Haecceity: Laying Out a Plane for Post Qualitative Inquiry

“I” and Haecceity

What was it about haecceity that was so radical for me then? I had studied poststructural theories of subjectivity and their critique of the Enlightenment’s description of man, Descartes’ cogito, the knowing, epistemological subject; a unique, unified, agentive, coherent, self-contained individual/person/self uncontaminated throughout his life by culture, by history, by living (see St. Pierre, 2000, 2011b); the Self set against all the Others; the empirical Investigator; the master of the universe. This subject is so normalized he’s imperceptible. But poststructural feminism’s refusal of that individual had given me hope, especially Butler’s critique of the “I” along with other foundational concepts we take for granted. Butler (1992) qualified her use of “I” in this way: “My position is mine to the extent that ‘I’—and I do not shirk from the pronoun—replay and resignify the theoretical positions that have constituted me” (p. 9). For Butler, agency is not innate but always possible because the subject must repeat itself again and again to maintain its identity, to recognize itself and be recognized, and can, therefore, refuse to repeat itself, can practice “subversive repetition” (Butler, 1990, p. 32). This was a different kind of freedom, an everyday practice of freedom I had already put to work.

Foucault (1982), who studied discursive-material formations—including the human sciences—by which, in which, we have transformed ourselves into different kinds of subjects, encouraged us to “refuse what we are . . . we have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality” (p. 216). I found Foucault’s freedom—refusing subjectification—powerful as well. Nietzsche (1992), the radical forebear of the postmodern critique of the humanist subject, refused the “I,” arguing there is no such substratum; there is no “being” behind doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction added to the deed—“the deed is everything” (p. 481). Spivak (1974), referring to and quoting Nietzsche’s critique of the humanist subject, argued that “the “subject” is a unified concept and therefore the result of “interpretation”; therefore, the “insertion of a subject” is “fictitious” (p. xxvi). This description seemed even more radical: the subject we believe we are is only an interpretation, a linguistic fiction! With Rajchman (2001), it seemed to me that “the real question [about the subject, the ‘I’] is . . . how our lives ever acquire the consistency of an enduring self, given that it is born in ‘delirium, chance, and indifference’” (p. 13) as Nietzsche and poststructural scholars suggest. Butler’s, Spivak’s, Nietzsche’s, Foucault’s, and others’ critiques had convinced me that “I” was only one description or interpretation of human being—though a powerful one fashioned at a crucial moment in Western history—and that if it could be thought and lived, so could others. This was freedom indeed.

As I’ve explained, I found Deleuze’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s work together after I’d read other poststructural scholars; in fact, quite a few of Deleuze’s (1991/1994) texts had not yet been translated into English in 1994 when I began writing my dissertation. Their book, What is Philosophy?, in which they noted the persistence of “I” in the face of centuries of critique, had just been translated. In it they wrote, “we are all contemplation, and therefore habits. I is a habit” (p. 105). They also wrote the quotation that begins this essay, suggesting that our goal might be “to reach not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says ‘I’” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 3). They caution that

it is relatively easy to stop saying “I,” but that does not mean you have gotten away from the regime of subjectification; conversely, you can keep on saying “I,” just for kicks, and already be in another regime in which personal pronouns function only as fictions. (p. 138)

Personal pronouns here refer to Nietzsche’s fictional subject that precedes the verb, that “I,” that “linguistic index” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994, p. 18), that grammatical subject of the verb we learn in English classes—an active, intentional, agential “I”—who initiates and authorizes the sentences upon which social science research is based: “I investigate,” “I collect data,” “I analyze data,” “I find,” “ I know.”

Smith (2012), following Deleuze, helps us think about this contingent subject, this habit, this “I” we begin with as researchers:

Like each of us, the philosopher—or the artist or the mathematician—begins with the multiplicities that have invented him or her as a formed subject, living in an actualized world, with an organic body, in a given political order, having learnt a certain language. But at its highest point, both writing and thinking, as activities, consist in following the abstract movement of what Deleuze calls a “line of flight” that extracts variable singularities from these multiplicities of lived experience—because they are already there, even if they have been rendered ordinary [emphasis added]—and then makes them function as variables in order to make them function together in a singular and non-homogeneous whole, and thus participate in the construction of “new possibilities of life”—for instance, the invention of new compositions in language . . . and at the limit, the creation of a new world (through singularities and events). (p. 185)

To me, believing we can create a new world is the epitome of freedom.

Perhaps it’s just luck that we encounter what we need to think differently. A word, a sentence, can surely change everything. Stalled in writing/thinking after fieldwork, I devoured Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980/1987) book, A Thousand Plateaus, where I found haecceity (thisness), a concept credited to the 13th century scholastic philosopher, Duns Scotus, who argued that formless matter exists (much like Deleuze and Guattari’s plane of immanence) and who described haecceity as an individuation not based on humans and objects. Sauvagnargues (2013) explained that Deleuze and Guattari warned “against the insidious habit of spatializing and positing an ‘I’ everywhere. The haecceity never refers to an individual subject, it does not cut out a class of beings, but captures becomings in action” (p. 43). In their book, Deleuze and Guattari illustrated haecceity using a sentence written by Virginia Woolf, “The thin dog is running in the road, this dog is the road” (p. 263). These words, this image, that concept seemed to be “a response to real problems” (Bogue, 1996, p. 263). I had encountered in fieldwork when taken-for-granted ontological distinctions collapsed—I will discuss those encounters in the next section of this article. After haecceity, I could no longer separate or individuate the dog, the running, and the road and think one ahead of the other as the structure of the English language, our grammar, requires (remember Nietzsche). The image was dog-run-road or road-dog-run, and so on, all together, a simultaneity, one individuation—haecceity. Entanglement and assemblage, now popular concepts, are also helpful in refusing common individuations, but it was haecceity that intrigued me then, perhaps because it was unintelligible and perhaps because I simply liked the sound of it.

