ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the implications for critical qualitative inquiry of the recent return to materiality in philosophy and theory. It focuses in particular on the contested status of critique within these new materialisms and the challenge that these pose for conventional notions of qualitative inquiry. In the new materialisms, agency and consciousness are not the prerogative of human subjects. Science and the social do not stand separate and opposed, and methodological virtue does not reside uncomplicatedly with one side' or the other. Material feminisms, in common with other contemporary materialisms, prioritize difference over sameness, and challenge the distance, separation, and categorical assurance that shore up the self-mastery of the oedipal subject of humanism. Judith Butler, in an essay on critique that draws on another by Foucault, points out that Adorno himself, leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, expressed fears about judgment as the key critical act.
