Antimethodology: Postqualitative Generative Conventions

And . . . And . . . And

Methodology came too late for my study that got to work in an assemblage of humans, nonhumans, living, and nonliving in family history genealogy (St. Pierre, 2011). ¹ When I wrote the research proposal in 2009 for the research that got to work in an assemblage of humans, nonhumans, living, and nonliving in family history genealogy, I quickly realized that this assemblage disrupted conventional humanist qualitative inquiry’s foundational conceptualizations of humans, nonhumans, living, and nonliving. Conventional qualitative research is subject-centered in that it primarily uses methods such as interviewing and participant observation to draw information from people face to face to produce to knowledge about people and the meaning they make of their lived experiences. If nonhumans such as documents, photographs, and artifacts are included within a conventional qualitative research project, they are generally viewed as secondary, ancillary data sources about people. However, my study considered nonhumans and humans (participants) to be equally important in the production of knowledge. The human/nonhuman binary could not hold in this study. Conventional qualitative research also relies on living people in that living people are interviewed and observed. However, my study focused on nonliving humans and how nonhumans animate the nonliving humans. The nonliving was equally important in knowledge production. The living/nonliving binary could not hold in this study. Conceptually, I assumed the human, nonhuman, living, and nonliving to be operating in a “logic of the and” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 25, emphasis in original), and I wanted to study the process of formation of these terms and the assemblage they create in family history genealogy. I wanted to know what these processes did and the “felt reality of [those] relations” (Massumi, 2002, p. 16) or the residues of those relations. Because I conceptualized humans, nonhumans, living, and nonliving differently, I had no methodologies, no methods that I could plug into the study. I only had theories. I had to invent through repetition and differentiation (Deleuze, 1994). ²

Ontological Event

Deleuze (1991) wrote, “Philosophy must constitute itself as the theory of what we are doing, not as a theory of what there is” (p. 133). And, so, I set off with a “plan” to think, live, and become with “the logic of the and” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 25, emphasis in original) among humans, nonhumans, living, and nonliving assemblage in family history genealogy. To think, live, and become with this assemblage, I attended to the and of the assemblage and what it did and continues to do in family history genealogy. How do humans, nonhumans, living, and nonliving move together in family history genealogy? How do other systems (e.g., theories, politics, and so on) work in this process? How does this process produce residues of these relations? How does this process create something else, something new? These questions suggest a different ontological framework that shifts away from conventional qualitative inquiry’s focus on unitary being, “a being that exists” (Simondon, 2009, p. 6) and can be known through methodologies such as case study and narrative inquiry as well as data collection methods such as interviewing and observation. As I have stated elsewhere (Nordstrom, 2015b), conventional qualitative research rests on a realist ontology, in which “being is considered as consistent in its unity, given to itself, founded upon itself, not created, resistant to that which it is not” (Simondon, 2009, p. 4). In such an ontology, being is stable, can be known and recorded, and works within binary divisions, such as Self/Other. Moreover, such an ontology focuses on humans rather than nonhumans and on living humans rather than nonliving humans. The questions I posed suggested another ontology of these terms—Simondon’s individuation and ontogenesis.

Simondon (2009) described individuation as “considering as primordial the operation of individuation from which the individual comes to exist and of which its characteristics reflect the development, the regime and finally the modalities” (p. 5). In other words, the individual is “grasped as a relative reality” (p. 5), a residue, “a partial and relative resolution” (p. 5) of contingent and constantly shifting relationships. Barthelemy (2013) explained, “The living being . . . possess[es] a complex and durable individuality; its associated milieu participates in its being, which is therefore a ‘theatre of individuation’” (p. 213). Simply put, an individual is a site of individuation and such a site is always in motion and composing itself. For the purposes of my study, individuals refer to both humans and nonhumans. As Barthelemy explained, Simondon’s technical object also undergoes the “process of ‘concretization’ through which the technical object calls forth an associated milieu that it integrates into its functioning” (p. 213). Both human and nonhuman, then, call forth a milieu that is always in motion that contingently forms them. Human and nonhuman individuals, then, are in a constant state of genesis, always creating, always becoming. Simondon uses the term ontogenesis to describe such a process. He claimed that ontogenesis is “genesis of the individual” (p. 5), “a becoming, a mode of resolution that is rich in potentials” (p. 6). Becoming, then, is an ontological framework of movement in which stasis of an individual is just a special kind of movement (Massumi, 2002), a slowing down, a momentary resolution of the relationships that contingently form an individual (both human and nonhuman). Simondon’s ontogenesis and individuation, however, focuses solely on the living. To attend to the nonliving, I drew on Deleuze’s (1993) fold, a “movement [that] cannot be stopped” (p. 12). While the physical body is no longer, the soul participates in a “whole dramaturgy of souls, which makes them rise, descend, and rise again” (p. 74). The infinite fold that is in constant movement and flux pumps this dramaturgy with vitality. The nonliving, the deceased, “forge their new present” (p. 74) through the constant folding between living and nonliving. Becoming, then, has “neither culmination nor subject, but draw[s] one another into zones of proximity or undecidability” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 507) for humans, nonhumans, living, and nonliving. In other words, an individual is always in movement, never completed, never whole thereby making that individual nebulous, even after death. Such undecidability, however, is not a lack. Instead, undecidability overflows with potentiality generated by ever-shifting relationships.

