Deleuze,Immanence,and Immanent Writing in Qualitative Inquiry: Nonlinear Texts and Being a Traitor to Writing

Immanence and the Virtual in Deleuze’s Philosophy

Immanence is the ideal of understanding reality, not as it appears in experience, but as it unfolds according to its own intrinsic genetic processes. (Reidar Due, Deleuze)

Most of Deleuze’s works, and his thought in general, can be seen as dealing with the fundamental issue of absolute (or pure) immanence (e.g., Lawlor, 2003, 2006). ¹ Immanence is the central principle of his entire philosophy, and, more generally, all of the French poststructural philosophy of the 1960s (e.g., Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard) amounts to philosophies of immanence. Interestingly, though, little qualitative research has dealt with the concept of immanence (for some exceptions, see Hein, 2016, 2017; St. Pierre, 2017); most of the Deleuzian concepts that have been used in qualitative research (e.g., rhizome, line of flight, becoming, nomad, territorialization, assemblage, smooth space, striated space) are either introduced in, or elaborated on extensively, in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987). It is in Deleuze’s final book, What is Philosophy? (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994), ² that the concept of the plane of immanence is introduced, and a detailed analysis of absolute immanence is one of the book’s central themes. In that work, immanence is conceived as a plane, a virtual, open whole that (ontologically) prevents absolute closure. But this plane is “neither a surface nor a volume, but a direction, or a manifold of directions” (de Beistegui, 2010, p. 3). It is characterized by movement, the movement of the open whole (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987). ³ As an open whole, the plane of immanence therefore has neither outside nor end, and this lack of an outside or finality prevents us from identifying what, precisely, this immanence is (i.e., it is not a “thing”). As absolute immanence, it expresses itself without end, and its movement is uninterrupted. Thus, the plane of immanence never ceases becoming and changing: It is continuously differentiating and expressing itself differently. For this reason, the plane of immanence is without structure (i.e., it has no form) or genesis: It consists solely of forces and becomings, and connections or relations that occur by chance alone. In other words, there is no “something” that brings order to the plane of immanence, and this lack of order makes the plane of immanence very similar to Deleuze’s concept of chaos. It should also be apparent that if the plane of immanence has no outside and expresses itself without end, that it has no inherent separation (i.e., it is an indivisible medium). This immanent plane is therefore prior to the separation between all binary pairs (e.g., subject/object, genesis/structure, sign/referent). ⁴

Deleuze’s concept of immanence is closely related to his concept of the virtual, which he distinguishes from the actual (e.g., Deleuze, 1966/1988, 1968/1994; Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, 1991/1994). Consequently, the plane of immanence discussed earlier could also be described as virtual. The virtual is of crucial importance to Deleuze’s later philosophy, and although he borrowed this concept from Henri Bergson (e.g., Deleuze, 1966/1988), he extended Bergson’s work by conceiving the virtual as a productive power of difference or differentiation (i.e., virtual difference). ⁵ More specifically, the virtual is that which differs from itself (i.e., the virtual is, in “itself,” always differentiated), and the process of differentiation (i.e., self-differentiation) is the expression of this essential difference: “What differentiates itself is first what differs with itself, which is to say the virtual” (Deleuze, 1956/1999, p. 54). ⁶ In other words, the actualization of the virtual, which is discussed below, occurs through a process of differentiation, divergence, or difference. Moreover, this differentiation occurs within a time frame that is shorter than the briefest period of time imaginable. How is this possible? Because the virtual and the process of differentiation are not spatiotemporal (i.e., the absolute movement of this differentiation has no spatiotemporal coordinates).

