Educational Philosophy and Theory

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Deleuze and Guattari’s language for new empirical

inquiry

Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre

To cite this article: Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre (2016): Deleuze and Guattari’s language for new
empirical inquiry, Educational Philosophy and Theory, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2016.1151761

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 Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2016.1151761

Deleuze and Guattari’s language for new empirical inquiry

Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre
Educational Theory & Practice Department, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This paper reviews Deleuze’s theory of language in Logic of Sense, and Deleuze; Guattari; language;
Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of language in A Thousand Plateaus. In the subject; ontology;
ontology informed by the Stoics described in those books, human being and empiricism; qualitative
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methodology
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.

The topic of this special issue, educational research and method in a more-than-human world, sets us
a difficult task because it challenges us to think an ontology in which the essential, centered, unified,
coherent, agentive knowing human being of Enlightenment humanism who is both the subject and
object of what I call conventional humanist qualitative methodology is impossible. Those of us who cut
our academic teeth on poststructural theories have known this for some time, but I don’t believe the
‘post’ critiques of the humanist subject have been seriously taken up in educational research methodol-
ogies, at least not in the US. After all, research is about epistemological issues and knowledge projects,
with the inquiring, knowing researcher, the Cogito, front, and center. We seldom talk about the nature
of being, about ontology, because it is assumed in this structure that to be is to know.
In the last decades, however, some in the humanities and social sciences refused the burdens of
epistemology and pursued ontological issues raised in poststructuralism we had mostly ignored, in large
part, I suspect, because Deleuze’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s work together that offers a radically differ-
ent ontology with many, many concepts to help us think differently was slow to be translated, though
Foucault and Derrida, among others we call poststructuralists, had surely engaged ontology head on.
This ontological work that decenters, troubles, and resists the humanist subject and the structure that
enables it turns deliberately to the material and has organized itself differently as, for example, affect
theory (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010), thing theory (Brown, 2001), actor network theory (Latour, 2005),
assemblage theory (De Landa, 2006), the new materialism (Coole & Frost, 2010), the new empiricism
(Clough, 2009), and the posthuman (Braidotti, 2013). I have been puzzled by a careless amnesia in
some of this ‘new’ work that claims Foucault’s and Derrida’s scholarship is too focused on discourse
and language—not material enough. I find ontology and the material all over their work. But there is
no doubt that Deleuze and Guattari’s work is a provocation for thinking ontology differently.
More importantly, in this difficult ontological turn that deliberately decenters epistemology and
methodology in order to imagine human being differently, I have been concerned with the rush to
application. This is not surprising, given that education and the social sciences are applied fields. As

CONTACT  Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre  stpierre@uga.edu

© 2016 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
 2    E. A. St. Pierre

