2. Inquiry, Refusal, and Virtuous Resistance in the Anthropocene

In this essay, I consider practices of inquiry as strategies of refusal and intervention amidst the Anthropocene. I argue that characteristics of the Anthropocene create unique opportunities for employments of inquiry as a politics of refusal even as they manufacture additional mechanisms for governance in our contemporary era. I situate inquiry as necessarily located in a liminal space, operating at the limits of convention, with the aim of creating that which normative logics of governance cannot anticipate. Inquiry entangles context with concept, drawing from the one to imprint the other. Next, I situate contemporary inquiry practices as necessarily entangled with the experimental methods employed by the Cynics, whom Foucault interpreted as living experimental critiques of the status quo through a position of radical exteriority. Lastly, I call for a repositioning of inquiry as a practice of virtuous refusal, an ethically-engaged form of resistance within the contemporary moment of the Anthropocene.