But the nature of the virtual can be made even clearer by describing its relationship to the actual: Neither one is independent of the other (e.g., Deleuze, 1956/1999, 1966/1988). Their relationship is one of asymmetry but not one in which there is a linear, unidirectional movement from the virtual to the actual. Instead, there is a continuous exchange between the two. More specifically, in differentiating itself, the virtual stops being what it is, while “all the while keeping something of its origin” (Deleuze, 1956/1999, p. 55). In other words, the virtual is actualized without ceasing to be virtual (i.e., the virtual continues to be involved in, or immanent to, what manifests it). More generally, in terms of the reciprocal relationship between the virtual and the actual, Deleuze (1985/1989) states that “there is no virtual which does not become actual in relation to the actual, the latter becoming virtual through the same relation” (p. 69). Thus, there is an irreducible pluralism in both the actual and the virtual (Deleuze, 1966/1988), so that virtual–actual movement is in no way linear or progressive. Also, as part of this relationship of asymmetry, the actual bears no resemblance whatsoever to the virtual that it embodies, in the same way that, as Deleuze (1968/1994) notes, the solution bears no resemblance to a problem. More specifically, this lack of resemblance (or duplication) between the actual and the virtual arises because actualization does not follow the rule of resemblance. It is also important to emphasize here that the virtual should not be thought of as “almost” or “virtually” real, but rather, as fully real: It is real without being actual. ⁷ It is the mode of what is (i.e., the actual), and the latter could not exist (or be thought) without it.

To avoid some possible confusion about Deleuze’s (1966/1988, 1968/1994) virtual, it should also be added that his virtual bears no resemblance whatsoever to the more current scientific conception of the virtual that is found in chaos theory or complexity theory. In both of these theories, the virtual is conceived only as (preformed) possibility, and the actual is thus understood as a realization, in the likeness and image, of the possible. But as we have seen, Deleuze’s (1966/1988) actual bears no resemblance at all to the virtuality that it embodies. In addition, preexisting possibility is necessarily spatialized and therefore differs fundamentally from Deleuze’s simple virtual, which, as noted earlier, is a productive power of difference and nonspatiotemporal. ⁸

In terms of qualitative inquiry in particular, and based on the above discussion of Deleuze’s (1956/1999, 1966/1988, 1968/1994) virtual and actual, lived experience and the self in general are not entirely actual but instead, are implicated in the virtual. In other words, each moment of our lives has two aspects, an actual and a virtual. As a result of this asymmetry or pluralism, “every experience then is not quite on time or in the right place” (Lawlor, 2014, p. 357). Also, various facets of our lives, such as the physical, psychological, and social are the actualization of different ontological levels of the virtual. More generally, history, whether it is that of an individual or a group, is a process that has its basis in the back and forth movement between virtuality and actuality. Last, the ontological positions that underlie mainstream qualitative research, such as realism, critical realism, and interpretivism (see Denzin & Lincoln, 2018), mean that immanence has not been made complete, as absolute immanence. As discussed earlier, absolute immanence has no outside and expresses itself without end or interruption (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, 1991/1994). Consequently, Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence is capable of incorporating or absorbing within itself all of the ontological positions that inform mainstream qualitative research, as well as any other modernist philosophy. As Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) note of absolute immanence, “Immanence is immanent only to itself and consequently captures everything, absorbs All-One, and leaves nothing remaining to which it could be immanent” (p. 45). This differs fundamentally from modern philosophy’s conception of immanence, as an immanence to consciousness, which excludes everything that exists independently of consciousness. In addition, the relationship between the virtual and the actual, like the plane of immanence itself, involves an ontological process that cannot be recuperated epistemologically. Thus, the plane of immanence and the virtual–actual relationship mark the limits of both epistemology and mainstream qualitative research.

Nonlinear Texts

The récit is not the relating of an event but this event itself, the approach of this event, the place where it is called on to unfold, an event still to come, by the magnetic power of which the narrative itself can hope to come true. (Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come)

In discussing Deleuzian writing, I would like to focus first on aspects of modernist writing such as linearity, plot, textual unity, and structure in general. As mentioned earlier, Deleuzian writing defies a thematic reading and resists linearity, plot, internal coherence, and structure in general (e.g., Deleuze & Parnet, 1987). To illustrate how Deleuzian writing rejects these elements, I focus on several sections of Blanchot’s (1973/1981) “story,” The Madness of the Day (or, in French, La Folie du Jour). Blanchot is widely considered to be the master of the French récit (i.e., story or narrative) and is perhaps the figure who, within the activity of writing, has most explicitly and systematically challenged the supposed unity and autonomy of the modernist subject (Singer, 1996). ⁹ He distinguishes the récit from the conventional novel on the basis of the former’s temporalization: In the récit, spatial elements (i.e., spatial references, including the self) are temporalized, whereas in the novel, they are thematized. In other words, the récit’s temporalization and verbal profusion contain few visual images, whereas the conventional novel’s thematization provides the certainty and fixity of the visual. ¹⁰

