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This article was downloaded by: [Eindhoven Technical University]On: 21 November 2014, At: 11:51Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
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Thinking data with DeleuzeLisa A. Mazzei aa Department of Leadership Studies , Gonzaga University , 502 E.Boone Avenue, Spokane, WA, 99258-2616, USAPublished online: 06 Oct 2010.
To cite this article: Lisa A. Mazzei (2010) Thinking data with Deleuze, International Journal ofQualitative Studies in Education, 23:5, 511-523, DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2010.497176
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International Journal of Qualitative Studies in EducationVol. 23, No. 5, September–October 2010, 511–523
ISSN 0951-8398 print/ISSN 1366-5898 online© 2010 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/09518398.2010.497176http://www.informaworld.com
Thinking data with Deleuze
Lisa A. Mazzei*
Department of Leadership Studies, Gonzaga University, 502 E. Boone Avenue, Spokane, WA 99258-2616, USATaylor and FrancisTQSE_A_497176.sgm(Received 16 September 2009; final version received 15 March 2010)10.1080/09518398.2010.497176International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education0951-8398 (print)/1366-5898 (online)Original Article2010Taylor & Francis0000000002010Dr [email protected]
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 andethics in qualitative research. Drawing on research in the USA with whiteteachers, this paper will specifically engage with Deleuzian concepts presented inhis 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 isconveyed in a cinematic sense, particularly if one is to consider silent films, is tothink about ‘viewing’ voice in qualitative research, and how such viewing mightmake it possible to ‘read’ the image of voice from a multi-dimensionalperspective.
Keywords: voice; Gilles Deleuze; silence; data analysis; feminist poststructuralism;whiteness
The act of thinking does not proceed from a simple natural possibility; on the contrary,it is the only true creation. Creation is the genesis of the act of thinking within thoughtitself. This genesis implicates something that does violence to thought, which wrests itfrom its natural stupor and its merely abstract possibilities. (Deleuze 1964/2000, 97)
Introduction
In this paper I am thinking with Deleuze’s philosophical concept of the ‘image’ of thespeech-act in cinema to engage with the implications for methodology and ethics inqualitative research. My current methodological project is a consideration of the prob-lem of voice in qualitative inquiry and the ways in which voice is constituted,constrained, fictionalized, or multiplied, all in attempts to offer an authentic essenceor voice that is present, stable, and self-reflective. Drawing on research in the USAwith white teachers, this paper will engage with Deleuzian concepts presentedprimarily in his two books on cinema (see Deleuze 1983/1986, 1985/1989) toward are-imaging of voice. Such a re-imaging encourages a thinking of the ‘speech-act’ asan ‘image’ in keeping with the visual because, as Deleuze states, ‘The heard speech-act, as component of the visual image, makes something visible in that image’(Deleuze 1985/1989, 223). To think with the ‘image’ of speech-acts and how voice isconveyed in a cinematic sense, particularly if one is to consider silent films, is to thinkabout ‘viewing’ voice in qualitative research, and how such viewing might make itpossible to ‘read’ the image of voice from a multi-dimensional perspective. Deleuze
*Email: [email protected]
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compares the components of the silent image with the talking image and in so doingmakes it possible to question what is made ‘visible’ in the image of voice, or thespeech-act broadly defined.
A reinterpretation of the material
Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense inwhich the only thing that doesn’t seem to matter anymore is matter. (Barad 2007, 132)
Karen Barad (2007) offers an examination of how matter and meaning are intertwined.She does so, spurred by an interest in:
understanding the epistemological and ontological issues that quantum physics forces usto confront, such as the conditions for the possibility of objectivity, the nature ofmeasurement, the nature of nature and meaning making, and the relationship betweendiscursive practices and the material world. (133)
Such questioning for Barad is undertaken for the purpose of reassessing how weunderstand social phenomena, how we unnaturally divide the world into categoriesthat include the ‘social’ and the ‘natural’ and the implications for meaning-makingand the ways in which matter matters, or in the case of my project, a move away fromthinking voice discursively toward a thinking of voice as discursive, as material, asdiscursive and material, and as constituted between the discursive and the material.
