The New Materialism in Qualitative Inquiry

Deleuze’s Plane of Immanence

The various forms of French poststructuralism that emerged during the 1960s all amount to philosophies of immanence (see, for example, Lawlor, 2003b, 2006). Immanence is, arguably, the key term in Deleuze’s entire philosophy, and it can be found in nearly all his major works. Put another way, Deleuze’s thought, like that of Derrida and Foucault, can ultimately be reduced down to this idea of immanence. Surprisingly, though, I have only rarely encountered this term in the qualitative literature. But what, precisely, is immanence? The concept of immanence has a long history within philosophy, having been used by both modern philosophers and poststructuralists. A crucial difference, however, is in the scope that the term has been accorded by each of these groups. Traditionally, the sphere of immanence has been conceived by modernist philosophy and science as based in the human subject, as the sphere of interiority or conscious life. Moreover, the whole of modernist thought since Plato has been characterized by binary (i.e., “either/or”) thinking, and transcendence constitutes the binary opposite of immanence. ¹ The sphere of transcendence is conceived as the sphere of exteriority, or things as they exist in themselves, independently of consciousness. Thus, modernist thought splits reality into immanence and transcendence, which, like dualisms in general, results in intractable philosophical problems (i.e., aporias) and restricts thinking. The result is a two-world ontology—things, insofar as they are given, and things as they exist in themselves—and endless uncertainty about the relationship between both spheres.

Within poststructuralism, which decenters the human subject, immanence and transcendence are conceived more broadly and refer to “remaining within” and “going beyond,” respectively. More importantly, though, the challenge of Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence is that there can be no two-world ontology: Immanence must be made complete, as a pure plane of immanence (i.e., all transcendence needs to be eliminated; Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, 1991/1994). This plane of immanence, which Deleuze also refers to as the plane of consistency (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987), is one of his most ineffable (quasi- or non-) concepts, ² but it can still be described coherently. If we begin from a radical immanence (i.e., an immanent plane), inherent separation is eliminated. There is no privileged standpoint (e.g., consciousness, representation) from which an external point of view can be taken (i.e., immanence is no longer an immanence to consciousness ³ ): Transcendence cannot enter it and establish another world. In other words, this plane is not immanent to something else, only to itself. As Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) explain,

Immanence is immanent only to itself and consequently captures everything, absorbs All-One, and leaves nothing remaining to which it could be immanent. In any case, whenever immanence is interpreted as immanent to Something, we can be sure that this Something reintroduces the transcendent. (p. 45)

The plane of immanence expresses itself without end: Its movement is uninterrupted. Because it is unextended in space, it is imperceptible; it has no outside or end that would allow us to say, definitively, what this immanence is. Thus, it is not some thing or being: It is virtual and formless, or chaos (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994). As mentioned earlier, the plane of immanence is not a concept or even a conceptual field but instead, a quasi-concept or, better, a nonconcept. That is, it exceeds all conceptual orders from the very beginning. Also, it is from this plane of immanence that subjects and objects are produced. There can be no structure or genesis on the plane of immanence: It is a surface on which there exist only complex networks of forces, relations, connections, and becomings. Movement and velocity are what distinguish the elements on this plane. As Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) note, “There are only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules, and particles of all kinds” (p. 266). Moreover, these productive relations between various unformed elements (i.e., events) occur purely by chance. Thus, the plane of immanence contains all the possibilities that are inherent in forces, relations, and other elements. It is reality itself, reality in the making. ⁴ For Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994), it is also the absolute ground on which we create the concepts that we use. ⁵ Also, as the above discussion partly reveals, the plane of immanence is synonymous with other major terms in Deleuze’s philosophy such as the virtual, chaos, pure difference, the body without organs, abstract machine, becoming, force, desire, and lines of flight.

