Inquiry as Mapping Space-Time Entanglements

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

Abstract

Objectives
• Explore the generative potential of using concepts as method
• Describe emergent practices when beginning with Deleuzian concepts of subjectivity and time
• Explore the implications for doing and teaching inquiry in/with the new empiricisms

Theoretical Framework
Thinking first with the concept of the Body without Organs (BwO), (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; 1983) and then with the concept of duration (Deleuze, 1991), I attempt a re-imaging of the subject no longer bound to instants or places or spaces. If time is not to be thought as a connection of instants that can be charted and placed on a line relative to one another in an ordered fashion, then a voice not of a body or subject is necessarily a voice that does not occupy instants in spaces that can be plotted in a similar fashion. Bergson argued that life does not develop “linearly in accordance with a geometrical, formal model” (Olkowski, 2008, p. 6). If voice is not necessarily of a body, then this voice on the BwO, is a voice not bound by “the temporal linearity of language expression” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 69) that privileges instants.

Methods or Modes of Inquiry
Instead of beginning with a research design that produces an interview protocol in which “instants” and “accounts” are privileged, starting with Deleuzian concepts of the subject and time prompts the consideration: What it might mean to think the subject in its many forms as not linked to an “I” of the humanist subject, located in a particular space and time? The paper will present an example of how concept as method offers an alternative approach to research method in the social sciences. If time is no longer to be thought as a succession of events, and space is no longer to be thought as locating naturally bounded bodies such as land, people, and resources, then inquiry is no longer about tracking and fixing these spaces and times in an attempt at reality, but about mapping the entanglements and lines of articulation that refuse such capture in a perpetual creation of possibility.

Implications/Scholarly Significance
Traditional social scientific inquiry adheres to a privileging of instants. In texts that discuss the development of research protocols, researchers are advised to think about site selection: as if it is bounded; what to do before entering the field: as if there is ever a before or outside of the field; and how to extract oneself from a site in a process of leaving the field (see for example Esterberg, 2002; Maxwell, 2012). In addition to conducting interviews reliant on participants to provide an account of past events, the expectation is that research logs, field notes, and transcripts are date stamped in order to track the ordering of events in said studies. These and other practices adhere to a privileging of instants, of absolute notions of space and time. Such absolute notions of do not account for how time and space exist in relation to one another.

Author

• Lisa A. Mazzei, University of Oregon