In the short novella, The Madness of the Day (Blanchot, 1973/1981), the first-person narrator of the récit has supposedly overcome the temporary blindness that resulted from having glass thrown in his eyes. The récit begins with the following paragraph:

I am neither learned nor ignorant. I have known joys. That is saying too little: I am alive, and this life gives me the greatest pleasure. And what about death? When I die (perhaps any minute now), I will feel immense pleasure. I am not talking about the foretaste of death, which is stale and often disagreeable. Suffering dulls the senses. But this is the remarkable truth, which I am certain of: I feel boundless pleasure in living, and I will take boundless satisfaction in dying. (Derrida, 1979, p. 95) ¹¹

This paragraph seems to start a narrative, but nothing is in fact recounted. Perhaps more importantly, the story appears to “begin” with a sentence that will also be quoted near the end of the story, as the very beginning of a story that the narrator tells to his interrogators. But it is also possible that the first sentence is quoting, in advance, the sentence that appears near the end of the story. In either case, the first sentence is the story’s end but appears before the end. The result of all of this is that it “deprives the text of any beginning and of any decidable edge or border” (Derrida, pp. 92-93).

The final part of the story describes the narrator’s interrogation by an eye doctor and a mental health expert:

I had been asked, “Tell us exactly what happened.” A story [Un récit]? I began: I am neither learned nor ignorant. I have known joys. That is saying too little. I told them the whole story [histoire], and they listened with interest, it seems to me, at least in the beginning. But the end was a surprise to all of us. “That was the beginning,” they said. “Now get down to the facts.” How so? The story [récit] was finished!

I was force to realize that I was not capable of forming a story out of these events. I had lost the thread of the narrative [l’histoire]: that happens in a good many illnesses. But this explanation only made them more insistent. Then I noticed for the first time that there were two of them and that this departure from the traditional method, even though it was explained by the fact that one of them was an eye doctor, the other a specialist in mental illness, kept making our conversation seem like an authoritarian interrogation that was being supervised and guided by a strict set of rules. Of course neither of them was the police chief. But because there were two of them, there were three, and this third was firmly convinced, I am sure, that a writer, a man who speaks and argues with distinction, is always capable of recounting facts that he remembers.

A story [récit]? No. No stories [pas de récit], never again. (Derrida, 1979, p. 97)

It can be seen in the above quote that the beginning of the account that the narrator tries to provide to his interrogators is the same as the first three sentences in the opening paragraph of the story. As Derrida (1979) explains,

This creates an exceedingly strange space: what appeared to be the beginning and the upper edge of a discourse will have been merely part of a narrative that forms a part of the discourse in that it recounts how an attempt was made—in vain!—to force a narrative out of the narrator. (p. 94)

Ultimately, the reader becomes aware that the beginning of the opening paragraph of the story is a quotation of a narrative fragment that, in turn, is simply quoting its quotation. There is no original performance, no speech act that is not already the repetition of another (Derrida, 1979), and the story ultimately fails to meet the authorities’ demand for an author or narrator (i.e., an identity)—an “I” who is capable of organizing a linear, internally coherent, unified, and credible narrative. Thus, unlike a conventional, linear narrative, which we can “finish” reading, the final part of Blanchot’s récit prevents any such ending of the text.

