Engaging Uselessness in Post-Qualitative Inquiry

• In Event: 29.082 - Roundtable Session 9
  In Roundtable Session: 29.082-8 - Work/Think/Play in Post-Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to experiment with how to live theory--to let it proliferate, “slow[ing] down and reorient[ing] my thinking about everything” (St. Pierre, 2014, p. 7). In the neoliberal academy, however, “everything” is not of equal value. Jobs parcel out time according to the values of the institution (e.g., teaching-focused v. research focused) and theoretical endeavors often privilege products rather than enabling different inquiries and ways of being to become thinkable. Drawing on Massumi and Manning’s (2013) discussion of uselessness, I explore how to make space for “useless” inquiry that welcomes what is yet to be thought, imagined, anticipated.

Perspectives: Manning (2015) describes how in university settings, “the lesson we learn (if we succeed) is that our value coincides with our ability to be called to order” (p. 204) by disciplinary structures that determine what is valued and how scholarship should be quantified. However, like the student Manning describes, who studies not to accumulate knowledge but rather to allow “learning to continue” (p. 202), I “barely hear the call of credit” (p. 204). That is, my scholarship, similar to Manning and Massumi’s (2013) description of philosophy, experiments in uselessness: “What is most experimental is most useless. If something is truly new, the context for its use will not yet exist. It will create its own context, giving rise to new uses never before imagined.”

Modes of inquiry and materials: The mode of inquiry is experimental writing in which I write my way in and out of meaning, “engaging,” as MacLure (2013) writes, “the materiality of language itself – its material force and its entanglements in bodies and matter” (p. 658). Manning (2015) argues that such “research-creation” requires “a re-accounting of what writing can do in the process of thinking-doing” (p. 210). For this paper, the page is a site of research-creation with living inquiry in work/think/play. I draw on practical constraints of my life as an assistant professor negotiating competing calls to order--the teaching focus of my small, private, liberal arts institution and neoliberal discourses of productivity that don’t easily recognize post-qualitative inquiry.

Results: Writing, then, becomes an ontological space where practical constraints are interrupted by “the entire assemblage that is a life thinking and, and, and” (St. Pierre, 2011, p. 622)--philosophy, parenting, teaching, weeding the garden, staring at stars, and, and, and--which all become something(s) to think with. That is, living inquiry is always already entangled with theory and being and ethics and working and thinking and playing. The result is a process through which “responsibility to being becomes urgent and constant” (St. Pierre, 2013, p. 655), a responsibility without limits (Derrida, 1992).

Significance: St. Pierre (2016) asserts that after the ontological turn, inquiry is “always already entangled” and has “no beginning” (p. 29). Therefore, “thinking and living are simultaneities, and we have to think possible worlds in which we might live” (St. Pierre, 2013, p. 655). This paper becomes a call for post-qualitative scholars to engage uselessness.

Author

• Jessica Van Cleave, Mars Hill University