Enactments of a Minor Inquiry

Deterritorialization: Turning Away From the Territorial Side of the Assemblage

Major and minor are not two different languages but rather two different treatments of a language (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 103). A minor language, by its very nature, is not external to but a deterritorialization of a major language; Kafka does not write outside of German but in such a way as to make German unintelligible to itself. To speak of a minor inquiry (e.g., Mazzei, 2017) is not to reject the methods and methodologies employed within the current epoch of social science inquiry but a call for experimentation from within research, constructing a continuum of variation around knowledge production. A minor inquiry seeks to (re)orient research not toward perceived structural invariants and constants (the objective of a “royal” science) but to the novel, the excessive, the “regulated, continuous, immanent process of variation” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 103, emphasis in the original). A minor inquiry attends to the omnipresent “cutting edge of deterritorialization” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 57) of research by seeking to make its methods “stutter” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 107).

Research is always already a relative deterritorialization. Similar to how the crocodile does not resemble a log but instead steals bits of code from the tree (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 11), the psychometrician’s assessment apparatus deterritorializes the elements of one assemblage (the student) and reterritorializes it in another (the test). The test is not a measure of an attribute or ability but the theft of code. Similarly, the ethnographer’s field notes do not describe, but produce; the interviewer’s transcript is not a copy but a simulacrum. Within the apparatus of the test, the notes, or the transcript, this code no longer functions as it did in the student assemblage but forms connections in relation to new flows of desire. As Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) articulate, language is not communicative but commanding (p. 75). Research is never about something, but rather is always doing something.

If this is true, then how anemic the contemporary social sciences are. Much as Freud took the revolutionary concept of the id and hid it behind Mommy/Daddy/Me (Adkins, 2015, p. 36), scholars take the generative capacity of research and overcode it with the mundane. The Neyman–Pearson (1933) null hypothesis test, a cornerstone in contemporary quantitative research methods, perhaps best exemplifies this. The null hypothesis test is a technique that takes these deterritorialized elements and subsumes them within a recapitulation of what was already known—we reject the null hypothesis, believing the evidence suggests the world functions as we thought it would. Although this appeal to a transcendent ideal is clearly evident within these quantitative methods, this resonates with any scholarship—quantitative, qualitative, or post qualitative—that aspires for validation, be it content, construct, criterion, or convergent. Validity is an umbilical tethering research to a plane of consistency, not imminence (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994, p. 24).

This is not a critique but an opportunity. If research is always already a relative deterritorialization, then a minor inquiry might disrupt this process of reterritorialization, keeping open possibilities through disruption and experimentation. Matt’s work developing a formative assessment to understand how pre-service and in-service teachers enact social justice in their classrooms illustrates this potential. Rather than solely focusing on this study’s findings, Matt instead, also experiments with those deterritorialized elements that refuse to be overcoded—the excesses of a “royal” sciences that are often relegated to the limitations sections of a manuscript, if given any attention at all.

Critical in this project is the distillation and validation of a framework defining what practices exemplify teaching for social justice to provide feedback to educators. Traditional research methods, predicated on a logic of extraction and as outlined by the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education (1999), dictate that an initial constellation of indicators ought to be extracted from the extant literature. These indicators should then be subjected to triangulation with ideas expressed by experts in the field, current educators, and the curriculum taught within teacher education programs.

Although there exist many methods for doing so, one popular technique is to subject these attributes to quantitative review using what is referred to as the Lawshe (1975) technique. In this method, a panel of experts is asked to review each item and articulate whether it is essential, useful but not essential, or not a necessary component of the construct of interest. These results can then be evaluated, using a simple algebraic formula, to derive the content value ratio (CVR). A positive CVR represents that more than half of the panel members agreed that the item represents an essential element of the construct, whereas a negative CVR represents that fewer than half of the panel members agreed. Various thresholds for significance have been devised insuring consensus of the panel while accounting for the possibility of type I errors, or false positives (e.g., Ayre & Scally, 2014; Lawshe, 1975).