If we are to consider voice as a performative practice, how does a reinterpretationof the material, or a rethinking of the relationship between the material and thediscursive, demand that we rethink voice and data not as a separation of the theoreticalfrom the material, but as an enactment, as a performative practice, one that asks ‘howmatter and embodiment come to matter in the process of research itself’ (Lenz Taguchi2008, 1) and in the process of expression and meaning-making? In other words, whatif we are to embark on a rethinking of voice as constituted between the discursive andthe material – as constituted without a beginning, or without being constrained by thereductive binary of the discursive and the material? Such a rethinking of voice withoutan ‘image’ might be in keeping with Barad’s ‘agential realism’ that: ‘rejects the notionof a correspondence relation between words and things and offers in its stead a causalexplanation of how discursive practices are related to material phenomena’ (Barad2007, 44–5). To further engage an image of voice with signs and images that havenever before appeared is to embark on a project of thinking voice without an image.
To think voice without an image is to theorize voice in such a way so as ‘not to leavethe material world behind and enter the domain of pure ideas’ (Barad 2007, 55) but toseek the excesses where a voice that is not constrained by an ideal can and does existoutside, in-between, and within the discursive and material. For Barad, ‘Theorizing,like experimenting, is a material practice’ (55). So I engage in the practice of experi-mental theorizing that might produce an excessive voice that escapes containment.
Thinking voice without an image
Several of Deleuze’s works consider the nature of the ‘image of thought’ (see, e.g.,Deleuze 1964/2000, 1968/2004, 1985/1989; Deleuze and Guattari 1991/1994).Deleuze approaches the quandary of the ‘image’, harkening back to Plato’s ideal form
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and the resultant problem perpetuated in western thinking as a result because, as hecontends, we can never get outside the cyclical nature of representation. In the sameway that we do not perceive, we also do not think if we are merely basing an imageor thinking on prior thought. For Deleuze, to think without an image is to find a kindof thinking that is without a subject and that can produce another image of thought.Likening his project to modern art, Deleuze wrote, ‘The theory of thought is likepainting: it needs that revolution which took art from representation to abstraction.This is the aim of a theory of thought without image’ (cited in Patton 1994, 141). It isa project that seeks to provoke a ‘convulsion’ which maintains ‘the repetition ofdifference, as the production of the new, while resisting the gravity of the circle ofrecognition’ (O’Sullivan and Zepke 2008, 1).
Such an emergence of thought and subjectivity can only occur, according toDeleuze, with signs and images that have never before appeared in the same way inthe process of becoming. The body ‘becomes for Deleuze (with Guattari) semiologi-cal, a question of different regimes of signs’ (Olkowski 1994, 120). And so whenDeleuze and Guattari write about the body without organs, they do so in an attempt toenact thinking without a subject and to confront our reliance on essential objects ormaterial representations to understand and explain. To take the metaphor seriously, inother words, to try to conceive of a literal body without organs, is to miss the pointentirely:
Deleuze insists that we should interrogate the genesis of any organized body or relativelyclosed form – including the bodies of humans, societies, art, philosophy and science [andhere I would add education and social science research] – and move to the ‘body withoutorgans’, or the forces from which bodies are composed. (Colebrook 2006, 30)
To think then of the forces from which bodies are composed, or the forces fromwhich voices emerge, is to theorize, not in order to ‘leave the material world behindand enter the domain of pure ideas’ (Barad 2007, 55). It is to engage in a theorizingthat, according to Barad, ‘is a material practice’ (55, emphasis in original), in thesame way that ‘scientific’ experimenting is a material practice.
