Life Before the Personal: Duration and Multiplicities in Histories

• In Event: 52.033 - Life History Research: Different Approaches, Future Directions

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to think with philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson to reconsider life, history, and research. We wonder what happens when life is no longer a set of discrete instants, but is seen as a pre-personal flow of potential that exceeds individualism and individual expectations (Rajchman, 2000). The basis for these ideas comes from Bergson’s (1946/2007) concept of duration, which thinks of time as acentered and multiple rather than as homogeneous and linear. Thinking of time in this way opens up new possibilities for what we think of as history and life. Viewed in this way, life is about singularities, a set of connections which cannot be traced back to a particular individual or subject. Deleuze expands on Bergson by viewing life in ways that decenter the human focus of methodology and the knowing subject. Instead, Deleuze (1995) views the (re)creation of the subject as a process of “establishing ways of existing” or “inventing new possibilities of life” (p. 95).
To demonstrate these ideas, we use data from interviews with young adults formerly in dependency care (e.g., foster care). Rather than focus in on collective experiences organized by homogeneous time, we view life as bleeding into itself, not belonging entirely to an individual, but as a process of the individuation and change of a whole. For example, a participant who moves through 30 different homes in a five-year span being recreated each time as “anxious,” “belligerent,” “runaway,” “sex predator,” “foster kid” is worked over as the various iterations bleed into each other recreating “her” in fragmented and syncopated ways belonging to multiple systems.
In this paper we propose that, in a post-qualitative space, life histories are changing and heterogeneous, and that controllable life history methodologies are insufficient because, in part, of their reliance on homogenous time. Embedded in the post-qualitative movement the ontological shift decenters the human and questions various stabilized notions of history, past, and the progression of historical events. Deleuze (1995) suggests that multiplicities of histories are elements in which things happen: “All processes take place on the plane of immanence, and within a given multiplicity” (p. 146). The absurdity of the past and becoming of the future are jointed in the present in unpredictable ways.
Life history methodologies have produced meaningful and situated knowledges for some time now. However, methodological approaches and discourses cannot stay the same when ontological shifts, such as Deleuze’s ontology of becoming and immanence, are used to guide inquiries and qualitative “experiments.” Thus, we suggest a fragmented and heterogeneous narrative that never belongs to one “person,” but that flows as pre-personal potential effacing the conditions presented by the past in the present.

Authors

• Mirka E. Koro-Ljungberg, Arizona State University

• Justin Hendricks, University of Florida