This approach describes a process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Attributes are extracted from published works, enmeshed with attributes perceived as similar from the works of other scholars, and overcoded according to an extant theoretical framework. From the heterogeneous body of literature is extracted the presumed homogenous constants. The expert panel, the rational arbiters, are then tasked with evaluating the veracity of the results. Below a certain threshold, the work is invalid, an unfaithful reproduction. Above the threshold, there is evidence to suggest content validity. The project is Platonic in nature, for what is this mode of validation but the predation of “phantasmatic simulacr[a]” (Deleuze & Krauss, 1983, p. 48)? The omnipresent danger within traditional research is to be the illegitimate copy, to offer a representation that either distorts or is untethered from reality. As Lee Cronbach (1980) asserts, “the job of validation is not to support an interpretation, but to find out what might be wrong with it” (p. 103).

To intervene in this quixotic process of validation, we follow Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980/1987) critique of Chomsky’s universal grammar as what both Chomsky and this research uncover are not the deep structures abstracted out of heterogeneous elements, but simulacra. They are simulacra not because the attributes are unfaithful copies but because there was never the possibility of faithful reproduction, there was only ever theft. “The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true” (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 1).

The problem with research seeking to triangulate the homogenous out of heterogeneous systems, parallel the problem of Chomsky’s search for deep grammatical structure, is not that it is too abstract but that it is “not abstract enough” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 90). That is, neither reaches the abstract machine that connects what a language is to what a language does. “The abstract machine as it relates to the diagram of the assemblage is never purely a matter of language, except for lack of sufficient abstraction. It is language that depends on the abstract machine, not the reverse” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 76). Abstracted universals are produced by extracting constants out of the substance and form of expression—by overcoding structure over variation. That which does not fit the model is relegated to the outside. However, one cannot simply turn away from structure and toward the pragmatic without the risk of extracting constants out of the substance and form of content—the limitation of poststructural linguistics (Bell, 2018, p. 77). Instead, what Deleuze and Guattari suggest is a minor research that explores abstraction at the level of abstract machines, exploring the co-constitutive variations of content and expression through which language functions. “To place the statement in continuous variation is to send it through all the prosodic, semantic, syntactical, and phonological variables that can affect it in the shortest movement of time” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 94). Here, we can see both language and research as a process, not product. The constant does not presuppose variation but, instead, is merely the territorial side of the assemblage. Within the context of this research, we attend to this process by turning away from this territorial side of averages and means and instead look at both the variances from which these constants are abstracted and the knowledge that is amputated by orienting the assemblage toward the constant.

In considering these two sides of the assemblage—the territorial and the “cutting edge of deterritorialization” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 57)—we are left with two different orientations regarding how to conceptualize results. On one hand, we can aspire to produce a faithful copy and allow these detteritorialized elements to be subsumed by the mundane—the apparatus of capture of a “royal” science. On this front, this project succeeds as the necessary threshold for the Lawshe test is met (Ayre & Scally, 2014). The set of social justice teaching practices extracted from the extant literature sufficiently captures the construct of interest and meets the established criteria for content validity according to the expert panel. Conversely, we can look at the data as simulacra, turn away from the transcendent ideal, and attend to this process of a becoming-minor research. We can look beyond abstraction to the level of the constant and move to the constant productive process of variation at the level of the abstract machine.

In reorienting research toward this productive process, we move from attending to the constant to diffusion and variation. Rather than examining the aggregate—looking for the constant out of our heterogeneous results—we can see the unique patterns of how these experts “plug in” to this process. What emerges is a different story than the aggregate, one in which each scholar differently adjudicates each indicator. These unique patterns disappear in the aggregate, as the sum of these scores is both in excess of and less than its parts—overcoding the constant over the heterogeneous.