Deleuze (1990/1995) explained that

there are many types of individuation. There are subject-type individuations (“that’s you . . .,” “that’s me . . . ”), but there are also event-type individuations where there’s no subject: a wind, an atmosphere, a time of day, a battle. (p. 115)

A haecceity could be an event like five o’clock in the afternoon; or a river on a bright, still afternoon; or Virginia Woolf’s heroine’s stroll; or “a strange moment during a concert” (Rajchman, 2001, p. 85); or any intensity with “perfect individuality which should not be confused with that of a thing or a formed subject” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1977/2007, p. 92). Haecceity describes a nonpersonal mode of individuation that is not an individualization but which consists of “impersonal individuations, or even pre-individual singularities” (Deleuze, 2002/2004, p. 137). Haecceities are “dynamic individuations without subjects” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1997/2007, p. 93) or objects. A haecceity is not one of a kind, but the “individuation of something that belongs to no kind, but which, though perfectly individuated, yet retains an indefiniteness, as though pointing to something ‘ineffable.’” (Rajchman, 2001, p. 85). A haecceity is a singularity.

Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) cautioned that a haecceity does not consist “simply of a décor or backdrop that situates subjects, or of appendages that hold things and people to the ground. It is the entire assemblage in its individual aggregate that is a haecceity” (p. 262). In this way, “the street enters into composition with the horse” (p. 262), just as Woolf’s running dog enters into composition with the road. The dog and the horse “cease to be subjects to become events, in assemblages that are inseparable from the hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life” (p. 263). Haecceity is a singularity that has “neither a beginning nor an end, origin, nor destination; it is always in the middle. It is not made of points, only of lines. It is a rhizome” (p. 263). Given that haecceity seems such a grand concept, I especially appreciated Deleuze and Guattari’s comment that “haecceities can be modest and microscopic” (p. 141).

Two characteristics of haecceity were particularly helpful in my study. First, a haecceity is not defined by linear, chronological time but by “floating times” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1997/2007, p. 92). It “can last as long as, and even longer than, the time required for the development of a form and the evolution of a subject” (p. 92). Second, haecceities are events, singularities always becoming in relations of speed and slowness, so they have no essence that forms and stabilizes them into a substance that can be subsumed under another concept or category. They “are bits of experience that can’t be fit into a nice narrative unity” (Rajchman, 2001, p. 85) that begins with “I.” Haeceities cannot be captured by conventional humanist qualitative methodology’s simple empiricism based on the idea that all knowledge derives from the individual’s sensations of lived experience. “I” does not exist ahead of experience. “I” does not have an experience. There is no such “I.”

In the next section, I provide examples from fieldwork during my dissertation research when the world kicked back. Interestingly, as Smith noted in the long quotation above, it was in the thinking that writing produces—in thinking and writing with haecceity after fieldwork—that the field of conventional ethnography deconstructed itself (St. Pierre, 1997b). What I learned in writing was that the epistemic field of my study which was already determined, and overdetermined, by conventional humanist qualitative methodology could not accommodate those startling encounters with the real, a real that was certainly “no longer what it used to be” (Baudrillard, 1981/1988, p. 171). As Manning (2016) wrote, method, “an apparatus of capture,” works “as a safeguard against the ineffable: if something cannot be categorized, it cannot be made to account for itself and is cast aside as irrelevant” (p. 32). There was no room in conventional qualitative methodology for the ineffable that ripped through my well-composed study.

The tales of the field (Van Maanen, 1988) that follow rely on the “I” of conventional humanist qualitative methodology’s ethnography and autoethnography, on the empirical Investigator awash in the sensory overload, the mad rush, of fieldwork. I did not have Deleuze’s concepts to think with when I was doing official fieldwork. I did have some feminist and poststructural critiques of the humanist subject that I described earlier which induced their own strangeness and a question for another paper: what do we make of using one theory of the subject to interpret the lives of people who know nothing of it and live in another? It seems we’re caught between letting the theories we’ve studied overdetermine our studies from the beginning or trying to paste them on at the end. More likely, we’re doing both and more because we can never be neutral or objective—we’re never theory-free. More to the point, we’re never free of some theory of ontology.

A Tale of the Field: Conditions of Inquiry, Encounters With the Real, and Ontological Dissonance

Conventional humanist qualitative methodology uses ethnographic methods of data collection like interviewing and observation to collect data in the field. The idea of the field is based on the Same/Other binary: the field is a place of cultural difference the researcher travels to, an inside (the Same) against the outside that’s different from it (the Other). For my dissertation research, I traveled from Ohio, where I’d lived for almost 20 years, to my hometown, Milton (a pseudonym), a small tobacco town in the Piedmont of the Carolinas. I came to Milton as a five-year-old Yankee and lived and taught school there until I finally left for Ohio. But I’d returned home many times over the years to care for my widowed mother, to visit my family, my friends and her friends, to just be there, be home.