My current methodological project, one with which I am attempting to think withDeleuze as I seek to think voice without an image, is a consideration of the problemof voice in qualitative inquiry and the ways in which voice is constituted, constrained,fictionalized, or multiplied, all in attempts to present an authentic essence or voice thatis present, stable, and self-reflective. I argue here and elsewhere that, ‘voice hasfrequently been privileged because it has been assumed that voice can speak the truthof consciousness and experience’ (Jackson and Mazzei 2008; Mazzei and Jackson2009). My project is not to solve the problem of voice, but to question the promise,problems, inadequacies, and deficiencies of voice – the ways in which voice isnarrowly defined and assumed to be fully present in words spoken by research partic-ipants that can be ‘captured’ through observation, interviews, and careful listening(Mazzei 2007). I am not alone in this pursuit (see chapters in Jackson and Mazzei2009) but what is a new direction for me is to exploit what is produced by the troubleof voice and how data in qualitative research generally, and voice specifically, mightbe conceived otherwise given a confrontation with the unthought, and in a Deleuzianfashion, a consideration of what is produced and enacted. This extends beyond aconceptualization of voice, to a consideration of what constitutes data (St. Pierre 1997)and how the very reliance on our received vocabularies predetermines to some extentwhat we are able to consider. Further, I am interested in how a conceptualization of
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the material as ‘agentic and performative’ (Barad 2007) might produce new ontolog-ical and epistemological understandings of voice. One that ‘rejects the notion of acorrespondence relation between words and things … shifting the focus from thenature of representations … to the nature of discursive practices’ (44–5).
Is it possible then to think a voice without organs, a voice too easily taken as a‘thing’, or a voice without a subject, in order to think the very limit of how voice isconstituted, constrained, manipulated, and held constant in our efforts as researchersto craft a narrative, tell a story, give voice, and make meaning? Might such an unthink-ing of voice, given a new vocabulary, call us to question our motives as researchers aswe continue to rely on and interrogate ‘a’ subject to tell ‘a’ story or to ‘give an accountof oneself’ (Butler 2005, 7–8, emphasis added)? Or worse perhaps, to use ourselvesas reliable narrators to convey or to ‘give voice’. A consideration of who decides,what gets spoken, and who benefits from the telling (Marker 2003) moves me towardqualitative research and narrative inquiry that posits voice beyond its already consti-tuted and repeated forms.
If we are to use Deleuze to help us think voice beyond its already constitutedforms, or to think voice that is not contained by a speaking subject, a ‘voice withoutorgans’ if you will, that is not bounded by the binaries between the discursive and thematerial, then what might be possible for us as qualitative researchers seeking tounderstand this imageless voice that is ‘out-of-field’ (Deleuze 1985/1989)? Thisquestion is particularly salient in our efforts to research those for whom voice isdangerous, inaudible, conflicted, unspoken, guarded, taken-for-granted, or not trusted(see, e.g., Chaudhry 2009; Marker 2003; McCoy 2008; McWilliam et al. 2009). Whatform(s) might our research practices take should we be loosed of our previous notionsof voice and narrative toward an out-of-field voice? Deleuze refers to sound that doesnot have a relation to what is seen in the visual element of the film as having an out-of-field source, for example, the sound of boots when marching soldiers are not seenin the frame. An example from my research would be music with sexist or racist lyricsbeing played by a teacher on an iPod. The aim in seeking the possibility of this out-of-field voice is not to improve the hearing, nor to probe for deep-seated meanings,but to rethink what it means to hear and listen to voice (e.g., the nature of representa-tion); in other words, to consider what constitutes voice and subsequently data (e.g.,the nature of discursive practices).
Describing the effect of sound in cinema, Deleuze discusses the continuum of theuse of sound elements in film, including music and silence. ‘The voice is not separablefrom noises’, and while noises can mask voice, they can also be used as elements ofthis continuum that is voice in film. For example, ‘sounds of doors, sounds of the sea… revolver-shots … the “attack” of music and the “attack” in the bank, the correspon-dences between these elements … form the power of one and the same sound contin-uum’ (1985/1989, 225). This continuum of sound fills both what is in the frame (thevisual image) and the out-of-field, that sound which has no relation to the visual imagepresented in that moment. Sound both dwells in the out-of-field and ‘fills the visualnot seen with a specific presence’ (Deleuze 1985/1989, 226). This continuum of soundand a consideration of what is in the frame and heard, in addition to what is out of theframe and heard with perhaps the same degree of impact and intensity, prompt me toconsider what might be opened up in a further exploration of voice in film.
In his two books on cinema, Deleuze uses cinema as a technology that enables arethinking of our relation to technology and the implications for thinking time, space,and movement differently (see Deleuze 1983/1986, 1985/1989). Deleuze in this case
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intentionally engaged in theorizing as a material practice as it was only with cinemaas a technological event of modern life that ‘a mode of “seeing” that is not attached tothe human eye’ (Colebrook 2002, 29) was enabled. For Deleuze, using cinema in thisway allowed an opening of a new philosophy, not because he applied philosophy tofilms, but, more importantly, because he allowed the creation of films and cinematic‘seeing’ to transform philosophy (Colebrook 2002, 29).