soon as some ‘new’ idea is presented, we believe we must immediately use it, apply it, create a new
‘methodology,’ write some journal articles and methods textbooks that tell us what to do next and
then next and next. However, I believe the last thing we need right now is a textbook on ‘new material
methodology’ or ‘new empirical methodology’ or ‘how to do posthuman educational research.’
It is very difficult to think ontology and empiricism differently in educational research because we
seldom study the history of ontology and empiricism or the history and philosophy of science and social
science. We are well trained in ‘how to do’ conventional research methodologies without understand-
ing their empirical and ontological assumptions. Thus, we see conventional humanist research studies
sprinkled with a few concepts from Deleuze or Barad or de Landa that claim to be doing ‘new’ work. For
example, a conventional phenomenological interview study grounded in the essential, authentic voice
of the humanist subject might claim to be, at the same time, rhizomatic. But phenomenology’s voice
and Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome are incompatible concepts because they are thought in different
ontological arrangements. It seems we’ve forgotten Derrida’s caution that a concept brings with it
the entire structure in which it is intelligible, or, more seriously, we don’t know that the structures are
ontologically different.
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MacLure (2013) wrote that ‘the shock of the altered status of language in a materialist ontology has
not yet been fully felt’ (p. 663). I would add that the shock of the altered status of human being after
the ontological turn has also not yet been fully felt. For me, descriptions of language and the subject
go hand-in-hand, and when they change, the entire structure in which they are thought must change
as well. I fear those of us trying to do this ‘new’ work are still mired in the old humanist descriptions of
language and the subject and the ‘methodologies’ they enable. To put it differently, I have begun to
understand how difficult it is to escape one’s training.
I surely wish I had studied empiricism and ontology before I studied empirical research method-
ologies in which a particular kind of empiricism (e.g. the empiricism of phenomenology or of logical
empiricism) was assumed and ontology was seldom addressed. For that reason, I have recently decided
to back up and study descriptions of language and human being in different empiricisms.
In this paper, I discuss Deleuze’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of language in their
transcendental empiricism that grounds much of this new work. For those who might argue that the
purpose of this paper should be to apply rather than to describe, I would argue that description (writing)
is application. I would argue that it is in writing, in putting words together (or not), that I first understand
I cannot ‘apply’ or use a concept from one ontology in a different ontology. It is in writing that I begin
to get ideas in my bones [when words and things ‘seep into one another’ (Deleuze, 1986/1988, p. 33).
In this way, I become in language, and for Deleuze language is on the same flattened ontological plane
as a galloping horse, the color red, a representation of a bird, the concept justice, and five-o’clock-in-
the-afternoon. Acknowledging that writing is an empirical application shifts educational research from
its recent attachment to the social sciences to its older attachment to philosophy and literature. In our
rush to a particular kind of application in this ontological turn that may not work—to conventional social
science research methodologies—I am reminded of Lacan’s (as cited in Ulmer, 1985) caution ‘first it is
necessary to read … avoid understanding too quickly.’ I suspect we would do well to stay with reading
and writing before rushing to application because they can clear the way for what else application
might be when the distinctions of the old empiricisms—this is an empirical application and this is
not—can no longer be made.
And now, on to the topic of this paper, the two understandings of language offered in Deleuze
and Guattari’s radical ontology, their transcendental empiricism. To those unfamiliar with their work, I
should explain that if their thoughts on language I describe below seem difficult, that’s because they
are. Their transcendental empiricism is not perfectly clear and easily accessible. Lecercle (2002) wrote
that it took him 30 years to begin to understand Deleuze’s (1969/1990) book, The Logic of Sense. And
you have to read Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980/1987) long book, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, which is not logically sequential, before you’re ready to read it. Masters of inventing
concepts, they throw concept after concept at the reader without explaining them; in other words,
they don’t carefully define their terms. Alas, they may replace a concept we’ve fallen in love with in
 Educational Philosophy and Theory   3

one text with one more robust or abstract in another. But if we keep reading, the concepts begin to
pile up and wash over us, producing a jamming effect that infiltrates and destroys the being we were
told was real so we might be ready for another image of thought. That is the lure of their work, their
invitation—thinking differently. Being different.
In his preface to The Order of Things, Foucault (1966/1970) explained that his book arose from a pas-
sage in Borges that ‘shattered all the familiar landmarks of my thought’ and demonstrated the ‘exotic
charm of another system of thought … the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking
that’ (p. xv). The following sentence from the first pages of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s (1980/1987) book,
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, surely has the same effect: ‘There is no longer a
tripartite division between a field of reality (the world), and a field of representation (the book) and
a field of subjectivity (the author)’ (p. 23). In this image of thought, there is no hierarchy with human
knowers at the top; a passive, static reality at the bottom; and language as a transparent medium
between the two capable of producing meaning. In that sentence, we find a different, flattened order
of things that overturns the descriptions of human being and language that ground conventional
humanist qualitative methodology.
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Deleuze and Guattari, like others we’ve labeled poststructuralists, rejected deep, foundational struc-
tures intended to provide order, coherence, certainty, and clarity, structures that, in fact, secure and stop
thought. For example, Deleuze rejected both philosophical and linguistic structuralism (e.g. Chomsky)
as well as the Habermasian claim that language can be the medium for noise-free communication and
dialog. In lengthy interviews with Parnet (Deleuze, 1990/1997), Deleuze said, ‘linguistics has done a lot
of harm.’
Both Deleuze and Guattari were opposed to mainstream, positivist, structural linguistics because
of its scientism, its rules, its claim that language is hard-wired in the brain, its focus on competence/
non-competence, its methodological individualism grounded in the individual speaking subject, and
so on. They objected to its hierarchical structure that privileges depth—deep is meaningful. For them,
language does not originate from an individual human subject (the grammatical subject, the ‘I,’ the
subject of the statement) but from collective assemblages of enunciation. Here, we remember that in
his analyses, Foucault (1971/1972), too, was not interested in speaking subjects, in their conscious and
unconscious activity, in trying to ferret out their intentions, determine what they mean, and so on, but
in discourse, ‘in what is given to the speaking subject,’ what Foucault called the ‘silent murmuring, the
inexhaustible speech that animates from within the voice one hears’ (p. 27).
Deleuze and Guattari’s work with language rejected structural linguistics in favor of pragmatics,
the study of language in use and in context. However—and this is important for qualitative method-
ology—like Foucault, they were not interested in conversations among individual speaking subjects
because neither their philosophy nor their philosophy of language begins with the human being of
humanism. For this reason, Lecercle (2002) explained their non-interest in something like the qualitative
research interview:
The detailed study of an everyday discussion or telephone conversation yields trivial and uninteresting results, for
such everyday exchanges are fully functional from the point of view of communication, and more often than not
irenic [sic]. And they do have a point, to be reached and negotiated as swiftly as possible … But there is hardly any
novelty involved, even if (especially if?) the conversation becomes personal and garrulous. As a result, we have a
series of utterances without interest … a static talking machine. (p. 199)
It should be obvious that their thoughts on language are not in line with humanist qualitative meth-
odology, which, of course, begins with the humanist subject and is obsessed with what people say
they think and know. In that methodology, data is generally textualized, reduced to words in interview
transcripts and fieldnotes, to language that represents the world. Deleuze and Guattari, however, reject
the logic of representation that allows words and things to be separated and locate language in the
mixture of words and things. As Whitehead (1928) remarked, ‘Both the word itself and trees enter into
our experience on equal terms’ (p. 13).
In an early text, The Logic of Sense, Deleuze (1969/1990) presented his most extended discussion of
language and a theory of meaning. Later, Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) outlined a general theory
 4    E. A. St. Pierre

