The Lure of the New and the Hold of the Dogmatic

Dogma: The Empirical Investigator of the Human, Social, Empirical Sciences

Following Butler’s earlier comment, one might ask how epistemology, the study of knowledge, produces a description of human being. Epistemology—like the dogmatic image of thought in which it exists—is structured by the rational/empirical binary; and both rationalism and empiricism require an intentional human agent separate from and ahead of the world who can investigate and know it—do science on it. As Barad (1996) noted, “the Enlightenment notion of science is premised on a separation between knowing subjects and observation-independent objects” (p. 184). This subject can either, with rationalism, produce valid, true knowledge through the right use of reason (the mind) or, with empiricism, produce valid, true knowledge through the senses (the body, matter). Both rationalism and empiricism require a knower, though Nietzsche (1887/1992) argued “there is no such sub-stratum; there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything” (p. 481). Nietzsche’s refusal of the epistemological subject, however, has seemed too aberrant to take hold.

Descartes (1596–1650) is generally credited as the founder of rationalism and its rational man. In his quest to distinguish certitude from doubt, Descartes (1637/1993) concluded that the only thing he did not doubt in the contingent, ever-changing world was that he was a thinking being. He wrote, cogito, ergo sum—“I think, therefore I am” (p. 18)—thus inventing a man defined by thought, the cogito, the calculative, thinking, rational man who produces knowledge with his rational mind, inventing ideas and concepts with which to approach and know the world, which is unreliable and uncertain because it is contingent, not stable.

Yet Descartes did not, in fact, doubt everything. Heidegger (as cited in Derrida, 2006/2008) noted that “Dasein, the I (the ego) is not put into question at all. This illusion and this ambiguity of a critical stance runs right through the whole of modern philosophy up to the most recent present” (p. 146). Derrida explained that “Descartes failed to pose the ontological question of what being meant in the ego sum: the latter doesn’t pose the ontological question, and in the end his ego sum remains dogmatic” (p. 147). Nonetheless, the “I” taken for granted in Cartesian subjectivity has become almost imperceptible in Western thought, especially in Western science. It is surely a self-evident ground for the social, human, empirical sciences.

The British empiricists (John Locke, 1632–1704; George Berkeley, 1685–1753; and David Hume, 1711–1776), in contrast to rationalists like Descartes, argued that true knowledge is produced not through the speculation of the mind but through investigation using the body’s senses, especially agencies of observation that provide visible evidence, empirical proof. Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) called this human being “the strange persona of Investigator advanced by the empiricists” (p. 72). Unlike rationalism, empiricism claims not to begin with pre-existing metaphysical theories or concepts because they contaminate what is “found” in the actual, real world. Instead, new knowledge/theory is produced from empirical findings, from solid evidence. Of course, empiricism is only a theory; and, of course, there are different empiricisms, for example, logical empiricism, the empiricism of phenomenology, and transcendental empiricism (see St.Pierre, 2016). The first two are common in the human, social, empirical sciences; the third is not.

In general, however, the empirical world is assumed to be obdurate, static, waiting for the investigator to measure, quantify, name, and categorize it. Rouse (2004) referred to this idea as a “now-discredited empiricist foundationalism” (p. 154). In foundationalism, knowledge is presumed to be constructed from the bottom up. In empiricism, the foundation is human sensations, while in rationalism the foundation is the cogito, as noted earlier. But the epistemological project always begins with the human, and the foundational assumptions of both rationalism and humanism introduce often unacknowledged metaphysical, ontological claims about being—that both the “I” and sensations actually exist and exist together in a particular structure. The point here is that epistemology’s rationalism and empiricism both make ontological claims about the being of being even if those claims are not directly stated. Recently, the phrase onto-epistemology (e.g., Barad, 2007, p. 185) has been used to bring ontology to our attention and to signal the always already relation between ontology and epistemology.