The productive potential in this pursuit for Deleuze is not what cinema is, but whatit ‘might be: its power or potential … pushed to exhaustion’ (Colebrook 2006, 15). Itis this ‘might be’ or ‘potential’ that is of interest to me. It is theorizing voice withcinema as a material practice through an examination of the different ways in whichthe technology of cinema altered voice. To use cinema as a way to transform thoughtand to further strain the boundaries of voice is to theorize what is to be gained inthinking with the object of cinema that may result in the potential of voice, or stateddifferently, in an exhaustion of the previous ways of thinking, reading, limiting, andhearing voice in qualitative inquiry.
Unless we push research and/or data (or theory for that matter) to its exhaustion,then we merely reproduce the original form – the colonized form if you will – limitingthe voices to which we customarily attend in listening to our participants,circumscribing what ‘counts’ as data as that which is tangible, and inhibiting ourability to make different sense of what has transpired. I admit the trap that I am settingfor myself, speaking of data, voice, research, etc. – all terms which risk the very thingDeleuze resists – a repetition based on prior thought. But perhaps, if I continue tostrain against such repetition, I might succeed in the act of ‘creative stuttering’, asdescribed by Deleuze (1994), making language ‘grow from the middle’, putting it ‘ina state of perpetual disequilibrium’ (27).1 I might succeed in a rethinking of voicein qualitative research that is informed by the continuum of a nonrepetitive voice incinema.
In my attempts to be faithful to Deleuze I resist forcing his concepts, and morespecifically, his use of the technology of cinema, into my thinking of data and voice.I do not wish to trace Deleuze’s concepts and graph them onto my project, but ratherto negotiate the map provided by Deleuzian concepts via an enactment of methodolog-ical practices. For Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) do make a distinction between amap and a tracing in stating that:
The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible,susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind ofmounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. … A map hasmultiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back to ‘the same’.The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged‘competence’. (13–14)
As I enact my own methodological practices I perform my project on thisDeleuzian map. And so I begin, and begin again, attempting to negotiate with a mapthat is changing, with an image that I must discard, and with a vocabulary that I mustunthink.
Alternative ‘images/imagings’ of voice
Positioned in an era of evidence-based policy and research-funding practices, I followDeleuze’s practice of thinking with the object of cinema, and do so in a productive
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resistance to those who wish to narrow notions of what counts as research andevidence – those who cling to a sameness perpetuated by maintaining a distinctionbetween the material and the discursive. What is produced by my desire to thinkalternative imagings of voice, and further, what might be gained from creativestuttering – do I risk being trapped in a repetition of consonants that evoke nonsense?Deleuze maintains that it is only out of nonsense that thinking occurs. In this time ofresearching situations that we no longer understand, ‘situations which we no longerknow how to react to, in spaces which we no longer know how to describe’ (Deleuze1985/1989, xi), how can thinking with Deleuze help us create a language and a wayof thinking that are up to the task? It is hoped, for starters, that one may use such think-ing and straining to push against the limits of the present toward a recognition of thoselimits that bind us and those limits which produce productive resistances. What are thelimits that we might make better use of, or put differently, how might we think atthe limit of voice2 toward new limits that produce alternative imagings of voice?
To further this blurring and to engage with Deleuze and cinema is to think the‘speech-act’ as an ‘image’ in keeping with the visual, because as he states, ‘The heardspeech-act, as component of the visual image, makes something visible in that image’(Deleuze 1985/1989, 223). If ‘viewed’ as an image in the visual sense of the word,might it be possible to read the image of voice from a multi-dimensional perspective?3
Deleuze compares the components of the silent image with the talking image and inso doing makes it possible to question what is made ‘visible’ in the image of voice, orthe speech-act broadly defined. ‘Looking’ at voice in cinema, I navigate usingDeleuze’s map to think the following questions:
(1) What becomes naturalized and denaturalized in the transition from silent totalking films? How does a repositioning of voice as ‘direct’ in talking cinemachange the way we think of voice?