of language in A Thousand Plateaus. In the next sections, I briefly review Deleuze and Guattari’s descrip-
tions of language in those two books.

Language in Logic of Sense

In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze (1969/1990)1 introduced the concepts sense and event and his geograph-
ical method of thinking with planes, surfaces, series, lines, and points instead of with classical methods
based on depths and heights, though this method is more fully developed in his later work with Guattari,
the inventor of many concepts in their collaborations. Deleuze constantly referred to Lewis’s Carroll’s
stories about Alice in The Logic of Sense, because he found in Carroll ‘the master and the surveyor of
surfaces—surfaces which were taken to be so well-known that nobody was exploring them. On these
surfaces, nonetheless, the entire logic of sense is located’ (LS, p. 93). For Deleuze, the concept sense is
a ‘surface effect’ (p. 70), and he credited it, along with event, to the Stoics, who greatly influenced his
ontology. Voss (2013) explained the Stoics believed that bodies—defined as what is capable of acting
and being acted upon—are the only things that exist, and that bodies included not only objects and
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human bodies but also souls, knowledge, thoughts, and justice, for example, all capable of acting on
another existing body. This was a truly radical move.
But the Stoics also believed in non-existent somethings, what they called incorporeals, that don’t
exactly exist but subsist; hence, we have a new distinction between existence and subsistence.
Incorporeals are not beings but ways of being. Long and Sedley (1987) explained how the Stoics thought
incorporeals with causation:
The Stoics say that every cause is a body which becomes the cause to a body of something incorporeal. For instance,
the scalpel, a body, becomes the cause to the flesh, a body, of the incorporeal predicate ‘being cut.’ And again, the
fire, a body, becomes the cause to the wood, a body, of the incorporeal predicate ‘being burnt.’ (p. 333)
‘Being cut’ and ‘being burnt’ are ways of being that do not exist in the depths of bodies but subsist on
their surface. So the Stoics invented two planes of being—‘the dualism of bodies that are causes and
the incorporeal attributes of those bodies’ (Olkowski, 1999, p. 216).
Another way to think about incorporeals is to use the contrast the Stoics made between ‘the thick-
ness of bodies, with these incorporeal events [eg being cut, being burnt] which would play only on
the surface, like a mist over the prairie’ (LS, p. 5). The domain of bodies is always associated with depth
where ‘everything is mixed together’ (Butler, 2005, p. 130), totally blended. When one body penetrates
another—when a scalpel cuts a body or a drop of wine is poured into water—they coexist in the depths,
in the thickness, of a mixture, which then produces qualitative or quantitative states of affairs—‘the
red of iron, the green of a tree’ (LS, p. 6).
To help explain incorporeals, sense, and event, Deleuze used the infinitive form of the verb, for
example, to green, which does not refer to a state of affairs deep inside a body in the existing present
(being green) but is an incorporeal event at the surface that is becoming. Here, Deleuze linked sense to
event, in that ‘sense as ‘event’ is a dimension of becoming, best described linguistically by a verb in the
infinitive’ (Marks, 1998, p. 40). Again, infinitives don’t point to mixtures deep in bodies but to ‘incorporeal
events at the surface, which are the results of these mixtures’ (LS, p. 6). For Deleuze, then, sense and
events subsist in infinitives—which are impersonal, indefinite, and do not interpellate subjects— and
he will always choose the infinitive (and the conjunction and) which infers becoming instead of the
copula, is, which infers identity and stasis. ‘The infinitive verb expresses the event in language’ (LS, p.
185). So sense cannot be found in the realm of being where one must go deep to find its existence but
in extra-Being: ‘sense is derived from the incorporeal realm of non-existent somethings, the effects that
rise up off of bodies like mist from a meadow, when events take place’ (Butler, 2005, p. 133). Deleuze
believed the Stoics produced an ‘upheaval in philosophy’ (LS, p. 6) because their dualism of what exists
(bodies and states of affairs) and extra-Being (incorporeal events) contrasted with Aristotle’s and Plato’s
thought which focused on what happened in the depths.
 Educational Philosophy and Theory   5