In the human, social, empirical social sciences, the focus of this article, the link between the knowing subject, science, and language is critical because what is observed must be captured objectively and documented accurately and precisely in words. The proof of recognition lies in representation—I recognize something and then reproduce it in a text. This practice is one of the most common in the empirical sciences. Rorty (1979) explained that “to know is to represent accurately what is outside the mind” (p. 3). The assumption in representational logic is “that a sign [can] exchange for meaning” (Baudrillard, 1981/1988, p. 170), that a word can, indeed, stand in for a thing. In this way, empirical science becomes as much a textual as an observational and “scientific” enterprise as language becomes the repository of knowledge. The empiricist carefully textualizes the world, domesticating and scientizing it, fixing it in words. The truth of the world is in the text, and the reader “believes in what it sees: in representations” (Derrida, 1993/1994, p. 146). The descriptive density of the scientific text must match the empirical density of the world. But Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) disputed the idea that things can reside in words, “It is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say” (p. 67). After the linguistic turn and the crisis of representation, language can only be an ambiguous and unreliable mediation between the observer and the real. And in the ontology of immanence in poststructuralism and post qualitative inquiry, the distinction between the observer and its object is shattered. None of those categories—observer, language, real—remains distinct, separate.

Foucault (1975/1979) was suspicious of the documentary zeal of the human sciences and wrote, “these sciences, which have so delighted our ‘humanity’ for over a century, have their technical matrix in the petty, malicious minutiae of the disciplines and their investigations” (p. 226), the minutiae of evidence carefully documented in records, charts, and other texts scientized and formalized to enhance their truth-value. Foucault wrote about the “Great Observer” in “psychology, psychiatry, pedagogy, criminology, and so many other strange sciences” (p. 226), who is much like Deleuze’s empirical investigator of the empirical sciences, pledged to observe and document everything pertaining to man.

The representational method used by the empirical investigator charged with capturing the world in language dominates both the natural and social sciences. However, the following startling statement from Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) tears apart the presumed ontological hierarchy of the world, language, and the knower that structures humanist empiricisms: “There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author)” (p. 23). In Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology of immanence, there is “no subjectification” (p. 22) at the beginning that dominates the order of things. There is no grammatical subject, as Nietzsche explained, no subject that, because it precedes the verb in the grammar of a language, tricks us into thinking it precedes the action of the world. But that subject is required for the human sciences and is completely bound to language and its supposed capacity to represent the nature of things. And all those efforts to document, capture, and represent the world depend on a human subject who, standing apart from the world, can recognize it. Recognize—find something like something else that already exists—and then represent it. That is the story of the empirical sciences.

Is it possible to dislodge that knowing, epistemological subject of the human, social, empirical sciences? Poststructural scholars surely put it under erasure to refuse it. Derrida wrote that he used concepts like the subject but crossed them out to indicate that they seemed necessary but were, in fact, impossible. For him, deconstruction was the “letting go of each concept at the very moment that I needed to use it” (Derrida, 1967/1973, p. xviii). Might that be a “practice” for the new work, refusing “the habit of saying ‘I’” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 48)? Derrida (1966/1978) explained that continuing to use the old concepts is dangerous, because “since these concepts are not elements or atoms, and since they are taken from a syntax and a system, every particular borrowing brings along with it the whole of metaphysics” (p. 181).

Continuing to use the concept of human being described in the traditional Western metaphysics of Plato and Descartes, then, locks us into the onto-epistemology of its structure. The task of deconstruction, on the other hand, is to overturn the “traditional architecture of the fundamental concepts of ontology or of Western metaphysics” (Derrida, 1988, p. 1) to make room for “the irruptive emergence of a new ‘concept,’ a concept which no longer allows itself to be understood in terms of the previous regime” (Derrida, as cited in Spivak, 1974, p. lxxvii). Deleuze and Guattari also encouraged the creation of new concepts, as Smith (2010) noted, because “old concepts have been problematized in some way” (p. 59). So Derrida’s deconstruction, then, is an ontological, a metaphysical, a philosophical, and not just a textual project as some believe. Deconstruction asks one to problematize the description of human being in the human sciences and to “catch at that word” (Spivak, 1974, p. lxxv), that human, that “I” when it appears, to question its necessity, and to understand that it can appear only in a particular onto-epistemological arrangement which much of the new work tries to refuse.

