Modus Contemplativa: Toward a Postqualitative Praxis of Lingering

Keywords: Method, Epistemology, Positivism, Lingering, Adorno
Session Type: Virtual Paper
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 4/11/2021 11:10 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada)) - 4/11/2021 12:25 PM (Pacific Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 38

Abstract

This paper draws on the philosophical work of Byung-Chul Han to argue that the temporality of qualitative inquiry, of conventional objects and geographies of study has imploded, failed, deepened, rearticulated, become otherwise. Perhaps it is more accurate to contend that time (which is to say, at least: memory, fixity, relationality, inheritance, hope) in its fullness and complex embodiment has begun to leak out from the phenomenological containers within which we have sought to isolate its constituent moments and parts, seeking strange connection against the order we, its watchers and interpreters, have sought to impose. With this in mind, I build from emergent work in postqualitative inquiry to posit a methodological praxis of lingering—not as a precise prescription, but as a rhizomatic, minor mode which both responds to the epistemic and metaphysical crises of postmodern temporality and variously articulates to more precise modes of inquiry and forms of life. Lingering can help us to resist the destruction and obfuscation which emerge from what Han, channeling Adorno, calls the working gaze: that frenetic, hegemonic will to information so common to positivism. Lingering as an epistemic practice must instead always seek the 'distanced nearness' of knowledge; it must be emergent, embodied, diffractive, contemplative, and accommodating to various and varied approaches across disciplinary and other boundaries. Most of all, it must go easy on the world.