Deleuze,Concept Formation,and the Habit of Shorthand Inquiry

Deleuze’s Philosophy of Concept Formation

Of the many qualities that distinguish Deleuze’s work from those employed by other mid-20th-century French philosophers and critical theorists, his commitment to producing and pursuing movement in thought (Patton, 2000) is perhaps most notable. The onus placed on experiencing the construction of thought and being as an enduring mobility, which Deleuze and Guattari (1994) characterize as “one and the same” (p. 37), is a matter that requires us to disengage in some way from the “already given tendency for thinking of life in homogenizing general terms” (Colebrook, 2002, p. 14). For Deleuze, such tendencies are reinforced by the habit to think and use concepts in ways that desire to “order, label, and measure individuals relative to an abstract norm” (Stagoll, 2005, p. 53). Of course, this is not to suggest that concepts are ever this simple. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari are quite clear about this matter, writing instead, “There are no simple concepts” (p. 15). And though using concepts in this way certainly affords a degree of ease and reliance that is appealing, which may indeed seem to be simple, especially as an everyday strategy to organize our thoughts and share experience, the simplicity of this usefulness is such that it undermines the complexity of our thinking and the exceptionality of our experiences in the world.

For Deleuze and Guattari (1994), the object of philosophy is to “create concepts that are always new” (p. 5), that are both equipped for and made ready to relinquish the always present and already given relations that occasion our work in the world, and that we use to constitute their knowability, that is, their identity. To speak to the identity of a concept is to speak to the terms that we assign to everyday things and processes that we experience. But, why do we do this? Though the aim and remarkability of our rationales are likely to vary, we do this to shore up the spirit (i.e., the essence) of those events and movements that are too complex, and that require us to say something not already given and knowable. As an example, Claire Colebrook (2002) draws attention to the everyday expression, “Happy Birthday,” explaining that our

day-to-day usage of concepts works like short hand or habit; we use concepts so that we do not have to think. We say, “Happy Birthday,” not because we want to say or mean something, but because that is just what we do. Everyday concepts, then, allow life to carry on in an orderly or functional manner. (p. 15)

In this example, the concept of “Happy Birthday” becomes something that we must learn to apply rather than something we do, or a doing that we must become part of, or enter into, a procedural rhythm that we live with and alongside of. Application, though, is adversative to such doing, in part because it “has less to do with invention than [it does] mastery and control” (Massumi, 2002, p. 17). But concept formation, as expressed by Deleuze, is an inventive act—a practice for thinking, doing, and being in the world that is, above all else, creative. Whereas the artist is someone who creates a work of art, the philosopher is regarded as someone who creates concepts, and “just as works of art bear the signature of the artists, so too do conceptual creations bear the signature of the philosopher who created them” (Smith, 2012, p. 125). This is not to suggest that Deleuze sensed the philosopher to be any less creative than the artist. In fact, Deleuze was rather clear in expressing philosophy as a practice that is every bit as creative as those to which the artist is committed. The key distinction for Deleuze is that philosophers create concepts and artists make paintings and sculptures, or rather, to use Deleuze’s language, artists create “a bloc of sensation, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 164, original emphasis). I’m less inclined, however, to suggest that paintings and sculptures are not also concepts, or that concepts are not also works of art, which are thus capable of giving particular kinds of visibility, shape, and direction to the problems and materials to which we are nearest. To create concepts then, “is, at the very least, to make something” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 7). I wonder, though, what might come to matter if, for example, the researcher were to be viewed as a creator, in the sense that Deleuze regards the artist and the philosopher? Moreover, what becomes possible if research methodology is sensed a bit differently, not simply as something that the researcher must locate, learn, and apply, but instead as creative material, and, importantly, as a creative methodology (Coleman & Ringrose, 2013), which offers the researcher new relations to and engagements with the world?