Deleuze and Conventional Materialism

Initially, Deleuze’s philosophy can appear thoroughly materialist: Apart from his own claims that his work is materialist, his writing makes use of a wide variety of physical imagery such as surfaces, strata, points and lines, particles, and molar assemblages (e.g., Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987). Before turning to Barad’s philosophy, it may therefore be useful to examine how Deleuze’s materialism differs from the more conventional materialism of the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. A common form of the latter is reductive materialism, whereby all processes or realities (i.e., the molar sphere) are seen as capable of being explained by reducing them to their more fundamental constituents, such as molecules and atoms (i.e., the molecular sphere). In this way, matter (i.e., physical nature) is reduced to a single stratum, the molecular. But Deleuze rejects this reductive molecular materialism and seeks instead to preserve each stratum of reality, without prioritizing one stratum over the other (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987). He does this by materializing the molar sphere without reducing it to the molecular, a unique approach that he describes as “universal machinism” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 256). This strategy preserves molar phenomena as material elements of even larger material processes rather than reducing them to molecular forms. He refers to these larger composites as “abstract machines” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 90), ⁶ although they are anything but mechanical. As Deleuze explains,

Machine, machinism, “machinic”: this does not mean either mechanical or organic. Mechanics is a system of closer and closer connections between dependent terms. The machine by contrast is a “proximity” grouping between independent and heterogeneous terms (topological proximity is itself independent of distance or contiguity). (Deleuze & Parnet, 1977/2002, p. 104)

It can be seen that the grouping referred to above shares important similarities with the plane of immanence described earlier, where there are only chance relations of movement and velocity between unformed elements.

Deleuze’s is therefore a nonreductive molar/molecular materialism that avoids ontologically privileging molecularity over molarity: The molar is no less real than the molecular (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987). Moreover, molecules can collect and swarm into active masses that are molar in nature, and vice versa. ⁷ To complicate matters further, Deleuze’s use of terms such as “molecule” can be confusing because he uses them in ways that differ radically from their conventional scientific meaning. As a result, and as will become clearer during the later discussion of matter, his terms can easily be mistaken as having the same meaning as their more conventional counterparts. Returning to Deleuze’s materialism, if molar phenomena are capable of materializing without being reduced to their more fundamental constituents, then his materialism is not a materialism in any normal sense of the word. Aside from his assertions that his work is materialist, it lacks any real relationship to conventional materialism. Nevertheless, Deleuze’s radical materialism has the advantage of avoiding the false material/immaterial binary. ⁸

In terms of the plane of immanence discussed earlier, Deleuze’s materialism, unlike conventional materialism, refuses to “devalue Nature [i.e., matter] by taking away from it any virtuality or potentiality, any immanent power, any inherent being” (Deleuze, 1969/1990, p. 268). Thus, all matter has its basis in this immanent plane. More generally, the immanent itself is the “origin” of both poles of the material/immaterial binary. That is, life and matter, or the material and the immaterial, are two different states of the same plane—immanence—and they are able to interact, and be integrated, in a ceaseless dynamism. It could be said, then, that immanence itself is the necessary condition for all of life (understood as including both the material and the immaterial) in its becoming. ⁹

Barad and the Role of Language in Contemporary Theory

Before focusing on Barad’s (2007) agential realism and her conception of matter, it may be useful to examine her assessment of the role of language in current forms of theory such as feminist theory, science studies, social theory, and cultural studies. I do this for several reasons: First, it provides important context (and part of the rationale) for her agential realism; second, it helps to elucidate an important aspect of Deleuze’s philosophy (and poststructuralism more generally); and last, it makes clear a fundamental difference between her philosophy and that of Deleuze. In the first paragraph of the chapter that is devoted to agential realism in Barad’s book, she discusses what she views as the overemphasis on language in contemporary theory:

Language has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately every “thing”—even materiality—is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation. . . . Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that doesn’t seem to matter anymore is matter. (p. 132)

Moreover, in encouraging us to take matter seriously and stop viewing matter as a passive and immutable substance, Barad argues that the privileging of language has meant that “materiality itself is always already figured within a linguistic domain as its condition of possibility” (p. 132). For Barad, agential realism avoids privileging discursive considerations over material ones and instituting the nature/culture dualism that she discerns in work such as Butler’s (1990, 1993).

