Researching without representation? Language and materiality in post-qualitative methodology

Abstract

The article imagines a materially informed post-qualitative research. Focusing upon issues of language and representation, under the influence of Deleuze’s Logic of Sense, it argues for research practices capable of engaging the materiality of language itself. It proposes the development of non- or post-representational research practices, drawing on contemporary materialist work that rejects the static, hierarchical logic of representation, and practices such as interpretation and analysis as conventionally understood. The article explores the ontological and the practical implications of this state of affairs, via a re-reading of a fragment of what would have been called data. Offering relief from the ressentiment and piety that have characterised qualitative methodologists’ engagements with scientific method, the ‘post’ could therefore be read as signalling the demise of qualitative research. Or at least, as inaugurating a qualitative research that would be unrepresentable to itself.

Keywords:

• post-qualitative research
• new materialism
• language and representation
• Deleuze

Notes

1. See Lather (2010) and St Pierre (2011) for critical discussions of the dispiriting effects of these encounters with science-based research and evidence-based policy and practice. I have entered that fray more than once myself: see for example MacLure (2005).

2. ‘Language’ and ‘discourse’ are not synonymous: especially within post-structural theory, discourse is not reducible to a matter of words or linguistic phenomena. It is, however, also the case that language and discourse are often conflated – for instance in the very notion of the ‘linguistic turn’, which is as much about discourse as it is about linguistics. This conflation is also seen in Susan Hekman’s materialist critique, in her rather broad use of the term ‘linguistic constructionism’ as an umbrella term for the diverse post-structural or discourse theories that, in her view, prioritise discourse at the expense of materiality. My concern in this paper is with language, rather than discourse, as far as this distinction holds up.

3. They are not necessarily distinct readings in any case. DeLanda (2002) makes the point that Deleuze moves through different terminologies as his oeuvre progresses. DeLanda traces some links and discontinuities across key concepts.

4. In the article which explored Hannah’s silence (MacLure et al., 2010), we found a connection to Melville’s novella, Bartleby the Scrivener. However, at the time I was not familiar with Deleuze’s own reading of this text, which construes Bartleby as an event, on account of the indecipherability of his ‘formulaic’ repetition of ‘I would prefer not to’. It is tempting to read this dislocated connection between the time of the first article and of this present text as another instance of the event lying in wait.

5. Even tears, after all, are classifiable. Nelson (2000) classified adult crying into types such as ‘healthy crying’, ‘crying for no reason’ and ‘prolonged or frequent crying associated with depression’, together with types of ‘inhibited crying’ such as ‘healthy tearlessness’ and ‘detached tearlessness’, relating these to attachment styles and symptoms of clinical disorders.

6. Lecercle’s angels are clearly a different species from the transgressive, perplexing annunciators of postmodernity, delineated most strikingly in my view by Lather and Smithies (1997) in their powerful and moving work on women living with HIV and AIDS. I would not wish to denigrate the power of the angel as a productive figure for postmodernism, but merely note here that – as Milton wrote many centuries ago – angels may play for more than one side.