It is at the extremes of these data that we can find particularly destabilizing results. One reviewer provides a point of disruption in this process of reterritorialization by identifying all indicators as not necessary components of social justice. Furthermore, within a section on the survey where reviewers are encouraged to provide qualitative feedback regarding other important indicators omitted from the survey, the same anonymous outlier offered this:

I completed the survey and responded thoughtfully, but I’m somewhat concerned with the initial premise of this research . . . When this formative tool is implemented, how will the results be used? Will it be a teacher-driven process used primarily for self-reflection, or an evaluative process of some sort?

Within traditional methods, this respondent’s concerns are noted and carry weight, but only as a single data point in relation to the responses of other experts. This respondent’s scores exert an influence on the overall result, but only fractionally and ultimately do they not disrupt the final conclusion.

But by looking at the heterogeneous rather than the homogenous, this bit of datum can interrupt this process of reterritorialization. Instead of functioning merely as variance within a statistical model, this response destabilizes both the methods and results. At the level of method, we can see how this reviewer fails to conform to the intended function of the assessment, particularly in responding to the qualitative question regarding additional indicators. Rather than respond to the question of capture of a “royal” science (“what is social justice”), this reviewer improvises by deterritorializing the method and refusing the question. Instead, they reframe the project around the problem of social justice: “What are the connections that constitute it, and what further connections are made possible and impossible?” (Atkins, p. 9). By doing so, this response cuts across both the impetus of the project and its results. As an interjection at the level of the problem rather than the question, this response disallows for an easy settlement on this logic of extraction, one that is content to overcode the constant over the heterogeneous. Reorienting research such that this result becomes the focus rather than excess necessitates attending to the problem of social justice, not just the question.

This enactment highlights three points. First, a minor inquiry and, by extension, the process of deterritorialization, does not stand in opposition to a major or “royal” science but rather is always already a part of research; “the task is not to categorize science as either royal or nomad [minor], but to recognize that all scientific practices will involve some combination of both royal and nomadic tendencies. The project of becoming, of creating the new, begins with seeing the nomadic in everything” (Adkins, 2015, p. 13). Second, although all research has both “royal” and minor tendencies, orienting toward the minor changes how traditional research methods and methodologies function. Whereas a royal science is fixated on ideals and validation (turning toward the territorial side of the assemblage), a minor inquiry instead focuses on the generative capacity of research or the “cutting edge of deterritorialization” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 57).

Finally, we have sought to demonstrate both the major and minor tendencies within Matt’s work in social justice education. Here, we see the value and power of a minor inquiry as not to sabotage this project aimed at understanding social justice teaching practices but to shake the certitude associated with traditional methods and methodologies—“it is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/1983, p. 112). Instead of an either/or research approach, we aim to think with the “and”—“Thinking with AND, instead of thinking IS, instead of thinking for IS: Empiricism has never had another secret. Try it, it is a quite extraordinary thought, and yet it is life” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987, p. 57). Here, we try and think with AND to hold on to both the old and the new empiricisms (St. Pierre, 2016), to attend to the political immediacy of the present milieu in desperate need of social justice while holding open the possibility of new modes of relations not yet knowable. We intend to do this work and hold it accountable as both necessary and insufficient, to take traditional methods and methodologies under erasure (Derrida 1967/1976).

Political Immediacy: The Assemblage as Content and Expression

In this section, we elaborate on the characteristic of political immediacy. In so doing, we offer an enactment to illustrate the way in which a minor inquiry produces an analytic practice bound by the ontological commitments of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage.

Deleuze and Guattari explicitly link political immediacy to an assemblage. Rather than think the assemblage as an arrangement of things, Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) write of the assemblage in terms of “what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities” (p. 4). An assemblage is “not a thing in the world—it is [that which explains] the existence of things in the world” (Buchanan, 2017, p. 463). An assemblage then in their words, “is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 8). “In practice, the assemblage is the productive intersection of a form of content (actions, bodies and things) and a form of expression (affects, words and ideas)” (Buchanan, 2015, p. 390). Attuning to the contours of a minor literature and its characteristics on which Mazzei (2017) invented a minor inquiry, different methodological interventions are made possible.

