Post-Qualitative Inquiry and Walter Benjamin’s “One-Way Street”

Foundational Philosophy to Post-Qualitative Inquiry. Part 1: Rupturing an Image of Thought

The Deleuzian concept of “thinking without image” is essential to a conversation about post-qualitative inquiry, as many scholars of the movement have embraced it as a means for getting at researching without method, or rather, as a means for beginning to undo that which has become habitual and dogmatic in social science research practices. “Image of Thought” is a chapter in Deleuze’s (1968/2004) Difference and Repetition (Deleuze, 1968/2004) in which he described this major concept that supports his philosophy and serves as somewhat of a criticism of other philosophers, particularly Descartes’ image of thought that has become dogmatic: “The theory of thought is like a painting: It needs that revolution which took art from representation to abstraction. This is the aim of a theory of thought without image” (p. 346). Deleuze’s argument was that philosophy seemed to think it has outthought and unthought everything, including even the ontological presumptions of existence, but it had not gone far enough to outthink and unthink thought itself. Hughes (2009) explained, writing, “This is what Deleuze means by an implicit or subjective presupposition: the idea that in the end being and thinking are treated not as a philosophical concept but rest on a principle of ‘self-evidence,’ on a ‘simple intuition of the mind,’ when it is not at all self-evident what Descartes means by thinking, being, or even the self” (p. 67). Destabilizing these concepts allows for the destruction of the dogmatic image of thought (in Deleuze’s earlier writings) or the replacement of the dogmatic image of thought with a new image of thought (in his later writings). In either case, his project is to go further into philosophy to disrupt our most dogmatic ways of being and thinking.

Disrupting the image of thought to the point of no return is useful in post-qualitative inquiry, as disrupting one’s image of thought creatively troubles the chances of working within the accepted categories using normalized research methods and producing narrow conclusions that limit the scope of our inquiries. In this way, post-qualitative inquiry problematizes what has become the dogmatic image of thought in qualitative inquiry (especially its positivist, quantitative bedfellows) and seeks to think against dogma. St. Pierre, Jackson, and Mazzei (2016) insisted that,

It is important to remember that the empirical turn, the material turn, the ontological turn, and others are possible because of a different image of thought in which everything has turned, an image of thought in which the old categories and distinctions can no longer be thought. Continuing to think and live in the structures of that image of thought is no longer possible or tolerable, and, we argue, unethical. (p. 100)

Until a rupture, people do not know they are working within an image of this kind, which is what makes the image dogmatic and which is why Deleuze argued philosophers are limited until they push past assumed truths. Jackson (2017) described this naturalized state, writing, “This dogmatic image is ready-made: already at work when we start to think, most of the time without our even knowing it” (p. 668). Occasionally, ruptures happen to the image and allow some of us to acknowledge them for what they truly are: one plane of thinking. St. Pierre (2017) experienced this when she was a graduate student completing her dissertation; she focused on “the end game, on fieldwork, on practice, on procedural methodology, on application, at the expense of the images of thought that enabled them” (p. 690). Finding deconstruction through Foucault and Derrida, then, sent her into a place from which she could not return: “Deconstruction can annihilate an image of thought such that it can never be thought again” (St. Pierre, 2017, p. 687). For her, this rupture of image affected her life and work, revealing the deficiencies of normalized, institutionalized, and accepted ways of conducting fieldwork and writing up that work. Her turn was a true rupture in image because upon making these turns, she could never turn back.