Another scholar we now call poststructural, Foucault (2008), historicized that description of human being, that particular human of the human sciences and wrote, “the theory of the subject in English empiricism probably represents one of the most important mutations, one of the most important theoretical transformations in Western thought since the Middle Ages” (p. 271), a mutation that produced homo oeconomicus, homo juridicus, and homo legalis. As a side note, it’s interesting that, for Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault, the human subject of empirical science is, respectively, impossible, a habit, and a mutation. Given, then, that it is a theoretical transformation and an invention—not a ground—and given that it is a historical and so a contingent figure—not a necessity—that particular human could cease to exist. In his 1966 best-seller, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Foucault (1966/1970) wrote that the human sciences ¹ invented the “man” they required about two hundred years ago:

Before the end of the eighteenth century, man did not exist . . . he is quite a recent creature . . . but he has grown old so quickly that it has been only too easy to imagine that he had been waiting for thousands of years in the darkness for that moment of illumination in which he would finally be known. (p. 309)

Foucault’s archeology identified a fundamental shift in the order of things, in the “arrangements of knowledge” (p. 387) during the 18th century that enabled “an epistemological consciousness of man as such” (p. 309) who comes into existence along with the human sciences. In other words, the human sciences had to invent the human they required. At that point, “man appears in his ambiguous position as an object of knowledge and a subject that knows” (p. 312). At the end of his book, however, Foucault speculated that the “whole configuration” in which that man had become thinkable, the modern configuration that produced the “sciences of man” (p. 386) was about to topple. He wrote,

If some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility—without knowing either what its form will be or what its promises—were to cause them [the arrangements of knowledge] to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. (p. 387)

It is not surprising that post–World War II continental scholars called for changes in the arrangement of knowledge and especially of its science, our Enlightenment birthright, which had produced such a catastrophic man-made modern war machine. After the war, it was clear that much of the world had been devastated by “man,” and poststructural scholars like Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, and others began the deconstruction of that arrangement and the human being at its center. But the human sciences have been stubborn, obdurate, and unwilling to give up their man as well as their precarious status as sciences. As Foucault (1966/1970) argued, they “are not sciences at all” (p. 371). They do try hard to be hard like the natural sciences but always fail because their ground is the soft, fragile, insubstantial man they invented.

Though World War II, that historical event, was a wedge that introduced in “the very roots of thought, of notions of chance, discontinuity and materiality” (Foucault, 1971/1972, p. 231), it proved unable to disrupt the “monotonous act of an endlessly repeated foundation” (p. 188), the foundational human still assumed by the human, social, applied sciences today. It’s possible, however, that the 21st-century intensification of the terrifying event of the Anthropocene might be a more powerful wedge that could tear apart the “man” who has destroyed the earth for the advancement of scientific knowledge. Again, scholars call for poststructuralism’s posthuman, for the more-than-human, the not-quite-human, the inhuman and shift their attention to things, objects, matter, to the real ground—the earth itself. Whether imminent disaster is force enough to commit to ontological speculation and invite the lure of the new, given that it might mean the end of the human and its sciences is, I believe, the question. Can we give up our selves? Can we risk becoming a subject we don’t recognize?

Dogma: The Empirical Methodologies of the Human, Social, Empirical Sciences

The problem with the empirical methodologies of the human sciences is that they exist ahead of inquiry just as their empirical investigator exists ahead of the world. That ontological assumption about the nature of being, based, in large part, on Descartes’s theory of the subject and his dualist ontology provides the architecture and the concepts of Western metaphysics that ground the human sciences today.

But the ontology that enables that subject and those methodologies has not always existed, even in Western thought. Bordo (1986), for example, historicized the onto-epistemological arrangement that enables us to think methodology in the first place: “for the medieval aesthetic and philosophical imagination, the categories of self and world, inner and outer, human and natural were not as rigorously opposed as they came to be during the Cartesian era” (p. 446). Bordo pointed to evidence of a different ontology in the art of the medieval period, noting that its artists did not assume “the point of view of a detached, discretely located observer confronting a visual field of separate objects”; rather, they presented an “experience of the world and self as an unbroken continuum” (p. 447). Indeed, as Barfield (1965) explained, “before the scientific revolution [in the pre-scientific experience of the world] the world was more like a garment men wore about them than a stage on which they moved” (p. 78).

