Image: Bob and
Roberta Smith
Blurring Boundaries
Katherine Evans
University of Exeter
A methodology written from practice
(Childers, 2008)
A study in empirical philosophy
(Mol, 2002)
‘Getting lost’ with Patti Lather…being
accountable to complexity…breaking down
expectations…producing knowledge
differently…producing different
knowledge…working with uncertainty…engaging
with messy spaces…stumbling…bringing
tensions and stuck places to the fore
What counts as data?
“There seems to be a tension between data
fragments that are able to be ordered and
tamed by codes as they are accumulated,
alongside data that rebelliously issues itself from
the chaos of the school, crawling under my
skin.”
(Holmes, 2014, p783)
“…other events that connect to this playground
event may include the histories and practices of
observation, genetics, figured worlds, sereology,
architecture, entropy, imagined bodies,
astronomy, enculturation, technologies,
calculus, myology, all articulations of a machinic
assemblage, a series of intensities, flows and
speeds.”
(Holmes, 2014, p784)
‘Theory as Data’ and ‘Data as Theory’
Contesting a perceived divide between philosophy and
empiricism.
Deleuze conceives of theory as enquiry; “a practice of the
seemingly fictive world that empiricism describes; a study
of the conditions of legitimacy of practices in this empirical
world that is in fact our own” (Deleuze, 2001, p36)
Empirical philosophy
Understanding theory as
living, both in the bodies
that do the theorizing and
the bodies that are
theorized about
(Clark/Keefe, 2014), can
shift understandings of
‘data’ from “something I
see, catch or capture to
something I sense it
doing.” (Clark/Keefe,
2014, p791)
Philosophy in practice
Approaching philosophy as “an
open system, rather than a
totalizing structure that must be
taken as a unified system of
belief.” (Hickey moody and
Malins, 2007, p2)
Banksy, 2013
Brooklyn, New York
Philosophical concepts as “a
collection of potentialities, the
value of which is affirmed in
their use” (ibid).
Sensation
Sensation is an important, but sometimes
overlooked, aspect of experience.
In experience, often “the body responds
with something powerful before we can
articulate awe” (Hickey Moody and Malins,
2007, p8)
Attending to sensation takes us beyond
abstract form, which “is addressed to the
head and acts through the intermediary of
the brain” (Deleuze, 2002, p31), to
something that acts directly and
immediately on the nervous system (ibid).
A ‘Logic of Sensation’ is “neither cerebral
nor rational.” (Smith, 2003, pxv)
Marc Quinn
Emotional Detox : The Seven Deadly Sins IV, 1995,
Sculpture, Cast lead and wax
Art, sensation and methodology
Deleuze and Guattari (1994) identify a close relationship
between artwork and sensation.
They explore the sensations produced by a body’s
relation to works of art, and consider that, if these
sensations are complicated or interesting enough, they
are capable of generating thought (Grosz, 2008).
“Sensation impacts the body, not through the brain, not
through representations, signs, images or fantasies, but
directly, on the body’s own internal forces, on cells,
organs, the nervous system.” (Grosz, 2008, p73)
An aesthetically based research
methodology
(Hickey Moody, 2013)
Cornelia
Parker. Cold
Dark
Matter: An
exploded
View, 1991
Everyday aesthetics: Propelling a
political agenda
Art is a mode of producing subjectivity that propels
a political agenda and creates a sensory landscape
through the ways in which a work of art can mke it’s
observer feel and the connections it prompts that
observer to make (Hickey Moody, 2013).
“…art can readjust what a person is or is not able to
feel, understand, produce and connect” (Hickey
Moody, 2013, p88).
‘Aesthetic validity’
Validity is multiple, partial and endlessly deferred,
rather than a guarantee of epistemological truth
(Lather, 2007).
“Sensations, percepts and affects are beings whose
validity lies in themselves and exceeds and lived”
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p164).
The only law of creation is that the concept or art
work created must cohere and stand on it’s own
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1994).
References
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Childers, S. M. (2008). Methodology, Praxis, and Autoethnography: A Review of Getting Lost.
Educational Researcher, 37, 298–301.
Clark/Keefe, K. (2014). Suspended Animation: Attuning to Material-Discursive Data and
Attending via Poesis During Somatographic Inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 20, 790–.
Deleuze, G. (2001). Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. New York: Urzone, Ltd.
Deleuze, G. (2002). Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What Is Philosophy?. New York: Columbia University Press.
Grosz, E. (2008). Chaos, territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the Earth. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Hickey Moody, A. (2013) Affect as method: Feelings, Aesthetics and Affective Pedagogy. In,
Coleman and Ringrose (Eds) Deleuze and Research Methodologies, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, pp79-95.
Hickey-Moody, A., & Malins, P. (2007). Introduction: Gilles Deleuze and Four Movements in
Social Thought. In A. Hickey-Moody & P. Malins (Eds.), Deleuzian Encounters: Studies in
Contemporary Social Issues (pp. 1–24). Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
Holmes, R. (2014). Fresh Kills: The Spectacle of (De)Composing Data. Qualitative Inquiry, 20,
781–.
Mol, A. (2002). the body multiple: ontology in medical practice. London: Duke University
Press.
Smith, D. W. (2003). Deleuze on Bacon: Three Conceptual Trajectories in The Logic of
Sensation. In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (pp. vii–xxvii). Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.