Post-qualitative inquiry demonstrates that the process of rupturing the dogmatic image of thought in our scholarship can only be made by researching without method, as methods are dogmatic images in themselves. Post-qualitative inquiry can become a confusing concept at this point, as many may not have considered methods to be dogmatic but rather have seen them as pragmatic: They are guides for conducting research and coming to conclusions that facilitate useful advances in a field of study. But thinking of methods as purely pragmatic misses an important point: Methods dictate how we do our work to the point that they are disciplinary, not simply pragmatic—they are lifestyles, world-views, ideology, or in a Deleuzian paradigm, dogmatic images of thought. Law (2004) wrote this exact point: “The argument is no longer that methods discover and depict realities. Instead, it is that they participate in the enactment of those realities” (p. 45). Along with challenging qualitative method, then, post-qualitative inquiry challenges every component that makes qualitative method what it is: “data, voice, narrative, meaning-making” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. viii), coding, the subject, truth, legitimacy, and so on. If we challenge even one of these, such as “voice,” poking at it to display its lack of stability, the entire system of qualitative methodology is destabilized along with that one component. When we use qualitative inquiry, then, we are agreeing to the terms and conditions of each component of it. Law wrote of this notion, too, referring to Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: “scientists don’t come to their work naïve but with a whole package, which he calls a paradigm. This includes law-like generalizations, implicit assumptions, instrumental and embodied habits, working models, and a general and more or less implicit world-view” (p. 43). In summary, if we are to do something different, we cannot use the old method nor its components, as they have too much baggage, too many limitations.

There is no exact prescription for how one would go about denying method entirely and using post-qualitative inquiry because post-qualitative inquiry is not an alternative or a replacement for methodology. There are some ideas about how to rupture an image of thought, however; Jackson (2017) quoted Deleuze’s explanation of how to do this, writing “‘Formed substances are revealed by visibility,’ . . . and method’s visibility has been captured and institutionalized by qualitative textbooks, coursework, publication standards, and so on” (p. 666). Jackson also explained that Deleuze has suggestions for how ruptures to the dogmatic image of thought happen. She wrote that “Deleuzian thought without image, or how thinking without method happens: (a) by force; (b) through an encounter, and (c) by chance” (p. 667). Being in the world and minding the nagging feelings, paying attention to encounters, and looking for the reward in chance encounters is the task of post-qualitative inquiry, then. As St. Pierre (2017) has celebrated, “Derrida (1990) wrote that ‘deconstruction is neither a theory nor a philosophy . . . It is what happens’ (p. 85) in spite of our attempts to keep familiar, comfortable structures intact” (p. 687) to make the point that, similarly, post-qualitative inquiry is just “what happens” if you let it; one need not worry over how to do it.

Foundational Philosophy to Post-Qualitative Inquiry. Part 2: Transgressive Data

In post-qualitative inquiry, the traditional qualitative “data collection” portion of a research project has been problematized. For example, some information worth considering for one’s research cannot be “collected” by the researcher but might simply find the researcher when it is time—this is, of course, an example of “what happens.” St. Pierre, Jackson, and Mazzai (2016) described this, writing, “Still, some encounter with the world jolts us and demands our attention. It sets our curiosity to work, sends us to the library to read hoping to find others intrigued by the same problem, intrudes in our conversations with colleagues . . . saturates that liminal space-time between sleeping and waking; and eventually, re-orients our seeing, re-orients our thinking, re-orients being, so that orthodox distinctions fail” (p. 104). These encounters might not hold much legitimacy in traditional qualitative methods, but in post-qualitative inquiry, they are viable sources of information.

St. Pierre (1997) noted in one of her earliest pieces on post-qualitative inquiry that her qualitative project of studying white older women in her hometown in North Carolina was filled with “transgressive data,” or rather, encounters with “emotional data,” “sensual data,” and “dream data,” none of which could be coded and none of which she specifically sought out. Certainly, many have noted that ethnographic studies come with a great emotional burden (p. 181), but in this conception, emotional burdens could be data that make new knowledge. She wrote, “My dreams, then, added a layer of complexity to my study, foregrounding problems I encountered, and reconstructed and reproduced data in representations that helped me think about data differently” (St. Pierre, 1997, p. 183). Reinertsen (2016), who is also interested in this notion of unconventional, nagging information, described it as “An apparatus constantly working against my preoccupation with presence avoiding creating something connected to ‘truth’ beyond languages of signs and figures, notation, and documentation toward creative and in-depth thinking skills in teachers/students/me and/as research/er data” (p. 267). MacLure (2013) similarly noted that when we allow for such things, we are playing with various normative notions of data, responsible human subjects, hierarchies, identity, opposition, and other significant qualities of qualitative research methodologies, thus performing a materialist critique inherit to Deleuzian concepts. This essential element of post-qualitative inquiry “has radical implications for qualitative methodology” because “It would no longer allow us to work under the auspices of common sense . . .” (p. 660). This information would “demand and defy translation into codes and significations” (p. 663). St. Pierre and Jackson (2014) explained that being open to all data is a core element in post-qualitative inquiry: “In this approach, all data are equal and worth of analysis” (p. 716). They added that the analysis of such unconventional data should come with philosophical exploration: “However, we recommend instead using theory to determine, first, what counts as data, and second, what counts as ‘good’ or appropriate data” (p. 716).