For some of the contemporary theoretical work that Barad (2007) refers to, her criticism is undoubtedly warranted. Other, similar objections also exist and refer to the overemphasis on language using terms such as pantextualism (e.g., Best & Kellner, 1991), linguistic idealism (e.g., Best & Kellner), or semiological (or semiotic) reductionism (e.g., Dillon, 1995). Theories that have been labeled in any of these ways are generally criticized for having reduced everything to textuality or discourse. A major concern expressed about such a move is that “textuality” has all but replaced the more traditional concept of “reality.” Thus, language is viewed as operating without constraining, external referents, and it is language itself that then establishes what is real. Put another way, the concern is that we are unavoidably bound up within the immanent sphere of language.

Deleuze’s philosophy (e.g., Deleuze, 1968/1994; Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, 1991/1994), however, does not constitute a form of linguistic idealism or pantextualism. St. Pierre (2013) makes a similar point in arguing that some proponents of the new materialism/new empiricism have dismissed poststructuralism and other “posts” as having prioritized the “linguistic” or “discursive” over the material. She explains that “the material is always already completely imbricated with the linguistic and discursive” (p. 647) in the work of the various posts. If, as was discussed earlier, a plane of pure immanence is the necessary condition for all of life (understood in its broadest sense), language cannot possibly function as the ground of life. For Deleuze and Guattari (1972/1977, 1980/1987), language is an individual flow of desire ¹⁰ among others (e.g., culture, history, social forces, politics, gender). A similar point can be made if we consider that Deleuze’s plane of immanence can also be understood as an immanent field of pure differences. Pure (or positive) difference should not be thought of as a negative difference, which is the difference between already identifiable things or terms, but rather as a constant, ungrounded process of differentiation that generates identities. ¹¹ It is important to emphasize that identity is being used here in its philosophical sense, as focusing on relation, and refers to the relation that a thing has only to itself (i.e., any thing has a relation of identity to itself and to nothing else). The philosophical concept of identity as sameness should not be confused with the more conventional concept of identity that deals with a person’s self-concept or social representation (e.g., gender identity, ethnic/racial identity).

A negative difference, then, is a difference between identities (e.g., an apple is different than an orange)—a difference from something. ¹² In other words, difference is here grounded in identity, whereas positive difference reverses this relationship (i.e., identity is grounded in, or constituted by, difference). ¹³ Positive difference, however, cannot be brought into view. It is not a thing or a system: It is a process. Modernist science, however, rejects positive difference and acknowledges only negative difference. Thus, Deleuze (1968/1994) inverts the traditional relationship between identity and difference and develops a philosophy of difference that refuses to reduce difference to identity but instead, attempts to account for difference itself. He maintains that we can begin true ontology (i.e., an ontology of difference) only when we consider what is in terms of difference rather than identity; that is, “Difference is behind everything, but behind difference is nothing” (p. 57). Deleuze therefore views positive difference as an eternal challenge rather than a theory. Positive difference is radical, even “monstrous” (p. 29), a “formless, ungrounded chaos which has no law other than its own repetition, its own reproduction in the development of that which diverges and decentres” (p. 69). He is referring here, of course, to the process of continual differentiation or divergence that was discussed earlier.

Understood from the perspective of Deleuze’s (1968/1994) philosophy of difference, language is a specific mode of difference that is made possible (i.e., produced) by pure or positive difference. ¹⁴ Language therefore cannot serve as the ground for materiality, or “reality” more generally. Instead, positive difference is what produces the more specific modes of difference (i.e., structures) that are associated with language, history, culture, society, gender, sexual orientation, and so forth. Put another way, there are specific kinds of differences (i.e., quasi-systems of difference) that are generated by the structures of language (e.g., the signifier “apple” has a different meaning than the signifier “orange”), history (e.g., life in 2015 differs in important ways from life in 1915), culture (e.g., cultures differ in their childrearing practices), and other categories, but positive difference is that which is not already determined by these categories. Positive difference exceeds all these categories: It is prelinguistic and prehuman, even inhuman. ¹⁵ Consequently, Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) emphasize the prehuman: the prehuman differences, forces, and processes that generate meaning, various kinds of entities, and life in general. ¹⁶