As I grew older, I became increasingly interested in the category older woman—a category I would surely occupy if I lived long enough. The older women I knew best were those like my mother in Milton, women who had been my school teachers and Sunday school teachers, the mothers of my best friends who had taught me how to be a woman. Feminist and poststructural theories of the subject aside, I suspected I would be much like them, and I wanted to know what I was getting myself into. What does old woman look like? “How does it get produced and regulated? . . . How does it exist?” (Bové, 1990, p. 54). How can it be refused?

With a research proposal approved by both my dissertation committee and Ohio State University’s Institutional Review Board in hand, I went home in the summer and fall of 1993 for fieldwork. I describe that research project—which was designed as what I now call conventional humanist qualitative research—as a combination of an interview study with 36 older White southern women who lived in my hometown and a long-term prior ethnography of that small rural community. I used Foucault’s ethical analysis, care of the self, to investigate the arts of existence the women used during their long lives in the construction of their subjectivity (St. Pierre, 1995).

The key in that problem statement, and what I suspect is the condition that produced the study’s ontological dissonance and enabled my career-long deconstruction of normalized qualitative methodology, is the phrase long-term prior ethnography. The study began unofficially (when I was five) much sooner than it began officially (when I was middle-aged). It began before it began, and I had always been in the middle of it. I had been interviewing and observing in Milton—collecting and interpreting data—for decades before I returned to study it for my dissertation research. That condition disrupted the study, to say the least. If I had designed a different study with people I didn’t know in a place I didn’t know, the same ontological problem might not have overtaken the study. But the time-space of the study called into question normalized categories of conventional humanist qualitative methodology, especially the field (St. Pierre, 1997b), interviews and observations (St. Pierre, 1995), data and data analysis (St. Pierre, 1997a, 2013b; St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014), and, of course, all the “I’s” of the study.

Ontological dissonance first became apparent during interviews. I had talked with many of those Milton women for years, and during official interviews with a tape recorder running, it was sometimes difficult to determine which/when woman I interviewed. Was she the fragile, old, dying woman I interviewed in her bedroom or the young, elegant, vibrant Latin teacher I so admired as a teenager? Likewise, who/when was I—her devoted young student sitting rapt in the front row of her classroom or her final devoted scribe, bent over her bed, straightening her pillows while we talked. Time was not linear; “we” were unstable.

Strange things happened not only in interviews but also in observations. Which/when Milton was I studying—the Milton a five-year-old Yankee outsider had had to interpret or the Milton a middle-aged researcher had permission to investigate? The study’s empirical density multiplied and exploded out of its methodological container when observations during fieldwork were no longer linked to a linear perspective. Time was unhinged, and there was no present with its past to secure the study. Because I had walked the streets of Milton my whole life, the new gym on Main St. easily became the women’s clothing store in the same location where we shopped when I was a girl. When I went to our church with my mother, the widows scattered in the pews were magically joined by their strong young husbands, long dead, whom I saw, plain as day, sitting beside them as they always had, heads bowed in prayer.

There was no present with its future either. As I walked down College Street past the elementary school four generations of women in my family had attended, I saw myself sitting on the front porch of the big old house I’ve always wanted to live in, my house in a future, the home of an old, old woman come home to Milton to die. When I drove down a country road to find the pre-Civil War home of a participant, a cousin I’d visited for decades, my body, one with the car and the road, anticipated every curve, every tobacco field coming up, the moment when I should lower the visor to block the sun. Even though my cousin was now a shut-in confined to a wheel chair, I could see her sitting on the porch railing, waiting for me, knowing I’d be right on time. The objective reality humanist methodology assumes fell apart in fieldwork as linear time collapsed in a different temporal and ontological arrangement, in a fold of time, perhaps the “floating” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1977/2007, p. 92) time of haecceity. I never knew quite where/when/what “I” was because “ontological units” (May, 2005, p. 121) other than individual human beings were in play. Sometimes I thought I had dissolved into all the times of Milton, into all the old women, that “I” had once again become formless, imperceptible, awaiting a different individuation.

Categories like “I,” time, and the field that condition fieldwork in conventional humanist qualitative methodology from the beginning immobilize us, require that we return to them at the end and acknowledge that we recognized what we were supposed to. But when they fail, what was given is in play again, and anything is possible. For example, if the field is unstable, so is everything we “do” in it, like collecting data. What/when was data in my study? I collected official data in the field, recording face-to-face interviews and writing detailed fieldnotes from face-to-face observations. But, later, when I returned to Ohio to write up my study, data came from everywhere as I wrote—from a past long before my study began, from a future I had not yet lived, from dreams—and an audit trail from data in official interview transcripts and fieldnotes to the sentences I wrote was impossible. As I’ve written (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005), I “collected” data as I wrote.

The radical empiricism of the study I lived, which opened to conditions of possible experience, was not the simple empiricism of the phenomenology of conventional humanist qualitative methodology that digs deep into the given, into experience that has been closed off and normalized (see, e.g., St. Pierre, 2016b). But I knew little about empiricism then. Even in a fairly undisciplined discipline like education, which may or may not be a social science, I studied more empirical social science methodology as a doctoral student than the onto-epistemological arrangements in which various empiricisms and their methodologies—or no methodology at all—can be thought.