The expression, “Happy Birthday,” then, which is of course only one example, is nonetheless an example that ought to stir up within us a rather intriguing set of questions, especially as it pertains to our day-to-day use of concepts in thinking and doing qualitative research methodologies. It is an expression that provides us with an occasion to consider differently the concepts of research methodology that we’ve come to use; that we’ve learned to read as ready, acceptable, efficient, and right; and that we’ve actualized as permissions to remove doubt and complexity from the process of thinking, altogether. This is not to suggest, of course, that our concepts are wrong, or that we ought to refrain from using them, nor is it an indictment of the histories that both beckon us and bear out in our methodological work. Rather, it is to suggest that our concepts of research methodology are always capable of doing more, of becoming something even more “Interesting, Remarkable and Important” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 82). And though it is sometimes the case that our concepts are thought to be insufficient or problematic, even impossible at times to live and think with, they are nonetheless expressions that signal a greater need to be more thoroughly invested in the troubling of our relationship to language in qualitative inquiry, and to the ways in which we’ve come to accept and embody, even desire, the oft-explicit affordances of “common and good sense” (Ringrose & Coleman, 2013, p. 145) that accompany such associations.

In what follows, I attend to these questions, not with any realistic or tangible expectation that I’ll somehow manage to locate an answer, but instead to initiate a new problem, an ethical refusal to accept the quick and easy judgments that undergird and supplement our everyday use of concepts, and that are too often used as a tactic to organize (i.e., constrain and compress) and more clearly communicate (i.e., reduce and rationalize) our thinking about inquiry, and the experience of doing it. This article argues that such habits relegate our concepts of research methodology, and, in particular, the experience of thinking and doing inquiry, to a form of “shorthand” (Colebrook, 2002, p. 15) that we assume is established from the start and that, as a benefit which is afforded by its readymade status, accords the very sense of security that we desire to duck out of those trying moments in which it is perhaps most necessary to put the riskiness of our inquiry into thought and the uncertainty of our thinking into inquiry. Drawing on personal memories and existing research and theory, as well as Charles Garoian’s (1972) sculptural performance/installation, Grids, this article activates Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical practice of concept formation as a means to trouble the everyday use of concepts in thinking and doing inquiry, as well as to cultivate a less-assured relationship to the languages of qualitative research methodology.

The “Gift” of Research Methodology

A few years ago, I overheard a group of graduate students talking in the hallway outside of my office about how they needed “to get some more theory,” and later on, an expression of concern about whether or not they would ever “find a research methodology.” I didn’t find their conversation to be entirely surprising, nor did I see it as being all that problematic. In fact, as I sat in my office, I remembered vividly my own experience and concerns about the relationship of theory and methodology to my work and interests as a researcher. Indeed, I found their conversations to be quite familiar as I recalled in vivid terms my own experience as a graduate student, sitting in my first research methods course, reading hard the texts that were spread out before me, but at the same time desiring even harder to find a way—the way—to think and do inquiry. What struck me as I sat in my office was not the nature of the statements that were being made, but rather the unspoken manner in which the students, by way of their statements, clearly longed to find a way—the way—to think and do inquiry, and to acquire the right kind of language to express their found orientations to research methodology.

I bring this memory to light for two reasons. First, it reflects what I feel is an important problem in the early experiences of graduate students, particularly as they begin to contemplate what it means and takes to think and do qualitative inquiry. Moreover, it raises serious concerns and questions about the ethical dimensions of introducing graduate students to concepts of research methodology and to their related languages. How do we go about orienting graduate students to concepts of research methodology, among other things, and what comes to matter as a result of our doing so? Second, the story about the students’ struggles to find the right methodological fit is important because to say, for example, “I need to get some more theory,” or, “I don’t think I will ever find a research methodology” is, to some extent, a statement that insinuates that research and its methodologies, as well as its languages, are already “waiting for us ready-made” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 5).

