Qualitative Inquiry

The article interrogates the notion of “the ruins” and its cognates (rupture, loss, failure, etc.) as productively destructive figures for postfoundational methodology and wonders how much damage has actually been done. Hoping for ruins, have scholars merely produced a picturesque gloss on the same old Enlightenment edifice? The author finds some promise in Deleuze’s notion of the stutter, using this to look at what happens when the body surfaces in language. The author suggests that attention to the bodily entanglements of language, which qualitative method generally prefers to forget, can be put to work to perform a particular form of productive ruin commended by Deleuze—namely, the ruin of representation.