Unrepresentable Justice: Looking for a Postqualitative Theory of Social Change

Abstract

I believe posthumanist philosophy promises the possibility of a more robustly ethical and political practice of social inquiry. I do not, however, believe analytic and rhetorical tools have been developed that deliver amply on that promise. This is less a reflection on the quality of efforts to do so, than it is on the scope of the challenge before us. Since this is an essay about what “postqualitative means to me,” I speak from within the desire to see that promise more fully realized and the belief that there is much work yet to be done. Simply stating that concern directly and describing the grounds for it, however, would involve a performative contradiction. It would presume the challenge is an epistemic one that yields to better information and clearer representation. The challenge, however, lies within the limitations of representation itself and the way convention compels us to address our scholarship to a humanist spectator subject, as opposed to seeking to transform the subject of address. This essay, therefore, departs from standard prose conventions in an effort to both do and describe what needs to be done.

Keywords

posthumanism postqualitative social justice new materialisms answerability performativity

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,

Come, you may stand upon my

Back and face your distant destiny,

But seek no haven in my shadow.

I will give you no more hiding place down here.

Maya Angelou, 1993 On the Pulse of the Morning

Whoever says You does not have something for his object. For wherever there is something, there is also another something; every It borders on other Its; It is only by virtue of bordering on others. But when You is said there is no something. You has no borders.

Whoever says You does not have something: he has nothing. But he stands in relation.

Martin Buber, 1970 I and Thou, p. 55

You are a researcher, but you no longer know what research means—or even what “meaning” means. You have spent enough time reading in the post theories—poststructuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, posthumanism, postqualitative research—that the objects of your inquiries have dissolved in your hands in response to your effort to grasp them. The idea that research will reveal the world to you, will tell the “truth” about things and that “truth” will make the world better, is in ruins as Elizabeth St. Pierre and Wanda Pillow (2002) say.

The critiques that brought you to this place have been narrated as liberations, a new practice of freedom, a throwing off the chains of a false foundationalism, waking from the dream that our efforts to know the world are innocent. Gender is a discursive contrivance (Butler, 2011; Halberstam, 2011). Mental health is a construct (Davis, 2016; Foucault, 2003). Race is a fiction around which brutal material systems of oppression are organized (Gilroy, 1998, 2000; Hall, 1996). Colonization has infiltrated the very possibility of thought and so the subaltern cannot speak (Spivak, 1988). Materiality returns, but this time with agency (Barad, 2007). You get it. You need to be freed from the taken-for-grantedness of concept, referent, and identity, their always already present status, if you are to have a chance at contributing to real social change.

And yet—and yet—in this postqualitative moment that allegedly “enables something else to be thought and to happen” (St. Pierre, 2014, p. 4), relatively little that contributes materially to social amelioration seems to be happening (King, 2017; Latour, 2004; Tuck, 2010; Weheliye, 2014). Yes, perhaps some of us are less bound by rigid constructs of gender identity and foundationalist justifications for racist attitudes. But those are negative accomplishments of a cosmopolitan freedom. Movements away from things. Meanwhile, these social ills seem to persist, even thrive, under conditions of critical anti-foundationalism. The movement toward something, the embrace of new effective/affective solidarities have been less forthcoming.

The pronouncements of the new possibilities to come, the justice to come, if you can just shed this or that encumbrance, proliferate. As if there is a will to good works just waiting to be unleashed, if only we can find the keys to the mental lock around our heart and hands. But the inquiries that deliver on that promise, that could inform acts of amelioration on a scale that feel satisfactory, are difficult to identify. You are not sure such a will to good works exists premade. If it were, wouldn’t it have found a means of enactment by now? It seems to you as if solidarities that can bring amelioration need to be built, not just by clearing out barriers with critique, but by fostering affective affirmations and ethical commitments. After the posts you frequently feel further away from such actions. If the postqualitative critique of research is a liberation, you feel it is a strange one; one with significant, almost intolerable, costs.

Justice Requires More Than Revelation

Your discomfort is not nostalgia for a reality you can name. Well . . . maybe a little. But not for a retrograde gender essentialism. Not for a simplistic reduction of materiality to economics. Not for an identity politics that denies the salience of intersectionality or glosses the violence of reifying inherited identity categories. You remain persuaded by the anti-foundationalist and anti-humanist critiques of naturalized social binaries. You understand that the violence being done in the world is a consequence, at least in part, of the circulation of cultural tropes that your research risks circulating further. Every word, every keystroke feels to you like a presumption and a risk.

