An Ontology of a Backflip

• In Event: New Empiricisms and the Challenge to Methodological Orthodoxy: Rethinking the Relationship Between Concept and Method

Abstract

Purpose
In this paper, I work rhizovocality (Jackson, 2003) as a concept-method to intervene in the “problem” of voice in qualitative inquiry. The “problem” that animates a response is the traditional and conventional use of a humanist voice that is attributed to rationality, consciousness, and metaphysical presence. The goal of using rhizovocality as a concept-method is to potentialize refrains that are both affective and material, thus swerving around the hazards of a humanist voice that is linguistically and discursively positioned.

Theoretical Framework
Voice in qualitative inquiry is not a problem to be solved, but a problematic to be cultivated in a field that conditions the invention of new concepts (Deleuze, 1991).
Jackson (2003) described the invented concept of rhizovocality:
Rhizo, a prefix I borrow from Deleuze & Guattari’s (1987) image of the rhizome, captures the heterogeneity of vocality in a spatial figuration, accentuating its connection to other things through its very diversity. Vocality, in music theory, emphasizes the performative dimension of voice, its expressive power, its tensions of dissonant counterpoint. (p. 707)

I take up rhizovocality and extend its use as a concept-method by working its ontological, refrain-like qualities. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe the refrain as repeatable, portable, with the ability to enable the holding together of many heterogeneous elements: it stakes territories. The refrain uses rhythmic processes that draw upon affective and material forces from multiple milieus; thus, they are unstable. Because the refrain is unstable, it opens up potentialities of new expressive forms, of new becomings: repetition as/with difference, or rhizovocality in qualitative inquiry.

Modes of Inquiry
The refrain can refer to any kind of rhythmic pattern that stakes out a territory (Bogue, 2003, p. 17). The refrain may be “eminently sonorous,” but Deleuze and Guattari (1987) explain that everywhere in nature, there are gestural, visual, and postural refrains, so I take on this minor form of the refrain as a dimension of rhizovocality.

As concept-method, rhizovocality opens up a new field of ontological questions and responses. What happens when voice exceeds language and is more than (un)vocalized words emanating from a speaking subject? What happens if we take seriously the pre-human affects and non-human materialities to disrupt the notion of fixed human subjects producing and receiving voice as participants and researchers in our work? How do we critique what it is doing, the forces that create it as well as its forces to create?

Scholarly Significance
Specifically, I see rhizovocality as the music of the refrain, the flows of becomings -- a form of expression that takes refrains elsewhere. These expressions are content put to work. Expressions do something; they result in new affects, materialities, and potentially new capacities to form further territories and assemblages. The significance of rhizovocality as irruptive, as becoming, as not limited to human voices, as affective and material is to refuse the hierarchy and “absolute criteria” of refrain-as-sound, and work the refrain as all of those expressions in an ontology of creativity and becoming.

Author

• Alecia Youngblood Jackson, Appalachian State University