Thinking data with Deleuze

Abstract

In this paper the author is thinking with Deleuze's philosophical concept of the ‘image’ of the speech‐act in cinema and the implications for methodology and ethics in qualitative research. Drawing on research in the USA with white teachers, this paper will specifically engage with Deleuzian concepts presented in his two books on cinema and his philosophical concept of the ‘image’ toward a re‐imaging of voice. To think with the ‘image’ of speech‐acts and how voice is conveyed in a cinematic sense, particularly if one is to consider silent films, is to think about ‘viewing’ voice in qualitative research, and how such viewing might make it possible to ‘read’ the image of voice from a multi‐dimensional perspective.

Keywords:

• voice
• Gilles Deleuze
• silence
• data analysis
• feminist poststructuralism
• whiteness

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at: the 2008 BERA Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland; the 2009 Feminist Methods Conference in Stockholm, Sweden; and the 2009 AERA Conference in San Diego. I am especially grateful for the comments provided on these earlier versions by Alecia Jackson, Hillevi Lenz Taguchi, Maggie MacLure, Kate McCoy, and Phillip Prince.

Notes

1. In her chapter, ‘Decentering Voice in Qualitative Inquiry’, Elizabeth St. Pierre (2009) discusses the fact that while poststructural qualitative researchers have deconstructed data, validity, authenticity, the interview, and voice, what is needed in thinking post‐methodology might be an abandonment of the old terms all together, including qualitative inquiry.

2. In the introduction to Voice in Qualitative Inquiry (Jackson and Mazzei 2009), I write with Alecia Jackson about the limit of voice, not in an attempt to solve the problem of voice, but to strain the epistemological limits of voice. What the book attempts is an engagement with a questioning of the: ‘very notion of what constitutes voice, the voices we choose (or are able) to listen to, how we listen to them, and why we accept some as true and others not’ as we ‘seek practices that confront and twist voice, meaning, and truth’ (3).

3. My positing of voice as an image is not a gesture toward a multi‐modal methodology. It is a gesture toward a consideration of voice that is not necessarily easily discernible or understood from a particular vantage point. It is a construction of voice that is both material and discursive.

4. The media picked up on this phenomenon in their analysis of the 2008 US presidential election (see, e.g., Herbert 2008; Williams 2008).