In addition to disrupting conventional qualitative research’s focus on unitary and living being, this ontological framework fractures the classical logic of induction and deduction that grounds conventional qualitative inquiry as evidenced by practices such as coding (Bendassolli, 2013). Simondon (1992) reminded us “that classical logic cannot be used to understand individuation” (p. 312) and that classical logic reduces the study of individuation and ontogenesis. In other words, induction and deduction are perfectly fine to use when studying unitary being. But, I was not interested in unitary being. To study, live, and become in ontogenetic relations, I had to engage in transduction, “an individuation in process” (Simondon, 1992, p. 313). Simondon (1992) described transduction as “correspond[ing] to a discovery of dimensions according to which a problematic can be defined” (p. 313). The problematic of my study, the assemblage of human, nonhuman, living, and nonliving in family history genealogy must be studied in the dimensions those terms (i.e., human, nonhuman, living, and nonliving) create. Helmreich (2007) explained that a transductive focus in ethnography would be a “mode of attention that asks how definitions of subjects, objects, and field emerge in material relations that cannot be modeled in advance” (p. 632). In this way, transduction shifts Crotty’s (2003) definition of methodology as a strategy or a plan of action into a different space. The strategy or plan of action, if one can call it that, is to get to work in the middle and becomings. In other words, the “strategy” became a way of

seeing [the living, nonliving, human, and nonhuman relationships and the residues of those relationships in family history genealogy] in the middle rather than looking down on them from above or up at them below, or from left to right or right to left. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 23)

Seeing in the middle asked me to radically rethink the supposed stability of “statement of the problem” and “research questions.” These entities only function within classical formulations of logic. In both induction and deduction, the question comes first and in so doing stabilize the context, participants, and the object of knowledge. One must define these areas. What do you want to know? Who will help you know that? Where will you go to “collect” data? In effect, the statement and questions striate context, participants, and the object of knowledge rather than actively composing them as they materialize in a moving ontology. To help me think in this moving ontology, the questions I posed worked with processes of formation and how these processes worked in the assemblage of humans, nonhumans, living, and nonliving family history genealogy. By simply asking about the work of this assemblage, I was able to “get to work in the middle” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 161) and follow the processes rather than predetermine them.

Object-Interview Event

To help me work in the middle and follow the relationships between humans, nonhumans, living, and nonliving and what these relationships generate, I invented a method, the object-interview (Nordstrom, 2013b). I had to invent because no method in conventional qualitative research would help me to attend to the relationships among humans, nonhumans, living, and nonliving and what those relationships might produce. The object-interview is a conversational space in which humans, nonhumans, living, and nonliving are entangled together to produce knowledge. I created an open-ended interview guide, mainly for the purposes of appeasing the Institutional Review Board (IRB). However, I never once used that guide because that guide would have attempted to anticipate individuation and ontogenesis rather than engage in these processes as they materialized in space and time. My work consisted of freeing up spaces for individuation and ontogenesis rather than succumb to traditional methods of data collection that unify being and stultify individuation and ontogenesis. My task was not to succumb to the allure of a unitary sense of being that desires interpretive questions (What do you mean?) or phenomenological questions (How did that make you feel? What was that like when you encountered that object?). The conversational object-interview became both a physical and linguistic space of exploring connections among humans, nonhumans, living, and nonliving. The physical spaces of the object-interviews became overwhelmed with relations and the residues of those relations. Piles of photographs, artifacts, and documents populated tables in participants’ homes where we conversed. Those piles steamed with the movements among humans, nonhumans, living, and nonliving. These movements materialized a language dripping with the residues of the associations and relations between those terms (Deleuze, 1991) in each object-interview. Each object-interview created its own unstable structure of relations—its own language of associationism—among these entities. No one object-interview was the same, even with the same interviewee. The invented object-interview was not even replicable in the study for which it was invented. This invented method was itself a product of ontogenesis, a becoming method.