You see how the aspiration to describe authoritatively the work that needs to get done presumes an imperial perspective, what Donna Haraway (1988) calls a “God trick of seeing everything from nowhere” (p. 581). And this god’s eye view is part of a difficult recursive problem. It is a manufactured confidence that does violence, erases what it fails to affirm. Every certainty and solidarity is built on exclusion, despite emancipatory intentions, as queer theorists have made clear repeatedly (Butler, 2011; Halberstam, 2011). The rhetoric of revealed truth often works against inclusiveness and underwrites the authority of empire. Appreciating the limits of the idea that simply describing injustice will lead to good ends feels like escaping from something big, from a trap of immense almost mystical proportions.

But escape into what? The primary theory of social change operating in the West for centuries—the one Universities and social movements are most often organized around—is left behind in this escape. To change the world, you first reveal what is wrong with it. You make people see the problems, expose the contradictions, describe alternatives, so they can do things differently. The truth precedes the good—Socrates and Plato’s legacy. This presumption animates positivist research, critical scholarship, even the logic of protest marches organized by activists. The goal is to inform and educate so action can be made possible. This is why you enrolled in graduate studies—to speak the truth to power. And as naïve as that now feels, some part of you still wants the leverage of truth in your struggle to do some good.

Finding yourself on the other side of some crossing that it is difficult to see a way back from, it is no longer clear what research or knowledge is supposed to do. You look around and you see things that need doing—whether it is teaching children to read, preparing doctors and nurses to better care for people, promoting fair housing policy in your community. Or perhaps you think on a larger scale, about resisting the global tides of class stratification, misogyny, resurgent racism, anti-immigrant hysteria, backlash against modest efforts to advance gender and sexuality freedom, the corrosive ongoing effects of settler colonialism, the encroachment of technology on our inner lives. All these things are materially real in their effects and urgently in need of address, but frustratingly difficult to definitively represent.

The Postqualitative Turn as a Dare to Commit

The disappointment of not having a clear path forward peels at you, leaves you feeling perpetually touchy, divided, over-exposed. Then you get the email from David Carlson. An invitation to write in response to the question “What does ‘postqualitative’ mean to you?” You stare, then rub your eyes and pinch the bridge of your nose. Really? The phrasing is almost cruel—as in Lauren Berlant’s (2011) cruel optimism.

The question takes the form of a (mocking?) dare. It refers to “postqualitative” as a quality that is actually out there, awaiting our effort to make meaning of it, to represent it to ourselves and others—despite the fact that postqualitative research theory rejects the project of representing meaning as if it is a thing awaiting our description of it. The question invites “you” to speak of a personal experience of postqualitative research or theory, even though one of the projects of postqualitative research is to problematize personal testimony and personal experience as a source of authoritative meaning (Guttorm et al., 2015; Jackson, 2013; Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; MacLure, 2013, 2017; Mazzei, 2013; Mazzei & Jackson, 2017; St. Pierre, 2004) .

A question presumes an answer. You have no answers. You do, however, have what Leigh Patel (2015) calls answerability. Obligations to answer to a chorus of pervasive community needs, to respond, to act. But you have no answers. And how do you act without answers?

You take a slow breath. Perhaps the question was just an unintentional slip back into the humanist meaning making discourse that postqualitative theorists say we all continue to make (MacLure, 2017). David Carlson is a smart person, but also a kind person. You don’t think it is likely he intends to mock. Maybe to dare. A dare would be clever. Either way, dare or slippage, you begin to think the prompt will be generative. It invites authors to make a commitment to meaning exactly where such commitment cannot be justified as either true or as simply personal. It lands right at the intersection of St. Pierre’s (2011) postqualitative critique of meaning and the need, as an embodied socially and historically located scholar, to act in ways that have beneficial consequence, however contingent the grounds are for that action.

Language Alone Won’t Save Us

So if you took the dare—which is really not just this dare, but a dare to continue the practice of writing as an act of social change after a century of critique has convinced you of the deeply compromised nature of any act of representing the social—if you took that dare, what would you do?

