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The posts continue: becoming

a
Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre
a
Department of Educational Theory and Practice , The University
of Georgia , Athens , GA , USA
Published online: 06 Jun 2013.

To cite this article: Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre (2013) The posts continue: becoming, International
Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26:6, 646-657, DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2013.788754

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 International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2013
Vol. 26, No. 6, 646–657, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2013.788754

The posts continue: becoming

Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre*

Department of Educational Theory and Practice, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA,
USA
(Received 19 March 2013; final version received 19 March 2013)

This paper describes assumptions of representational logic and phenomenology

that organize much of Enlightenment humanism and one of its knowledge
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projects, conventional humanist qualitative methodology. The author argues that

the ontological critiques of “post” theorists, including Foucault, Derrida,
Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Deleuze and Guattari, were set aside in favor of
epistemological projects following World War II and that, in general, the “posts”
had little effect on that methodology. Those critiques are now being put to work
and extended in the new empiricism and new materialism to re-imagine being,
always an ethical task. Whether humanist qualitative inquiry can survive the
ontological turn is a question to consider.
Keywords: post; qualitative; research

In his archaeological and genealogical analyses, Foucault (1966/1970) studied various

systems of thought in different historical periods and examined how each had created
an “order of things” that cohered for a time until it did not. He wrote as follows:
The fundamental codes of a culture – those governing its language, its schemas of
perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices –
establish for every man … the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and
within which he will be at home. At the other extremity of thought, there are the
scientific theories or the philosophical interpretations which explain why order exists
in general, what universal law it obeys, what principle can account for it, and why this
particular order has been established and not some other. (p. xx)

In other words, Foucault explained that different cultural codes produce systems of
thought that enable different ontologies and epistemologies. He was not interested
in establishing some rational narrative of historical progress or in unearthing the
meanings behind a particular order. Instead, he wrote that in his historical work he
attended to “chance, discontinuity, and materiality” (Foucault, 1971/1972, p. 231)
in the order of things – seemingly insignificant and random material and discursive
irruptions that, over time, enabled something different to be thought and lived – a
different order of things.
Scholars whose work has been labeled “post” (e.g. postmodern, poststructural,
post-Fordist, posthuman, post-emancipatory, postfoundational, postcolonial,
postsubjective, and so on) provided a diverse array of analyses to interrogate the

*Email: stpierre@uga.edu

Ó 2013 Taylor & Francis

 International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 647

ontological and epistemological order of things in Enlightenment humanism. There

are differences among scholars in each of those systems of thought – Enlightenment
humanism and the “posts” – some of which I have described elsewhere and will
not repeat here (St. Pierre, 2000). For that reason, Butler (1992) questioned our
motives in grouping the diverse and conflicting work of scholars into such large,
overarching categories:

Do all these theories have the same structure (a comforting notion to the critic who
would dispense with them all at once)? Is the effort to colonize and domesticate these
theories under the sign of the same, to group them synthetically and masterfully under
a single rubric, a simple refusal to grant the specificity of these positions, an excuse
not to read, and not to read closely? (p. 5)

I agree with Butler about the importance of reading and reading closely. I am espe-
cially concerned that some of the work organizing itself under categories called,
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variously, the “new empiricism,” the “new materialism,” and the “ontological turn,”
has casually dismissed the “posts” as too “discursive” or “linguistic” to attend to
the material and the empirical (but this is an old story). I continue to disagree with
that position because in several decades of reading the post theorists, I have found
the material, the empirical, and the ontological everywhere, as is evidenced by Fou-
cault’s commitment to the material in the quote above from one of his early books.
In this paper, I argue that the posts provided extensive critiques of Enlighten-
ment humanism’s ontologies as well as its epistemologies and its science and that
the material is always already completely imbricated with the linguistic and discur-
sive in that work. I believe, however, that ontology – always so difficult to think
differently – was eclipsed to a great extent by what seemed to be urgent epistemo-
logical concerns in the last half of the twentieth century. Now, I think those
ontological critiques, which have been available in the posts for decades, are being
mobilized and put to work, sometimes without attribution.