In this formulation, there are no boundaries or beginnings to a study, as any moment may provide information to be not so much collected, but rather, considered. This engagement with the world demands a sense of engrossment in all that we do, dream, and read. It emphasizes the notion that “Close reading is required, always required” (St. Pierre et al., 2016, p. 103), an idea born from deconstruction—everything is readable beyond the written or spoken text, and that reading the world this way allows us “to examine any commonplace situation, any ordinary event or process, in order to think differently about that occurrence—to open up what seems ‘natural’ to other possibilities” (St. Pierre, 2000, p. 479). In other words, one way to think and see differently—to rupture an image—is to be so engrossed in even the most mundane thing so that we can see it differently than we see it when we habitually glance at it. McCoy (2012) suggested that “Producing and allowing for these types of encounters opens an orientation to theory and data that I have observed going by many names in poststructurally informed research that challenges simplistic realist ontology and relationally knowing subject” (p. 763), emphasizing how the research hinges on the encounter with the unexpected, and the unexpected has the potential to create new ontologies. All of the practices that emphasize this type of inquiry “bust things apart in unexpected ways by allowing for aleatory things that do not belong together, unraveling what can be thought toward new possibilities for critique that deal in complexity” (McCoy, 2012, p. 764). This is liberating in that we have fewer boundaries, but intimidating because of that.

Foundational Philosophy to Post-Qualitative Inquiry. Part 3: The Problem of Writing

This embrace and invitation of complexity and mess in our research certainly assists in creating new knowledge, but it also troubles notions of representing meaning through language. The act of writing no longer functions to produce conclusions. St. Pierre (1997) wrote that she discovered this issue while in the process of writing up her dissertation’s qualitative study. Faced with the transgressive data and the “turns” reading had caused her to take (the post-structural influence), writing only emphasized the problems of qualitative methodology, making her project nearly impossible to be written:

I immediately encountered all sorts of problems, many of which dealt with issues of language and linearity. The disjunction between my praxis and the signifiers I had been given to represent it was not unbearably troublesome, however, until I began to labor in the thinking that writing produces. Indeed, it was only when I struggled to write a traditional description of my ethnographic practices, my fieldwork, and to insert those practices into the categories provided by the grid of traditional methodology . . . that I experienced was Spivak (1992) calls “moments of bafflement.” (St. Pierre, 1997, p. 178)

Similarly, other scholars drawn to post-qualitative inquiry cite writing to represent meanings and conclusions as one of the most problematic parts of qualitative studies. Bridges-Rhoads (2015) described that she had to start writing as Foucault did: “not as a theorist who ‘constructs a general system either deductive of analytical, and applies it to different fields in a uniform way’ but as an experimenter ‘writ[ing] in order to change myself and in order not to think the same thing as before’” (p. 704); in other words, she abandoned conclusions and wrote for inquiry’s sake and personal or intellectual transformation. In Guttorm, Loytonen, Anttila, and Valkeemaki’s (2015) post-qualitative article, they sought to remove the “I” from writing by co-writing with others until the subject of authorship was dissolved. Honan and Bright (2016) celebrated troubling the dominant forms of graduate thesis papers to push against “logical, precise, clear, direct, and concise” (p. 736) writing to a looser form with less expectation to conform to established forms. Kuby et al. (2016) similarly questioned the academic manuscript conventions to suggest that once you have experienced a certain amount of theory, traditional form writing no longer does justice to ideas. I would say that, currently, in the post-qualitative inquiry movement, scholars are experimenting with how writing can serve them, though all would agree it has obvious limitations.