Deleuze needed the Stoics’ ontology and their incorporeals to rethink language when he found
inadequate the traditional description of the relations of the proposition—a fundamental concept with
a long history in philosophy and language. In linguistics, the proposition is typically said to have three
dimensions: denotation, manifestation, and signification. In brief, denotation or indication subsumes
individual states of affairs, relating the word to the image it represents; manifestation constitutes the
realm of the personal, the speaker, ‘I’; and signification, the realm of language. Deleuze wrote, ‘From
denotation to manifestation, then to signification, but also from signification to manifestation and to
denotation, we are carried along a circle, which is the circle of the proposition’ (LS, pp. 16–17).
To these three relations of the proposition, Deleuze added a fourth dimension, sense, discussed ear-
lier, because it escapes the linguistic circle—it is not conditioned or limited by the other three because
it is incorporeal. Again, sense is ‘an incorporeal, complex, and irreducible entity, at the surface of things,
a pure event which inheres or subsists in the proposition’ (LS, p. 19). In his discussion of language in the
Logic of Sense, sense is located neither in the proposition (language), nor the state of affairs (the body,
the thing), nor in a sensible or rational representation. ‘Everything happens at the boundary between
things and propositions’ (p. 8). Here, we should note that Deleuze’s two chief series2 in The Logic of Sense
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are states of affairs (bodies, things) and propositions (expressions). ‘Sense is the event that enables the
noise that passes my lips—the bodily series—to intersect with another series—meaning’ (Colebrook,
2006, p. 126).
Near the end of the introductory section of The Logic of Sense in which he introduced sense and event
to oppose the propositional logic of structural linguistics, Deleuze wrote this summative statement:
Sense is both the expressible or the expressed of the proposition, and the attribute of the state of affairs. It turns one
side toward things and the other side toward propositions. But it does not merge with the proposition which
expresses it any more than with the state of affairs or the quality which the proposition denotes. It is exactly the
boundary between propositions and things …. It is in this sense that it is an ‘event’: on the condition that the event
is not confused with its spatio-temporal realization in a state of affairs. We will not ask therefore what is the sense of
the event: the event is sense itself. The event belongs essentially to language; it has an essential relationship to
language. But language is what is said of things. (p. 22)