After Descartes and the Enlightenment’s scientific revolution, a different man and a different ontology began to form as man turned inward to compose himself, to unify and individuate himself as a self-conscious being separate from the external world, from the rest of being. The binary of the conscious, rational knower separate from a world waiting to be known is the modern condition of knowledge and the ground of the human, social, empirical sciences and their research methodologies. Both require that the world be external to man, the object of his knowledge and his science; and objectivity—the guarantor of the division between human being and the rest of being—became a priority for modern science.

As man withdrew from the world, objectivity replaced continuity. In his archeology of the human sciences, mentioned earlier, Foucault (1971/1972) described in great detail the emergence of this different order of things that enabled both the human sciences and their man. Those sciences then turned their attention not only to the empirical world—to Nature in the Man/Nature binary—but also to the Man they had created, the man who had withdrawn from the world and could then be both an object of knowledge and the one who knows. Human sciences like psychology, sociology, anthropology, and linguistics were invented to reveal him, to decipher him in his obscure complexity through objective, scientific methods.

Interestingly, much of the “new” work returns to that old ontology in which human being and the rest of being had not yet been so starkly divided. Barad (2007), for example, used the concept entanglement to revive that old ontological arrangement as follows:

To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating. (p. ix)

In entanglement, the subject/object distinction is cloudy and blurred, and the empirical sciences and their methodologies become irrelevant and drop out. Indeed, that overturning enables the “new.”

The Anthropocene provides ample evidence of the destructive consequences of separating human being from the rest of being, of keeping man intact so he can objectify and manipulate the world. The implicit suspension of ethics required to accomplish that onto-epistemological project has been outed for some time, as has its science, which has operated on the assumption that if the world is not us, if Nature is not Man, then we need not worry about what science does to it. Our first concern is Man, always Man.

To the contrary, in a Spinozan ontology, ontology is ethics; and his concept, common notion (Spinoza, 1677/1996, p. 54, IIP 37), according to Deleuze (1970/1988), refers to an ontology in which “everything enters into composition with other things in existence” (p. 114) so that “an animal, a thing, is never separable from its relations with the world” (p. 125). A Cartesian ontology based on binary oppositions (Man/Nature) is as impossible for Spinoza as it is for the poststructuralists’ ontology of immanence in which everything is always entering into external relations, “always variable and constantly being altered” (p. 128), always becoming—never static and still enough to be objectified and known.

If everything is entangled in continuous variation—always becoming—then bits can’t be separated out, objectified, and known. I do not believe either the human sciences we’ve inherited or the dualist ontology in which they exist can survive an ontology of immanence; and it seems to me they are already deconstructing themselves in much of the new work, resulting in what Derrida (1972) called an “overturning of the classical opposition [man/world] and a general displacement of the system” (p. 329). I have made it clear in my work that post qualitative inquiry can accommodate neither the ontology, nor the subject, nor the research methodologies of the human sciences. They are simply not recognizable in an ontology of immanence.

The ontological turn that presses for the “new” requires an understanding of old and new, Western and non-Western ontologies that are not Cartesian, though the study of the history and politics of ontology is typically not included in social science research curriculum in academia. Why can social science researchers not recognize the incommensurability between a dualist ontology and an ontology of immanence? I think social science research curriculum typically begins and ends with methodology and mostly ignores philosophy and the history and politics of ontology, epistemology, empiricism, and so on. I think methodology has become disconnected from onto-epistemology. Having sprung from nowhere, methodology stands alone, ready-to-hand. Why study onto-epistemologies when you can just follow a fool-proof, pre-existing research process already described in textbook after textbook and taught in methodology course after methodology course? That dogmatic approach to research employs Descartes’s method (as cited in Baxter, 2002) and his rules for the regulation of the mind:

The fourth of his [Descartes’s] Regulae is . . . “A method is necessary for investigating truth . . . By method I mean certain and easy rules, such as that those who use them precisely will never suppose anything to be true which is false.” (p. 43)

