Deleuze's Athleticism: Encounters With the Outside of Method

• In Event: 18.059 - Research Without Method in Post-Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Purpose:
The intent of my presentation is to invent a new way of practicing inquiry, without method, that draws on Gilles Deleuze’s (1993/1997; 2001/2007) essays and interviews on literature, writing, and life. My aim is to push social science method to its own outside. To create something new involves encounters, shocks, disturbances, and delirium that take us to the edge of method. This mode of life (and writing) is Deleuze’s athleticism, which is practiced as traveling on lines of flight and thus experimenting with new possibilities for inquiry.

Theoretical Perspectives:
I use Deleuze’s ontological vitalism in a post-structural and post-human philosophy, particularly as related to his concept of athleticism: a form of life that is a constant experimentation on ourselves, involving dis-integration, becomings, and lines of flight. This athleticism is provoked by encounters, another Deleuzian concept that is relevant to his critique of method. Deleuze (1968) explained that an encounter is not an object of recognition but is an involuntary confrontation with the outside – a violent intrusion that disturbs common sense and “forces us to think” (p. 139). Encounters are intensities that we sense, like sounds and colors, and we respond with a range of affective tones – not consciousness, or voluntary method. We turn the encounter into a problem – not a problem to be solved, understood, or interpreted via methodical procedures, but a creative problem-posing that opens up to the outside, to the new. A mode of life that transforms itself is the proprioceptive vitality of an athleticism that affirms difference, multiplicity, and constant variation.

Mode of Inquiry:
Methodological/theoretical

Textual Sources:
Deleuze’s essays and interviews in two texts: Essays: Critical and Clinical and Two Regimes of Madness.

Significance:
The conceptual work in my paper is significant because it moves beyond a critique of method to a creation and experimentation with the outside of method. While method is self-referential and categorically recognizable, athleticism takes us into the relations and functions (i.e., conditions) that make possible new modes of existence and ontological transformations in research.

References
Deleuze, G. (1968/1994). Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Deleuze, G. (1993/1997). Essays Critical and Clinical. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. (2001/2007). Two Regimes of Madness. New York: Semiotext(e).

Author

• Alecia Youngblood Jackson, Appalachian State University