The issue of course is not so much that the statements were made, or even how they were made, but rather that the students expressed relationships to theory and methodology, much like the habit of saying, “Happy Birthday,” reflects a common tendency to accept the conceptual languages to which theory and methodology are connected, as “a gift,” as something—an object, even—that we can readily assume and that we only ever need to purify and polish. But what does it mean to express the conceptual languages to which theory and methodology are connected, as a gift, especially one that only ever needs to be purified and polished? To do so is, in part, to desire research methodology as a concept that is always whole, which has a history yet is somehow—miraculously—devoid of a turbulent geography, to use Deleuze and Guattari words. It is in this way that research methodology gets constituted as a gift, as essence and objectality, which we are always entitled to, that we deserve to acquire, and that remains intact and functions accordingly, despite the absence of any real material investment, effort, or engagement. This everyday, gift-like concept of research methodology articulates, then, not as a practice of generosity, as an ongoing movement toward creation, but instead as a practice of entitlement, an ongoing desire for stratification and possession.

But, as Deleuze might say, there was just too much desire for any of the students—and me, too—to get or find anything at all. But, what if that group of students, for example, did manage to get some more theory, and, as it turns out, were also fortunate enough to find a research methodology? What would those once desired, now received, theoretical and methodological gifts (i.e., those readymade versions of research and methodology) make possible—for the students, for others, and for the world(s) to which their inquiries were (and will become) entangled? When I think about these questions, I am reminded of Elizabeth St. Pierre’s (2016) recent essay, The Long Reach of Logical Positivism/Logical Empiricism, in which she recounts an experience that she had while talking to a group of doctoral students about their research at the Qualitative Research special issue group (SIG) at AERA. She writes,

When I asked them about their research, every single one responded with something like, “I’m doing a grounded study,” or “I’m doing a case study,” or “I’m doing a cross case analysis,” They leaped not just to methodology but to research design. I was completely taken aback. When I asked about the theories that guided their studies, they were taken aback and stumbled for an answer. (St. Pierre, 2016, p. 22)

Though intended to draw attention to what was or wasn’t, at the time, considered to be an essential, even necessary, part of one’s educational research curriculum, St. Pierre’s reflective discussion also forms an important resonance with the aforementioned example. Moreover, it extends the methodological desirings presented in this discussion by illustrating the real material effects that accompany the experience of assuming too much, expecting too little, and accepting too readily the idea that research methodology is indeed a conceptual gift—a “label or name that we attach to things” (Colebrook, 2002, p. 15)—which can be found and readily applied, as opposed to being endeavored as a project of investigation and creation. Whereas the students in my earlier example demonstrate a clear desire to both see and secure research methodology in this way, as a label or name that might and hopefully will be gifted to them, the students featured in St. Pierre’s example give visibility to the vacuous state that takes shape when such gifts are not only expected, but accepted, too.

When a student says, then, as an example, that they are doing a case study, they are saying this because they’ve learned that it is something to say, that it’s what they ought to say, and perhaps that it’s what other’s desire for them to say. Moreover, they say this because at some level, they’ve learned that labels and names matter, and that when accepted as theoretical and methodological gifts, such labels allow them the capital and flexibility that is needed to wiggle free from those situations that demand of them a more discussive fortitude regarding the decisions that they are making, and about the things they are thinking and doing. It becomes essential then, as part of this image of thought, to know your concept of research methodology, to set it out and control it (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994), and to remove from doubt the very assumptions, attitudes, and languages that compose it. In this way, research methodology becomes an everyday expression, similar to saying, “Happy Birthday,” which we must not only find or get more of but that we can and should move readily toward an accepted form of application. But thinking and doing research methodology in this way, as a “homogenous form” (Colebrook, 2002, pp. 12-13), is not only a leap to methodology and research design, as St. Pierre points out, it is also a movement to “conform to a model” (Deleuze & Parnet, 2007, p. 2) that is either devoid of or simply indifferent to the personal, empirical, ontological, and philosophical histories to which it was and is becoming entangled. And despite the fact that we want methodology to exist for us as a purely procedural concern, “it is always already connected to our conceptions of ontology, epistemology and ethics. These theoretical ideas inform the questions we formulate and the spaces, or sites, we take these questions to” (Dyke, 2012, p. 151).