In that dogmatic image of thought with its certain and easy rules meant to be applied precisely, it’s best not to waste too much time reading philosophy and to just get on with it. I’ve argued that approach to inquiry is positivist and that even qualitative inquiry, which claims to have made the interpretive turn, retains the positivism it was invented to critique (St.Pierre, 2006, 2012). The chief tenant of positivism is that social science research can and should be theory-free and value-free as is, supposedly, research in the natural sciences; though, of course, positivism is just another theory (with a dualist ontology) laden with values. Poststructuralism has always countered positivism. In his discussion of postmodernism, Lyotard (1979/1984) wrote, “we are all stuck in the positivism of this or that discipline of learning” (p. 41), and Steinmetz (2005) wrote that positivism is the epistemological unconscious of the social sciences.

Post qualitative inquiry came out of my long (too long) apprenticeship with poststructural and other scholars in that aberrant line of philosophy, an apprenticeship burdened at every turn with and nearly trumped by the threat of methodology. I finally realized that working the ruins (St.Pierre & Pillow, 2000) of, or deconstructing pre-existing methodologies should give way—sooner rather than later—to overturning methodology altogether so that something different could be thought. To hasten whatever that difference might be, I have written that the first “practice” of post qualitative inquirers is to refuse pre-existing social science research methodologies from the beginning (St.Pierre, 2015). That refusal is difficult, of course, for those overtrained in methodology but absolutely necessary to escape the dogmatic image of thought and its ahistorical, normalized methodologies. As Kuhn (1962/1970) explained, by the time the textbooks have been written, the jagged conflicts of the past—the fierce debates about ontology and epistemology—have been smoothed over to produce an untroubled, consensual present.

Though the present conceals the past and is immediately out of date, it is, nonetheless, familiar in its repetition and supported by strong forces including “everyday practice, habit, stupidity, capital” (Fuglsang & Sørensen, 2006, p. 2). “Normal science “is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like” (Kuhn, 1962/1970, p. 5). That is, everybody knows it is grounded in a Cartesian dualist ontology, with the “I” at the beginning of everything: “I think,” “I know,” “I investigate”—I this, I that. Descartes’s subject with his “methodological solipsism” (Rorty, 1979, p. 192) prevails in the human sciences, “promoting cognitive dismissal of all that lies outside its bounds of sense” (Hoagland, 2007, p. 101). But in entanglement and in an ontology of immanence, neither that “I” nor his science nor his methodology is possible.

I have explained the problem of pre-existing social science research methodologies, methods, designs, and practices in my work on post qualitative inquiry. A Cartesian, dualist, subject/object, Man/Nature onto-epistemology can produce, and has produced, pre-existing humanist research methodologies which the pre-existing empirical investigator can “apply” to a separate object of knowledge that already exists in the world. But, again, if nothing pre-exists becoming, if everything is in continuous variation, then there can be nothing stable in advance (man) who can apply a stable method of inquiry (methodology) to something stable that exists (the world) because nothing is ever stable. Again, in an ontology of immanence, there is no ground, no foundation, no beginning, no origin anywhere. There never has been. The world does not and cannot contain separate, stable entities. Everything is always in continuous variation, becoming; and the empirical methodologies of the human sciences are inconceivable, irrelevant, and useless.

More importantly, I believe they are dangerous, and, I venture to say, even unethical when they stop thought, when they prevent the new—what “can and must be thought” (Foucault, 1984/1985, p. 7). With Spinoza (1677/1996), I believe ontology is ethics, but the study of ontology, the study of the nature of being and the categories and relations of what exists, has too often been confined to philosophy. Given the looming catastrophes of this 21st century, I believe it is imperative that the human, social, empirical sciences re-consider what they think the world is like, beginning with an intense study of the history and politics of ontology (and ethico-onto-epistemology). What do we have to lose at this point?

Poststructural scholars using an ontology of immanence were quite clear that they refused pre-existing methods and methodologies as noted below:

Dow (2001) summed up the poststructural view of method and methodology, “Because postmodernism denies the prescriptive role of methodology, it is consistent that nothing may be said about method” (p. 67). And there we are.