In enacting a minor inquiry, there is no subject who speaks from a position of knower or acts independent of the assemblage. The source of all utterance is a collective, whether social, national, or political. Being collective, the utterance is always already producing and produced by the political immediacy: always an assemblage of forces, bodies, affects, and things that produce utterances.

A minor inquiry then can only ever be that which approaches sites of inquiry and analysis as a process of couplings and connections of an assemblage—as a collectivity. From the perspective of inquiry, the concern is not with what makes up the assemblage but how the assemblage functions and what is captured in its territory. “An assemblage, in its multiplicity, necessarily acts on semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows simultaneously” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 23). It is these flows, both material and semiotic, that are the source of utterance with which we are interested. How these flows are deterritorialized and reterritorialized is how the assemblage maintains its center, producing as we describe reproductions of racism and White supremacy, reterritorialized.

In returning to the assemblage, and considering expression, the utterance is not treated as the product of the individual but of the assemblage. We turn now to an enactment based on a recent event with which many may be familiar. Because we map this as it is transformed by inquiry in a minor key, we cannot think it as a singularity, or an event, but as a product of the assemblage, always a collective in excess of the locale, the subject, the utterance, the event. Political immediacy, that is the assemblage.

Two black men walked into a Starbucks in downtown Philadelphia on Thursday afternoon April 12, 2018 and sat down. Officials said they had asked to use the restroom but because they had not bought anything, an employee refused the request. They were eventually asked to leave, and when they declined, an employee called the police.

The arrests prompted a #BoycottStarbucks campaign and protests at the store, in Philadelphia’s Center City.

On May 29, Starbucks will close 8,000 locations to administer racial bias training for 175,0000 of its employees. The move is a response to national outrage over the arrests of two Black patrons while they were simply waiting for a meeting to begin at a Philadelphia coffee shop. (Feldberg & Kim, 2018)

Reading the Starbucks event as the product of racist practices by an individual manager, or an individual company, is what prompted the boycott campaign and protests. And while we are not dismissing the importance of collective action to combat individual racist acts and practices, especially in the current political climate, we are arguing that to view this without the characteristics of a minor inquiry, thereby ignoring an ontology of the collective in the form of an assemblage, is to fail to consider how the Starbucks incident is claimed in a territory of white supremacy and racism, thereby reterritorialized. Starbucks customers can be outraged because they are generally well educated and affluent. They see themselves as well educated and sensitive to equity issues.

An article in the Houston Chronicle (Bean-Mellinger, 2018) reported that Starbucks’ target audience “is often described as affluent or high income ($90,000)” (para. 1). And while this is not the entire market base, five target categories are described: high-income, high-spenders; urbanish, on-the-go; technology early adopters; healthy-ish professionals; socially conscious; flexible to change.

A customer base who falls into one or more of the aforementioned categories would necessarily be outraged at what happened in the Philadelphia store and justifiably voice their horror that such a thing would happen in a space that they frequent on a regular basis. What happens, however, if we are to re-think this episode as a minor inquiry would have us do given our understanding of political immediacy? We then have to consider this outrageous act as always already a product of the assemblage, always a collective in excess of the locale, the subject, the utterance, the event. Political immediacy, that is the assemblage.

In a minor inquiry informed by Deleuze and Guattari, there are no singulars, only connectives. The individual concern is of concern because of the whole contained within it. In other words, the individual is of and is constituted by the assemblage. To account for the whole, it is necessary to think what agency might be in an assemblage. There are no discreet acts or utterances, only those produced by the collective. What if we are to think of the Starbucks episode not as the action of an individual racist agent but in relation with and patterned by previous events?

On the recent anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, Kathleen Belew wrote this in an OpEd piece appearing in The New York Times:

When neo-Nazi and alt-right demonstrators attacked counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Va., last August [2017], killing one and injuring several others, many Americans responded with surprise that white supremacists were suddenly in their midst. But White-power activism is not new, nor has it been part of an underground history. We knew. And we forgot.

