Agonistic Ontologies: Foucault's Genealogical Analytic, Ethical Self-Formation, and Post-Qualitative Inquiry

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

Abstract

Objectives or purposes: This paper contributes to the emerging scholarship on the importance of the work of Michel Foucault in the post-qualitative turn and focuses on two interrelated tasks: 1. Philosophically explores the concept of agonism in Foucault’s genealogical and ethical works. To link his genealogical works with his ethical studies, this paper makes the argument that Foucault returned to ontology in his later works and developed what the author is calling an Agonistic Ontology. 2. Experiments with how an agonistic ontology can move post-qualitative work forward.

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: The post-qualitative turn has ushered in new possibilities for the field of qualitative inquiry (St. Pierre, 2017; Lather & St. Pierre, 2013). Primarily, the turn instigates a reengagement with philosophy, specifically with the post-structuralist thinkers, Michel Foucault, Jacque Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze (St. Pierre, 2013). Post-qualitative scholars use these thinkers to contest traditional humanist approaches to research as well problematize method and methodologies (St. Pierre, 2018). They contest on very sound philosophical grounds the very fabric of qualitative inquiry. Foucault’s work has proven to be vital for many post-qualitative researchers. This paper focuses exclusively on Foucault’s concept of agonism in his later works and explores his returnr to ontology after genealogy. (Foucault, 1975; Foucault 1978; Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983). Much of the scholarship currently in the post-qualitative literature relies primarily on Foucault’s archaeological works of The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge (St. Pierre, 2011). This paper works explores his scholarship on ethics, care of the self, and ethical self-fashioning back to his genealogy to argue that Foucault develop what the author is calling an Ontology of Agonisms. What I am arguing is that the concept of the agonisms played a key role in his genealogy and in his scholarship on ethics. I argue that Foucault developed an agonistic ontology grounded in the genealogy as an assemblage of power/knowledge forces (as exemplified in the Dispositif) and in his scholarship on ethical self-fashioning (as exemplified by the concepts of Askesis, as a continually working of the self, and Essai, or test). A genealogy functions ontologically as a continual working on the self as a test to work with, through, between, various agonisms. This onto-epistemological emphasis on the concept of Agonism has several implications for post-qualitative researchers. Most notably, the importance of ontology in research, the not-so-evident and shifting perspective of the “researcher”, the grey areas (the known and potentially unknown) of composing one’s life as a work of art.

Author

• David L. Carlson, Arizona State University