Force, Speed, Quanta: Concepts as Ontogenetic Empirical Devices

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

Abstract

Aim
The aim of this presentation is to elaborate on how ‘concept as method’ offers an alternative approach to educational research, and to show specifically how the concepts of force, speed and quanta are powerful devices for educational researchers, producing important insights into the relationship between human and non-human dimensions of learning. I argue that these concepts respond to recent interest in various materialisms and recent developments in science and technology studies. My aim is to show how these concepts transform the political terrain of education research, redefining what it means to be human, and opening up new ways of pursuing qualitative methods.

Theoretical Framework
The concepts of force, speed and quanta inhabit both philosophical and physical practices, and have been taken up extensively in the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), who use them to support their claim that “every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics. (original italics, p. 213). The notion of micropolitics is not new to education, but is newly inflected through their work, directing our attention to the micro-practices that operate alongside human participation (Webb, 2008). The concepts of force, speed and quanta allow researchers to attend to the micro-politics of learning. These concepts seem well suited to engage with contemporary culture and the radical mutations of the individuated human body – that being the organic image of the body as organism – as we turn increasingly to digital forms of life, calculated publics, and neuro-physiological interventions. But this reckless dive into the molecular and derangement of the human body, must be pursued, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) suggest, with an “art of dosage” and an “injection of caution”. As they point out, one can easily botch it. This presentation takes up the challenge to articulate a micropolitics of learning assemblages, using these three concepts, without serving the control society and its dehumanizing agenda.

Data sources
This presentation uses video data from a middle school classroom in NYC. Two hours of video data are analyzed using the concepts of force, speed and quanta.

Scholarly Significance
Since “political” could be said to always imply a people or community (Mengue, 2008), this presentation contributes to attempts to rethink the political, redirecting our attention to post-human or non-human forms of interaction as unexamined sites of the political. Following Deleuze, this presentation develops the concepts of force, speed and quanta to meet the contemporary needs of educational researchers, exploring three facets of these concepts: (1) Rather than only emphasize force as action/reaction, we must study forces for how they assemble bodies, (2) Rather than explain forces only in terms of cause and effect, we must study them for how they sculpt and bring forth the new, and (3) In contrast to mechanistic quantitative models, we must study force using quantum-inflected probability models that embrace the ontological role of chance.

Author

• Elizabeth De Freitas, Manchester Metropolitan University