Twenty-three years ago, on April 19, 1995, a Ryder rental truck filled with fertilizer exploded in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The bombing killed 168 people, including 19 children— the largest deliberate mass casualty event on American soil between Pearl Harbor and the Sept. 11 attacks.

And yet, in these 23 years, the bombing remains misunderstood as an example of “lone wolf” terrorism. People repeat the words of the bomber Timothy McVeigh, an avowed white-power advocate who before his execution pointed out how scary it was that one man could wreak “this kind of hell.”

But in fact, the bombing was the outgrowth of decades of activism by the White-power movement, a coalition of Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, skinheads and militias, which aimed to organize a guerrilla war on the federal government and its other enemies. (Belew, 2018)

Outrage is a legitimate response to any incident in which a person of color is targeted by law enforcement. One need only review the grim statistics of the number of Black men incarcerated in the United States, or the number of unprovoked shootings of Black males that fed the formation of #Blacklivesmatter. Or the disgraceful campaigns run by politicians seeking public office who are condemned by the president, not for their racist and inflammatory remarks, but because they are perceived as too extreme to win a general election against a moderate candidate. However, outrage, implicit bias training, and treating incidents such as the Starbucks debacle is to still focus on the action of individual humanist subjects. It is to revert to meaning to be found in utterances and actions by self-determining agents. In an assemblage, there are no singulars, only connectives. The individual speaker speaks and acts from the collective assemblage.

We go again to Deleuze:

The minimum real unit is not the words, the idea, the concept of the signifier, but the assemblage. It is always an assemblage which produces utterances. Utterances do not have as their cause a subject which would act as a subject of enunciation, any more than they are related to subjects as subjects of utterance. The utterance is the product of an assemblage—which is always collective, which brings into play within us and outside us populations, multiplicities, territories, becomings, affects, events. (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987, p. 51)

Inquiry and analysis, therefore, refuses “a” singular subject, narrating instead the whole contained within it. The utterance or act is not treated as the product of the individual but of the assemblage. It is not that individuals don’t speak or act, but in a minor inquiry, “direct discourse is a detached fragment of a mass and is born of the dismemberment of the collective assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 84).

In Deleuze’s semiotic, material, and social flows, there is no longer a division between the three orders of reality, representation, and subjectivity, which ground conventional qualitative methodology. We might then say that these enactments are examples of what St. Pierre (2011) has named post qualitative inquiry. In other words, the conventional hierarchy of a reality that exists that the researcher can find and represent in language is not thinkable, that is, language stands between reality and the researcher. Rather the collective, or “an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 23). The three orders are entangled on the same plane, not on separate levels, and act on and produce one another simultaneously. “Every statement is the product of a machinic assemblage, in other words, of collective agents of enunciation” (p. 37).

In the following section, we illustrate an enactment of collective enunciation. Like that which has been presented in a discussion of political immediacy and the assemblage, there is no longer “a” voice of a humanist subject, but as Mazzei (2016) has written, simply voice “without origins or beginnings” (p. 158). It is an enactment of collective enunciation in which there are no singular subjects, or static places, or traceable times. It is not that the individual bodies or utterances disappear, but narration must be thought that enacts the social and collective nature of language and the subject. “There is no separate, individual person to which a single voice can be linked—all are entangled. In Deleuzo-Guattarian ontology, there is no present, conscious, coherent individual who speaks the truth of her present or her past” (Mazzei, 2016).

Collective Assemblage of Enunciation: Student Success in Higher Education

Minor inquiries demand experimentation, movement, and immanence. When the actions of researchers are bounded by observation as they are in this enactment, the “glow” (MacLure, 2013) of collective assemblages of enunciation remains available through breaking open words and visibilities, however experienced (Deleuze, 1986/1988). As noted in the introduction and in our reading of political immediacy, in a minor inquiry, utterances are products not of persons but of collective assemblages of enunciation. Collective assemblages of enunciation, or expressions, produce both forms and substances (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987). These forms and substances include utterances, objects, persons, and other words and visibilities to be broken open. This enactment explores the expression of student success in higher education, cultures of data, and the constitution of its substance, the successful student.

