align with this intellectual turn, this paper revisits my research projects with, and develops, the Chinese “wind” as a philosophical concept that has implications for doing post-foundational inquiries tied to relational ontologies, feminist new materialist thinking, and posthuman studies in the Western scholarship. This “wind” philosophizing hopes to enrich East-West knowledge transfer and collaborations toward a more equitable and pluriverse world.

Theory
Postfoundational inquiry has an agenda of exposing, displacing, and overturning the otherwise naturalized foundational principles and assumptions that ground our knowledge and truth (re)production. Postfoundational inquiry, as Butler (1992) contends, is not to do away with incessant and inevitable foundations toward a nihilistic anti-foundational stance, but to position them as permanently contingent and “sites of possible reconfigurations” to be used “in the service of an alternate production.” Along the Butlerian line of thinking, Jackson and Mazzei (2022) foreground the “contingency” of postfoundational inquiries to the extent that they are 1) emergent, 2) responsive to specific (temporary) conditions, and 3) attuned to what has been previously foreclosed to make room for experimentation and creation. Furthermore, it considers the inquirer as constituted by practices of inquiry, rather than a presiding subject or identity or agent ready to pick up some theories and methods. Referencing these features, this paper revisits my research trajectories with the Chinese “wind”, further developing “wind” as a philosophical concept that provides Eastern implications for postfoundational inquiries in and beyond the West.

Research methods
I treat postfoundational inquiry not as a ready method to apply, but a philosophical-methodological orientation and checklist. Henceforth methodologically, I re-count and inter-lace three moments of encountering and dancing with the Chinese “wind”, which along the way exposes, displaces, and overturns my otherwise taken-for-granted beliefs, knowledge, subjectivity, and identity. More importantly, it subverts my agentive role as a researcher who controls and selects into a follower, attuning to the dancing “wind” as well as the new wondering and wandering pathways it opens me to, say, the non-representational Chinese language and Confucius’ own educational envisioning as expressed in his commentary on a Yijing hexagram. At the same time, the Chinese “wind” becomes no longer merely “air in movement”, but rather a notion, a way of reasoning, and an onto-episteme that in turn spells out a Chinese correlative cosmology and a dao-qi field, which I demonstrate provides implications for posthuman new materialist thinking of the West.

Findings
Dancing with the “wind” as a philosophical concept provides the following implications and considerations in doing post-foundational inquiries. First, post-foundational line of thinking is not some theory to start with but rather, a philosophical orientation with new onto-epistemic-ethical significance. When we look at certain educational phenomenon, it is crucial to discern a temporary and contingent starting or turning point in our unconsciously naturalized humanist research that could possibly implode and displace foundational assumptions to begin anew and think otherwise along a post-foundational direction.

Second, post-foundational line of thinking needs to attend to the materiality as it is the materiality that constitutes the entanglement of our doing and living onto-episteme-ethically. The Chinese notion “wind” in my case is no longer an object of knowledge, but becomes an agentive materiality that demands me to follow and attune to. That is, wind becomes a newly imagined concept that bears upon philosophical significance and ontological force in guiding and configuring the parameters of my inquiry. Similarly, language becomes more agentive in my writing to the extent that it calls to question from time to time the formal features of our syntax. For example, how can we place objects, knowledge, non-human materialities in the place of grammatical subject to enforce and express the ontological doings of material things, body, and matter?

Last is an incessant re-consideration of “I/me”, or my agency, in the inquiry as an effect of agential cuts in a temporary phenomenon cut apart/together from the always performative entangled. My wind inquiry for example turns me into a Daoist onto-un-learner, taken from a Dao De Jing statement, “a follower of learning gains whereas a follower of dao loses, losing upon losing reaches wuwei (nonaction), and wuwei (non-action) to wubuwei (non–non-action, i.e., full activity” (Chapter 48). I use “un-learning” to paraphrase the notion of losing, forgetting, or letting go, which indicates a suspension or bracketing of the knowledge, skills, viewpoints, values, identity, will or intention subsistent in a foundational and instrumental learning logic. That is, a follower of dao lets go such added-on baggage and instead follows, attunes to, and co-responds to the dao movement immanent in dynamic relationality of myriad things (humans included) in the cosmos, putting me in an incessant re-turning process.

Scholarly contributions
Postfoundational inquiries expose and overturn otherwise naturalized foundational assumptions in our knowledge (re)production. Dancing with the Chinese “wind” provides a case study, as well as an entry point, to expose and suspend these normative foundations as principles of inclusion and exclusion. It is de-colonial and anti-colonial in the sense that it starts anew from a new starting point, rather than starting anew from the traditional Western archipelago (Paraskeva, 2016). It provides not only an alternative, but an alternative on the alternative, toward anticipating an onto-cognitive justice on a global scope.

Author

• weili zhao, Hangzhou Normal University