The focus of my doctoral program was always on the end game, on fieldwork, on practice, on procedural methodology, on application, at the expense of the images of thought that enabled them. I studied enough poststructuralism to understand Rorty’s (1986) comment that “we only know the world and ourselves under a description” (p. 48), but, to me, then, he referred to epistemological diversity, which I had studied—feminist epistemologies, queer epistemologies, race epistemologies, and so on—but not to ontological or empirical diversity. Thus, I mostly ignored the strangeness of fieldwork in the spectacular rush of doing it. It all seemed a blur, an intensity I lived but could not think or fit into existing research categories. It was when writing, too, became the field; when writing insisted I attend to the strange and singular encounters with the real in Milton that the slow deconstruction of conventional humanist qualitative methodology began. As Derrida (2007) explained, deconstruction “does not settle for methodological procedures, it opens up a passageway, it marches ahead and marks a trail” (p. 42).

The text writes itself, and the first chapter of my dissertation begins with a dream and a sentence that became a refrain repeated throughout the dissertation: “This story never begins but has always been, and I slip into it over and over again in different places, and it is as if I too have always been there” (St. Pierre, 1995, p. 5). This refrain was “a prism, a crystal of space-time” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 348) that staked out the strange ontological difference I had lived in fieldwork but could barely think and write then. Repeating the refrain as I wrote comforted me, assured me that I was on to something, it reoriented me; it slowed me down before I speeded up again.

So that is how it worked. Encounters with ontological difference during fieldwork in Milton, in reading, in writing, and in thinking were truly shocks to thought. “No method can determine in advance what compels us to think,” only the “imperative imposed by the problem” (Smith, 2012, p. 181). The problem that pressed on me during fieldwork and in writing was that conventional humanist qualitative methodology was “predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like” (Kuhn, 1970, p. 5), and more specifically, that it is based on recognizable, accepted ontologies and their corresponding empiricisms. That methodology, based on the incrementalism of positivist social science (even as it professes to be phenomenological), almost guaranteed I would simply repeat existing knowledge—perhaps add another small brick that hardly mattered to fill a gap in a structure of knowledge. In that methodology, the idea that existing relations might become variable was not possible.

The concept haecceity and words from Virginia Woolf I found after fieldwork and before writing did not signal recognition (and then representation) of either the everyday lived experience of participants in the study or mine as a researcher. In other words, I did not identify those moments of ontological dissonance I described above as haecceities and then organize my “findings” by describing, say, four haecceities I “found in my data”—remember that a haecceity is not a substance that can be recognized and represented. “Recognizing is the opposite of the encounter” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1977/2007, p. 8). What that means is that a philosophical concept like haecceity cannot be “applied” to and so represent something in the empirical world as social scientists are wont to do with concepts, for example, “That vignette was an example of teenage culture” or “I recognized racism in that school.” Instead, philosophical concepts like haecceity act with force, with violence, on “the flows of everyday thought” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 32) that in its givenness seems necessary. And the world acts with force too, when it refuses the conditioning we’ve used to tame it.

After haecceity, I was no longer sure “I” thought, deductively or inductively, as researchers are instructed when they analyze data collected from the “flow of opinion, the doxa, the flow of convention, idle talk and idle chatter, the discourse of the “they” (what “they” say; Smith, 2012, p. 185). I came to understand that thought is not “the verb of an ‘I’” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994, p. 27) but is, instead, “thought without image” that disrupts established, normalized relations of identity (this is that) and puts the variables of relations into play again in “continuous variation or pure variability” (Smith, 2012, p. 180). A philosophical concept like haecceity “strips thought of its ‘innateness,’ and treats it every time as something that has not always existed, but begins, forced and under constraint” (Deleuze, 1968/1994, p. 136). Thus, recognition and intelligibility are deprived of their necessity and “we can be thrown into a becoming by anything at all, by the most unexpected, most insignificant of things” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 292). But, as Derrida understood, we researchers do not initiate this—it happens. Bryant’s (2008) caution is important here:

we must be skeptical and conservative concerning our own powers of invention. Just as Nietzsche claimed that thoughts come to us, we don’t originate thoughts, so too must we understand that we are not the creators but are the result of these invented intuitions. The will to create will most likely end up in trite imitations of what already belongs to the field of the recognized. We do not set the problems to be solved, but instead find ourselves in the midst of problems which function like imperatives to which we must respond. (pp. 9-10)

Given that social science is based on the “I,” the empirical Investigator, my question has become whether we can think together social science research and philosophical concepts like haecceity. Of course, Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts are already being used in social science research. Nonetheless, I worry about a too-casual application of concepts, especially for new researchers who, for example, use the philosophical concept rhizome, which is both antimethod and anti-”I” in an autoethnography, a humanist methodological research design based on the “I.” I argue it’s imperative we social science researchers not skip that long preparation required to move into a different image of thought. I will return to this caution at the end of this essay.

Philosophy’s Plane of Immanence and Conceptual Personae

In their book, “What is Philosophy,” Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) wrote that there are “three great forms of thought” which are equally but differently creative: philosophy, science, and art. The conceptual personae of philosophy create concepts on a plane of immanence, the partial observers of science create functives on a plane of reference, and the aesthetic figures of art create percepts and affects on a plane of composition. Deleuze and Guattari discussed each form of creative thought and their relation to each other in their book, but their chief task was to stake out a domain that is philosophy’s own.

In their introduction to the book, they were dismissive of rival claims to concept-creation from, for example, the human sciences (especially sociology), epistemology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, and logical analysis because these disciplines use concepts to consolidate and then represent states of affairs in the world. In doing so, they condition possible experience to make it fit into preexisting concepts to add to the already-known, the foundations of knowledge. Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) argued that such work cannot be creative. They were especially disdainful of “shameful and inane rivals” (p. 11): the fields of computer science, marketing, design, advertising, the disciplines of communication, as well as information services and engineering, all of which “seized hold of the word concept” in their enterprises to market and sell, for example, “a packet of noodles” (p. 10).

Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) made it clear that philosophy is not, as is generally thought, “contemplation, reflection, or communication,” which they argued are “machines for constituting Universals” (p. 6) that confine thought to what has already been thought. Lawlor (2003) wrote that Platonic thought, for example, became immobile, “returning at the end to an idea that had already been present at the origin, leaving thought caught between a beginning and an end” (p. 123). For Plato, instances of “justice” in the affairs of men, in lived experience, were always conditioned by the preexisting transcendental Platonic Form of Justice. The problem that results is that justice can never be thought differently, it cannot become; it is always and only determined by the universal concept Justice. To say it a bit differently, the danger of using a universal concept at the beginning is that one is likely to recognize in the world, in states of affairs, only representations which the concept conditions. Unlike universal concepts, philosophical concepts like haecceity are singularities, preindividual and prepersonal individuations that are not preconditioned by universals. In fact, they do not exist but are always becoming and mutating as they respond to a problem imposed on thought. More importantly, the actual in states of affairs does not and cannot resemble the virtual, the singularity, that produced it—it is a genuine creation, the “new.”

Philosophy’s task, then, is not passive but active; its goal is to create, to make something new. In this regard, Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) wrote that “philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts” (p. 2); that “philosophy is the discipline that involves creating concepts” (p. 5); that “the object of philosophy is to create concepts that are always new” (p. 5) (always new because philosophical concepts are not universal but always becoming); and, further, that philosophy is the “creation of concepts and the laying out of a plane” (p. 36). I will return to a discussion of philosophical concepts and their possible use in the social sciences after explaining philosophy’s plane.

Philosophy’s plane is called, variously, the plane of immanence, the plane of consistency, the body without organs, and the abstract machine. Using different names for the plane of immanence is an example of how philosophers recast and renew their concepts over time and how a “concept sometimes needs a new word to express it” (Deleuze, 1990/1995, p. 32). This plane is “destratified, decoded, absolutely deterritorialized matter” (Bogue, 1989, p. 132)—pure difference, pure variation, limitless. It is a flattened plane on which disparate things and signs move at infinite virtual speeds and slowness: “a semiotic fragment rubs shoulders with a chemical interaction, an electron crashed into a language, a crystallization produces a passion” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p 69). Philosophy is both the creation of concepts and the laying out of a plane of immanence which, then, is the “foundation on which it creates its concepts” (p. 41). But concepts are not deduced from the plane; rather, they “pave, occupy, or populate the plane bit by bit, whereas the plane itself is the indivisible milieu in which concepts are distributed without breaking up its continuity or integrity” (p. 36). The plane is an image of thought that is constantly self-differentiating, being made, being laid out at different speeds, but not in a systematic way. Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) described this work as a “groping experimentation” that is not “very respectable, rational, or reasonable” (p. 41).

According to Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994), over centuries of thought, the three great forms of creativity—philosophy, science, and art—have laid out many planes as they have confronted and tried to capture chaos, which they wrote is “characterized less by the absence of determinations than by the infinite speed with which they take shape and vanish” (p. 42). But “the base of all planes is the plane of immanence . . . that which must be thought and that which cannot be thought. It is the nonthought within thought” (p. 59), the “unthought in every plane” (p. 60). Deleuze and Guattari used the Cartesian plane of thought as an example of a philosophical plane and noted that it is based on an image of thought whose commonsense assumption is that “everyone knows what thinking, being, and I mean” (p. 26). Concepts have components, and Deleuze and Guattari explained that doubting, thinking, and being—categories Descartes (1637/1993) used to order human activity—are the components of his concept, the cogito. These components exist in zones of neighborhood that connect them, and the concept cogito forms itself, “condenses” (p. 25) or intensifies, when “I” passes through all the neighborhoods. The first concept on Descartes’ plane, then, was the cogito, who doubts, thinks, and is. The concept and the plane are thus posited together in thinking, and once this new “I” is posited on the plane, other concepts can be posited as well, and the plane can be laid out.

Planes have strata, or thickenings—“accumulations, coagulations, sedimentations, foldings” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 502), “layers, belts” (p. 40)—especially planes as old as Descartes’. Strata are mobile, connect with other strata, are buried as substratum, then surface again. Strata capture and territorialize the formless matter of the plane of immanence and can produce highly stratified structures and hierarchies; they order the chaos of the world differently again and again through “everyday practice, habit, stupidity, capital” (p. 159). Strata capture formless matter from the plane of immanence which is then propelled from the plane like “a falling fruit” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1977/2007, p. 150). Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) named the three great strata “that most directly bind us: the organism, signifiance [sic], and subjectification” (p. 159). But the formless matter of the plane of immanence is always there, “everywhere, always primary, always immanent” (p. 70), deterritorializing strata as they crack and shift. That is why, as noted earlier, the plane of immanence contains diverse bits of deterritorialized strata from different planes, for example, a fencepost, an interpretation, a memory, a love affair. The strata are “residue” from the plane of immanence (p. 56).