“One-Way Street” and the Ruptured Image of Thought

“One-Way Street,” like post-qualitative inquiry, asks us to think differently, and in doing so, we can take pleasure in its complexity and bafflement. This piece looks like a frustrating imbroglio of odd ponderings, but on thinking differently, it looks like beautiful, true inquiry. I propose that we can read the title of his essay as a metaphor for thinking so differently that we cannot return to our old ways of thinking. The title “One-Way Street” could be read as sham because nothing about this text is linear, as one might expect of a city street; Benjamin’s interest in contradiction and dialectics is obvious in a title like this. But an one-way street has another quality of interest: It takes you in a direction without the option of turning around and heading back from where you came, though you could turn off and go in a different direction. Benjamin, too, takes his readers somewhere from which they cannot easily return. His vignettes, careful presentations of important arguments about modernity and life, show no distinguishable methods, provide no citations, contain no clear conclusions, but work within dreams, referential citation, unconventional forms of time, and traumas. At the end of his essay, the reader is somewhere unfamiliar.

Benjamin plays with the concept of jolts that rupture our dogmatic images, as he is very interested in re-oriented seeing, thinking, and being to defy orthodox distinctions. In fact, Benjamin even describes this process on occasion. Consider the vignette Lost and Found Office (Benjamin, 1928/1996):

Articles lost.—What makes the very first glimpse of a village, a town, in the landscape so incomparable and irretrievable is the rigorous connection between foreground and distance. Habit has not yet done its work. As soon as we begin to find our bearings, the landscape vanished at a stroke, like the façade of a house as we enter it. It has not yet gained preponderance through a constant exploration that has become habit. Once we begin to find our way about, that earliest picture can never be restored.

Articles found.—The blue distance which never gives way to foreground or dissolves at our approach, which is not revealed spread-eagled and long-winded when reached but only looms more compact and threatening, is the painted distance of a backdrop. It is what gives state sets their incomparable atmosphere. (p. 468)

This text makes easy conversation with the ruptured image of thought that undergirds post-qualitative inquiry. When we encounter a large and new place, like a town we are walking toward, and it comes into vision, it is not yet understood. We are looking at it in a strange way, different from how we look at a familiar village. Space is not even the same, as the “rigorous connection between foreground and distance” provides the view. We have not yet come to separate them. We haven’t yet entered the town to have the scale of things vanish a memory of the landscape of it, and we have not yet come into the inside of the home, beginning to know it deeply. This is, very much, the process of something becoming—the newness and unfamiliarity that a chance encounter can provide with the object not-yet-known. Importantly, this is the description of an article lost, not found. Why? This reminds us how quickly the first encounter is gone and replaced by the explored. No longer does the image seem so unfamiliar that everything we are experiencing causes us to wonder what we are seeing. To “know” is to lose. Benjamin in conversation with the notion of the image of thought here suggests we might call what we come to know, not knowledge, but merely “habit,” destabilizing the authority that “know” has taken on and replacing it with the thing we wish to break, “habit.”

Here, what is found is a different landscape. Benjamin (1928/1996) posited that what is found is the landscape that “never gives way to foreground or dissolves at our approach.” The thing that does not allow you to see scale, walk inside, and know is the thing found; it is constantly becoming. This is a radical contradiction to conventional thought because the thing found is the exact that which evades you. Not only might it evade you, but it is the thing that looms. It might be threatening. Similarly, McCoy (2012) noted that when Deleuze “has what might count as an encounter, he asks himself, ‘does it disturb me?’” (p. 763). Being open to chance encounters means perhaps coming across the thing you will never be able to truly explore, never be able to explain; this thing may remain un-seeable and un-namable, and if it does, you have truly found something. This dialectic suggests that you would finally take on some authority in knowing if you celebrate that you don’t know the first thing about it.

