Immanence in Poststructuralism and the Freedom of Not Knowing "What to Do"

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

Abstract

Objectives or purposes: This paper questions the expectation in the applied social sciences that researchers should know what to do before they begin to inquire, that they, in fact, need a pre-existing methodology that provides a proven, systematic research process that, if followed, will guarantee the validity of their work. This paper explains that poststructuralism cannot provide a methodology in advance of inquiry because it uses an ontology of immanence.

Perspectives or theoretical frameworks: Poststructural philosophy.

Mode of inquiry: Methodological/theoretical

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

Results and significance: Poststructural philosophers differently addressed the failure of concepts produced by Western Enlightenment thought that continue to structure and limit contemporary thought, especially descriptions of human being (the Cartesian cogito, Locke’s personal identity); the claim that language can adequately represent reality; that rational, systematic method can produce true knowledge; that knowledge is the goal of inquiry, and that inquiry begins with ontological questions about what exists (what is?) rather than what might be (the not yet, the to-come). Descriptions of those concepts, and others, when aligned, organize onto-epistemological arrangements that, in turn, may or may not enable methodologies. Given the Enlightenment’s ontological focus on a stable reality that pre-exists thought and its epistemological focus on knowledge production about that reality, it’s not surprising that various methodologies were invented that can be “applied” to inquiry, methodologies that tell researchers “what to do” before they begin. Yet the onto-epistemological arrangement of poststructuralism does not focus on epistemology (e.g., Deleuze seldom mentions epistemology), and its ontology is immanentist instead of realist. That is, poststructural philosophy is concerned not so much with what exists, what we have created (socially constructed), but with what we might create, invent—the thought we cannot yet think that might produce a world and a people yet to come. But educational researchers, perhaps over-trained as methodologists, expect they should know “what to do” when they begin to inquire. In that case, no matter what onto-epistemology informs their studies, they leap to methodology, assuming that inquiry begins with methodology. In fact, poststructural inquiry cannot begin with a pre-existing methodology because it is immanentist, and poststructural scholars were quite clear that they did not use pre-existing methods and methodologies in their scholarship. If one dates 20th century French poststructuralism from the 1950s, it is quite surprising that, 70 years later, educational researchers continue to use conventional humanist research methodologies in studies they claim are poststructural (Foucauldian, Deleuzian). For example, they may sprinkle poststructural concepts like rhizome or différance in a qualitative study as if those concepts are thinkable in interpretive (or critical or postpositivist) qualitative methodology. This paper argues that 21st century inquiry, especially if it claims to use the “posts,” must refuse methodology and knowing “what to do” in advance in order to invent the “not yet.”

Author

• Elizabeth A. St. Pierre, University of Georgia