How would you avoid the slippage back into a naïve practice of representation and a reproduction of the totalizing authority such representation presumes? You could refrain from making claims. But it is hard to see how silence helps by itself. You could work with others, using community participatory action research (CPAR) protocols, share the responsibility involved in inquiry. But in your experience sharing the work of inquiry with others still involves communication and representation. CPAR is compelling, but it is subject to most of the same risks of overreach that haunt traditional academic research (Coombes et al., 2014; Kemmis, 2006; Sandwick et al., 2018).

You could turn your attention inward, point out the limitations of representations—highlight their irreducible historicity, expose their inevitable reliance on a metaphysics of presence, refer to them as a reterritorializing of immanence. But that work has been done. Repeatedly. And it really isn’t that much of a departure. It is a rejection of representation that nonetheless takes the form of representation. As Maggie MacLure (2017) said in her 2016 keynote address to the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, “I think we continue to underestimate the sheer difficulty of shedding the anthropocentrism that is built into our world-views and our language habits.” (p. 55)

The English language, you know, is not your friend in this work. You could try some other type of language. You have read that some Indigenous languages enable the construction of very different kinds of subjectivities and modes of being (Bunge, 1984; Rosiek et al., 2020). Perhaps you and your audiences have access to such language. If not, the Indigenous studies literature, nonetheless, provides proof of plausibility for what Indigenous feminist poet Paula Gunn Allen (1986) calls going beyond “mere preachments of truth” to using “the sacred power of utterance . . . to shape and mold, to direct and determine, the forces that surround and govern human life and the life of all related things” (p. 56).

You could manipulate the language you have. You long ago turned away from third-person prose of expository writing and the totalizing pretensions it harbors. For a while you were attracted to first-person prose, the kind often used by autoethnographers to avoid the implication of omniscience in third-person prose, while still retaining a claim to a certain kind of realism—the realism of lived experience. This has come to feel to you like a faux transparency, however. Every representation of a self in such texts is crafted, a product of decisions influenced by discourses with histories well beyond your individual experience (Mazzei & Jackson, 2017; Scott, 1991). The stories we tell are not the experience itself, nor even entirely our stories (Rosiek & Snyder, 2018).

You don’t assume that every call for us to listen to personal experiences is born of naïveté about these foundationalist issues. As a naïve realism remains the coin of the current empire, you find it difficult to find fault with people whose priority is addressing the violent excesses of empire and whom, consequently, choose to traffic in that coin. But when you write it, first-person realism feels duplicitous. Both third- and first-person prose are caught in a web of conventions that presume more certainty than you feel.

You could experiment with second-person prose. It might have an epistolary feel, a direct address to the reader—a form with which Brook Hofsess (2016), Shawn Wilson (2008), and Eve Tuck (2009) have experimented. There could also be some ambiguity built in, with the “you” also referring to both the reader and the author. In that way you would avoid the totalizing pretensions of third-person prose, but also the isolating authority of appeals to private experience. The ambiguity could express a sense of possibly, but not necessarily, shared experience. A performative invitation to solidarity such as that contained within the Rastafarian expression “I and I” that collapses the distinction between “you & me.”

Second-person prose, however, would not escape already established conventions. It can also carry the tone of imperative and command. The presumption of shared experience, even if invitational, always risks erasing difference. Words inevitably escape your intentions. And, if you are honest, you can’t really trust your own intentions—or ask others to do so.

If you can find no way out of the limitations of your language, maybe any language, still you can struggle against them. Performatively, if not effectively, refuse convention. Bang on the cage with your cup. Taunt the guards.

The Risk of Desiring More

Of course, you want more. As real as the constraints of language are, some part of you believes that is not the whole story. Attributing your difficulties finding a postqualitative practice of social change exclusively on deeply encoded habits of language and thought feels inadequate, like a tragic pose—sophisticated, beautiful even, but somehow self-insulating. It leaves you in the familiar territory of describing things, even if what you are describing is the limiting conditions of your descriptive activity.

