Using a Deleuzian Becoming in Qualitative Data "Analysis"

• In Event: Doing Deleuze: Exploring Qualitative Research Methodologies in Education

Abstract

Purpose
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze & Guattari wrote, “When one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work” (p. 4). My task in this paper is to illustrate a Deleuzian approach to qualitative data analysis that could be considered “plugging in.” The two things that I put to “work” by plugging them into one another are 1) an interview data excerpt from a black woman academic named Cassandra and 2) Deleuze & Guattari’s concept of becoming. The “plugging in” is an activity to elaborate each.

Theoretical Perspective
Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of difference, one of becoming, is their response to western philosophy’s adherence to becoming as a linear process that relies on a stable identity (or sameness) for external comparisons and relations, as in grouping. Traditionally, philosophy applies universal characteristics to group; for example, the social category of woman possesses consistent traits and remains stable because of its distinction from man. However, with Deleuze & Guattari, becoming is not a linear process between two points. There is no origin, no destination, no end point or goal. So while becoming is directional (away from sameness), the movement creates something unique and particular within that emerges in the middle of things. Becoming, then, is immanent to (not outside of) the social field to which it applies; becoming is an escape, the movement through a unique event that produces experimentation and change.

Data
The data for the paper come from a two-hour interview conducted with Cassandra, a black professor who is tenured at a comprehensive university in the southern U.S. Her data is a part of a larger qualitative interview study examining what first-generation academic women have to say about their rhizomatic path to and through higher education. For the analysis (or “plugging in”), I do not seek the meaning of Cassandra’s becoming but elaborate the connectives to see what opens up and what closes down inside the material and discursive academic machine in the southern United States. The overall goal is to represent Cassandra’s alive-ness and her power to live in the ways that her becoming incites her to live.

Conclusions/Significance
To think with a Deleuzian becoming is to show the possibilities of both Cassandra and her academic life transforming into something else as an effect of their becoming. This methodological use of Deleuze for qualitative data analysis offers a way to move analyses away from causal or correlational attributions in educational research; that is, ascribing meaning to practices as a result of stabilized identity categories (i.e., race or gender). Rather, becoming allows a consideration of an immanent becoming in the threshold of academic teaching, mentoring, and scholarship. Cassandra was becoming in that she was a site of struggle over the materiality and the transgression of what an academic does – not what she is. Becoming is never finalized, connections and micro-events create tiny explosions that keep new creations on the move.

Author

• Alecia Youngblood Jackson, Appalachian State University