Using Deleuze and Guattari’s “Mapping” To Produce Rather Than Reproduce

• In Event: The Usefulness of Post-Structuralism in Educational Research and Practice

Abstract

In this presentation, I argue for how Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) distinction between the tracing and the map can be used to conduct research that is not representational/reproductive but generative/productive. A tracing is a copy and operates according to “genetic” principles of reproduction based on an a priori deep structure and a faith in the discovery and representation of that structure. Deleuze and Guattari use psychoanalysis as an example of an historically powerful regime of truth within which tracings are always at work. No matter what an analysand utters, it is read against Oedipus, the phallus, lack, desire for the mother, rage against the father, etc.
In contrast to tracings, maps are open systems—contingent, unpredictable, and productive. “The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted, to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation” (p. 12). A map produces an organization of reality rather than reproducing some prior theorization of it. In drawing maps, the researcher (like an original cartographer) works at the surface, creating possible realities by producing new articulations of disparate phenomena and connecting the exteriority of objects to whatever forces or directions seem potentially related to them.
To illustrate the usefulness of mapping versus tracing in the conduct of research, I share findings from analyses of two focus group studies that were informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s poststructural insights about the distinction between tracing and mapping—a study of black adolescents responding to the film Panther and a study of new immigrants discussing their struggles trying to make a new life for themselves in the U.S.

Deleuze, F., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Author

• George A. Kamberelis, University of Wyoming