Given that research methodology is often envisioned in terms of preexisting models, concepts, and processes, which are already knowable rather than always potentially thinkable in new and interesting ways, we acquiesce, establishing instead a relationship to our concept of research methodology that is “stale” (St. Pierre, 2004, p. 286), “flimsy” even (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 83), but that somehow manages to suffice. But, as Daniel Smith (2012) points out, what is often availed as a current idea is not necessarily a vital idea (see also Deleuze & Guattari, 1994), namely, because it is far “too regular, petrified, and reduced” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 83) to address in any substantive way (i.e., in a way that is multiple and creative) the performativity of inquiry and the inventiveness that research methodology both needs and desires. As a result, our concept of research methodology becomes habit, a form of shorthand that provides us the approvals that we need to abdicate our ethical and intellectual responsibilities to thinking and doing those aspects of inquiry that are unfamiliar, even incomprehensible.

The Habit of Shorthand Inquiry

What does it mean for inquiry to become a habit, or to think and do inquiry as a form of shorthand? How does the habitual produce inquiry as shorthand? Furthermore, what happens when our relationship to inquiry and to the conceptual languages of research methodology no longer exists for us as a “possible encounter with an other as a whole new world” (Colebrook, 2002, p. 17), but instead as a relationship to “opinion” (p. 16), to “Entity,” “Objectality,” and “Essence” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 3)? And to what degree, as St. Pierre (1997a) suggests, is our work being limited by the acceptance of these “received understandings” (p. 175) and by the many promises that they extend, produce, or reify? Our concepts of research methodology and, in particular, the relationships that get established, and that we enter into, are not waiting for us readymade, nor are they the “heavenly bodies” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 5) of thought that we desire them to be. They are multiplicities, each with an intimate yet indefinite mixture of “components that define them,” and that must continuously be formed, invented, and fabricated (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 2). As Colebrook (2002) writes, drawing on Deleuze,

Concepts are not correct pictures of the world; we should not be striving to create a science or theory that is as close to the world as possible. Concepts are philosophical precisely because they create possibilities for thinking beyond what is already known or assumed. (p. 19)

Thinking back to the examples that have already been discussed, one persisting issue is that we too often desire research methodology as a word, one that is already familiar, an extension of our “mother tongue” (Spivak, 1993, p. 69), which only intensifies the assumptive position that a correct picture of the world can and somehow will emerge (Colebrook, 2002). But it’s not just the world that is assumed to be correct in its emerged, picturesque state. Inquiry too is bequeathed a similar fate, a matter that was evidenced by the students who, in dialogue with Elizabeth St. Pierre, revealed a similar set of assumptions and, the expectation too, that their words for research methodology would serve effectively as a stand-in for the experience of conceptualizing inquiry itself. What’s troubling though, in addition to the already given status attributed to the world, and to the belief that it can somehow be replicated adequately through readymade concepts, is the attitude that often gets attached to the reality and nature of the concept itself.

The Three Ages of Conceptual Work

In the introduction of What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari’s final collaborative work, they provide in brief a discussion about the “three ages” of a concept, which consists of “encyclopedia, pedagogy, and commercial professional training” (p. 12). Each age, in relation to the others, offers a distinct but also interrelated form of conceptual work. And though it is not openly expressed to have significance, the positioning of the pedagogical in-between the encyclopedia and commercial professional training, which, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) contend, “safeguards us from falling from the heights of the first into the disaster of the third” (p. 12), certainly seems to be significant, if not strategic. More recently, though, in an article written by Nicholas Gane (2009), the three ages of the concept are described and ordered in different terms, referred to instead as the “three main forms” (p. 86) of conceptual work, and presented with the pedagogical following both the encyclopedia and commercial professional training. In what follows, each of the three forms of conceptual work, as outlined by Gane (2009), is discussed in relationship to the problem of research methodology, and to the aforementioned examples (i.e., the students in the hallway outside of my office and those in conversation with Elizabeth St. Pierre). I’ve elected to keep the ordering that Gane’s articles presents so to more effectively highlight Deleuze’s cautionary tale, that when thinking conceptually about research methodology, the potential fall from heights of the encyclopedia into the pits of commercial professional training is indeed a disaster, especially for thought.