A focus on knowledge
I begin with a reminder that after World War II, scholars, many of whom were
activists and public intellectuals whom we have since labeled “post,” provided anal-
yses for examination of Enlightenment humanism’s descriptions of knowledge,
power, language, discourse, reality, the empirical, the subject, agency, freedom, and
so on – topics any system of thought describes. Spivak (1993) wrote the following
about what compelled their work and identified some of their specific methods of
analysis that address both ontological and epistemological concerns. I have noted in
brackets the theorists attached to each method:

The critique of humanism in France was related to the perceived failure of the Euro-
pean ethical subject after the War. The second wave in the midsixties, coming in the
wake of the Algerian revolution, sharpened this in terms of disciplinary practice in the
humanities and social sciences because, as historians, philosophers, sociologists, and
psychologists, the participants felt that their practice was not merely a disinterested pur-
suit of knowledge, but productive in the making of human beings. It was because of
this that they did not accept unexamined human experience as the source of meaning
and the making of meaning as an unproblematic thing. And each one of them offered a
method that would challenge the outlines of a discipline: archaeology [Foucault], gene-
alogy [Foucault], power/knowledge reading [Foucault], schizo-analysis [Deleuze &
 648 E.A. St. Pierre

Guattari], rhizo-analysis [Deleuze & Guattari], nonsubjective psychoanalysis [Lacan],

affirmative deconstruction [Derrida], paralogic legitimation [Lyotard]. (p. 274)

There are quite a few references in that long quotation to knowledge and meaning,
and the methods Spivak listed continue to enable powerful critiques of the
epistemological projects of humanism in which we ask what counts as knowledge
and whose knowledge counts, how knowledge becomes foundational and is used to
secure truth, the imbrication of knowledge and relations of power, the links between
knowledge and ethics, how knowledge produces reality, and so on. But the very
idea of epistemology was critiqued by “post” theories. Butler (1992), for example,
wrote that the “epistemological point of departure in philosophy is inadequate”
(p. 8) and argued that epistemological foundations are always contingent, never
secured. Spivak (1993) noted that “deconstruction has always been about the limits
of epistemology” (p. 125). World War II proved to many that the Enlightenment’s
promises that knowledge can be innocent and outside power relations and that true
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knowledge will set us free were not only false but destructive and violent.
About the same time that Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, and
Lacan put their methods to work, those who participated in the social movements
of the 1960s–1980s also began to critique western epistemological projects that
marginalized certain knowledges. Their identity politics were often grounded in
essentialist descriptions of gender, race, sexuality, and so on and so remained within
Enlightenment humanism’s enclosure. One of their first tasks was to recover knowl-
edges of the oppressed that had been suppressed. In addition, their descriptions of
situated knowledges (Haraway, 1988), standpoint theory (Harding, 1986; Hartsock,
1983), and “an insurrection of subjugated knowledges” (Foucault, 1980, p. 81)
became available. Some of their knowledge projects employed “post” analyses;
others did not. And though the nature of being was completely imbricated in that
knowledge work, I believe it was seldom addressed directly. Foucault (1984/1997)
noted how, in Descartes’s work, epistemology trumped ontology:

Reading Descartes, it is remarkable to find in the Meditations this same spiritual con-
cern with the attainment of a mode of being where doubt was no longer possible, and
where one could finally know [connait]. But by thus defining the mode of being to
which philosophy gives access, one realizes that this mode of being is defined entirely
in terms of knowledge, and that philosophy in turn is defined in terms of the develop-
ment of the knowing [connaissant] subject, or of what qualifies the subject as such.
(p. 294)

