Beyond Measure

This article examines the implicit educational logic of Patti Lather’s book Getting Lost: Feminist Efforts Toward a Double(d) Science and her insistence on critical self-reflection. To unlock the form of education that Lather enacts through Getting Lost, I will turn to Italian critical theorist Giorgio Agamben and his notion of study as an alternative to mere learning. What is unique and important is that Getting Lost offers a moment of what I refer to as studious inoperativity wherein the researcher as studier can live within a threshold condition that is neither outside nor inside the research protocol. Instead of being lost, Lather emphasizes getting lost as a state betwixt and between, of pushing forward toward resolution while also perpetually withdrawing from such resolution, of constantly feeling the power to find solutions while also perpetually witnessing such solutions fade into the background as new problems arise, of learning from and wrestling with a learning that un-learns itself in its learning. In this sense, to get lost in the remnants of research is to feel the shift in the educational logic of research from learning from one’s experiences (to be an advocate or militant researcher) to studying in the ruins of this experience.