Dogma: Recognition (and Repetition)

I believe Descartes’s dualist, subject-object ontology dominates the methodologies of the human, social, empirical sciences to the extent that immanentist approaches to inquiry can scarcely be recognized. For that reason, in my teaching, I introduce doctoral students to scholars in the aberrant line of philosophers, especially the poststructuralists, as soon as possible. Likewise, in teaching post qualitative inquiry, I am very clear that post qualitative inquiry begins with their ontology of immanence and their philosophical concepts and not with a Cartesian ontology and its subject, the empirical investigator (St.Pierre, 2006, 2012, 2017a).

It does take some time for them to understand that those two ontologies are incommensurable. What that means is that one can’t simply drop a Deleuzian philosophical concept thinkable in an ontology of immanence such as assemblage (see Buchanan, 2015, 2017), rhizome, or haecceity into an interpretive qualitative study thinkable in a dualist ontology. Following Derrida and as discussed earlier, those concepts bring the whole of Deleuze’s immanentist ontology along with them, dismantling Descartes’s dogmatic image of thought and so, our social science research methodologies.

For that reason, an interpretive qualitative researcher cannot just add a rhizome to her study and stir. Incommensurables can’t be combined—they bounce off each other. And yet the practice of putting the unrecognizable into existing, recognizable containers and categories has become common. For example, I’ve read articles about post qualitative methodologies even though I’ve been very clear that post qualitative inquiry is not and can never be another social science research methodology. But I’m not surprised that those who have not studied poststructuralism and its ontology of immanence would make that mistake. What else would one do with post qualitative inquiry except try to recognize it (this must be that) and put it in an existing category (so I’ll put it here). In similar fashion, Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida refused method, as noted above, yet there are many references to their methods and methodologies. How does this happen?

I think it happens because scholars in the human, social, empirical sciences feel forced to write too soon, feel forced to apply a philosophical idea or concept before they’ve read enough to understand they can’t be applied as can sociological or psychological or anthropological concepts (see St.Pierre, 2017b). Philosophical concepts are intended to re-orient thought and not to be applied to the lived world. Philosophy, then, cannot accommodate the social sciences’ fierce rush to application. As Lacan (as cited in Ulmer, 1985) wrote, “first it is necessary to read . . . avoid understanding too quickly” (p. 196). I believe reading is rigor in the new inquiry, reading that involves what Deleuze and Parnet (2002) called the “lengthy preparation, yet no method, nor rules, nor recipes” (p. 8).

If social scientists want to use philosophy, they must study philosophy—there are no shortcuts. They must read carefully and slowly. In the last decades, social scientists borrowed the humanities’ understanding of the work of writing using different genres and “messy texts” (Marcus, 1994, p. 567) in their representations. Perhaps it is time to borrow their understanding of the difficult work of reading. To sum up, I think too many social scientists have the bad habit of not reading enough before they apply, and that practice can be particularly dangerous when they engage philosophy in a cursory fashion and then produce insubstantial, almost incomprehensible, work.

I think another reason social science researchers immediately turn to pre-existing methodology so quickly is that the social sciences are already so methodologized it may be impossible to recognize any kind of inquiry that does not have a pre-existing methodology. For example, in a recent doctoral advisory committee meeting, colleagues were aghast when I said the student didn’t have to have a methodology for her study. As the conversation continued, one of them declared, “I think you can methodologize anything.” Indeed, that has already been done—think of how narrative and discourse and even conversations have been methodologized. Another colleague was distressed because students without a pre-existing methodology wouldn’t know “what to do.” I don’t believe post qualitative inquirers should know “what to do” at any point in their studies. How could one know what to do in the “not yet”? Referring to Derrida, Beardsworth (1996) wrote,

Derrida is careful to avoid this term [method] because it carries connotations of a procedural form of judgment. A thinker with a method has already decided how to proceed, is unable to give him or herself up to the matter of thought in hand, is a functionary of the criteria which structure his or her conceptual gestures. (p. 4)

In an ontology of immanence, pre-existing methodologies are impossible.