Given the pervasiveness of Descartes’ cogito in western thought and science for
over 300 years, we should not be surprised that issues of knowledge overtake issues
of being in our work.
In the 1980s, about the time the social movements were coming into their own,
qualitative inquiry – informed by interpretive cultural anthropology but unable to
escape the hold of positivist social science – was conceived as well (see, e.g.
Erickson, 1986; Lincoln & Guba, 1985) to resist so-called value-free scientific
knowledge and make public the knowledge and everyday lived experiences of the
oppressed, the silenced, and the lost and forgotten in the service of social justice. In
that way, the new methodology was a powerful tool for researchers in the social
movements. Its face-to-face methods of data collection used in natural settings –
interviewing and observation – were especially helpful in gathering the stories of
 International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 649

the oppressed and countering the rage for quantification that disappeared people into
numbers. Its focus on culture and the authentic context of everyday life became
increasingly important in explaining why things were as they were, so much so that
we began substituting the word “cultural” for “social” in our research reports.
Today, I find that kind of empirical work increasingly confused, borrowing, as it
does, simultaneously from phenomenology and positivism. At any rate, I would
argue that the posts have had little effect on the humanist underpinnings of qualita-
tive inquiry, chiefly because its ontology remains intact.
Given the nature of the historical and political period following World War II, it
is not surprising that epistemology – knowledge, knowledge, knowledge – was front
and center across the humanities and social sciences. We had witnessed world-wide
devastation caused by “knowledge for knowledge’s sake.” Those who had gone to
war knew well that different cultures produce different knowledges and practices.
The social movements encouraged us to embrace multiculturalism and diversity,
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and, because we wanted to hear everyone’s voices and know what they knew, we
invented new methodologies to capture that knowledge. It seemed urgent to disrupt
disciplinary, exclusionary canons by including the knowledge of the dispossessed.
To that end, twentieth-century knowledge projects of Enlightenment humanism con-
tinued unabated (and still do) though the “posts” had introduced a counter system
of thought that critiqued not only humanism’s epistemology but also its ontology.

Ontology in the posts

Ontology was a high priority for “post” theorists, and their critiques of representa-
tional logic and phenomenology, which I discuss briefly below, are important in
undermining ontologies based on a particular understanding of human being.
Logical positivism/logical empiricism was another structure with a firm hold on
humanist thought the “post” theorists critiqued, and I have described that work else-
where (St. Pierre, 2012).

Representation
Much “post” critique focused on the representational logic (and here we must think
about rather than dismiss language) that pervades humanist, especially modernist,
ontological thought. Representational schemas assume depth and hierarchy – first,
that there is a primary, originary reality out there to be found and, second, that
language can accurately represent it. Indeed, science is based on the belief that lan-
guage (surface, secondary) can be used in such a way that it does not distort the
truths scientific practice has discovered in the real world (depth, primary).
The “posts,” however, do not accept the “metaphysics of the ‘depths’”
(Foucault, 1966/1970, p. 245) but present an aesthetics of depthlessness and
suggest that everything appears at the surface, at the level of human activity. In this
way, ontology in the “posts” flattens what was assumed to be hierarchical. Here,
there is no Real – nothing foundational or transcendental – nothing beneath or
above, outside – being to secure it. Language and reality exist together on the
surface. As Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) wrote in regard to books and authors,
“There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a
field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author)” (p. 23).
Foucault, too, wrote that the analyst must work at the surface and examine practices
rather than going deep, looking for origins and hidden meanings that exist outside
 650 E.A. St. Pierre