Comparing Barad’s Agential Realism and Deleuze’s Philosophy of Immanence

Barad (2007) states that agential realism provides the central theoretical framework for her work and that the chapter that is devoted to it is the key or core chapter of her book. On the face of it, Barad’s philosophy differs fundamentally from Deleuze’s philosophy in that the former is a realist philosophy and the latter is a philosophy of immanence. But the differences between both positions can be brought into sharper focus if we examine Barad’s philosophy in more detail. For Barad, agential realism encompasses epistemological, ontological, and ethical dimensions, and it also avoids reinscribing a material/discursive dichotomy (i.e., a material/immaterial binary). Instead, the material and the discursive are mutually implicated in a process of intra-action:

Discursive practices and material phenomena do not stand in a relationship of externality to each other; rather, the material and the discursive are mutually implicated in the dynamics of intra-activity. The relationship between the material and the discursive is one of mutual entailment. Neither discursive practices nor material phenomena are ontologically or epistemologically prior. Neither can be explained in terms of the other. Neither is reducible to the other. Neither has privileged status in determining the other. Neither is articulated or articulable in the absence of the other; matter and meaning are mutually articulated. (p. 152)

Barad therefore views intra-action as a key component of agential realism and also defines the former as “the mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (p. 33). She emphasizes that intra-action differs dramatically from the conventional concept of interaction, which assumes that independent individual agencies exist prior to their interaction. In contrast, the concept of intra-action

recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action . . . “distinct” agencies are only distinct in a relational, not an absolute, sense, that is, agencies are only distinct in relation to their mutual entanglement. (p. 33)

As Barad (2007) makes clear, neither the material nor the discursive has any privileged ontological or epistemological status in accounting for, or determining, the other. “Distinct” agencies such as these in fact mutually constitute one another and can emerge as such only through their intra-action. Understood from the perspective of positive difference, these mutually articulated agencies constitute identities. But more importantly, even if Barad’s distinct agencies lack any ontological status prior to their intra-action, the process of intra-action is itself an identity. As discussed earlier, positive difference is not fixed (i.e., it does not have a single identity), and it therefore differs even from itself. As a process of continual differentiation, it exceeds all concepts, including intra-action. Ontologically, for Deleuze (e.g., Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, 1991/1994) or any other philosophy of immanence, positive difference (or pure immanence) is the necessary condition for intra-action. ¹⁷

The above points can be elaborated further if we examine Barad’s (2007) conception of agency, which bears a close relationship to intra-action. For agential realism, agency neither is limited to humans, nor is it simply expanded to include nonhumans or other forms of agency that have both human and nonhuman elements. Rather, the human and nonhuman are seen as not fixed, so that agency encompasses all the possibilities for reconfiguring the materiality of these and other forms. Moreover, in her most explicit and detailed discussion of agency, Barad states,

Crucially, agency is a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has. It cannot be designated as an attribute of subjects or objects (as they do not preexist as such). It is not an attribute whatsoever. Agency is “doing” or “being” in its intra-activity. It is the enactment of iterative changes to particular practices—iterative reconfigurations of topological manifolds of spacetime-matter relations—through the dynamics of intra-activity. (p. 178)

Similar to the ontological status of intra-action in the previous discussion, it is evident that Barad’s notion of agency, like all conceptions of agency, lies entirely within the sphere of transcendence. As the above quote makes clear, agency is an enactment, a reconfiguring of “spacetime-matter relations,” but as was noted earlier, positive difference is nonspatiotemporal (e.g., Deleuze, 1968/1994). Positive difference is the system of differential relations that generates specific actual spaces and times and hence is different from, and ontologically “prior” to, Barad’s notion of agency. Put another way, despite being pre-subjective and pre-objective, agency (or an enactment or a reconfiguration) remains an identity: It lacks the ontological status of positive difference.