There is an affect here being deferred to. Consider that postqualitative research theory begins as a step back from the imperial spectator subject of positivism—including the positivism found in interpretivism, grounded theory, and phenomenology. To this is added a step back from the subversive subject of the critical theory disciplines, traditions of thought that trouble naïve empiricism but retain a foundationalist realism and promise an authoritative insider knowledge that can lead to real change. This includes standpoint theory, critical race theory, as well as Marxism and post-Marxism.

The alternative to the modified foundationalism of critical theory is the aporiatic suspension of all foundationalism found in poststructuralism. This offers you yet another step back, this time into what Ricoeur (2008) calls a hermeneutics of suspicion and a subjectivity characterized by ironic regard for all representations. But even this is eventually found lacking. Posthumanism emerges as a step back from the overemphasis on linguistic representation in poststructuralism.

Each step back is a hard-won technical achievement—an advance of analytic rigor you admire and find enjoyable. The persistent overarching form, however, is one of constantly stepping away from something. If you are honest, it looks to you like a flight response. Flight responses are based on the affect of fear. Which suggests a question: what anxiety is fueling all this critical backpedaling?

Whatever it is, it must be terrifying. Not just to you, but to many others as well. Two millennia have been spent engineering a foundationalist discourse that tells us the conclusions we come to are the only ones possible—the truth, the best practices, the most efficient practice, the exclusively logical conclusion. We are not responsible for the stances we take. The world, reality, forces them on us.

Even when the more critical, post discourses come into play, this anxiety is manifest. The shelter of foundationalism is replaced with a sheltering fog of critical suspension. Instead of actions justified by a deluded confidence, you refrain from offering authoritative representations. Analysis shifts to enforcing anti-foundationalism, a compulsive aversion to binaries, metaphysics, and explicit prescriptions for justice. Meanwhile truth becomes truthiness and the world continues to churn and burn.

Either way—with positivism or poststructuralism—you still do not have to take responsibility for advocating for particular forms of social relations. What remains to be developed is a practice of committing to specific onto-ethical entanglements, to what Sylvia Wynter calls specific genres of being, instead of others—without foundational justification (Wynter & McKittrick, 2015).

It is not clear to you what such a practice would look like. It is not that anything is possible. But many constitutions of subject–object or agent–agent relations are possible. If ontology is relational and pluralistic, then every act of relation is constituted by an inevitable refusal of other possible ontological relations. Once refused, those alternative possibilities and the cascade of related possibilities for yourself and others are lost.

Is this the anxiety provoking part? Not a fear of being unwittingly caught in old ways of thinking. Instead a fear of losing worlds of possibility as you affirm other worlds? Of course, you are afraid. This is an understandable fear. Who are you to abandon whole futurities under the banner of singular truths, best practices, or optimal efficiencies? You lack a language for even talking about that kind of ontological loss, for thinking about it. And if you can’t name a loss, then you can’t acknowledge the reality of it, take responsibility for it, mourn it. That is a recipe for a brittle arrogance and collective melancholia (Butler, 1997).

This then is what postqualitative “means to you.” It means to stand at a threshold of many ontological, ethical, and political possibilities, to be faced with an alleged freedom and to have a presentiment of existential loss that will come with any course of action you take. Even tarrying on that threshold is an action. The action and loss are always already underway.

You know what you need to do. You need to risk committing to representations, without the tricky hubris of pretending to be a god. You probably need to do it with others, with humility, because the risks are not just your own. The representations you generate—constrained by semi-malleable materiality, suffuse with imagination—should offer not authoritative claims, but invitations to futurities worth having.

In this way, your research becomes less a coercive revelation, and more like committing to a cause among many worthy causes, participating in a collective gamble on what the world can be.

Do you dare?

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Jerry Lee Rosiek

Author Biography

Jerry Lee Rosiek is professor of Education Studies at the University of Oregon where he teaches courses on the cultural foundations of education, the racial politics of education practice and policy, and qualitative research methodology. His scholarship has experimented with the use of fiction and narrative modes of representations and is informed by revisionist pragmatism, posthumanist philosophy, critical race theory, and Indigenous studies literature. His writing has appeared in journals such as Harvard Educational Review, Education Theory, Educational Researcher and Phi Delta Kappan and his book, Resegregation as Curriculum (coauthored with Kathy Kinslow), won the American Association for Teaching and Curriculum 2017 Book of the Year Award.

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