being. In this regard, Derrida (1966/1978) wrote in an early lecture that the
“movement of supplementarity” (p. 289) in language – its inability to secure mean-
ing – prevents it from representing a supposed stable presence (Being) in the world.
Baudrillard (1981/1988) claimed that “all of Western faith and good faith was
engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of mean-
ing, that a sign could exchange for meaning and that something could guarantee this
exchange” (p. 170). He went after representational logic and its Real head-on in his
examination of psychology, ideology, politics, technology, and religion for their con-
tributions to a “representational imaginary,” a “mad project of an ideal coextensivity
between the map and the territory” (p. 167), between some imagined Reality “out
there” and our representations of it – “the perfect descriptive machine” that could
only ever be a simulacrum, a representation of a Real that did not exist. He claimed
that we had entered an age of simulation that demanded the “liquidation of all refer-
entials,” an age in which “never again would the real have to be produced” (p. 167).
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The Real, after all, is only desire and simulation; it never existed at all.
Lyotard (1979/1984) addressed reality and representational logics in science and
explained that the Enlightenment enabled man to progress from knowledge pro-
vided by divine revelation to knowledge acquired by human method, Science,
which, as Descartes assured us, can be free of doubt, of contingency. Lyotard noted
that State science is usually grounded in scientific realism and depends on the
observation of proof, seeing the real out there that can be described (represented)
and used as evidence to support a scientific claim. To observe more clearly, scien-
tists have, over the centuries, developed technologies and instrumentation that more
accurately capture and measure the real. Lyotard wrote wryly, “By the end of the
Discourse on Method, Descartes is already asking for laboratory funds” (p. 44). In
his critique of representational logic, he invented the concept paralogy as an alter-
nate form of legitimation because even a “maximized performance” (p. 60) of, for
example, language cannot produce a representation of a world that is unstable, fluid,
organic, and constantly in flux. For Lyotard, postmodern science, then, is character-
ized as “discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical” (p. 60) because
the world is not continuous and predictable and cannot serve as the stable object of
“observation” and “representation.” A different science must be thought.
I believe the discussion above makes clear that one must rethink the assump-
tions of a representational logic that puts language to work in a certain way in the
service of the real and the material if one is to rethink the ontology that logic
makes possible. “Post” scholars did exactly that, not by dismissing language as if it
did not matter in mattering but by taking very seriously what we have wanted lan-
guage to do in this world and what that desire has really, actually done in the mak-
ing of the world.
Clearly, we cannot ignore language in a different ontology, so how can we think
it differently? An obvious question this discussion enables is whether we can think
reality without representation? Must we remain within representational logic and
the language/material binary? As Foucault (1966/1970) noted, this idea is extremely
difficult to escape because representation is the “very field upon which the human
sciences occur, and to their fullest extent; it is the very pedestal of that form of
knowledge, the basis that makes it possible” (p. 363). This is why I think ontology
is so hard to think. It may be easier to just dismiss the linguistic and the discursive,
as some do, than to struggle with the flatness of being in which language is not
second-order, removed from and representing first-order materiality. Can we think
 International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 651

language and materiality outside that representational binary? Do we collapse

language into materiality? Has it always already been collapsed in materiality?
What is materiality anyway? How do we think this? Do these words work?

Phenomenology
The “post” theorists also critiqued phenomenology, which is organized by the
representational logic described above, and I sketch here some of Foucault’s and
Derrida’s thoughts on phenomenology. First of all, in his archaeological analyses,
Foucault provided a rich and complex historical analysis of phenomenology and
noted that it “expected ‘lived experience’ to supply the originary meaning of every
act of knowledge” (Foucault, 1998/1985, p. 475). He explained further that
phenomenology’s allegiance is “to interrogation concerning man’s mode of being”
(Foucault, 1970/1966, p. 325) so that we can get to the essence of the pure,
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immediate, and transcendental nature of our experience. Foucault noted that phe-
nomenology thus “revived the problem of the a priori and the transcendental motif”
(p. 326) and so “retains something of the poisoned gift of transcendental philoso-
phy” (Rajchman, 2000, p. 131). In simple terms, phenomenology is rooted in the
idea of givenness (for critiques, see Bryant, 2008; Sellars, 1956/1997), the idea that
there is a brute reality out there – present and fixed – with an essence that can be
both immediately perceived (because it is self-evident) and brought to light and
expressed in language. In this way, the phenomenological project leads to an empir-
ical description of “actual,” primary experience and to a particular ontology that
maintains a representational logic.
Derrida (1972/1981), like Foucault, was suspicious of that ontology and of any
such givenness, essence, and phenomenology’s lived experience expressed in pres-
ence; and he invented the concept différance whose movement “produces different
things” (p. 8) by means of:
delay, delegation, reprieve, referral, detour, postponement, reserving. In this sense,
différance is not preceded by the originary and indivisible unity [center, essence] of a
present possibility that I could reserve. What defers presence, on the contrary, is the
very basis on which presence is announced or desired in what represents it, its sign,
its trace …. (p. 8)