Data Data Event

The object-interviews connected to other data (e.g., theories I used to help me see in the middle; theories that materialized in the object-interview transcripts; weather, dreams [St. Pierre, 1997]; spectral data [Nordstrom, 2013a]; and so on) in what I call a data assemblage (Nordstrom, 2015a), yet another invention (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Manning (2016) reminded us that an assemblage “has too often been read as an object or existent configuration, rather than its potentializing directionality” (p. 123). The data assemblage is not a thing or object, rather, it “caries within itself a sense of movement and connectability” (p. 123). The data assemblage focuses on what data do rather than how they can be organized (Manning, 2016).

As a moving entity of ontogenetic residues of transduction and individuation “that somehow functions together” (Bogue, 2003, p. 98), the data assemblage made it possible to think data relationally instead of categorically, which, as Foucault (1977) reminded us, reduces being. As data move together, they work together to produce knowledge, in what Bennett (2010) might call an agentic assemblage. Each constitutive line of the assemblage is “vibratory in which both the membership changes over time and the members themselves undergo internal alteration” (p. 35). In other words, the various data are always changing; as they modulate, they shift the assemblage. It is useful, then, to think of the word data as a verb. The data data as they move in modulating ontogenesis. As the data data (or whatever it is that they do), they contingently structure themselves, to grow and morph in different and unanticipated connections. The data assemblage, therefore, is “a veritable invention” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 406), a moving constellation of data dataing that is pumped by individuation and ontogenesis.

Knowledge Event

Most of the existing studies on family history genealogy use humanist categories, such as subject-centered identity, to describe family history genealogists and their work. For example, the existing literature focuses on family history genealogists’ identities (e.g., Hackstaff, 2009a, 2009b, 2010; Nash, 2002; Tutton, 2004; Tyler, 2005), family history genealogists’ research practices (e.g., Bishop, 2008; Duff & Johnson, 2003; Lambert, 1996; Veale, 2004), memory work (e.g., Harevan, 1978; Lambert, 1996, 2002, 2003; Parham, 2008), and family history genealogy and its relation to the field of history (e.g., Rosenzweig & Thelen, 1998). Clearly, these humanist categories are both known and assumed (Colebrook, 2002). The data assemblage, however, seeks “to create linkages not yet assembled, to produce ways of becoming, to invent new modes of existence” (Manning, 2016, p. 124). What knowledge does a data assemblage produce about family history genealogy?

The concept “ensemble of life” manifested from the data assemblage that allowed me to “create new ways of thinking” (Colebrook, 2002, p. 17) about family history genealogy. I explain the concept in more detail elsewhere (Nordstrom, 2013b, 2015a). Here, I provide a definition in movement: An ensemble of life is a loose grouping of objects that continuously moves with an ancestor and is open and connectable to other objects, ancestors as well as social, historical, and cultural milieus, just to name a few. To create this concept, I moved between examples from the data assemblage and theories, specifically Deleuze’s (1990, 1993, 2006) fold, event, and a life. ³ Elsewhere (Nordstrom, 2015a), I explain how theory was always already moving about in the data assemblage. The fold, events, and Deleuze’s (2006) a life were already moving and shifting in the assemblage. As I read Deleuze’s writings on these concepts, the concepts amplified and pulsated with new vitality. Deleuze’s writings, then, were not a “system of signs or conventions that we impose upon the world in order to organize or differentiate our experience” (Colebrook, 2002, p. 20). I did not insert these Deleuzian concepts into the data assemblage. Instead, Deleuze’s writings about these concepts became “actions, or constant questions and creations in response to experience” (p. 20) in the data assemblage. In other words, Deleuze’s concepts responded to the data assemblage and the data assemblage responded back in a constant relay. The concepts became entangled with the data assemblage and “creat[ed] a future” (p. 21), a future that had already announced itself in the data assemblage. Because the concept manifested itself from a generative data assemblage, the ensemble of life has moved and shifted as I put different examples together to see what those examples might do in other writings. Each time I write about the ensemble of life, it becomes something else, something subtly different from other iterations of the concept. To do this day, I am surprised to see the work of this concept as it moves and shifts, always responsive to new, different, and sometimes unanticipated experiences and theories.