“Lost” can be the status of a thing we cannot find and can also be a state of being. Because the state of being lost forces us into the unfamiliar, being lost can be a technique for encountering things that might rupture our dogmatic images of thought. Being lost is that disorienting state that eventually leads to re-orienting. Susan Sontag (1979) wrote that Benjamin learned maps to learn how to do precisely the opposite, get lost: “His goal is to be a competent street-map reader who knows how to stray” (p. 10). In the vignette Ordnance, Benjamin (1928/1996) seems to be getting at this point again, differently. He described going to see a “woman friend” in a town “unfamiliar” to him, where people spoke a language he did not know: “For two hours I walked the streets in solitude . . . From every gate a flame darted; each cornerstone sprayed sparks, and every streetcar came toward me like a figure engine” (p. 461). All this unknown stuff excited him, and he wondered if the woman friend might come from around a corner. He mentioned that had he encountered the woman friend while walking and had their eyes met, he “would have gone up like a powder keg” (p. 461). Walking around a town full of unknown everything causes all the orthodox distinctions to fail for Benjamin, especially as his curiosity about the whereabouts of his woman friend excites him and keeps him attentive to the details of the city. This little walk is literally explosive because he is coming to it as a stranger, which allows for a new way of seeing. Sontag (1979) explained further, “Once, waiting for someone in the Café des Duex Magots in Paris, he relates, he managed to draw a diagram of his life: It was like a labyrinth, in which each important relationship figures as ‘an entrance to the maze’” (p. 10). He walked those streets looking for his woman friend, embracing the maze she offered.

“One-Way Street” and Transgressive Data

In addition, Benjamin absorbed information at all times, including in the dream state. This is significant in conversation with post-qualitative research because St. Pierre (1997) specifically points toward dream information as productive in her early work on transgressive data, challenging conventional and legitimate evidence. Benjamin’s (1928/1996) vignette Breakfast Room opens with, “A popular tradition warns against recounting dreams the next morning on an empty stomach. In this state, though awake, one remains under the spell of the dream” (p. 445). He tells us that eating awakens our insides and not just our outsides, taking us out of a dream state and back into the real, where we can recount a story. We should tell our dreams “from the far bank, from broad daylight” (p. 445), from a place of memory rather than a place of sleep talking. This vignette ends: “The fasting man tells his dream as if he were talking in his sleep” (p. 445). He is, then, arguing that we should be less empirical in the conventional sense when we retell dreams and actually filter them through the problematic system of memory, layering them with the inaccuracy of retelling rather than the exactness of the present. Undoubtedly, Benjamin would want to distance himself from some of the dreams he describes because they were often disturbing; they were, for him, the messengers of things to which he had not tended. This is the “nagging” post-qualitative scholars have described, the thing in your research that keeps calling you back or calling you away. Rather than consider this notion of dreams in a Freudian context of the unconscious visiting us, we can think of it in post-qualitative context of research anti-data: Dreams have information that bolster our research, and when we refuse conventional method, dreams are then viable. Benjamin suggested that reducing the accuracy by getting away from their presence is the most effective use of dreams: Layer a dream through memory, temporality, telling and retelling, and the limits of language—then they have been handled properly.