Whereas phenomenology establishes and then tries to capture the immediacy of pre-
reflective experience – the now, stable reality, presence – Derrida saw presence as a
nostalgic, transcendental illusion. What is, the present, is always contaminated by
the trace of the past (how else would we recognize the present as present) and the
future, the to-come (which can never be present and so is impossible but without
which we cannot recognize the past and so is necessary). So the present never is.
What’s really going on with things and words is that they are always slipping away.
For Derrida, then, différance is an ontico-ontological difference that points to
the exhaustion of phenomenology’s belief not only in the existence of a transcen-
dental presence in being but also of language’s ability to capture and close off
meaning, to represent being (lived experience). Once we dispense with those ideas,
a different ontology is possible. “To risk meaning nothing is to start to play … to
be entangled in hundreds of pages of a writing simultaneously insistent and ellipti-
cal … carrying off each concept into an interminable chain of differences” (p. 8).
But Derrida made it clear that this writing, “the concept of text or of context which
 652 E.A. St. Pierre

guides me embraces and does not exclude the world, reality, history” (Derrida,
1988, p. 137). So when he wrote that there is nothing outside the text – the world,
reality and history – he meant that there was nothing transcendental or foundational
outside human experience to secure living. Again, we see the flatness of being. And
for Derrida, writing is not mere writing nor is its work merely linguistic but always
already exquisitely ontological and material, just as Foucault’s (1971/1972) work
focuses on the materiality of linguistic and discursive practice, what he called early
on the “discourse-object” (p. 14) to show the imbrication of language and material-
ity. So both Foucault and Derrida critiqued phenomenology’s hold on ontology and
especially on its representational logic that separates language from materiality.
Deleuze’s philosophy and his ontology are also outside the tradition of phenom-
enology because they do not address phenomenology’s problems. Murphy (1998)
explained that:
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as the principles of Deleuze’s ontology have come to light, it has become clear that it
does not fit into the dominant phenomenological line of descent of Western philoso-
phy. This lack of connection with the dominant strains of thought in the human sci-
ences has slowed and distorted the reception of Deleuze’s ontology in Anglophone
circles; his work appears as an odd mixture of precision, reduction, and omission to
critics schooled in derivations of phenomenology. (p. 212)

Deleuze’s and, later, Deleuze and Guattari’s work together, like Foucault’s and Der-
rida’s to a great extent, can be traced, not to the phenomenological tradition, but to
Nietzsche; and Deleuze’s, especially, to Spinoza.
Once we take up Deleuzian ontology, representational logics and phenomenol-
ogy are unthinkable. What we find is a complex, affirmative, experimental ontology
of becoming, what Rajchman (2000) called a “superior empiricism” (p. 17) that
describes a “way out of the impasses of the two dominant philosophical schools of
his generation, phenomenological and analytic” (p. 7). Following Nietzsche, Dele-
uze moved away from epistemology and representation, seeing the “normative as
having philosophical primacy over the epistemic. For Deleuze, philosophy is funda-
mentally a matter of living rather than knowing” (May, 1996, p. 294), and thought
enables rather than represents being.
Deleuzian ontology is affirmative in that it requires “a belief in the world” (p.
75) and belief in the possibilities of world(s) we have not yet thought: “It may be
that believing in the world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task” (Deleuze
& Guattari, 1991/1994, p. 75). Rajchman (2000) explained as follows:
It is not so much a matter of being optimistic or pessimistic as of being realistic about
the new forces not already contained in our projects and programs and the ways of
thinking that accompany them. In other words, to make connections one needs not
knowledge, certainty, or even ontology, but rather a trust that something may come
out, though one is not yet completely sure what. (p. 7)

This is a different kind of ethics.

Deleuzian ontology is also experimental, and Deleuze with Guattari invented new
concepts (e.g. line of flight, bodies-without-organs, the nomad, and becoming animal)
to help us with the experimental work of thinking the world differently. These con-
cepts reject a binary logic in favor of a logic of connection, a logic of the and (this
and this and this and …), of becoming. The verb, to be, is, is anathema in Deleuzian
ontology because it stops thought. Once equilibrium and identity are established – I
 International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 653