The very notion that research methodology is a problem is important, for as Colebrook (2002) writes, “Problems . . . are not like quiz-show questions where there are right answers just waiting to be revealed. A problem is a way of creating a future” (p. 21). The problem of research methodology, however, specifically the manner in which it has been cast in the aforementioned student examples, always seems as if it is caught somewhere in-between those lingering, anticipating quiz-show pauses and a future that is not yet. In what follows, though, points of entry are established that allow for further inquiry into the distinct yet comingled work narratives of the encyclopedia, commercial professional training, and the pedagogic. These entry points elaborate occasions in which it becomes possible to ask more pointed questions about the performativity and production of each age of conceptual work, and the ways in which these they contribute to our concept of research methodology.

Problematic Forms

At some point, however, decisions need to be made, actions taken, movements precipitated, and so the difficult work of conceptualizing and living alongside of research methodology must commence. As Koro-Ljungberg (2016) points out, to be a researcher is to be

expected to make (potentially informed) decisions about theories, methods, representation, emergent questions, interactions with other scholars, peer reviews, and so on. Methodology is a kind of journey—a journey without a clear beginning or ending point and a journey with multiple paths to be taken . . . Different projects and research plans call for exploration and expansion of existing and new methodological spaces. (p. 3)

In contemplating the messy and iterative spaces of Koro-Ljungberg’s methodological journey, I’m reminded of a series of sculptural works made by the artist and art educator, Charles Garoian. Completed in 1972, Garoian’s mixed-media sculptural works were installed as part of a solo-exhibition in Lodi, California, at the Lodi Community Art Center (see Figure 1). ¹ Inspired by the earth works of Robert Smithson (e.g., Spiral Jetty) and Michael Heizer (e.g., Double Negative), as well as Eva Hesse’s process works, Garoian’s sculptures explored concepts of placement and displacement in relationship to his own lived and remembered experience of learning to be Armenian at home and American at school. For Garoian, who grew up on a vineyard and also worked that very same vineyard as a young boy, and whose family immigrated to America from Hoghe, a small village in Armenia, the translation of which is soil, the fertile agricultural conditions of the San Joaquin Valley offered a resonant collective of material, aesthetic, and cultural potentials to work on, from, with, and through.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Charles Garoian, 1972, Grids, Lodi Art Center, Courtesy of Charles Garoian.

But, of the many works that Garoian exhibited at the Lodi Art Center, there is one in particular that has always managed to capture my attention and keep me lingering. This work, which I will hereto forward refer to as grids, is characteristic of the transversal relationship between the tensions in Garoian’s background and those that were foregrounding his present movements and endeavors as an artist. As Garoian put it, “[Grids] was an experiment to see what would happen when the ceiling, string, soil, grids, floor, and gravitational force encountered one another” (C. Garoian, personal communication, April 9, 2016). So too does Grids embody the experimental nature of Garoian’s lived and remembered experience; his ongoing engagements with historical and contemporary, periphery, even prophetic concepts of artistic practice; and the highly attuned yet improvisational manner in which he sought to trouble, supplement, and extend both personal and public forms of imagery and knowledge.

But, there is also a palpable tension that emerges in Grids, a clear and difficult sense of anxiety that makes discernible the play of Garoian’s cultural negotiations. Grids is a composite of differential forms and formations—a becoming, in the Deleuzian sense. But, Grids is also a preformulated composition,

with a sequence of vertical frames suspended from the ceiling, one under the other, each with wire screens attached, the opening of their mesh diminishing in size to enable sifting large clumps of soil form the top frame and through the successive frames below until fine dust has sifted through and accumulated on the floor. (Garoian, 2016)