In the final line of the previous quote from The Madness of the Day (Blanchot, 1973/1981), it is also apparent that the question (“A story?”) that was posed in the first line of the first paragraph of the quote is repeated. But as was the case with the repeated text that was discussed earlier (i.e., “I am neither learned nor ignorant. I have known joys. That is saying too little.”), this repetition does not follow chronologically or logically what seems, to the reader, to precede it in the first line of the quote. Also, the question in the final line of the quote refers to (i.e., quotes) the story that is recounted in the text that precedes the question, and it also quotes the question that appears in the first line of the quote. But it is impossible to establish which question (or story) in fact quotes the other one, and equally important, which story serves as the border or edge of the other one:

Each includes the other, comprehends the other, which is to say that neither comprehends the other. Each “story” (and each occurrence of the word “story,” each “story” in the story) is part of the other, makes the other a part (of itself), each “story” is at once larger and smaller than itself, includes itself without including (or comprehending) itself, identifies itself with itself even as it remains utterly different from its homonym. (Derrida, 1979, pp. 99-100)

Derrida also notes that such nonlinear texts, which he refers to as doubled or invaginated texts, can appear in any form, not just narratives, but that wherever they occur, they have “the structure of a narrative in deconstruction” (p. 100).

Losing Face: Being a Traitor to Writing

For it is difficult to be a traitor; it is to create. One has to lose one’s identity, one’s face, in it. One has to disappear, to become unknown. (Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues)

In using Deleuzian writing, qualitative researchers are not limited to the development of nonlinear texts. Turning to aspects of modernist writing such as the organization of subjects according to a structure, and to fixity or identity in particular, for Deleuze, in conventional writing, “we are always pinned against the wall of dominant significations . . . A wall on which are inscribed all the objective determinations which fix us, put us into a grille, identify us and make us recognized” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987, p. 45). In contrast, Deleuzian writing has as its aim to “lose one’s face” (p. 45) or identity, whether this involves the identity of the narrator and/or one or more of the characters who are described, and the result of such writing is that there is “individuation without a subject” (p. 40). Or, in other words, people have “the status of . . . personifications without persons” (Singer, 1996, p. 132). Thus, to avoid being pinned against the wall that fixes or identifies us, it is necessary to lose face, which, for Deleuze, also means to betray (i.e., to betray those powers or established mechanisms that try to fix or identify us). And to betray is to be a traitor to all of these established mechanisms and dominant significations. As Deleuze notes, “What other reason is there for writing than to be traitor to one’s own reign . . . to one’s majority? And to be traitor to writing.” (p. 44). But to write as a traitor, a traitor to all, is a difficult task: It involves creation, the establishment of a line of flight—writing against any stabilizing sense of identity and against other categories and boundaries that are dictated by modernist writing. As Deleuze emphasizes, “the experimenter is a traitor” (p. 41).

Returning to the first paragraph of The Madness of the Day (Blanchot, 1973/1981), the narrator introduces himself not as “I am” but as “I am neither learned nor ignorant [emphasis added],” which, as Derrida (1979) notes, “immediately removes the performance [i.e., the narrator introducing himself] from presence” (p. 95). In other words, the narrator’s introduction rejects oppositional (i.e., binary) logic by undercutting the boundary created by the learned/ignorant binary. Thus, even in this brief example, we can see that the narrator’s description of himself defies basic categories: He is not organized according to a binary structure. We could also say that the narrator’s status in relation to the binary poles of “learned” and “ignorant” is undecidable (e.g., Derrida, 1992, 1967/1997) but not indeterminate. Similarly, Singer (1996) describes the narrator as having “no place (space) in which he can objectify himself (p. 128). In mainstream qualitative research, though, it is tacitly assumed that researchers will develop positive, precise statements about themselves and their participants, thereby all but ensuring that these statements or descriptions will conform to a binary logic.

A failure to conform to binary logic is also evident at other points in Blanchot’s (1973/1981) récit, such as the following:

I nearly lost my sight, because someone crushed glass in my eyes. That blow unnerved me, I must admit. I had the feeling I was going back into the wall, or straying into a thicket of flint. The worst thing was the sudden, shocking cruelty of the day; I could not look, but I could not help looking. To see was terrifying, and to stop seeing tore me apart from my forehead to my throat. What was more, I heard hyena cries that exposed me to the threat of a wild animal (I think those cries were my own). (p. 11)

It can be seen that the statements, “I could not look, but I could not help looking” and “To see was terrifying, and to stop seeing tore me apart from my forehead to my throat,” involve, each in their own way, an avoidance of binary thinking. Also, in the final sentence of the quote, the status of the hyena cries as having their source in the narrator or in something other than him is, ultimately, undecidable.