am a woman – becoming and difference are impossible. “What is … ” is not only the
“instituting question of philosophy” (Spivak, 1974, p. xvii) but also the “basis of
objective descriptions” (p. lvii), representations that establish a reality we assume is
real. The Deleuzian concepts assemblage and rhizome are particularly helpful in
thinking connections rather than oppositions, movement rather than categorization,
and becoming rather than being. In Deleuze’s nomadic empiricism – his way out of
phenomenology – we are always connecting and reconnecting “conceptual bits”
(Rajchman, 2000, p. 21) in different series and plateaus to address different problems
based on events and encounters in the world.
Of course, Deleuze’s experimental ontology is much more complex than
presented here, but it does not allow the language/material, human/material opposi-
tions to be thought or lived. We are not separate from the world. Being in every
sense is entangled, connected, indefinite, impersonal, shifting into different
multiplicities and assemblages. Importantly, “all multiplicities are flat” (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 9). What happens to the humanist subject in this flattened
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ontology is a topic for many other papers (see, e.g. St. Pierre, 2011a, 2011b), but
Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) wrote that that subject is only a “habit” and that
we want “to reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it
is no longer of any importance whether one says I” (p. 3).
“In order to follow Deleuze’s lines of flight, one must move onto the terrain that
his work has defined and engage with the tradition that he has created for himself”
(Murphy, 1998, p. 212). In this tradition, he, and he and Guattari together, created
“new concepts that are always new” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994, p. 5). Careful
reading is absolutely essential here, because DeleuzoGuattarian concepts are so
immediately useful that it is too easy to pluck one or two – e.g. line of flight,
assemblage – out of a dense system of imbricated concepts and wrongly insert them
into a humanist ontology. Each DeleuzoGuattarian concept brings with it their entire
system of thought, a very different order of things, and a vibrant and seductive
ontology. Even so, Deleuze and Guattari encouraged us to plug their work into our
work and see what happened, and that work is now being accomplished.

A new ontology, the new materialism, and the new empiricism

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Barad (2007), Bennett (2010), Clough
(2009), Coole and Frost (2010), Kirby (2011), Olkowski (2012), and others have
encouraged us to focus on ontology. Much of this work calls itself feminist, as
humanist projects have always consigned women to the material, de-valued side of
all the binaries. These projects also take up and extend the ontological work of
“post” theorists. Barad (2010), for example, thinks quantum physics with Derrida’s
(1993/1994) Specters of Marx and, concerned with the status of the material in
representational logic, she cites Foucault’s (1971/1972) comment in The Archaeol-
ogy of Knowledge that “‘Words and things’ is the entirely serious title of a prob-
lem” (p. 49) [the French title of The Order of Things is Les Mots et les Choses].
Her concept, quantum entanglement, seems quite Deleuzian. Kirby (2011) uses
Derrida as well, thinking materiality differently with deconstruction and troubling
totalizing notions of culture – dismissed along with language in some of this work;
but not if one thinks those concepts with différance outside essentialism.
Bennett (2010) uses Deleuze and Guattari’s work to help think a vital material-
ity and vibrant matter that has thing power. Coole and Frost (2010) encourage us to
 654 E.A. St. Pierre

“reopen the issue of matter” (p. 3) once too closely associated with an exhausted
essentialist phenomenology and structural Marxism. They remind us that “the great
materialist philosophies of the nineteenth century, notably those of Marx, Nietzsche,
and Freud, were themselves hugely influenced by developments in the natural sci-
ences” (p. 5), as are the new materialists. Olkowski (2012) calls this engagement
“postmodern philosophy and the scientific turn,” reminding us that “post” theorists
have always engaged the “hard” sciences. For example, there are many links
between Deleuze and Guattari’s work and physics, and Lyotard’s critique of positiv-
ism in State science remains right on.
Like Lyotard, Clough (2009) worries about the continuing influence of positivist
social science, which Steinmetz (2005) called the “epistemological unconscious of
US sociology,” and she argues that “qualitative methodologists did not break with
many of the assumptions of a methodological positivism” (p. 45) that assumes the
“obdurateness of the empirical world” (p. 46). Even when they did take note of the
“posts,” she claims, they remained trapped in phenomenology. She notes, for
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example, that qualitative researchers who do auto-ethnography and performance eth-

nography and are considered radical continue to privilege an essentialist “voice.”
The focus on ontology at the beginning of this new century is both timely and
provocative, and there is much to read and re-read. As I wrote at the outset, the
“posts” are rich in ontological critique, and those analyses have been awaiting this
new attention.

