Desire Undone: Productions of Privilege, Power, and Voice

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

Abstract

Objectives
In the preparation of abstracts for this symposium submission, authors were encouraged to think carefully about the methodological implications of Deleuze’s work and how thinking with Deleuze informs our research processes in the context of posthumanist educational research. This paper will present ways in which strained meanings and representations “may emerge through a rigorous engagement with the work of Deleuze and Guattari toward transformations of research practices and knowledge” (Mazzei & McCoy, 2010, p. 503).

Theoretical Framework
In this paper I specifically draw on a stretching and straining of language as invoked by Deleuze & Guattari to present examples as to how this happens in my own thinking about research, data and voice with Deleuzian concepts, specifically that of desire (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987). I present a genealogy of sorts that traces my movement to Deleuze and how, as a result of my strained/strange encounters with Deleuzian desire, I am as researcher undone as a result.

Discussion of Methods
In research with pre-service teachers (mostly white), much of my methodological writings have been concerned with accounting for the silences that occur in conversations with participants, both literal and metaphorical. In doing such work I have leaned heavily on Derrida to theorize silence as data and to develop strategies to account for such in the records of research that we name and collect in discourse based research. While thinking with Derrida was very productive in that he had much to say about the absent present (Derrida, 1976; 1978), I began to brush up against the limits of his methodological thinking about voice. Derrida helped me consider the trace, the always already absent present, but failed to help me interrogate why the absent present in the form of previously unthought voices might be inhabiting the narratives. Why were there persistent silences in the data and what did they produce?

Significance
I go to Deleuze to interrogate how the straining of language possible with Deleuze produces that which was previously unthought in a consideration of what “counts” as data—what I name productions of privilege, power, and voice. Such thinking pushes me beyond a humanist striving for meaning toward a posthumanist pursuit of thought in a “production of the new” (O’Sullivan & Zepke, 2008).

References:
—. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Originally published as Mille Plateaux, vol. 2 of Capitalisme et Schitzophrénie, (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1980).
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
__ . Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
Mazzei, Lisa A. and Kate McCoy, "Thinking with Deleuze in Qualitative Research," International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 23, No. 5. (2010): 503-509.
O’Sullivan, Simon and Stephen Zepke. “Introduction: The Production of the New.” In Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New, edited by Simon O’Sullivan and Stephen Zepke, 1-10. London: Continuum, 2008.

Author

• Lisa A. Mazzei, University of Oregon