But in terms of the issue that is of most importance to us here, Barad (2007) defines matter in the following way:

In an agential realist account, matter does not refer to a fixed substance; rather, matter is substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency. Matter is a stabilizing and destabilizing process of iterative intra-activity. Phenomena—the smallest material units (relational “atoms”)—come to matter through this process of ongoing intra-activity. “Matter” does not refer to an inherent, fixed property of abstract, independently existing objects; rather, “matter” refers to phenomena in their ongoing materialization. (p. 151)

The term phenomena, as used in the above quote, has the meaning that Niels Bohr assigned to it: The independent objects (and their independent properties) that conventional science recognizes, which Barad refers to as a “metaphysics of things” (p. 33), are replaced by phenomena as the fundamental units of reality (i.e., “primary ontological units,” p. 33). In expanding on Bohr’s conception of phenomena (as indicating our inability, epistemologically, to separate observer and observed) in her agential realism, Barad defines phenomena ontologically as “the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting components” (p. 33).

Barad (2007) also says of matter that it “is produced and productive, generated and generative . . . Mattering is differentiating, and which differences come to matter, matter in the iterative production of different differences” (p. 137). Thus, within Barad’s philosophical framework, matter is not a fixed property of independent objects but instead, is substance in its intra-active becoming (a doing rather than a thing). Matter is produced and productive; it involves differentiation. Initially, her use of terms like “becoming,” “productive,” and “differentiating” to describe matter can lend the impression that her philosophy shares important similarities with Deleuze’s philosophy. On closer examination, though, the meaning that Barad assigns to these terms can be seen to differ dramatically from that of Deleuze (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, 1991/1994). As mentioned earlier, Barad’s is a philosophy of identity and remains within the sphere of transcendence. Barad’s matter, ¹⁸ substance, phenomena, differentiating, and becoming are therefore part of the sphere of transcendence; her matter lacks the immanent power that Deleuze assigns to the term. Put another way, Barad’s matter is not virtual or formless, as understood within Deleuze’s philosophy, and her becoming is not Deleuze’s immanent becoming. Also, there can be no genesis—even if understood in the form of intra-action—on the plane of immanence.

We can also consider Barad’s (2007) matter in terms of the matter/discourse binary that intra-action is said to undo. From the perspective of a philosophy of difference, even if matter and discourse are mutually constituted or articulated, as Barad asserts, a binary logic is still implicitly at work (i.e., the matter/discourse binary has not truly been undone). More specifically, within a philosophy of difference, for binary opposites to be truly inseparable, they must be thought on the basis of positive difference rather than some third term (Deleuze, 1968/1994), which in Barad’s case is intra-action. As mentioned earlier, intra-action functions as an identity, and for Deleuze, relations (such as the relationship between matter and discourse) need to be viewed in terms of difference rather than identity. Ontologically, positive difference is the true “origin” of the matter/discourse binary.

Barad’s (2007) concept of intra-action nevertheless represents an impressive effort to reduce dichotomy, despite remaining within an ontology of identity, and it would therefore be reasonable to ask how, precisely, an ontology of difference would improve on agential realism. As mentioned earlier, when viewed from the perspective of a philosophy of difference or immanence, agential realism is a philosophy of identity, and it establishes a two-world ontology. Agential realism therefore leaves fundamental questions unanswered about the ontological status of the material and the discursive, and the relationship between the two (i.e., agential realism cannot account for positive difference as such). Deleuze’s philosophy (e.g., Deleuze, 1968/1994; Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, 1991/1994) would therefore emphasize the opening or excess of Barad’s ontology (i.e., other ways of understanding the status of both poles of the matter/discourse binary and the relationship between them) and call for other concepts that would open up this structure to allow other possibilities of being. For example, Barad’s agential realism is grounded in Niels Bohr’s probabilistic theory of particles, but pilot-wave theory, which was first proposed by Louis de Broglie and later modified (see, for example, Bacciagaluppi & Valentini, 2009), has recently begun to offer an intriguing and plausible alternative to the standard, Bohr-influenced Copenhagen interpretation. More specifically, recent experiments in fluid dynamics, involving a drop of oil that is made to bounce repeatedly along a liquid’s surface, ¹⁹ have replicated all the findings of the quantum equivalent of the classic double slit experiment but without the ghostly behavior and “collapse” of the latter (see, for example, de la Peña, Cetto, & Hernández, 2014).