More to the point, in the vignette Cellar, Benjamin (1928/1996) described dreaming of a schoolboy friend and also of addressing how his life came to be what it is in the same instant: “We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault, and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations!” (p. 445). The dream reveals these antiquities. Leslie (2013) described what Cellars might be about:

We do not track constantly how our life came to take on the shape it did, generated from a million tiny events and encounters. Foundational for the house of the self is the cellar, which is the oldest part. More is stored there than we care to know. Brutally and compulsorily, old work is shoved in there—such is the character of ritual. Ritual involves the sacrifice of other possibilities. Ritual is the name for the life that came to be, unconsciously. Dreams and failures are archived in the cellar too. Much is forgotten, until the moment when the house of the self is under sustained assault. When this occurs, our very foundations are rattled. Benjamin suggests that once this assault has occurred, we are cut adrift from our pasts and become fully transformed. (p. 416)

A dream reminds us of the possibilities we took for granted or did not follow, or reminds us of the millions of encounters we did not think about after their happening, but which rear up by force into our minds again. For Benjamin, any of these tiny memories (including memories of things that did not actually occur) that come back through dreaming prove to be disruptive and reveal the way in which he followed life as a habit, not seeing every encounter for what it offered. This is a wonderful example of how the notion of a ruptured image of thought can rely on the encounter transgressive data offer—the encounter can birth the rupture, thus these foundational philosophical concepts have an inter-dependence in post-qualitative inquiry that is easily at play in “One-Way Street.”

We can consider St. Pierre’s (1997) descriptions of her transgressive data that were “corrosive, painful,” “ongoing and wrenching” (p. 181) as similar to Benjamin’s disruptive dreams. She wrote,

I confess that I wonder sometimes about the dreams I have forgotten and fear that many important data are still unintelligible. Even though they were never officially accounted for, the dreams remembered and those deferred linger in some dislocated space of my text, producing dissonance, alterity, and confusion. My dreams enabled and legitimized a complexity of meaning that science prohibits. (p. 183)

Benjamin (1928/1996) wrote that, in a dream, he sits with an aged Goethe and they eat. Goethe has trouble rising so Benjamin gets up to help him: “Touching his elbow, I began to weep with emotion” (the vignette Dining Hall, p. 446). In this dream, too, a table was set for Goethe and all Benjamin’s relatives, but realizing there were so many seats, he knew there were places for all his ancestors too, launching him into a different articulation of time or mortality. In this case, dreams are useful data because of the way they push at not only what we have not tended to but also structures we have taken for granted and not acknowledged as the man-made inventions they are, such as time. Benjamin plays with this notion through “One-Way Street,” suggesting that if we pay close attention to signs, we can foretell a death of a friend or other things: “Don’t you see in the flames a sign from yesterday evening, in a language you only now understand?” (the vignette Madame Ariane: Second Courtyard on the Left, p. 483).

In addition, Benjamin celebrates other types of information, such as joyous encounters that provide opportunities for gathering artifacts to inform new knowledges. This is a shifting away from habitual research through the means of complete engrossment in what we are doing (perhaps to get lost, even). Benjamin’s interest in children was undoubtedly a reverence for how they did things without habit or convention, especially in how they could construct worlds so different from the dogmatic world many of us live in. He wrote in the vignette Child Hiding (Benjamin, 1928/1996) that a child can become “enclosed in the material world” in the way “a man who is being hanged become[s] aware of the reality of rope and wood” (p. 465). Despite the melancholic imagery, it is a good thing to be so engrossed in a room that “he himself is the door” (p. 465). In Child Reading (Benjamin, 1928/1996), he wrote, “Reading, he covers his ears” (p. 463) to notice the possibilities within the text. This engrossment allows him to be “unspeakably touched by the deeds, the words that are exchanged; and, when he gets up, he is covered over and over by the snow of his reading” (p. 463). The inability to speak afterward about what happened suggests that what happened was too different to represent through language. Similarly, in the vignette Chinese Curios (Benjamin, 1928/1996), Benjamin explained, “Only who walks the road on foot learns the power it commands, and of how, from the very scenery that for the flier is only the unfurled plain, it calls forth distances, belvederes, clearings, prospects at each of its turns” (p. 448). Regardless of whether it is reading or living, coming to the task with engrossment permits information to be accumulated. Thinking again of St. Pierre’s (1997) above lamentation that science limits us, Benjamin describes that in a child’s approach: “Magical experience becomes science” (p. 466), replacing the conventionally empirical not only with the experiential but also with the ethereal.