(2) What does it mean to ‘see’ a speech-act according to Deleuze and how doesthis inform methodological thinking that discards the material/binary distinc-tion? How do we account for doings and actions as constitutive of voice?
(3) If we agree that talking cinema is much more than filmed dialogue, then whatimplications does this have for how we ‘film’ and treat voice in qualitativeinquiry?
(4) How does a disequilibrium of voice occur in film and what is to be learned orgained?
Question 1: (de)naturalizing voice?
Before pictures became talking, they still conveyed speech. ‘The silent film was notsilent, but only “noiseless”’ (Deleuze 1985/1989, 216). In silent cinema, the visualimage is presented as ‘naturalized’ and innocent. We view artifacts and objects usedby the director that ‘present us with the natural being of man in history or society’(217). At the same time, the nature of discourse is indirect or denaturalized. The visualimage is constructed in such a way that it, ‘points to an innocent physical nature, to animmediate life which has no need of language, whilst the intertitle or piece of writing[used to transmit dialogue] shows the law, the forbidden, the transmitted order’ (216).It is this transmitted order, or voice as truth, that is reinscribed when qualitativeresearchers privilege voice and bestow upon it a similar naturalness or innocence inpresenting the unadulterated voices of their research participants.
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When pictures begin to talk with noise, an obvious observation is that the ‘speech-act … is no longer read but heard. It becomes direct, and recovers … features of“discourse” which were altered in the silent or written film’ (Deleuze 1985/1989,217). What happens as a result is that the talking picture not only naturalizes speechor voice, but it denaturalizes the visual image: ‘in so far as it is heard, it makes visiblein itself something that did not freely appear in the silent film’ (218). Whereas before,interactions in the visual image constituted speech-acts, they are now rendered by aspoken voice, robbing the framed image because we now see based on what we hear,rather than hearing based on what we see.
Question 2: seeing speech?
If, in our work as researchers, we seek data and meaning in the form of a text that isdirectly communicated by participants, in other words, basing what we know on whatwe hear, then we also fail to consider how what we know and subsequently hear mightbe based on what we see. Not in a literal sense of what we see, although this can bethe case, especially if we are researching our Other, but in the sense that we narrowlydefine voice and thereby consider only one aspect employed by our research partici-pants to convey meaning. Put differently, we focus only on the scripted, spoken wordsor intertitles in our strategies to capture data and make meaning, thereby limiting ourunderstandings of what our research participants are saying, or trying to say. Wegather and produce ‘evidence’ of these voiced encounters in the form of transcriptsthat reproduce and classify direct speech-acts. In a move to unloose such stricturednotions of voice, we can turn to a performative understanding of discursive practices,which according to Barad (2008), if properly constructed, ‘is not an invitation to turneverything … into words’ but is instead ‘a contestation of the excessive power grantedto language to determine what is real’ (121). Such a move shifts the focus method-ologically ‘from questions of correspondence between descriptions and reality … tomatters of practices/doings/actions’ (121).
In silent pictures, the voice is not contained by a speaking subject because subjectsspeak only indirectly through the use of intertitles, visual text in the form of writtendocuments, and visually constituted speech-acts (e.g., gestures, facial expressions,movements). The voices of the actors are communicated through the use of a ‘seen’image and an ‘intertitle’ that is read. The intertitles are thus used to convey in additionto other elements, ‘speech-acts’. Deleuze continues to write that the silent film did notjust call for the talkie but ‘already implied it’ (Deleuze 1985/1989, 216). Prompted byDeleuze, we might consider how our participants give voice, not in ways that aredeemed absent as silent, but in ways that are meaningful as noiseless. By so doing, webegin to consider the intertitles and images used by our participants that function toconvey voice. To consider the voices, both performed and projected through theseintertitles and images, is to consider what is missed if we only rely on one or the otherin the viewing of film (or encounter with research participants) as silent rather thannoiseless. If we depend on the ‘filmed’ dialogue in the form of tapes and transcripts,then we miss the noiseless properties of voice.
Question 3: the problem of ‘filming’ voice?