Becomings
In this paper, I have argued that the urgency of epistemological and emancipatory
projects in the decades after World War II – essentialist projects that now seem
exhausted to some extent – as well as what I call “conventional humanist qualita-
tive inquiry,” which served those projects, mostly ignored the epistemological,
ontological and methodological critiques of the “posts.” Qualitative inquiry
remained mired in Enlightenment humanism and simultaneously committed, in
some confused fashion, I think, to positivism and phenomenology, both of which
rely on humanism’s representational logic.
Though some of us who engaged the “posts” tried to work in the ruins and out
of the ruins of that methodology, its structure, so deeply mired in humanism, con-
tinued mostly unabated as it was proliferated by the publishing industry in too
many textbooks, handbooks, and journals and by universities that disciplined and
perpetuated it in research courses. Never taken too seriously by many in power – as
we learned during the debates about scientifically based research – our task was to
establish the validity of an alternative to positivist social science methodology
though we did so, ironically, by relying chiefly on positivist markers such as syste-
maticity, linear processes, technique, clarity and transparency of language, accurate
observation, representation, and so on that idealize and normalize a particular form
of science that equates knowledge with science. Early in the western Enlightenment,
Descartes (1641/1993) invented the cogito, the knowing subject, and it will be diffi-
cult for those of us who call ourselves researchers to escape the centuries-old
knowledge-making machines his fiction has spawned.
I believe that the “new empiricism” and the “new materialism” are signals that
the ontological can no longer be ignored. Scholars introducing this work are mobi-
lizing and extending “post” ontological critiques that insist we rethink the nature of
 International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 655

being. Importantly, this is an ethical charge. In this ontology, thinking and living
are simultaneities, and we have to think possible worlds in which we might live.
As long as we think the nature of being as subject/object, materiality does not mat-
ter, and we live in the world accordingly. Deeply embedded in the new ontology
are ethical concerns that acknowledge the destruction of the world humanism and
its science projects encourage with their man/nature, human/nonhuman binaries.
Refusing that binary logic which pervades our language and thus our living is a pri-
ority, because if we see ourselves as always already entangled with, not separate
from or superior to matter, our responsibility to being becomes urgent and constant.
About the refusal of binaries, Derrida (as cited in Caputo, 1993, p. 86) wrote sim-
ply that “deconstruction is justice.” Barad (2010), taking up his charge, wrote “only
in this ongoing responsibility to the entangled other, without dismissal (without
‘enough already!’), is there the possibility of justice-to-come. Entanglements are not
intertwinings of separate entities, but rather irreducible relations of responsibility”
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(pp. 264–265).
Here I stress again (see St. Pierre, 2011a) the ethical commitment, and the plea-
sure, of the close and careful reading Butler (1992) recommended. We cannot do
this work carelessly. We surely have our work cut out for us as we try to set aside
a system of thought, an order of things, that is so powerful we can slip back into it
with a single, telltale word.
Where do we go from here and what happens to conventional humanist qualita-
tive research methodology in the new ontologies? I do not believe its order of
things can cohere when its structuring ideas about the nature of being – positivism,
phenomenology, representational logic, and so on – are withdrawn. What would be
the purpose of inquiry if we stop privileging knowledge? Would inquiry matter so
much after all? If so, what would it look like? What else would we think about?
How do we think about thinking? What else would we do? How would we be?
These are questions the posts helped us ask over half a century ago that we might
be ready to attend to now. As always, there is much to read, much to think, and
new ways to live if we believe in the possibilities of worlds to come.

Notes on contributor
Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre is Professor in the Educational Theory and Practice Department
and an affiliated professor of both the Qualitative Research Program and the Women’s
Studies Institute at the University of Georgia, USA. Her work focuses on poststructural
theories of language and subjectivity, on the new empiricism/materialism, especially in
feminist theory and methodology, and on a critique of what she calls conventional, humanist
qualitative research methodology.

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