Magical experience is messy as a mode of research, particularly when we are combining so many things that are unpresentable or unrecognizable. Lather’s (2013) description “QUAL 4.0,” which includes post-qualitative inquiry, includes “methodology-to-come” (p. 653), a place where we can “produce different knowledge and produce knowledge differently” (St. Pierre, 1997, p. 175). Lather (2013) wrote, “This inquiry cannot be tidily described in textbooks or handbooks. There is no methodological instrumentality to be unproblematically learned” (p. 635). Likewise, Benjamin revered children for their chaotic ways of being. In Untidy Child (Benjamin, 1928/1996), the child collected from everything around him, and nothing he has is organized into subcollections. This helps us understand how we might perform post-qualitative inquiry by thinking with whatever comes to us. Benjamin describes a child’s way, writing, “Each stone he finds, each flower he picks, and each butterfly he catches is already the start of a collection, and every single thing he owns makes up one great collection” (p. 465). This collection is not just objects, but also the unseeable: “Scarcely has he entered life than he is a hunter. He hunts the spirits whose trace he scents in things” (p. 465). And while Benjamin uses the language of “hunter” to suggest that the child tracks and finds things, he also emphasizes that the child allows things to happen to him: “His life is like a dream: he knows nothing lasting; everything seemingly happens to him by chance” and when he comes home with his new item, he seeks to “cast out its spell” (p. 465).

“One-Way Street” and the Problem of Writing

The issue of writing it all down to explain conclusive findings is problematic in Benjamin’s work just as it is in post-qualitative inquiry. Mehlman (1993) explained this engagement with the failure of representation in Benjamin: “meaning itself . . . functions as a form of ‘censorship,’” which is why Benjamin celebrated the notion that “‘Children . . . do not allow themselves to be censored by meaning’” (p. 6). In other words, there is something better than representation and meaning, something children are able to access. This idea threads through much of Benjamin’s work, but in “One-Way Street,” in particular he conceived of successful writing as exactly the failure to write toward conclusions and represent meaning. In his description, fragments, and unfinished ideas are the pleasure and the goal of a great writer. In the vignette Standard Clock, he posited (Benjamin, 1928/1996).

To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they work throughout their lives. For only the more feeble and distracted take an inimitable pleasure in closure, feeling that their lives have thereby been given back to them. For the genius each caesura, and the heavy blows of fate, fall like gentle sleep itself into his workshop labor. Around it he draws a charmed circle of fragments. “Genius is application.” (p. 446)

This concept of writing privileges the writing that takes up a lifetime and which appears fragmented and never finished; to be happy with an end to one’s research is “feeble” and “distracted.” Much like Bridges-Rhoads’ (2015) need to transform herself through writing, Benjamin’s concept of writing suggested that the writer’s true occupation is a life-long project that never reaches completion. Further, the goal should be to have our lives taken from us by the writing, as a writer who finishes a project feels “that their lives have thereby been given back to them” (Benjamin, 1928/1996, p. 446). In this, we see a dependence on his emphasis on engrossment in tasks to consider different types of information and his philosophy of writing. For him, engrossment in tasks is at the core of the writing process—in what Benjamin (1928/1996) called “self-immersion” (the vignette Si parla Italiano, p. 480)—as this allows the writer to become the project; thus, any finished project is a death in itself. Finally, the last sentence in this section is not an embrace of the social sciences obsession with the importance of application. For Benjamin, “genius is application” represents one of three quotes we find in “One-Way Street,” quoted to indicate it is a German maxim. McFarland’s (2012) reading of Benjamin’s use of this cliché stated, “the text strikes the reader with the force that changing colors and singing silence strike the questioning child, a text that cannot be institutionalized into a somber pedagogic procedure but that lingers outside the received categories of communication” (p. 303). Benjamin preaches unfamiliar notions that oppose all commonplaces about what a writer is supposed to do, then he ends on a commonplace notion to jolt our attention, which blurs the meaning of the maxim altogether. The genius of this application is to apply what scholars know to be true—inquiry is ongoing and unending—and then to actually apply it: avoid constant conclusions.