Informed by this juxtaposition of the nature of voice in silent and talking films, howmight we unthink voice, or perhaps, think a voice without organs, a voice that is not
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contained by a singular speaking subject, but a voice that is communicated,performed, seen, read, and heard? Just as the meaning made changed (and seemed‘easier’) when pictures began to ‘talk’, we can too easily slip back into what is voicedin a literal sense in our research settings – that which is spoken with audible words asthe source of meaning – away from a ‘reading’ of the multiple registers of voice, bothspoken directly in a literal sense and spoken indirectly. With the addition of ‘sound’we can be seduced into thinking that what we hear is the image of voice, withoutattending to the other speech-acts that are present – we filter out or fail to attend tothese other images because we are focused on ‘a’ speaking subject. When watching afilm in a language that we do not understand, we must rely on subtitles, sounds, music,and nonverbal cues to make meaning from the multiplicity of speech-acts. How mightwe use this example to rethink how we attempt to ‘capture’ voices, make meaning,and ascertain the ways in which voice is enacted by our participants?
Question 4: disequilibrium?
Another shift described by Deleuze with the advent of talking film was a disequilib-rium of voice, typified at the outset by the American comedy of the late 1930s andearly 1940s (e.g., Kathryn Hepburn’s roles in Bringing up Baby, The PhiladelphiaStory, Woman of the Year), and later exemplified in films by Capra and the genre ofadventure films. What Deleuze (1985/1989) claims is that speech-acts are used to fillspace in these examples, and that they succeed so completely as to reduce others to‘vain attempts, stammerings, efforts to interrupt’ (222). The barrage of speech-actsblurs meaning and identity to the point that ‘subjects themselves disappear’ (223).Armed with our notepads and digital recorders, we seek this continual stream of talk-ing by our participants, we encourage a disequilibrium of voice that demands a streamof audible responses from our participants, but we lament cases of failed attempts togather narratives and make meaning (see, e.g., McWilliam et al. 2009; Nairn, Munro,and Smith 2005), thereby continuing vain attempts to reinsert ‘a’ speaking subject onwhich to pin our evidence.
Filmmakers who were able to capitalize on this disequilibrium, or repositioning ofvoice, began to reconsider the potential in making speech more visible in talking filmthrough the use of the heard voice to hollow out space, in other words, that which isseen (again) being used to convey the subtlety and ambiguity of voice. ‘The reversalwhich tends to be produced in the talkie, in relation to the silent cinema, thus appears:instead of a seen image and a read speech, the speech-act becomes visible at the sametime as it makes itself heard, but also the visual image becomes legible as such, asvisual image in which the speech-act is inserted as a component’ (Deleuze 1985/1989,224). Might there be a productive potential, not in seeking a disequilibrium thatdemands a steady stream of audible responses from our participants, but that allowsan even more disquieting equilibrium in an eliciting and recognition of those speech-acts that hollow out space and fill it with a fullness of absence?
Thinking data with Deleuze
In an initial study that I conducted with a group of white teachers, I carefully used thenarratives and stories shared by my research participants to create a biography bywhich I could introduce each of the cast of characters. I did so in order to providecontext for their remarks, and as a way of displaying the inconsistencies between how
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the teachers described themselves and what they said and did when they were talkingabout their teaching practice and their views toward colleagues and students. Iconstructed histories and stories that were sometimes used to explain away an absenceof race talk, or a presence of racist remarks, and/or an inability to recognize both. Itreated these teachers as speaking subjects and while I did deconstruct voice as a wayof considering the silences that communicated a great deal, I still continued to try tomake meaning based on each of the teachers as a singular subject or a character in thefilm who could be studied, dissected, and understood. I framed voice, attempting tocreate an image (or story) based on what was heard rather than what was presented.
Consider the biography of Anne, the youngest member of the group:
Anne
At the time of this study, Anne was a new teacher (less than five years of experience)in a primary school in a large urban district. She is white, a single mother, and isworking on her master’s degree part-time. She is in a relationship with an African-American man, something that is causing great tension for her in her relationship withher parents. This is what Anne tells us when asked to describe herself in reference toa cultural heritage project that she completed in fulfillment of the requirements for themulticultural education class where we first met, and where I recruited participants formy study:
I was never raised – ‘Your ancestry was British and this is who you are’. I had to ask, Ithink in high school, ‘What are we? Where did I come from?’ I was never raised with asense of who you are. The reply was, ‘You are American, you are our family, and that’sit’. I did not feel good once about where I came from in that whole class [referring to themulticultural education class that I observed].