Writing Event

As ontogenesis churns a contingently structuring assemblage, I can never anticipate ethical events. Deleuze (1990) wrote, “Either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us” (p. 149). Each thought and piece of writing about this study is an attempt to not be unworthy of this study. Deleuze and Parnet (2002) and his notes about his and Guattari’s (1986) book on Kafka guide this work. He wrote,

Think of the author you are writing about. Think of him so hard that he can no longer be an object, and equally so that you cannot identify with him. Avoid the double shame of the scholar and the familiar. Give back to an author a little of the joy, the energy, the life of love and politics that he new how to give and invent. So many did writers must have wept over what has been written about them. (p. 119)

In many ways, this quote illustrates what I try to do when I think and write about this study. Each piece of writing is driven by a “power of creation [and the] cultivation of joy” (Sellars, 2006, p. 166). Each piece of writing attempts to give back what participants, theorists, and other scholars have so generously given me. Each piece of writing aims not to make these people weep over my writing. Each piece of writing aims to cultivate joy through different ways of thinking. Deleuze and Parnet (2002) went on to write, “I hope that Kafka was pleased with the book that we did on him, and it is for that reason that the book pleased nobody” (p. 119). As I continue to write about this study and, in particular, the ensemble of life, I hope to please the participants, their ancestors, my ancestors, Deleuze, and other authors I cite. My writing hopes to create joy by affirming the ontogenesis that continues to pump through this study.

Writing about ontogenesis and the residues that it produces is always an approximation, always working at the “border which separates our knowledge from out ignorance and transforms the one into the other” (Deleuze, 1994, p. xxi). Writing about this study is a way for me to keep surprising myself at that border. I suspect that I give other scholars headaches. Why won’t she just say what she did? What is so damned difficult about it? Why can’t she just sit still? Why can’t this study she keeps writing about keep still? These questions gesture toward what Lather (2015) called the “gravitational pull of humanism” (p. 100); such a pull is weighted by “implications” that pin down and normalize a process so that others can replicate a study and draw sure knowledge from it. And, if that gives people a headache, well, then, I suppose I am okay with it. I cannot anticipate what the rhythms of ontogenesis will create. Much like the etymology of the word “implication,” ontogenesis entangles me and generates life-affirming difference.

Six years now have passed since I formally “collected data.” During those 6 years, however, the study has kept assembling itself. For example, I am still in contact with the 11 family history genealogists. The genealogists still contact me when they find new objects associated with their ancestors. One genealogist sent me a book she wrote about her genealogical work. I still read and reread theories to help me think differently about the study. This study, it seems, will not end. When “there exist no other drives than the assemblages themselves” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 259), studies never begin or stop. The “beginning” and “ending” points of a study became arbitrary markers of space and time that momentarily pause around the points that are usually determined by outside forces (i.e., graduation deadlines set by universities). Data keep dataing. They always were dataing and they will continue to data. Analysis, then, becomes a constant series of Deleuzian unending encounters that “force us to think” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 79). Thoughts compose me, this study, as “slow beings” (Deleuze, 2006, p. 283). We are always too late as ideas, conversations, and entanglements continue to connect to each other. From the residues of connections made possible by ontogenesis, I attempt to “map realms to come” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 5) by imagining, creating, and inventing possibilities with these connections.

Problematic Events

Manning (2016) wrote that agencement, or assemblage, “is not an action directed by an existing subject, but a force of distributed directionality in the event” (p. 137). The assemblage of humans, nonhumans, living, and nonliving at work in family history genealogy generated known and unknown forces that moved the research events described above. Each of the research events carry forces with them that move me to think differently to this day. I soon realized that there was no researcher behind this study. The research created me. In so doing, these research events became momentary recognitions in which I “discover[ed] how [my] practices situated [me]” (Stengers, 2011, p. 372). Research concepts and practices learned in qualitative research courses along with posthumanist theories collided together in the assemblage. These collisions were productive, generative even though they operated in two different ontologies. Practices were no longer “pure mechanism(s)” or “routine process(es)” (Malabou, 2008, p. vii) as interviews became object-interviews (Nordstrom, 2013b) and a data set became a data assemblage (Nordstrom, 2015a). Practices became creative and generative tensions that moved with “questions and problems” (Colebrook, 2002, p. 21) that have no right answer. They have no right answer because they are in an intermezzo, a generative middle space, “where things pick up speed . . . [that] is necessarily constituted by the already familiar distinctions of social science, and to pick up speed is to recreate its concepts from within” (Fugelsang & Sorensen, p. 6). A collective collision of research events in an assemblage, then, asked me to rethink the practices—the habits and concepts—of qualitative research.