In addition to privileging fragments as a writing/life ethic, fragments allow for the creation of more writing and exploration from others. Fragmented writing has a tradition in writing aesthetics and fragmented prose style, but in this case, I am not discussing fragments as a literary technique but rather in their use in the social sciences as a way to challenge the notion of the “conclusion.” Law (2004) wrote of this, too, when he suggested, “we will need to unmake many of our methodological habits, including . . . the expectation that we can usually arrive at more or less stable conclusions about the way things really are” (p. 9). Something unfinished suggests there is more to do, whereas very conclusive papers deter others from entering the project. For Benjamin, writing was a teaching process, almost an ethics of pedagogy, where the writer should be of use to others. Marcus (2016) wrote,

“One-Way Street” is a work permanently in progress. It enacts the credo Benjamin set down in 1934: “An author who teaches a writer nothing teaches nobody anything. The determining factor is the exemplary character of a production that enables it, first, to lead other producers to this production, and secondly, to present them with an improved apparatus for their use. And this apparatus is better to the degree that it leads consumers to production, in short that it is capable of making co-workers out of readers or spectators.” (p. xxv)

Past the Marxist language Benjamin used to describe a writing process, there is a strong post-qualitative impetus that is similar to a post-qualitative article by Guttorm et al. (2015), where they practice dissolving the subject-author through confusing the “I,” to Honan and Bright’s (2016) toying with the thesis, and to Kuby et al.’s (2016) troubling of writing form through theoretical intervention. In another play against tradition, Benjamin (1928/1996) described how he did justice to his own ideas through referential citation rather than direct citation: “Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who lead out, armed, and relieve the idle stroller of his conviction” (the vignette Hardware p. 481), ultimately muddling the relationship between his ideas and those who inspire him to write, or maybe muddling ideas to a greater extreme, into the realm of the multiple.

We might ask, then, if Benjamin frames the scholarly writing project as one where readers can become the coworkers of writers, can we conceive of post-qualitative work as a collective, unending project, one promoted through reading, then writing, then reading, then writing, ad infinitum? In some ways, it seems Benjamin is perhaps just playing around with ideas of writing as inquiry, which some post-qualitative scholars have also begun working with, and which have a longer tradition in other fields, such as rhetoric and composition. Or perhaps Benjamin’s ideas could serve us differently, in helping to deconstruct the subject-researcher, even if that was not Benjamin’s original intention with his project. I think both are possible and useful.

Against Dogma in Benjamin and Post-Qualitative Inquiry

I think it is easy to find examples of what post-qualitative inquiry could look like in the work of Walter Benjamin, especially in his essays that represent his more sociological or pedagogical interests (or the very postmodern The Arcades Project), but actually reading his work and making any sense of it requires thinking with such a different image that it is a labor in itself. So much of it involves relieving the expectations of understanding in exchange for allowing for close reading and moments of bafflement. Just as Benjamin (1928/1996) remarked that children have the ability to “bring together, in the artifact produced in play, materials of widely differing kinds in a new, intuitive relationship” (p. 449) that do not imitate the artifacts adults have already made, we must attend to life and our work this way, “haunting any site where things are being visibly worked on” (Benjamin, 1928/1996, Construction Site, p. 449) and could be worked on, disallowing institutionalized conceptions about what research must look like to “find its way” (Benjamin, 1928/1996, p. 450) into our scholarship, because “methods, their rules, and even more methods’ practice not only describe but also help to produce the reality that they understand” (Law, 2004 p. 5). Post-qualitative inquiry might have a lofty goal of shedding all the old images and attempting to research with no image, “But this necessary state of intense and uncomplaining attention could, because we are in mysterious contact with the power besieging us, really call forth a miracle” (Benjamin, 1928/1996, Imperial Panorama, p. 451).