Implications of Barad and Deleuze for Qualitative Inquiry

As I have tried to show, Deleuze (e.g., Deleuze, 1968/1994; Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, 1991/1994) and Barad (2007) make use of fundamentally different ontologies: Deleuze’s is a philosophy of immanence and difference, whereas Barad’s is a philosophy of transcendence and identity. Beyond a degree of surface resemblance, their philosophies could hardly be more different (and incommensurable). An attempt to find common ontological ground between both philosophies, within the broader framework of the new materialism in qualitative inquiry, does not look promising. At the risk of oversimplifying both positions, at a general level, Deleuze’s work can be seen as emphasizing force and creation, whereas Barad’s work can be seen as emphasizing indeterminacy and intra-action. Moreover, both theorists may use some of the same terms (e.g., matter, particles, differentiating, becoming, producing), but the meaning that they assign to each of these terms differs fundamentally. As mentioned earlier, Deleuze’s concepts can be easily mistaken for their more conventional or orthodox forms. In terms of matter in particular, for Barad, matter is substance in its intra-active becoming rather than a fixed substance. Matter involves differentiation and emerges through intra-action. Deleuze, however, materializes the molar without reducing it to the molecular. His matter is immanence based, and therefore has virtuality and immanent force. Barad’s conception of matter is based in an ontology of identity and transcendence, whereas Deleuze’s matter is based in an ontology of difference and immanence. As a result, these materialisms are incommensurable. Also, Deleuze’s materialism bears little, if any, resemblance to conventional materialism, whereas Barad’s materialism is more closely aligned with conventional materialism.

The ontologies/philosophies of Deleuze (e.g., Deleuze, 1968/1994; Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, 1991/1994) and Barad (2007) also have distinctly different implications for qualitative inquiry. In terms of the specific issues taken up in this article, Deleuze’s philosophy can be seen as emphasizing the inherent instability of all structures and the need to open them up and create new concepts and forms of life, whereas Barad’s philosophy can be seen as emphasizing the important role of matter in inquiry and offering the concept of intra-action or entanglement as an important alternative to the conventional concept of interaction. Deleuze’s work, which has been used by qualitative researchers for at least 20 years, appears regularly in the qualitative literature and has been applied in a variety of ways (e.g., Gale, 2014; Masny, 2013; Mazzei, 2013; Mazzei & Jackson, 2012; St. Pierre, 1997). In contrast, Barad’s work is much more recent and has, so far, appeared much less often in the literature (e.g., Davies et al., 2013; Mazzei, 2014). As far as combining the work of Deleuze and Barad in the same qualitative study, ontologically, their philosophies are incommensurable, and mixing or blending them is likely to result in ontological/theoretical incoherence. Furthermore, when qualitative researchers draw from the work of these and other theorists, it is often in the form of using specific concepts, and the meaning of a concept is, of course, inevitably tied to the ontology of which it is a part. For example, as I have shown, Deleuze’s conception of matter (e.g., Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, 1991/1994) differs fundamentally from that of Barad (2007), and combining them obscures these crucial differences as well as the ontological differences that underlie them. We could therefore extend Barad’s statement that “matter matters” (p. 210) by adding that the type of matter also matters.

The above problem of ontological incoherence is closely related to the “ontological confusion” (p. 80) that St. Pierre (2015) discerns in much of the ostensibly post-qualitative work that she has examined, and she cautions against “carelessly mix[ing] ontologies” (p. 90). For example, she discusses the danger of ontological incommensurability that arises when one or more concepts from a post-humanist theorist such as Deleuze are inserted into an otherwise conventional, humanist qualitative study and concludes that “using a concept from one ontology in another just doesn’t work” (p. 87). The issue of ontological incoherence, as it relates to combining the philosophies of Deleuze and Barad, also highlights the need to examine the appropriateness of combining Deleuze’s philosophy with that of other new materialists/new empiricists. Whether his philosophy is compatible with these other forms of new materialism/new empiricism remains to be established, but what does seem clear is that such compatibility will depend, to a large extent, on whether the latter constitute philosophies of immanence or difference.