The particular student success initiative studied here was justified through gesturing to expansive notions of success and operationalized as a 10 percent increase in the four-year graduation rate of the Class of 2020 against the Class of 2016. Both of these characteristics were important to the imagination of the initiative in its first year. However, the one that gave a clear measurement benchmark, and as such was made meaningful to the continued employment of several persons within the initiative, channeled decision making. The initiative was charged with both, and a 10 percent increase in the four-year graduation rate became its North Star. (“Did they not get the memo? Have they not heard [about the 10 percent promise]?”)

Taking collective enunciation seriously requires some shifting in the presentation style of empirical evidence. In what follows, quotations from observational field work within the first year of Great State University’s ¹ (GSU) student success initiative are identified only relationally. Quotations in the following from persons within the initiative are labeled administrator; quotations from persons on the borderlands of the initiative are labeled advisory. For those still tracking persons, note that human membership in these groups are in constant movement. Administrators and faculty, from entry level to senior, from nontenure-track to full professors, occupy both groups in ever-shifting combinations. Administrator, when used to name speakers throughout this enactment, refers to a person in that context who was on the inside. Advisory, when used to name speakers throughout this enactment, refers to a person on the boundary between inside the initiative and outside of it. There is no presumed hierarchy between these two namings; sometimes advisory folk are below administrators on organizational charts, and sometimes they are above. There can be no naming of speakers who are purely on the outside, as those expressions escape the visibility of the initiative, the institution, and myself, Laura, the narrator of this enactment who is somehow implicated in both and neither of these groups. In practice, in a world of content and expression at GSU given shape by an assemblage of data-driven control, ² these distinctions matter. In some cases, as in the previous paragraph, this indirect attribution will also fall away from quotations, leaving the only possible attribution to the assemblage. The aim of the larger project excerpted here is to map the orientations and disorientations of GSU’s collective assemblage of enunciation in search of possibilities of machining content, in particular the material-discursivities that are students, differently. Through giving no attribution to quotations other than administrator and advisory, the ultimate attribution of quotations here is to the collective assemblage of enunciation of GSU’s student success initiative.

The truth of student success in American higher education is produced by the system of relationships formed through student success as data-driven control. This assemblage in the national literature also holds true locally at GSU. The question of this enactment further interrogates the topology of this orientation: what constitutes the form of expression of student success at GSU? This was a live question throughout the first year of the initiative, as there was never a decided-upon set of student success knowledge, of strategies and tactics and dividuals ³ (Deleuze, 1992; Raunig, 2016) and flows in play. At a student success planning meeting in April, one administrator asked, “Do we need to step back from the 2020 goal for a minute and go back to the research, to what impacts retention?” “The research” was a phrase invoked throughout the year; it was a specter of affirmation hanging over the day-to-day minutia of such a large organizational undertaking. The research put into use most frequently by administrators came from white papers, conferences, and emails produced by foundations and not-for-profits. Traditional academic literature came into the initiative from time to time, but the literature generated by foundations and not-for-profits most swiftly moved practices within the initiative. The contours of the assemblage of student success expressed by the gray literature better aligns with student success as operationalized at GSU:

Access, progression, retention, completion—those are the four [strategies]. We’re mixing categories . . . those were what are the categories in the research that tell us what leads to retention. I think we also need to make sure best practices are on there. We have to include best practices.”/“Those are tactics.”/“The specific ones from Complete [College] America, from EAB⁴—those.”/“Can you put a red one [tactic] under there for increase credit accumulation?”

The assemblage of student success in operation in the gray literature and at GSU, data-driven control, produces a collective assemblage of enunciation, or expression, that can be broadly characterized as cultures of data. The utterances regarding student success in circulation are all expressions of the assemblage; some are actualized by GSU, others are actualized by the gray literature. Several forms of cultures of data are explored in the following.