The Dizzying Leap: Post-Qualitative Inquiry as a Transversal Stop-Motion Animation

• In Event: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Post-Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Objectives or purposes: This paper offers an example of what can be done in the ruins of knowing what to do before beginning. It will provide an overview of how philosphical conceptions of movement and knowledge in an immanenist ontology inspired the author to experiment and theorize stop-motion animation as a transversal post-qualitative practice.

Perspectives or theoretical frameworks: This paper differentiates post-qualitative inquiry in an immanenist ontology from scientifically based research methodologies by drawing from Henri Bergson’s differentiation between movement and duration as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s differentiation between Art, Science, and Philosophy in What is Philosophy. In addition the paper considers the ethical and epistemological potential of stop-motion animation by drawing from Deleuze’s description of “control societies,” which is an elaboration of Foucault’s “biopower,” and queer post-structuralist Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure.


Mode of inquiry: Methodological/theoretical


Data sources, evidence, warrants: In a special issue of Qualitative Inquiry Serge Heine (2017) discussed how undermining common-sense assumptions about knowledge practices reflect the dangerous force of experimentation with the real as described by Deleuze and Guattari. Heine suggests that “we experiment not only to see what will emerge but also to see what else inquiry, researchers, specific research practices and activities, and research settings are capable of” (p. 663). This idea emphasizes the importance of thinking that happens in movement, particularly movements that are elliptical, rather than in reference to objects and outcomes. This paper draws from epistemological, ontological, and ethical problems that initiated and became possible during an experimentation with stop-motion animation as a process for exploring the nature of comedy and conflict in secondary social studies classrooms. The emerging result of this play has been to describe and theorize post-qualitative inquiry as a transversal movement within an immanenist ontology.


Results and significance: One critique sometimes levied against poststructural theorists is that they fail to adequately address the political and material realities of injustice in any particular political moment. This implies that only certain types of knowledge-production practices can expose and correct ethical injustices and furthermore, that philosophically oriented projects cannot do so. Embedded in this argument are assumptions about the relationship between inquiry and change: that inquiry can and should lead to the communication of discrete pieces of knowledge (findings) that can and will lead to concrete actions. However, poststructuralist theorists in an immanenist ontology resist the idea of linear cause and effect, meaning that knowing or doing is always more than the outcome of objective information and discrete subjective perspective. Therefore, any project of discovery and communication becomes problematized, such as the ones within scientifically based quantitative and qualitative research. This paper suggests that using stop-motion animation has been one example of beginning with philosophy to engage and theorize a transversal post-qualitative project.



References
Hein, S. F. (2017). Deleuze’s New Image of Thought: Challenging the Dogmatic Image of Thought in Qualitative Inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(9), 656–665. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417725354

Author

• Mel Kutner, University of Georgia - Athens