In their book, A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) posited a machinic assemblage (which is different from an abstract machine) between the plane of immanence and the strata. The machinic assemblage exists in two states of intensity, with one of its sides facing the absolutely deterritorialized plane of immanence and the other side facing the strata which try to signify, subjectify, and organize the formless matter of the plane (the body without organs). As they work, machinic assemblages “rotate in all directions, like beacons” (p. 73). Deleuze and Guattari’s question about this constant movement between the plane and the strata, between deterritorialization and territorialization, is “not how something manages to leave the strata but how things get into them in the first place” (p. 56). At any rate, the goal of philosophy is to experiment with the flows of destratification on the strata and to tip the machinic assemblage toward the plane of immanence, toward pure difference and possibilities for the new. Clearly, the philosophy Deleuze and Guattari described is active, shot through with movement and becoming, full of possibilities, experimental. There is nothing passive, stable, certain, universal, or totalizing about this image of thought—philosophy is infinitely creative.

It follows, then, that Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) argued that every great philosopher is creative and lays out a new plane of immanence, a new image of thought, based on his problem (e.g., Plato’s transcendent doubling; Descartes’s fear of doubt, of error) that changes so completely the way we think that no two philosophers could be on the same plane. Functionaries, on the other hand, use a ready-made thought without being aware of the problem that produced the thought to begin with. My earlier example of a qualitative researcher using the philosophical concept rhizome in an autoethnography is an example of a functionary not understanding the ontological problem to which rhizome responds. But different philosophers can use another philosopher’s image of thought and create new concepts on the same plane for a long time until the plane begins to be a different plane. This coexistence of planes always diverging, joining, being laid out here and there by chance—not through an intentional, causal, or linear development—is the becoming of philosophy.

As noted at the beginning of this section, conceptual personae are involved in the creation of concepts on the plane of immanence. Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) did not explain exactly what they are except to emphasize that they are not philosophers, not human subjects or “psychosocial types” (p. 64) who are living, historical figures. Conceptual personae are more like an event—even though they may sometimes have a proper name. For example, Deleuze and Guattari suggested that Socrates was the conceptual personae of Platonism and Dionysus of Nietzsche. Other conceptual personae have more general names: the Madman, the Idiot, the Claimant, the Friend, and the empiricists’ Investigator. They explained that conceptual personae are barely discernible, mysterious, hazy, moving, and becoming with the creation of concepts and the laying out of the plane of immanence. They proliferate on the same or a different plane, and their purpose is solely to think and “to show thought’s territories, its absolute deterritorializations and reterritorializations” (p. 89). Conceptual personae can think in us and cause language to stammer, can cause thought to stammer. In this way, the “philosopher is only the envelope of his principal conceptual personae” (p. 64). It should be clear by now that there is no methodical rationality in this thinking and becoming that guarantees a correct outcome. Rather, the conceptual personae

plunges into the chaos from which it extracts the determinations with which it produces the diagrammatic features of a plane of immanence: it is as if it seizes a handful of dice from chance-chaos so as to throw them on the table. (p. 78)

Can such an unpredictable, unscientific venture work? The plane created with the conceptual personae may at first respond to the problem at hand, but it might also veer off and enable other problems to be thought that require other concepts and planes. Thus, “philosophy lives in a permanent crisis. The plane takes effect through shocks, concepts proceed in bursts, and personae by spasms. The relationship among the three instances is problematic by nature” (p. 82). Conventional standards of goodness, truth, adequacy, and so on cannot be applied to this philosophy. “Rather, it is categories like Interesting, Remarkable, or Important that determine success or failure” (p. 82). In any case, ordinary, habitual, stratified thought must be violated and shocked out of its necessity to enable the unthought within thought.

The Concept of Concept

According to Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994), the third element of philosophy, in addition to the plane of immanence and conceptual personae, is the philosophical concept. I discuss it last because the other two elements are strange, created in an unfamiliar image of thought, and so must be understood to some extent to understand the third element, Deleuze and Guattari’s “concept of concept” (p. 19), which is different from the concepts of philosophy’s rivals like the human sciences—for example, culture from anthropology, role from sociology, cognitive from psychology—and concepts from other rivals like direct marketing from advertising and message from communication theory, all of which Deleuze and Guattari disdained and dismissed. Unlike those concepts, a philosophical concept does not correspond to and represent a state of affairs in the world. For example, as I wrote earlier, haecceity cannot be attached to qualitative data—lived experience—so that a researcher could write in her findings, “I found four haeccities about that culture’s music in my qualitative study.” Unlike other concepts, a philosophical concept cannot be used to classify and organize empirical materials into a system, perhaps an encyclopedia, or into a discursive system of knowledge, nor can it serve capital’s commercial ventures as a product to be traded, “Here’s a concept you can use to sell your product.”

Philosophical concepts have “the more modest task of a pedagogy of the concept” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994, p. 12) in that they are “experimental tools that are born out of the tensions between the empirical world” and “philosophical thought” (Gane, 2009, p. 87), and they teach us something, as did haecceity in my dissertation study. I learned that the empirical world associated with haecceity does not begin with “I” but is a nonsubjective, impersonal, preindividual empirical world—a simple “there is.” Again, haecceity is a response to an ontological problem that is not thinkable in the empiricism of conventional humanist qualitative methodology.

Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) did not define a philosophical concept, tell us what it means. In fact, they wrote that concepts are “fuzzy and vague” (p. 143), so here I pile up snippets of their and others’ words that might be helpful. They explained that concepts like haecceity are neither ideas nor objects nor functions (like the functives of science). They are creative forces, “learning devices” (Gane, 2009, p. 91), “singularities, rather, acting on flows of everyday thought” (Deleuze, 1990/1995, p. 32). They are “precarious and unstable bridges between the empirical world and its presentation in thought” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1990/1994, p. 85). The concept, then, is “an act of thought, it is thought operating at infinite . . . speed” (p. 21). Because they create the unthought within thought, concepts are “full of a critical, political force of freedom” (Deleuze, 1990/1995, p. 32) and possible worlds.

Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) did explain that a concept is composed of distinct but inseparable components. For example, thinking, doubting, and being are the components of Descartes’ cogito that give it its specificity, its consistency, which is not a unity (endoconsistency) but a multiplicity because the components remain separate and do not dissolve into a whole. The concept is the “point of coincidence, condensation, or accumulation of its own components” (p. 20). If a component is removed from or added to a concept, it is no longer the same concept.

As mentioned earlier, concepts link to other concepts in their zones of neighborhood on the plane by constructing a bridge to another concept, thus paving or populating the plane bit by bit and laying it out (exoconsistency). The specificity of the concept depends not only on its endoconsistency but also on its exoconsistency because “a concept vanishes when it is thrust into a new milieu” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994, p. 28) on a different plane that has been laid out in a different image of thought. As concepts connect, the plane may curve, enabling new problems, new concepts in response to those problems, and new solutions. At some point, the plane may become a new plane.

Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) clarified the relation between concepts and the plane as follows: “concepts are concrete assemblages, like the configurations of a machine, but the plane is the abstract machine of which these assemblages are the working parts” (p. 36). Even though concepts “are dated, signed, and baptized” (p. 8) by their conceptual personae, they may mutate, be renewed, and be replaced as in the earlier example of Deleuze and Guattari’s ongoing renewal and renaming of the concept body without organs (plane of immanence, plane of consistency, abstract machine). A concept is a particular kind of open-ended multiplicity always becoming, first, as its components become in “continuous variation” (Smith, 2010a, p. 57) and, second, as it becomes in infinite variation (through mobile bridges) with other concepts on the same plane and other planes. Deleuze and Guattari’s questions about the creation of concepts were: “‘What to put in a concept?’ and ‘What to put it with?’” (p. 90).

Concepts don’t come from just anywhere, and Smith (2010b) argued that concepts are “never created willy-nilly, but always as a function of a problem” (p. 136) thinkable only in a particular image of thought. They are singularities (without an identity) linked to problems “without which they would have no meaning and which can themselves only be isolated or understood as their solution emerges” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994, p. 16). The concept is a possibility in a particular milieu. It is an intensity, a “center of vibration” (p. 23) with the “contour, the configuration, the constellation of an event to come” (p. 33)—the not-yet that might be thought and lived. In fact, the concept helps form that event. “The greatness of a philosophy is measured by the nature of the events to which its concepts summon us or that it enables us to release in concepts” (p. 34), perhaps in a “blast of original concepts” (p. 32). Deleuze and Guattari, always staking out philosophy’s domain, wrote, “The concept belongs to philosophy and only to philosophy” (p. 34).

Can We Take Deleuze Into the Field?

If philosophical concepts, as described by Deleuze and Guattari, exist in a specific philosophical relation with conceptual personae and a plane of immanence—if the concepts are philosophical, if they have a “precise philosophical value” (Brown, 2010, p. 107)—can the empirical Investigator of philosophy’s rivals—for example, the human or social sciences—take them into the empirical “field” of those disciplines (Bonta, 2009) and use them with social objects that exist in a different ontological arrangement? This is a very serious question. Remember that the social sciences did not rise to the level of a positivity for Deleuze and Guattari as did philosophy, science, and art. For that reason, they did not lay out a plane for the social sciences but, in fact, treated them as second-rate. Here are some points to consider as we think about this question.

First, of course, is the condition just mentioned, that Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical concepts exist only in relation with philosophical conceptual personae on philosophy’s plane of immanence, not with, say, Clifford Geertz (a person, a proper name) in a discursive system of knowledge like cultural anthropology (a human science).

Second, Deleuze and Guattari’s transcendental empiricism is incompatible with the empiricisms of phenomenology and logical empiricism which pervade the human sciences in general and conventional humanist qualitative inquiry in particular. Transcendental empiricism does not begin with the implicit presupposition of the subject of action—the “I” of lived experience that initiates the human sciences. Instead, it conceives a prepersonal “field without subjects” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994, p. 48) populated by “impersonal individuations” and “pre-individual singularities” (Deleuze, 2002/2004, p. 137)—the plane of immanence described earlier in this article. For that reason, Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) asked, “Is it necessary ‘to begin,’ and, if so, is it necessary to start from the point of view of a subjective certainty” (p. 27)? In the fluid ontology of transcendental empiricism that informs, for example, post qualitative inquiry, the answer is “no.” In this empiricism, “‘I’ loses all meaning, the beginning loses all necessity” (p. 27), and “ontological units” (May, 2005, p. 121) other than individual human beings are possible. However, “I” does begin the empiricisms of phenomenology and logical empiricism.

Third, Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts are responses to particular philosophical problems that are unlikely to be the same in anthropology or cognitive psychology or literacy education. Fourth, if the components of a philosophical concept change, it is no longer the same concept. It is unlikely that the components of the concept rhizome would be the same if it is “applied,” for example, in autoethnography. Fifth, a concept vanishes if thrust into a new milieu. I believe the concept rhizome disappears if it is taken from the milieu of Deleuze and Guattari’s transcendental empiricism and plopped down in the milieu of a qualitative interview study. As explained earlier, there is a specificity to a philosophical concept that is different from concepts in the human sciences, the social sciences, and education that do “travel” (e.g., Bal, 2002; Culler, 2000). Sixth, if social scientists do create philosophical concepts, one might argue they are doing philosophy instead of social science.

