Language and Materiality in Qualitative Methodology

• In Event: New Material Feminist Methodologies

Abstract

Objectives and overview
The paper considers the relation of language and materiality. Its main objective is to explore the implications for qualitative methodology of a materialist theory of language. The paper identifies a pervasive ‘forgetting’ of the body in qualitative method, and attempts to breach this amnesia by ‘re-membering’ Stewart (1996) moments when the body surfaces in language. Such moments are often overlooked, stripped out or suppressed in the methodic operations that produce ‘data’.

Theoretical framework
The paper is informed by the re-emergence of empiricism in philosophy and the social sciences – eg Deleuze’s (2004) ‘transcendental empiricism’, and Clough’s (2009) ‘infra-empiricism’ - and the possibilities these offer for a more materially engaged practice. These new empiricisms trace intensities of affect that move and connect bodies sub-atomically, biologically, physically and culturally, without privileging human interpretation or consciousness. Such approaches are consonant with recent material feminist work, in disabling dichotomies such as nature-culture, world-word, science-social, and insisting instead on immanence, entanglement and ‘queer’ dis/continuity (Barad, 2010) as the primary form of relationality among entities.

More specifically, the paper understands language in terms of the anti-representational framework elaborated by Deleuze (2004) in The Logic of Sense, in which language does not ‘represent’ a pre-existent reality, but traces a ‘frontier line’ between things and propositions. Language thus ceaselessly spins out a surface to separate the depths of bodies and the heights of the Platonic idea, allowing these oppositions to come to existence as if on opposing ‘sides’ of a long-lived philosophical dichotomy. Yet language does not exist apart from the propositions that express it and the bodies from which it issues. Something must happen, then, to free language from its status as visceral rumblings and animal noises. For Deleuze, this decisive, though chancy, factor is sense or the pure event.

Method
The research brings the Deleuzian conceptualisation of language to bear on a range of data fragments, in order to identify occasions when that frontier line between proposition and thing, language and body, is not properly drawn, and traces of the body irrupt into language, with potentially ruinous – though educationally and politically instructive – effect.

Data sources/analytic objects
The paper is primarily concerned with theoretical and methodological development and critique. However the discussion is focussed on a series of instances, drawn from fieldnotes, poetry, literature, art and theoretical texts, in which language momentarily ‘stutters’ (Deleuze), calling attention to its bodily entanglements.

Conclusions and significance
The paper contributes to contemporary efforts to understand the entanglements of discourse and matter, and begins to trace embodied connections that are more complex than the static connections that method often assumes between self and other, researcher and researched, knowledge and action.

Author

• Maggie Maclure, Manchester Metropolitan University