Here ‘language is rendered possible by the frontier which separates it from things and from bodies
(including those which speak)’ (p. 166). So sense does not exist ‘either in things or in the mind; it has
neither physical nor mental existence’ (p. 20), and it ‘belongs to no height or depth, but rather to a
surface effect, being inseparable from the surface, which is its proper dimension’ (p. 72). Sense, as an
incorporeal does not exist but subsists. Butler (2005) explained the relations among sense and the two
series—(1) states of affairs, bodies and (2) expressions, propositions—as follows:
The moment of the proposition, the moment when we speak and signify the events that happen at the surface of
bodies, we travel from one side of the surface (the side of bodies about which we speak) to the other (the side of
propositions we utter). To slide from one surface to the other is to traverse sense like a Möbius strip. It is to move
from one side to the other without leaping across any gap or void. (p. 134)
This flattened ontology with surfaces and incorporeals that locates meaning in neither the speaker
nor in language seems barely intelligible to those trained in the depth metaphors of structuralism
and interpretation that inform, for example, humanist qualitative methodology in which language is
always second order and in which the interpreter is separate from and so must excavate the depths
(interiority) of language and subjects for meaning (but see MacLure, 2013). We clearly do not have
the same philosophy of the subject found in Hume and Kant in this ontology where ‘individuality is
a temporary effect of the mixing of bodies’ (Halewood, 2009; p.168) or a mere ‘transitory hardening’
(De Landa, 1997, p. 259). Here, people don’t make sense; the world makes sense.
Deleuze did not continue to use the concept sense after The Logic of Sense, though the concept event
flourished in his work. Lecercle (2002) noted that the concept affect seems to be used much like sense in
his first book on the cinema (Deleuze, 1983/1986). Lecercle speculated that sense ‘was still contaminated
with shades of “meaning” and “interpretation,” that is, with the older philosophy of language Deleuze
seeks to replace’ (p. 165). Perhaps for this reason, Deleuze, with Guattari, shifts to another description
of language in A Thousand Plateaus.
 6    E. A. St. Pierre

Language in A Thousand Plateaus

In Plateau 4, ‘Postulates of Linguistics’ and Plateau 5, ‘On Several Regimes of Signs’ in A Thousand Plateaus,
Deleuze and Guattari offered a different description of language that retains the general image of
thought found in The Logic of Sense and is also opposed to scientific linguistics in which language
(langue) is idealized and disembodied. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze introduced sense (and event) as the
fourth dimension of the proposition to escape its circle of denotation, manifestation, and signification.
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari used their geographic method and different concepts to
escape the regimes of signs of semiotic systems, concepts like assemblage, abstract machine, diagram,
plane of consistency, strata, and others. They do not clearly define these concepts, which all work together
in their ontology, and it is difficult to explain one without explaining others.
In Plateau 4, ‘Postulates of Linguistics,’ in place of the two series, states of affairs and expressions or
propositions found in The Logic of Sense, we find assemblages composed of ‘machinic assemblages of
bodies’ and ‘collective assemblages of enunciation’ (ATP, p. 88). The collective assemblage of enunciation
does not speak of the machinic assemblages of bodies and things—‘it speaks on the same level’ (ATP,
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p. 87). Again, ontology is flattened in the assemblage and based on mixture, not separation. For Deleuze
and Guattari, ‘the separation between subject and object, thought and matter, words and things, is an
illusion of language’ (Lecercle, 2002, p. 27). In this description of language, it continues to function on
the surface where states of affairs (bodies and things) and expressions meet so there can be no pre-
existent, intentional individual—the speaking subject of humanist qualitative methodology who exists
ahead of language—nor a pre-existent meaning the individual statement (expression, proposition)
represents, because the utterance comes from the mixture.
The purpose of language is not to mean or communicate meaning but to function and, especially,
to enforce order, for example, to create dualisms. Like Austin (1975), Deleuze and Guattari believed lan-
guage is action, a way of doing things with words. ‘Language’s primary function is not to communicate
neutral information but to enforce a social order by categorizing, organizing, structuring and coding
the world’ (Bogue, 2005, p. 111). Statements come from the impersonal and non-individual collective
assemblage of enunciation which contains the directives and obligations of the social order as well
as its order-words, functions of language that can be explicit commands or statements pre-packaged
with implicit presuppositions. Order-words can produce an incorporeal transformation of bodies, as,
for example, when Marx created a new social class with the last sentence of his ‘Communist Manifesto’:
‘Workers of the world, unite!’ ‘Incorporeal transformations … are the expressed of statements but are
attributed to bodies. The purpose is not to describe or represent bodies … representations are bodies
too’ [emphasis added] (ATP, p. 87). The incorporeal transformation, then, is not about representation
but intervention. ‘Signs are at work in things themselves just as things extend into or are deployed in
signs’ (p. 87).
And here are more concepts. This assemblage with its machinic assemblage of bodies and collective
assemblage of enunciation is flattened on a single plane of consistency that is ‘destratified, decoded,
absolutely deterritorialized matter … [that is] everywhere present, everywhere first and primary, always
immanent’ (Bogue, 1989; p. 132) and on which no differentiation between words and things can be
made. Again, we see the Stoics’ influence at work. The plane of consistency is composed of haeccities, a
mode of individuation that is not an individualization (not personal but impersonal), neither a subject
nor a thing, a word nor a body—‘you have the individuality of a day, a season, a year … a climate, a fog,
a swarm, a pack’ (ATP, p. 262). ‘Five o’clock in the evening’ is a haecceity. Haecceities are pre-individual
and immanent. They ‘precede us as subjects or persona, and yet they are always ‘expressed’ in our lives’
(Rajchman, 2000, p. 85). Because the plane of consistency is immanent, it is not stratified by language.
On the plane of consistency, anything can happen because nothing yet has, and no one is there.
In Plateau 5, ‘On Several Regimes of Signs,’ which does not necessarily follow Plateau 4 in a sequen-
tial, logical order, Deleuze and Guattari introduced the concept, regimes of signs, which are ‘stratified
signifying chains of signs’ (Goodchild, 1996, p. 153)—like structural linguistics— that use their power to
extend themselves, incorporating new signs through the activity of interpretation that codes, stratifies,
 Educational Philosophy and Theory   7

