Deleuze and Guattari’s language for new empirical inquiry

Abstract

This paper reviews Deleuze’s theory of language in Logic of Sense, and Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of language in A Thousand Plateaus. In the ontology informed by the Stoics described in those books, human being and language do not exist separately but in a mixture of words and things. The author argues that this flattened ontology of surfaces is incommensurable with the ontology of depth used in conventional humanist qualitative methodology and recommends beginning new empirical inquiry with a concept instead of with method and methodology.

Keywords:

• Deleuze
• Guattari
• language
• subject
• ontology
• empiricism
• qualitative methodology

Notes

1. Throughout the paper, I abbreviate The Logic of Sense as LS and A Thousand Plateaus as TP.

2. Williams (2008) explained that ‘series’ is the key concept for understanding the scope and function of Deleuze’s philosophical move. For Deleuze, an event runs through series in structures, transforming them and altering relations of sense along the series. Events are not breaks or ruptures, hence, the example of ‘the slow silting of a river strangling a port and its estuary into decay’ (p. 2). Deleuze was interested in what happens to a series when an event runs through it.