Inquiry as Divination

The article proposes divination as a speculative method for inquiry, drawing primarily on the work of Deleuze. Divinatory practices would be diagrammatic, ambulant, cryptic, affirmative, and experimental. They would look for strange relations between the one and the many, in the shifting totality of the cosmos, and entertain relations that are always to some extent inhuman. The article offers an example from an ethnographic study of classroom interaction. It suggests that divination has the power to import “catastrophe” into the frameworks and methods of research, in the hope of clearing a space for creativity and unforeseen outcomes.