and territorializes. Deleuze and Guattari vigorously opposed interpretation and noted that ‘the principal
strata binding human beings are the organism, signifiance [meaningfulness] and interpretation, and
subjectification and subjection’ (LS, p. 134).
Plateau 5 begins as follows:
We call any specific formalization of expression a regime of signs, at least when the expression is linguistic. A regime
of signs constitutes a semiotic system. But it appears difficult to analyze semiotic systems in themselves: there is
always a form of content that is simultaneously inseparable from and independent of the form of expression, and
the two forms pertain to assemblages that are not principally linguistic. [emphasis added] (ATP, p. 111)
Here, we find the two series from Logic of Sense, states of affairs (bodies, things, content, machinic
assemblages of bodies) and propositions (expressions, collective assemblages of enunciation). Again,
language can’t be considered in isolation, separate from the non-linguistic, because it is completely
imbricated in the mixture that is the assemblage.
Deleuze and Guattari identified in the assemblage something they called an abstract machine that
is more than language and makes no distinction between the two series, regimes of signs or semiotic
systems and regimes of bodies or physical systems. The abstract machine is a mixture that is com-
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pletely destratified and deterritorialized, neither semiotic nor physical, but diagrammatic, in that it is
‘independent of the forms and expressions and contents [not yet formed] that it will distribute’ (ATP,
p. 141). The abstract machine operates by matter, not substance, and by function, not by form. It is
pure Matter-Function. It is
neither an infrastructure that is determining in the last instance nor a transcendental Idea that is determining in
the supreme instance. Rather, it plays a piloting role. The diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to
represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality. Thus, when
it constitutes points of creation or potentiality it does not stand outside history but is instead always ‘prior to’
history. (ATP, p. 142)
There are no regimes of signs on the diagrammatic level in the abstract machine where the diagram
‘produces and creates, bringing new entities into existence and thereby serving an ontological function’
(Watson, 2009, p. 11).
Deleuze (1986/1988) introduced the diagram in his book, Foucault, and described it as ‘a map, a
cartography that is coextensive with the whole social field. It is an abstract machine’ (p. 34), not static
like a structure but dynamic and asignifying and so outside the realm of representation. In Foucault’s
discussion of discipline and punishment, the panopticon is not a diagram; rather, the ‘function of the
structure of surveillance [discipline] is labeled as a diagram’ (Zdebik, 2012, p. 5). The diagram, the abstract
machine, is pure abstracted function that imposes a ‘particular conduct on a particular human multiplic-
ity’ (Deleuze, 1986/1988, p. 34). The diagram is abstract, so abstract that it can map across the two series,
bodies (prisons, prisoners—visibilities, what is seen) and expressions (penal law—expressions, what
is said)—what Foucault (1966/1970) called words and things—‘that seep into one another’ (Deleuze,
1986/1988, p. 33). In Foucault’s study of surveillance then, the relations that constitute discipline can
be abstracted from the prison and used in other relations that are very different such as the school, the
military, and the clinic. ‘The diagram folds together abstract relations of forces, and then unfolds them
in another system’ (Zdebik, 2012, p. 6). To repeat, ‘a diagram is a map, or rather several superimposed
maps. And from one diagram to the next, new maps are drawn’ (Deleuze, 1986/1988, p. 44). The possi-
bility of the ‘new’ illustrates the affirmative character of Deleuzian ontology.
With an image of thought enabled by their geographic method, Deleuze and Guattari provided an
image of language in which our conventional understanding of language and linguistics is unintelli-
gible. It should be clear, too, that their ontology does not accommodate the logic of representation
with dualisms like subject/object and word/thing, nor metaphor (the structure of substitution—this
for that—which implies language as representation), nor meaning (which metaphor multiplies), nor
interpretation (which Deleuze and Guattari called ‘interpretosis’ (ATP, p. 114)). In any event, they reject
the privileged signifier, which represents the signified, and thus installs interpretation and representa-
tion in language.
 8    E. A. St. Pierre