But methodology has become dogma in the human, social, empirical sciences—the Same—and dogma is recognizable. The Other, Difference, is neither recognizable nor welcome. To keep its dominant structure intact, the social sciences are expected to repeat themselves, to be the same and recognizable—what everybody knows. The new is suspect because it might well erode that structure, especially if it refuses its precious, pernicious ² methodologies and enables different, unrecognizable, approaches to inquiry.

I invented post qualitative inquiry to do exactly that. I encourage students I work with to begin reading philosophy early in their doctoral programs; and those who do their reading, those who, as Butler (1995) wrote, are “available to a transformation” (p. 132) of who they are often become unmoored in the delirium and chance of the not yet. Freed from the bonds of methodology and poised on the edge of the new, they can, however, quickly be discouraged when advisers who maintain their disciplines’ dogmatic image of thought recommend they refuse the new and repeat inquiry their fields recognize. I find that refusal of Difference in favor of the Same—methodology’s fascist tendency—increasingly dangerous, bordering on unethical.

All that is to say that after 25 years of struggling with how to support students who are enchanted by the lure of the new—those eager to experiment and create, I believe I have come to grips with the profound damage caused by the “model of recognition” (Deleuze, 1968/1994, p. 134). I believe recognition is the curse, the scourge, the cancer the dogmatic image of thought deploys to shut down the new. Recognition produces a banal, instrumental, hackneyed, brute repetition of the Same and the end of thought.

The model of recognition is dogmatic because it presupposes the unity of the self-conscious, knowing Cartesian subject described at the beginning of this article and referred to throughout. In the human, social, empirical sciences, that man who pre-exists the world uses his conscious mind and his memory to recognize what he already knows, the dogmatic. Thought is not disturbed in this image. Patton (2000) explained it this way: “implicit in this model is the conflation of thought with knowledge and the supposition that knowledge is ultimately a form of recognition” (p. 19).

However, in Deleuze’s work, as I’ve discussed, thought is pre-subjective and pre-individual, an involuntary activity. Thought does not and cannot begin with an “I.” As Deleuze (1968/1994) explained, “something in the world forces us to think” (p. 139). Here, something, some force, disturbs thought and gestures toward the “existence of a possible world” that cannot be recognized—a “field without subjects” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994, p. 18). In his early study of Nietzsche, Deleuze (1962/1983) wrote the following about thinking in thought:

Thinking, like activity, is always a second power of thought, not the natural exercise of a faculty, but an extraordinary event in thought itself, for thought itself. Thinking is the n-th power of thought. It is still necessary for it to become “light,” “affirmative,” and “dancing.” But it will never attain this power if forces do not do violence to it. Violence must be done to it as thought, a power, the force of thinking, must throw it into a becoming-active. (p. 108)

Deleuze (1962/1983) continued by explaining that thinking in thought is “opposed to method . . . a premeditated decision” (p. 108). Here, method predetermines thought to protect it from the violent forces of thinking in thought that would disturb its unity. “The form of recognition has never sanctioned anything but the recognizable and the recognized; form will never inspire anything but conformities” (Deleuze, 1968/1994, p. 134). Method only recognizes and repeats; it cannot dance and become light.

To repeat, in an ontology of immanence where thought does not begin with an “I,” “there is no basis for a conception of method” (Patton, 2000, p. 19). In fact, Deleuze’s philosophical concept rhizome is “anti-method” (Zourabichvili, 2012, p. 208), as is, by the way, Lyotard’s (1979/1984) paralogy (p. 100)—both scholars echo the poststructural position against the methodological project. The dogmatic image of thought grounded in the “I” who recognizes cannot conceive of “encounters which escape all recognition” (Deleuze, 1968/1994, p. xvi).

An “I” that does not precede the world. Thought that does not begin with an “I.” Inquiry without methodology. That is the challenge, I believe, and the stakes are enormous. I take very seriously Deleuze’s (1968/1994) caution that to meet the challenge of the new, inquirers must treat the dogmatic every time “as something which has not always existed, but begins, forced and under constraint” (p. 136). The dogmatic must not remain imperceptible but become impossible, every time, so that thinking in thought itself can begin—the new.