The result of this undecidability about the narrator in particular, and the pervasive ambiguity of the story’s narrative plot in general, is that the narrator is always on the verge of disappearing. ¹² Or, perhaps more accurately, a kind of personification takes place that is independent of the dominant modernist concept of person (Singer, 1996). In this way, one commits treason, producing writing that is a betrayal. We are, therefore, effectively deprived of the security of a stable narrator, one who exerts control over the narrative. As mentioned earlier, this loss of identity is not limited to the narrator but can also involve one or more of the characters in the story.

Ending a Friendship

To further illustrate Deleuzian writing, below I present a brief example that deals with the experience of friendship or, more accurately, the ending of a friendship. The reader will see that I have drawn on some of the basic writing style in The Madness of the Day (Blanchot, 1973/1981), but doing so is not essential to Deleuzian writing. I drew on some of the writing style not because I was intent on imitating elements of Blanchot’s récit but because I found, in the end, that they were the most effective way to express some aspects of my experience.

I am neither forgiving nor unforgiving, neither patient nor impatient. I am not timid, I can speak my mind. I consider myself to be a good judge of character, but I also know that sometimes I am not. I have my flaws, but no more or less than others, I think. And I have had my share of friendships, although perhaps fewer than most people. Has my life been any less rich as a result? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I have known stable, harmonious friendships that lasted decades, and I have also known volatile, conflict-prone friendships that lasted only a short while. I enjoy the company of friends, but I also enjoy solitude. In fact, there have been times when I was alone and thought that I was completely miserable and unfortunate in life, but I was nevertheless happy and content. I am satisfied with the friendships that I have had in the past and those that I have at present, and the friendships that I foresee myself having in the future seem adequate enough to me.

Can I describe what happened? The friendship was neither short-lived nor long-lived. The amount of time that we spent together was neither great nor small. Sometimes we would meet twice per week and, at other times, six weeks or more would go by between meetings. At times, we agreed on issues involving politics, religion, or human nature, and at other times we didn’t. But disagreements were always dealt with tactfully and smoothly, at least in the beginning. I tried to be helpful, whenever possible, and it always seemed well received: “Thanks. A million thanks.” Then things changed, but I can’t be sure of precisely when. Near the end of the friendship, on three separate occasions when I had done my utmost (perhaps too much) to help, the response, at first, was gratitude, it seemed. But days or weeks later, it suddenly showed itself to be anger and contempt. Some of the words cut deeply. And I can tell you that after the first two, the third time came as a real blow to me.

A few days later, and quite unexpectedly, I felt this third offence merge with the previous two to form a dense nucleus. I felt its full weight. And, in what seemed to me like the entire friendship compressed into a single instant, I knew that the friendship was over, that I couldn’t go on with it anymore. I felt little sadness but, instead, a flood of relief. At that moment, too, a part of my interpersonal world that had been out of balance for a number of months suddenly shifted toward greater equilibrium.

Then, a few days later, conscience suddenly appeared before me ¹³ and said, “You value compassion and acceptance of others’ shortcomings, don’t you?” “Yes, of course.” “Doesn’t she deserve one more chance?” For some reason that I can’t explain, I chose not to respond and waited instead. “Do you see that point there, where the earth meets the sky?,” she asked. I followed the line of her outstretched arm and finger to that point on the horizon. “Do you see it? Tell me, how many friends do you have? And how many will you have in the future?” I looked hard at that point for what seemed like a long time and then turned to her: “No, I can’t continue on that way anymore.” Soon after I uttered these words, she began to fade before me, slowly at first and then more quickly, until she disappeared completely. She reappeared a number of times over the next few months, each time beginning by saying, “Doesn’t she deserve one more chance?” And each time, I stopped her: “No, no more discussion. Please.”

No, no more discussion.