In the two brief descriptions of language presented here from The Logic of Sense and A Thousand
Plateaus, we find a smattering of the dense constellation of concepts Deleuze and Guattari invented
to enable their ontology. As noted earlier, they introduce new concepts that replace earlier concepts;
their concepts interact, overlap, and their meaning shifts; they create a minor language within the
major language we’re comfortable with so we feel like foreigners in our own language. They make
language stutter and stammer. They make thought stutter. We’re not used to this kind of writing, this
kind of thought, and their work often seems too hard to read. Who wants to work so hard? On the
other hand, their concepts are immediately, almost dangerously useful. And they are often playful. In
the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, we sense the pleasure of their collaboration. How can one
not continue to read?
The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. Here we
have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have assigned
clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely habit. (p. 3)
This opening volley destroys the humanist subject.
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Implications
In an ontology of planes and surfaces on which bodies exist (humans, animals, language, revenge,
dreams, the weather, green) and incorporeal somethings subsist (the not-yet), neither language nor
the subject are separated or separable, individual or agentive, primary or secondary—they are mixed
on the surface with everything else. I cannot see how our humanist methodologies are intelligible in
that image of thought.
Several years ago, frustrated and bored with much methods-driven, under-theorized qualitative
research, I called for post-qualitative inquiry that might (1) actually use poststructural theories and
methods without trying to embed them in the humanist structure of qualitative methodology (e.g.
an awkward combination of an interview study and a Foucaultian genealogy) and/or (2) engage ‘post’
ontologies and inquire differently from the beginning. And I do mean from the beginning.
To begin this new empirical work, I believe we must leave humanist methodology behind. We
invented it, we made it up, and we can now try to forget it, because how can we do new empiricist
work in a humanist study? We can’t simply add a paragraph or two about the more-than-human or the
posthuman or entanglement to our humanist studies. We can’t just drop a DeleuzoGuattarian concept
like rhizome or assemblage—which brings along with it their entire transcendental empiricism—into a
study grounded in a humanist ontology.
But this will not be easy for those of us who have been well trained in qualitative methodology.
What concepts from the old empiricism will we want to hang on to? Research designs like ‘case
study’ and ‘autoethnography’ (‘I’ after ‘I’ after ‘I’)? Methods of data collection like ‘interviews’ and
‘observations’ (‘I’ after ‘I’ after ‘I’)? Concepts like ‘data’ (meaningful words in interview transcripts
and fieldnotes) and methods of data analysis like ‘coding data’ and ‘cross-case analysis’ (positivist
practices)? Perhaps we cannot give up rich thick description, the language that represents the
real. But the order-words of the old methodology will surely keep us stuck in the old ontology.
This ontological turn of the new empiricism will require a great deal from us, because there are
no textbooks, handbooks, workshops, or university research methods courses that tell us how to
begin and then what to do next.
Deleuze and Guattari taught us that the new already exists in the world. The new is immanent, but
it must be created. That is what their famous challenge tells us: ‘We lack creation. We lack resistance to
the present’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994, p. 108). The present is the old methodologies of the old
empiricisms that we must set aside. But then what? If we call ourselves researchers, we might need a
method. Perhaps in new empirical work, we might think concept as method and begin with concepts
like assemblage and haecceity in the middle of the mixture of words and things, in the folding of the
Outside that makes the new, the new we will create.
 Educational Philosophy and Theory   9

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

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre is Professor in the Educational Theory and Practice Department and Affiliated Professor of
both the Interdisciplinary Qualitative Research Program and the Institute of Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia,
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USA. Her work focuses on theories of language and the subject from critical theories and poststructural theories in what
she has called post qualitative inquiry or post inquiry—what might come after conventional humanist qualitative research
methodology. She’s especially interested in the new empiricisms/new materialisms enabled by the ontological turn.

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