I never really saw myself as prejudiced, but then I never really had to deal with any‘other people’. … It’s hard to say that groups were pointed out. We’re White, they’rethis, they’re that, … from very very young, you know even as far as I remember livingnext to a German family, or the mother was German, and I can remember as a child thatbeing pointed out. And I’m thinking, as a little like six-year-old thinking, what’s the bigdeal? But it being pointed out as ‘that’s different’. So I was raised this way and now I’vecome to a very, very, very liberal, very open-minded understanding as far as my friends.I’m also a single mother, as far as people who I go out on dates with, political views,everything and it’s very, very conflicting with my parents. Not really, like my sisterswith my generation, but its very hard for me because I’m confused a lot of the time, I’mtorn. You know, I want to do things with the person that I’m going out with right nowand it’s wrong and I’m thinking, you know, what’s the difference if I get along withsomebody or if my friend is Hispanic, or you know, what’s the big deal. So I’m way overhere on the right and my family is over here. So I’m just real torn and my whole paper[cultural heritage project in fulfillment of course requirements] was just about how tornI am and how now that I’m, you know, I’m thinking how you always find out who youare and sometimes I think that my family must look at me and say, ‘How in the world?Where did she come from and why is she like this? How could that happen?’
I can (and did) read Anne’s story as one of a young white teacher who is veryconflicted as she confronts situations in both her personal and professional life that arechallenging some of the values that she was instilled with growing up, but that arebecoming strained in the reality of her life. She is a single mother, in a relationship withan African-American man, and feels that she cannot be honest about many aspects ofher life with both family and colleagues (as demonstrated in her withholding of
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information in group interviews). She teaches in an inner-city school where the blackstudents outnumber the white students but the white teachers far outnumber the blackteachers. She confronts these ‘Other’ people in all aspects of her life, and yet she failsto name and claim their presence. Race is present in most of my conversations with her,and in the conversations that we had together with the other teachers in the study;however, it is often present as that which we acknowledge but are fearful of speakingbecause we risk voicing racist remarks.4 I did take what I learned from Anne and theother teachers to inform subsequent pedagogy and research with white teachers whoare confronted by racial difference in their classrooms (see, e.g., Mazzei 2008), but wassometimes at a loss in terms of what to do with how she and the others were voicingtheir anxieties and struggles. In other words, I focused too much at the time on whatwas being voiced directly, rather than a cognizance of indirect speech-acts silentlyvoiced.
Instead of trying to attach Anne’s story to a singular subject, however, or to presenta collective voice spoken by these teachers, what might be possible if I were toreconsider Anne’s voice not as being conveyed through the direct nature of speech-acts, but as a voice both personal and relational, as a voice both direct and indirect, asa voice both material and discursive, as a voice in a perpetual state of disequilibrium?If I am to consider the image of voice that we can conceive from looking at speech/voice in silent films as not emanating from ‘a’ subject, then how might ‘voice’, bothsilent and spoken, be communicated in research settings that are not linked to aspeaking subject? To do so means that I must take into account the desires thatproduce speech-acts, both talking and noiseless, the fears that produce silences, andthe cultural mores present in a conservative Midwestern US city that tacitly prohibitthe crossing of boundaries.
To consider our field sites as a silent film is to watch a ‘film’ that is noiseless.When we add ‘sound’, we can be seduced into thinking that what we hear is thecomplete image, without attending to the other speech-acts that are present. In otherwords, we filter out other images because we are focused on a speaking subject that isconstructing a narrative for our consumption, rather than being open to the possibilityof a radical presence that produces unexpected imagings. We are busily anticipatingand creating an image of ‘the image of voice’ rather than being present to the voicewithout organs that exists outside our frame of knowing.