Habits and Concepts

Ravaisson’s (2008) rethinking of habits positions them as ontological dispositions with capacities of change. Rather than thinking about research habits as permanent entities that are somehow outside of “transitory change” (p. 25), habits can be “understood as a power of beginning” (Malabou, 2008, p. viii) that begin again and again in the middle. Habits, Ravaisson argued, is a “moving middle term” (p. 59) between a multiplicity of tendencies that occur in transitory space and time. As research habits are put to work in different multiplicities, they respond to a variety of tendencies (e.g., theories, contexts, people, time, etc.). As these habits respond to these tendencies, they momentarily cohere “between the living being’s activities and its milieu” (Grosz, 2013, p. 218). Habits, then, move and shift in relationship to the multiplicities from which they manifest. As habits are repeated, they may very well “draw from repetition something new: difference” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 70). This difference then creates “an aptitude for change” (Malabou, 2008, p. ix). Habits as middle spaces become “elaboration[s] of tendency, production[s] of potentiality” (Grosz, 2013, p. 223). Grosz (2013) wrote the following about Ravaisson’s conceptualization of habits:

They entail a change, a new virtuality, a new tendency to act, a new potentiality. They bring about a new ability, the capacity to persist, thrive, change and grow in the face of a world that is itself subject to endless and often random change. Habits provide the ability to change one’s tendencies, to reorient one’s actions to address the new, and to able to experience the unexpected. (p. 221)

In a moving ontology, in a world in which being does not sit still, habits contingently move between individuals and milieus. As habits persist and change (Ravaisson, 2008) in a moving ontology, they are at once both “poison and remedy” (Malabou, 2008, p. xix). In sum, habits occupy a middle space that is constituted by movement. As habits repeat and differentiate in this transitory space, they mobilize the potential of doing and thinking the habit differently.

Habits, however, cannot be divorced from concepts. For, as Deleuze and Guattari (1994) wrote, “Wherever there are habits there are concepts” (p. 105). Deleuze and Guattari go on to write that the “habits are developed and given upon the plane of immanence of radical experience” (p. 105). Habits and concepts, or habits–concepts, then become “conventions” (p. 105) that ask the question, “What is the habit that constitutes its concept?” (p. 106). The term conventions articulates a meeting, a contingent agreement, between habit and concept. Conventions of research become a way to think about how habits and concepts cannot be thought apart from one another. Moreover, conventions of research gesture to Ravaisson’s (2008) idea that habits are dispositions manifested by virtual potential in a middle space. Likewise, concepts, as Deleuze and Guattari (1994) note, are neither stable entities nor “the essence or the thing” (p. 21). Rather, as Colebrook (2002) suggested, concepts “create possibilities for thinking beyond what is already known or assumed” (p. 19) as they are “incarnated or effectuated in bodies” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 21). Because conventions of research are not stable, they manifest themselves differently in each project. A new meeting, or an unholy agreement, is always possible.

An Unholy Science

Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) thoughts about royal science (or more sedentary practices of science) and nomadic science (a more eccentric science) provide useful ways to think about such unholy unions. In this instance, royal scientific practices refer to conventional qualitative research and its drive to normalize qualitative research through a series of discrete processes that form an imperative. Nomadic science, however, “follows the connections between singularities of matter and traits of expression, and lodges on the level of these connections” (p. 369). The connective and elastic nomadic science generated by poststructural theories deterritorializes the more striated, or royal, scientific practices, as I have attempted to demonstrate in the previous sections. Nomadic science, however, can never be disconnected from royal science—a reterritorializing practice—that “continually imposes its form of sovereignty on the inventions of nomad science” (p. 362). In other words, the eccentric and deterritorializing creativity of nomadic science practices is reterritorialized by royal science. Stengers (2011) wrote, “The only who is dangerous, irremediably destructive or tolerant, is someone who believes himself to be ‘purely nomadic,’ because he can only define his practice in contrast to all others” (p. 373). Nomadic and royal science cannot be teased apart. Rather, science, or research conventions, defines itself between the complementary movements of a deterritorializing nomadic science and a reterritorializing royal science. For example, I named the data assemblage to gesture toward the connectivity and elasticity between the two sciences. Research conventions, then, are situated within these complementary movements with the and “play[ing] the role of a tensor” (p. 99) among royal and nomadic forces.

Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of continuous variation is useful to think about the complementary movements between the two sciences and conventions those movements produce. Research conventions built on a continuous line of variation create “a new form of redundancy. AND . . . AND . . . AND . . .” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 98), an “atypical expression of all of the possible conjunctions” (p. 99) between royal and nomadic scientific forces. Research conventions become residues of the and as well as historical. Deleuze and Guattari wrote,

Not only are there as many statements as there are effectuations, but all of the statements are present in the effectuation of one among them, so that the line of variation is virtual, in other words, real without being actual, and consequently continuous regardless of the leaps the statements make. (p. 94)

For example, when the term methodology is built on the line of continuous variation, it is at once all of its previous iterations as well as possible future iterations. A continuous line of variation does not erase the history of methodology, for example, the forces of its colonialist and imperialistic iterations (Tuhwai Smith, 2012). Rather, building methodology on a line of continuous variation asks researchers to be accountable for all its iterations, even as a concept moves along the line. In this sense, “A variable can be continuous over a portion of its trajectory, then leap or skip, without that affecting its continuous variation” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 95). As methodology becomes a mobile concept and is deployed in certain contexts, it carries with it a history of previous actualizations and virtual possibilities of doing research differently. On a line of continuous variation, the practices of these terms are not “pure reiteration” (Manning, 2012, p. 56), but instead, are “repetition with a difference” (p. 56). In this way, research conventions, such as methodology, materialize a particular repetition and difference that is responsive to the research project at hand. A materialized research convention thus becomes a series of questions. How does a research convention repeat and differentiate in a study? How do research conventions “move through movement again” (Manning, 2012, p. 56)? “What remains of a repeated change, the residue of repetition” (Malabou, 2008, p. viii) in a study? How might these residues create glimpses of research conventions that are “in fact constituted by a resource of possibilities” (p. viii)?

These questions gesture toward the “tension-limit[s] between the two kinds of science” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 364). Conventions of research hence became practices of “thinking with AND, instead of thinking IS, instead of thinking for IS: empiricism has never had another secret. Try it, it is quite extraordinary thought, and yet it is life” (Deleuze & Parnet, 2002, p. 57, emphasis in original). This shift in conventions began to “express one’s openness to the future, along with one’s relation of connection to the past: [they] express the continuity of one’s attractions and desires, a cohesion that is endlessly open to modification” (Grosz, 2013, p. 224). In this way, methodology, for example, becomes “a series of balancing acts” (Braidotti, 2011, p. 284) in an assemblage that is “out of joint but also engaged with the times, to be vowed to the future but active in the here and now” (pp. 284-285). These balancing acts generated different actualized research convention possibilities that always carry with them virtual potential.

Strategic Enactments of Royal Science

I cannot simply pretend royal science away or assume that I am somehow outside of its reterritorializing forces. As Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) wrote,

The State does not give power (pouvoir) to the intellectuals or conceptual innovators; on the contrary, it makes them a strictly dependent organ with an autonomy that is only imagined yet sufficient to divest those whose job it becomes imply to reproduce or implement of all of their power (puissance). (p. 368)

In order for me to do research with humans, the study has to be sanctioned by the IRB at my university. The IRB operates firmly within positivism, a royal science that, as many of us know, sometimes does not even recognize qualitative research as a scientific methodology. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) suggested that “Royal science is inseparable from a ‘hylomorphic’ model implying both a form that organizes matter and a matter prepared for the form” (p. 369). Specific to IRB, I have to organize the study, the matter, into particular practices, specifically positivist epistemologies and ontologies. For example, I have to clearly delineate research questions even though I anticipate and know they will change with individuation and ontogenesis. Likewise, I have to position the methodology and methods of data collection as static entities. I have to anticipate all the data I will collect and all the ethical issues that might arise during the study. I have to anticipate how participants might respond to interview questions and any possible discomfort and gains from participating in the study. Simply put, I have to both discursively and materially produce a study within positivism so that it will be sanctioned by those in power, in this instance the IRB.