In this way, Grids desires to prioritize the problematic while encountering it (those large, indeterminate clumps of dirt), and that is always promising to find a way—the way—to make it into something intelligible—to make it something (a fine, carefully curated dust). However, as Rajchman (1998) suggests, following Nietzsche, “the way—does not exist!” And it is for this reason that Grids, like our concepts of research methodology, is always in “the thick of things” (Pickering & Guzik, 2008, p. 8). To be in the thick of things, in the Deleuzian sense, is to be up against the problem of conceptualizing research methodology, and, in particular, the everyday “tendency for thought to settle with what is most obvious or least resistant” (Colebrook, 2002, p. 21, emphasis added). Rarely is there an occasion, though, in which our concepts of research methodology get viewed as something in-between, as a matter yet to be determined, or as that which can—and should—remain open to assuming the work and material of having multiple directions, destinations, and determinations. Instead, our concepts of research methodology get used as templates, unflinching in their capacity to form inquiry and beyond reproach when having shaped what comes to matter.

When I look at Grids, I recognize the play of these oppositional forces; the multiple tensions that exist between stratified and non-stratified formations of matter, what Deleuze and Guattari (1977) refer to as “the two heads of desire” (p. 326); and, the extent to which they come to figure the methodological work that we do. On one hand, Grids evokes in our thinking about research methodology a set of everyday tendencies that are both indifferent toward and disinterested in the problem of what happens. This everyday version of Grids does not harbor a curiosity for what will happen because it has already determined what has. As such, Grids constitutes and gets constituted as a habit, a form of shorthand, which desires only to firm up the identity of its components (i.e., the atmospheric qualities of the room, the ceiling, string, grids, floor, soil, and gravitational forces that are at play). As an everyday concept of research methodology, Grids actualizes the very dogmatic image of thought that Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism seeks to challenge. In turn, this doctrinarian image of thought makes possible a form of conceptual work that consistently removes the pedagogical from its creative practice, between the encyclopedia and commercial professional training. The issue, of course, is that when Grids is activated as an everyday concept of research methodology, it seizes the definitions and functions that are associated with its preexisting terms and languages, and legislates as well the questions and problems that it has presupposed from the start.

For the artist, Charles Garoian, Grids was an experimental practice, an emergent engagement with the problematic question of what happens when ceiling, string, soil, grids, floor, and gravitational forces encounter one another. But Grids, when approached as the conceptual by-product of an everyday practice, proposes a very different set of problems and questions. Though problems are a frequent point of emphasis and discussion, in both educational and research contexts, they are too often “subordinated to the solution, the actual outcome” (Olsson, 2009, p. 115). The problem, then, is of the quiz-show variety, and the questions that get put to it are merely “preparatory movements” (Olsson, 2009, p. 115) to shore up a desired solution, only to dissipate when the outcomes settle in place. In this sense, Grids takes as its problem, not the pedagogical experiment of its components’ happenings—the performativity of the room’s atmosphere and its interplay with the ceiling, strings, grids, and floor—but instead the efficiency of the sifting and the degree to which these components separate out, sort through, and settle the soil on the floor as dust.

On the other hand, Grids has the capacity to evoke in our thinking about research methodology a sensibility for what happens that is curious and creative, and that asks instead what comes to matter, because the question of what happens is a matter that’s always getting created. Grids, in this sense, embodies a problem that can never quite digress to the status of given, nor can it be fully reduced to a form that dissipates when solutions appear, no matter how hard such appearances are desired (Olsson, 2009). The underlying point is this: When contemplating their concept of research methodology, the students talking outside of my office and those in dialogue with Elizabeth St. Pierre were intimately and intensely engaged with a problem. The issue, of course, is that the problem of research methodology, like Grids, has both the tendency to function as an everyday gift, akin to saying, for example, “Happy Birthday,” or, in the Deleuzian sense, a pedagogical practice of creation. It is a conundrum. In the same way that Garoian mused about the potential happenings between the ceiling, string, soil, grids, floor, and the gravitational forces at play, I find myself contemplating how graduate students, for example, come to think and do research methodology. I wonder, if I were to provide a group of graduate students a photograph of Grids and then invite them to muse, as Garoian did, about its potential happenings; for example, how it might come to matter as a concept of research methodology; what might they say? (see Figure 2).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Charles Garoian, 1972, Grids (emphasis changed), Lodi Art Center, Courtesy of Charles Garoian.