Bonta (2009) asked whether we social scientists can take Deleuze to the field, whether we can do that work well, and whether we can “get it right” (p. 137). Bonta and Protevi (2004), Brown (2010), DeLanda (2006), and Fuglsang and Sørensen (2006), among others, have thoughtfully explored these possibilities. I agree with Gane’s (2009) statement that “Deleuze’s empiricism offers a way out of hackneyed and time-worn sociological debates about the connection between theoretical and empirical research, and the techniques or ‘methods’ needed for the study of so-called ‘reality.’” (p. 83). But are we doing this work well or are we just ill-prepared functionaries? I fear the rush to application that structures the empirical social sciences maintains the theory/practice divide. Deleuze (1985/1989), however, argued against that binary as follows:

However, philosophical theory is itself a practice, just as much as its object. It is no more abstract than its object. It is a practice of concepts, and it must be judged in the light of the other practices with which it interferes. (p. 280).

Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical concepts have been popping up everywhere recently, removed from their milieu, from the image of thought in which they were created and the problems to which they respond. Granted, concepts like assemblage and rhizome are immediately “useful” but not for hasty application in a conventional humanist qualitative study where they vanish. In similar fashion, Marcus and Saka (2006) wrote that “it has been the power and often beguiling attraction of Deleuze and Guattari’s language that has encouraged the piecemeal appropriation of certain concepts [they focus on assemblage] for the re-making of middle-range theorizing that informs contemporary research projects” (p. 103). Massumi (2002a) warned that we should not apply concepts because application is about “mastery and control” (p. 17). And Deu (2007) explained that “Deleuze’s philosophy is neither so abstract as to be divorced from practical relevance nor is it in any way directly ‘applicable’ to experience, in the manner, say, of a scientific theory” (pp. 4-5). How, then, are philosophical concepts useful for social scientists? I believe they are useful not in “application” but in reorienting thought and in inspiring and sustaining the long preparation of reading and studying the history and politics of ontology and empiricism and philosophy that can denaturalize the dogmatic image of thought that traps us.

Deleuze and Guattari’s blast of philosophical concepts responds to problems the world asks us, but surely there are other problems we have not yet thought that become thinkable in images of thought neither Cartesian nor Deleuzian. If one or two images of thought can be thought, so can others. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the condition of possibility for pure difference, for a “new” image of thought, is that we be available to the world, that we trust it, that we trust that a “fundamental encounter” with the world that “can only be sensed” (Deleuze, 1968/1994, p. 139) is possible. Nonconceptual forces of the world “not already contained in our projects and the ways of thinking that accompany them” (Rajchman, 2001, p. 7) can teach us that a different world is already there, waiting to be thought and lived.

Old concepts not renewed and new “flimsy concepts” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994, p. 83) weigh us down, but a new concept that responds to a problem might just shift the curve of a plane so a new plane is formed. How do we create new concepts? Massumi (2002a) warned that “the first rule of thumb if you want to invent or reinvent concepts is simply: don’t apply them” (p. 17). Again, a concept is not a functive of science but an “act of thought” extracted from a “thought flow” (Smith, 2010b, p. 144), not from a person, an individual, a human being who willy-nilly creates concepts. For me, this creativity resonates with Derrida’s deconstruction in that it happens without intention or deliberation and certainly not at the will of a human being. Something in the world forces us to think, and a concept appears.

I expect few researchers in the human sciences, the social sciences, and education create philosophical concepts like Deleuze and Guattari’s, but thinking with their concepts in our work may point us toward the not yet that is possible. In my dissertation research, I believe the philosophical concept haecceity—an “act of thought” (Deleuze, 1968/1994, p. 139)—slowly reoriented my thinking and deconstructed conventional humanist qualitative methodology until I could no longer think it or do it. In the thinking that writing produces, the phrase post qualitative inquiry wrote itself one day, opening possibilities for new inquiry.

It seems that new “concepts” are crowding in now. It is worth noting that in this special issue about using concepts as or instead of methods to guide inquiry, Mazzei created minor inquiry and Jackson created thinking without method after many years of thinking with Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts in relation to their conventional humanist qualitative studies, as did I. No doubt other social science researchers have taken a similar route. I don’t believe post qualitative inquiry or minor inquiry or thinking without method are philosophical concepts, but each was enabled not only by encounters with ontological dissonance in conventional humanist qualitative studies but also by encounters with Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical concepts in the texts they wrote. Together, post qualitative inquiry, minor inquiry, and thinking without method resonate, accumulate, intensify, and begin to crack the principle strata of conventional humanist qualitative methodology: the organism, signifiance [sic], and subjectification. They help loosen matter captured on the strata and return it to chaos, to the formless matter of the plane of immanence and infinite possibility.

And so the forces of the world change the problems we’ve asked of it and then change the concepts with which we’ve responded. The world kicks back and demands a new image of thought which can institute new concepts and a new plane. “On the edge of the thing” (Derrida, 2006/2008, p. 9) where anything can happen, we must deconstruct the traditions we inherit and do it well. What new concepts can we think? What components will we put into those concepts? What concepts will link via mobile bridges to other concepts on that plane and other planes? What planes will be laid out and with what others will they intersect? What, then, can be thought? It might be too much to wish for, but perhaps Deleuze’s image of thought or another we must think could someday become as imperceptible as Descartes’.