I call this work “strategic enactments of royal science.” These enactments help me navigate the politics of my “present-based practices of [my] everyday life” (Lather, 2015, p. 111). I cannot pretend the neoliberal academy that is grounded in royal scientific practices away. The forces of royal scientific conventions thereby reterritorialize much of my work. As many qualitative researchers know, we still have to defend qualitative research to others. I have to use words like “data” and “methodology” to situate my research so that others can understand it. For example, I carefully write about my research in job applications, research award dossiers, yearly evaluations, and so on, so that it can be sanctioned by those (e.g., department chairs and deans) in power. Moreover, I cannot pretend away the colonialist and imperialistic history of research (Tuhwai Smith, 2012), especially given my positionality as a White researcher who is situated in the academy. As I strategically enact royal science, I must be careful and aware about how research conventions materialize in a research study. How might research conventions mobilize and materialize dangerous colonial and imperialistic forces? How might other forces bring about different iterations of research conventions that are antioppositional? Strategic enactments of royal science help me to navigate not only my everyday politics but also the larger politics of research.

A + Researcher + To Research

I have titled this section, “A Researcher to Research” to gesture toward a collective researcher subjectivity of “traitor prophets, insofar as they perform a treachery in relation to our more dominant affective/signifying regimes” (O’Sullivan, 2009, p. 248). This collective subjectivity is in between the forces of nomadic and royal science and working on continuous lines of variation. This collective is political, problematic, past–present–future, and undefinable. This collective, then, “does not offer a reassuring mirror reflection of a subjectivity in place” (p. 248). Instead, it diffracts, shakes up, cracks, and fissures any sense of stability. To make this collective subjectivity, I draw from Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) becoming grammar of “indefinite article + a proper name + infinitive verb” (p. 263).

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) began their discussion of the above formula of becoming with the infinitive verb. “To research” situates the action of research in Aeon, “the floating, nonpulsed time” (p. 263) rather than chronological time that is pulsed and linear. In Aeon, there is no singular past, present, and future. Rather, all these times indeterminately coexist together. “To research” becomes indeterminate, a sum of all its past, present, and future iterations. “To research,” then, enables us to get to work on lines of continuous variation. In this way, “to research” and its constituent research conventions open to the virtual. “To research” becomes an event, something that passes through us, something we must try and figure out later, something that cannot be codified, because another event is always possible and even the same event may very well pass through us differently.

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) explained the proper name as follows:

The proper name does not indicate a subject; nor does a noun take on the value of a proper name as a function of a form or a species. The proper name fundamentally designates something that is of the order of the event, of becoming or of haecceity. (p. 264)

In other words, the proper name does not do the verb “to research.” Simply put, we have never done research. Rather, “to research” happens to us, moves through us, and marks us with events and becomings. “Researcher” becomes characterized by events and becomings—“the speeds that compose them and the affects that fill them” (p. 264). “Researcher” is always already decentered in tenuous movement. She becomes a shuttlecock in a game of badminton between reterritorializing royal and deterritorializing nomadic forces. In such a game, “Subjectivity is rather a process ontology of auto-poiesis or self-styling, which involves complex and continuous negotiations with dominant norms and values and hence also multiple forms of accountability” (Braidotti, 2012, p. 31). In this self-styling, there is no magic pill that immunizes her from royal science. Nor is there a pill that makes her purely nomadic. Perhaps the only magic pill she might want to take is that of the Deleuzoguattarian proper name “Researcher,” a pill to remind her that “to research” happens to her and will forever change her.

The “A” in “A researcher” serves “as an individuating function within a collectivity” (p. 264). The indeterminate article “A” contingently positions “researcher” within the researcher to research collectivity. The “A” becomes a momentary recognition in the grammatical formation of the subject, a marker of an event or a becoming. For example, not once have I felt like or known with certainty that I was a researcher or that I was doing research. I have always felt like the research has carried me, taken me to places I could not anticipate. I was never quite sure what or how I was doing research. Research events passed through me, changed me, and became part of me. These “moments . . . when the self is emptied out, dissolving into rawer and more elementary sensations—mark heightened levels of awareness and receptivity” (Braidotti, 2011, p. 234) and beg questions. What particular iteration of habits and concepts constituted a particular research convention in a particular project? What was the work of those habits and concepts in a research convention? As I began to think through these questions, I was able to momentarily recognize myself within the “a researcher to research” collectivity. Each event, becoming, became a “constitutive component that [had] to be affirmed as part of [my]self” (Sellars, 2006, p. 161). Not once did I feel threatened by these events (Sellars, 2006). Rather, these became affirmative moments of recognition within the statement “A + Researcher + To research.”