Most generally, it can be seen that there is a temporalization of spatial elements in the above example (i.e., apart from the use of metaphor and personification, few visual images are present), and these spatial elements would have been thematized explicitly in a modernist version of the experience. In terms of the story’s nonlinear structure, the sentence that appears near the end of the penultimate paragraph (i.e., “No, no more discussion.”) is repeated in the final line of the story. But, for the reader, this repetition does not follow, either chronologically or logically, the sentence in the preceding paragraph. Also, the final sentence of the story refers not only to the narrator’s discussion with conscience in the previous paragraph (and it quotes the sentence that appears near the end of that paragraph), but also to all of the preceding text in the story. Thus, it is impossible to establish which discussion is being referred to in the final sentence of the story and, hence, which discussion functions as the border of the other one. In terms of being a traitor to one’s own writing, a significant portion of the story defies basic categories by undercutting binary opposites. This is apparent in the opening paragraph and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in the second paragraph. In the opening paragraph, most of my description of myself does not conform to a binary structure, and, as a result, those aspects of the narrator are undecidable. Similarly, in the second paragraph, the status of important elements of the friendship, which involves the identity of the narrator and the character whom he describes, is also undecidable. Also evident in this paragraph, as well as the final one, is uncertainty about key aspects of the friendship and my experience of its ending, which further undermine identity or fixity.

Given its radical departure from the requirements of the modernist text, Deleuzian writing is likely to be viewed by mainstream qualitative researchers as audacious and illegitimate, and as subverting fundamental, taken-for-granted aspects of qualitative research. Specifically, mainstream qualitative research tacitly assumes that researchers strive to create clear, linear, internally coherent, and meaningful texts that adhere to a basic structure. It also assumes that researchers are subjects, stable narrators, who can articulate phenomena unambiguously and that the participants who are described display a similar level of fixity and are organized according to a structure. In fact, these regulative assumptions are so powerful and pervasive that I cannot think of even one mainstream qualitative exception to them. Mainstream qualitative researchers are also likely to find Deleuzian writing unintelligible and disorienting, with the probable result that the text will be set aside in frustration.

In terms of the earlier discussion of immanence and the virtual, it is also clear that nonlinear texts, in their rejection of a conventional, linear, narrative structure, make use of writing that moves, ontologically, toward the plane of immanence or the virtual (e.g., Deleuze, 1966/1988; Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, 1991/1994). More specifically, we could say that nonlinear texts involve a doubling between the virtual and the actual or that they point back to the plane of immanence, which provides the absolute “ground” upon which all texts are created. Similarly, to write as a traitor (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987), and to strive to avoid all binary structures, is to produce a text that moves toward the plane of immanence or the virtual. The plane of immanence or the virtual underlies all binary pairs and therefore functions as their “origin.” Thus, we could also refer to Deleuzian writing as immanent writing. More generally, the methodological and epistemological issues that preoccupy mainstream qualitative research have their ultimate origin in ontology or, for Deleuze, in the plane of immanence or the virtual. In other words, because mainstream qualitative research is not grounded in a fully immanent ontology (i.e., because it fails to consider how the actual, which it focuses on exclusively, is implicated in the virtual), absolute immanence or the virtual marks its limits.

To write in a Deleuzian way, then, requires that we produce a type of writing that avoids linearity, plot, textual unity, binary logic, a sense of fixity or identity, subject–object distinctions, and structure or genesis in general. Moreover, immanent writing can contribute, along with the relatively well-established body of poststructural research (e.g., Hein, 2013, 2015; Lather, 1993, 1996, 2007; St. Pierre, 1997a, 1997b; St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000) and the emerging body of postqualitative research (e.g., Hein, 2015; Lather, 2013; Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; St. Pierre, 2011, 2013, 2017; Taguchi & St. Pierre, 2017), to the achievement of a fully immanent qualitative inquiry. A fully immanent qualitative inquiry would have no “outside” or finality, meaning that it would include Deleuzian forms of writing, all existing qualitative research practices (mainstream and otherwise), and future qualitative research practices that are, as yet, unimaginable.