To return to Anne’s remarks above, we can ‘see’ what Anne is saying in a reviewof the transcript, but we cannot so easily determine what she is not directly saying –in other words, how her voice is being ‘imaged’ through these indirect strategies. Whydoes Anne fail to name her boyfriend and to mask her relationship with a HispanicOther who in some circles can pass as white? If we only listen to Anne in a way inwhich we ‘image’ what she is saying, we then lose images of what she is voicing withboth silent and spoken speech. We may also miss the other speech-acts in theexchange – the body language of the others present, the changing register of her voice,her failure to answer questions or to deflect the question and answer one of her ownchoosing. To consider Anne’s voice as being produced by images both seen and heardis to look at how her voice is produced in concert with the other players; in this case,the other teachers in the study, the other teachers in the graduate class where we beganthe research, her colleagues, friends, students, and family – in other words, out-of-field voices.
As researchers, we desire to maintain equilibrium, control, and a clear sense of selfas articulated through easily discernable and transparent speech-acts – evidence to
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support our claims. Such desire is also shared by our research participants, and so weare complicit in the production of a narrative that tells a neat story and that ‘tightensor loosens the bonds between individuals’ (Deleuze 1985/1989, 222). Such desiresrevert to a false sense of security and equilibrium. We expect conversations to fill allthe gaps, but they can never succeed in fulfilling such a grandiose charge. Attemptingto fill the spaces creates a disequilibrium pointing out what already exists – conflict,values that clash, embarrassment, shame, fear, and confusion. Ignoring the gaps doesnot make them go away, but if we attend to the ‘image’ of voice, we are present to theexperience of a radical presence in which the speech-act is the image and within theimage is a becoming.
Mapping a new methodology
A whole pedagogy is required here, because we have to read the visual as well as hearthe speech-act in a new way. (Deleuze 1985/1989, 237)
A challenge in using cinema (or any other figuration for that matter) to think researchand data differently is to explore how such thinking can inform methodology withoutsimply reinscribing the old methodology with a new language – to provide importanttheoretical tools needed to: ‘move conversations … beyond the mere acknowledgmentof … how conceptions of materiality, social practice, nature, and discourse mustchange to accommodate their mutual involvement’ (Barad 2007, 25). The implicationfor thinking data with the technology of cinema and the material conditions that itcreates demand the creation of a pedagogy that enables us to enact a new reading ofvoice on a Deleuzian map. It is a pedagogy that rejects the production of a tracing thatmerely superimposes an outline of the map on top of our old methodology. To thinka new pedagogy is to embrace an uncomfortableness that comes with a loss ofcertainty, transparency, and fixed images. It is to attend to a voice that is not withoutmeaning, but that is in a perpetual state of disequilibrium. It is to think new imagingsof voice and to open ourselves to an out-of-field voice that is both material and discur-sive.
While I am exhausted by all this talking and thinking with theory, I have not yetpushed to exhaustion the potential in thinking with cinema, nor in thinking withDeleuze. What I have presented in this paper is but one imaging, not intended as anideal or model, but as one enactment of methodological practice on a Deleuzian map.As I continue to seek the multiple entryways on this map, I am interested in the imag-ings that may result by further consideration of a voice without organs, the possibili-ties present in discursive practices that are performative expressions of voice ratherthan pronouncements, and Deleuze’s notion of becoming, all of which will requirefurther enactments. And so I continue to think with Deleuze toward a mapping ofvoice without an image, beyond its already constituted forms.
AcknowledgmentsEarlier 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 AERAConference in San Diego. I am especially grateful for the comments provided on these earlierversions by Alecia Jackson, Hillevi Lenz Taguchi, Maggie MacLure, Kate McCoy, and PhillipPrince.
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Notes1. 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-methodologymight 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 withAlecia Jackson about the limit of voice, not in an attempt to solve the problem of voice, butto strain the epistemological limits of voice. What the book attempts is an engagement witha questioning of the: ‘very notion of what constitutes voice, the voices we choose (or areable) 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 isa gesture toward a consideration of voice that is not necessarily easily discernible or under-stood from a particular vantage point. It is a construction of voice that is both material anddiscursive.
4. The media picked up on this phenomenon in their analysis of the 2008 US presidentialelection (see, e.g., Herbert 2008; Williams 2008).
Notes on contributorLisa A. Mazzei is an associate professor at the Department of Leadership Studies, GonzagaUniversity, USA, and a visiting research fellow at the Education & Social Research Institute,Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Her methodological writings take up a troubling ofvoice in qualitative inquiry as informed by her research with white teachers.
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