Antimethodology is affirmative

Massumi (2002) wrote the following about writing that I believe can be extended to research. He wrote, “If you know where you will end up when you begin, nothing has happened in the meantime. You have to be willing to surprise yourself writing things you didn’t think you thought” (p. 18). When antimethodology happens to me, I have no idea what is happening or where a study is going. I have to trust in the surprises, the research events, that radically alter how I do and think antimethodology. I have to trust in the assemblage that entangles me. I have to resist that lure to think that I can somehow step outside of the assemblage in wrestle it into categories. I have to trust that I will eventually catch up to the doings of a study. This is affirmative work. It affirms wild experience and the possibilities for thinking and doing research at the limits of thought and practice. This is joyous creation.

Antimethodology is an ongoing practice

Anti-methodology is not a thing or an entity. As such, antimethodology is not a successor regime, something that can be easily replicated, or “the answer” to methodological questions in postqualitative inquiry. Readers cannot simply plug this methodology into a project. Each study will bring about a new set of problems, which are, of course, linked to concepts and habits that emerge from multiplicities. Because each study is a unique and untimely conglomeration of problems, there is no way to systematize antimethodology (St. Pierre, 2015). If anything, antimethodology is an open system that is available to constant modification.

Antimethodology treats the habits and concepts of qualitative research as elastic ontological entities with capacities to change

The use of “anti” in antimethodology suggests the movement of methodology on that line of continuous variation as well as how methodology moves between the complementary reterritorializing forces of royal science and deterritorializing forces of nomadic science that render research conventions malleable. As they move, research conventions “must remain on the plane of composition” (Manning, 2012, p. 10). On the plane of composition, a researcher can only “think with AND” (Deleuze & Parnet, 2002, p. 57). The AND shifts questions. Rather than asking what or why questions that focus on “thinking with IS” (p. 57), antimethodology asks questions about “how to proceed” (Foucault, 1983, p. xii) in the AND. How does antimethodology move in between complementary reterritorializing and deterritorializing forces? How does antimethodology proceed and move in a study? How do politics, desire, and so on, proceed in antimethodology? How do previous iterations of antimethodology move in a study? How might antimethodology contribute to colonizing practices (Tuhwai Smith, 2012)? How do virtual potentials animate antimethodology differently? These questions place antimethodology and its resulting creative research conventions on a plane of composition so that they can begin to “express one’s openness to the future, along with one’s relation of connection to the past: [they] express the continuity of one’s attractions and desires, a cohesion that is endlessly open to modification” (Grosz, 2013, p. 224).

Antimethodology is strategic

Antimethodology provides a way for researchers to occupy an academic schizo-society. Citing Buchanan, Kuntz (2015) wrote, “we literally live within a schizo-society . . . the incessant production of multiple and often contradictory truths that lead to our schizophrenic state” (p. 97). For those researchers doing postqualitative work, we sometimes have to position our work through strategic enactments of royal science so that we get and retain jobs, for example. As such, multiple methodological truths occupy us and we them. The forces of these truths push and pull us, always positioning us in the middle of them. The middle, however, is not a place of paralysis or docility (Kuntz, 2015). In the middle of forces, one can enact strategic enactments of royal science to describe their work that may very well subvert those very same royal scientific practices.

Antimethodology is a + researcher + to research

The researcher is not in advance of the research. Rather, antimethodology decenters the researcher such that she asks, “Was that me?” (Manning, 2016, p. 37). Each study creates different generative research conventions that undoubtedly position her differently and may very well render her imperceptible to herself.

Antimethodology is a doing

Antimethodology constantly makes, unmakes, and remakes itself as it travels after individuation and ontogenesis, to “see for yourself, go check something, some inexpressible feeling deriving from a dream or nightmare . . . to see if [something] really exists [and how] it exists somewhere, out there” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 78). Antimethodology engages transduction as a way of seeing, seeing in the middle, and seeing how methodology materializes in space and time. Antimethodology invents and connects. Antimethodology affirms ontogeneisis, becoming, never-ending, ever-undulating potentiality and possibility. Antimethodology moves between moments of stasis and residues of movement (Massumi, 2002). Antimethodology materializes from reterritorializing and deterritorializing forces—forces that crack and fissure “the researcher.” Antimethodology happened, happens, and continues to happen. Antimethodology creates and cultivates rather than reproduces. Antimethodology is a “creative contagion” (p. 19).