Abstract
In this article, I describe how following the contour of concepts can enable a minor inquiry in which voice might be rethought as what Deleuze and Guattari called a “collective assemblage of enunciation.” Following the contour of Deleuze and Guattari’s “minor literature” and thinking voice as an assemblage, I both explain the characteristics of a minor literature and provide examples of the conditions for a minor inquiry. Mapping an enactment of a minor inquiry with examples from my previous work on voice, I conclude with what minor inquiry might look like as I experiment further with collective assemblages of enunciation.
The concept is the contour, the configuration, the constellation of an event to come.
Introduction
When Claire Colebrook urged a group of feminist researchers to consider “concept as method,” she reaffirmed the practice of beginning with concepts as intensive and creative orientations for thinking, and thus inquiry. 1 In the call for proposals for this special issue, the editors made the point that using concept as method would “begin our inquiry with a concept . . . and not a methodology.” In other words, it would produce a different thinking of “method” if one were to begin with a concept, producing a style of thinking that opens a new plane of inquiry. Instead of the dogmatic practices of traditional research patterned by method in a major language, a minor inquiry is that which is provoked by a problem and transformed by the contour of a concept. In this article, I will discuss how a minor inquiry has been provoked by the problem of voice in traditional inquiry, and thus how understandings of voice are thereby transformed by the contours of a concept. This practice is what I will present as following concepts as a contour for inquiry.
Much of my previous work has approached inquiry as emergent from thinking with concepts, a practice that is congruous with a “shift toward philosophy and away from the ‘methods’ of social sciences,” as described by the editors in their call for papers. In my work with Alecia Youngblood Jackson (2012), we wrote about thinking that happens in the middle of things, in the threshold, in our analytic practice of thinking with theory. In our work together, we offered the figuration of the threshold to situate how theoretical concepts and data constitute one another in our analytic method. Troubled by the problem of voice, I am attentive to concepts that emerge in the threshold of thinking and doing in a way that has guided my work for years. In her writing about how to make the concept your method, Hillevi Lenz Taguchi (2016) explained that to do so is to envision the “pedagogical process of learning from and with the concept, by tracing its conditions of creation in ways that can transform those conditions, and make it possible for us to create new concepts and subsequent material-semiotic differing realities” (p. 214). For example, in thinking with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept, the Body Without Organs (BwO), I have theorized a Voice Without Organs (VwO) as a voice that does not emanate from a singular subject but is produced as an entanglement of forces (Mazzei, 2013). Making the concept my method has allowed me to transform the conditions of inquiry, thinking voice as no longer emanating from a unique essentialist subject (Mazzei, 2016a).
In this article, I describe how following the contour of concepts can enable a minor inquiry in which voice might be rethought as what Deleuze and Guattari (1975/1986) called a “collective assemblage of enunciation” (p. 18). Following the contour of a “minor literature” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1975/1986) and thinking voice as an assemblage, inquiry is shaped by the problems posed in working the concept and problem together. Furthermore, a minor inquiry does not begin with the subject, or method, or the desire to give an account. It begins with a problem in the midst of inquiry, in my example, the problem of voice. Following the contour of a “minor literature,” I am interested in both how a minor literature is different from a major language (Deleuze & Guattari, 1975/1986), the implications for how voice is enacted differently, and what this offers in making possible a minor inquiry.
In their discussion of concepts, Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) stated, “concepts are only created as a function of problems” (p. 16). Provoked by Deleuze and Guattari as I often am, I begin with a discussion of how I am thinking about concepts and how they function to provide contours for inquiry. Following the contour or shape of a minor literature, I both explain the characteristics of a minor literature and provide examples of the conditions for a minor inquiry. Mapping an enactment of a minor inquiry with examples from my ongoing work, I conclude with what minor inquiry might look like and how voice is transformed as I experiment further with collective assemblages of enunciation.
Following the Contour of Concepts
A concept does not just add another word to a language; it transforms the whole shape of a language. (Colebrook, 2002, p. 17)
Concepts, Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) tell us, are “not waiting for us ready-made, like heavenly bodies” (p. 5) but instead are “connected to problems without which they would have no meaning and which can themselves only be isolated or understood as their solution emerges” (p. 16). They must be created, and in their creation, they enable new contours and lines of flight. Colebrook (2002) further explained, “Concepts are not labels or names that we attach to things; they produce an orientation or a direction for thinking.” (p. 15). Following the invitation of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of a concept as a contour, I next describe how I think concepts work, how the contour incites, and how inquiry that follows the contour of concepts both begins with the problem and is transformed by the concept.
A concept is not a word, Colebrook (2002) tells us, but instead is “a creation of a way of thinking” (p. 20). For example, when Deleuze and Guattari write about the BwO, they are not using the words to present a representation of what an actual body might look like or how it might function if it were to have no organs. Instead, they are creating a way of thinking without a subject. They are transforming the shape of a language, creating a concept that moves beyond what we have previously thought in an opening of a new plane of inquiry, one that is incompatible with the way we think about individuals in traditional qualitative research, what I refer to in this article as research in a major language. Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) emphasized, “A concept also has a becoming that involves its relationship with concepts situated on the same plane” (p. 18). This new plane makes possible inquiry not tethered to an individual humanist subject. In other words, gone is the compulsion to represent the experience of individual participants that traditional research patterned by method in a major language dictates. Concepts for Deleuze and Guattari, “are intensive; they make connections among changes or fluxes that, in turn, allow thought to move or differ” (Colebrook, 2006, p. 27), creating the conditions for a minor inquiry: deterritorialization, political immediacy, and collective assemblage of enunciation.
Allowing thought to move or differ is how I think about the contour that Deleuze and Guattari describe. If we think of a concept as in flux, as becoming, then we would not think the movement of concepts as following a predetermined trajectory or direction. Instead, a contour conjures shape, design, movement, form, ellipse, and elevation. Following a contour therefore, thought moves on its own, not according to a given trajectory, fundamentally changing the shape of inquiry as the contour of concepts allow connections to flow and bend. There is no capturing the voice of a participant in a minor inquiry, for such capture arrests thought. Method, on the contrary, follows a trajectory prescribed by inquiry in a major language. For example, capturing voice, congealing it in the form of a transcript, producing an interpretation, all of these fix thought and thereby arrest becoming
As is often the case, Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) provide a further provocation.
Concepts that suggest contours for inquiry offer a process of attuning to the “center of vibration” (p. 23) that presents itself at the time. “If one concept is ‘better’ than an earlier one, it is because it makes us aware of new variations and unknown resonances” (p. 28), bringing forth new contours and possibilities in a “becoming that involves its relationship with concepts situated on the same plane” (p. 18). This is how the concept functions as a contour, enabling new thought and connections. In other words, concepts vibrate, resonate with other concepts, perhaps with existing concepts, establishing relations with others, thus laying out the plane on which they converge.
An illustration of allowing thought to move or differ according to the contour of concepts can be seen in a mapping of how I have moved from Derrida to Deleuze in my theorizing of silence. In my early work, I leaned heavily on Derrida to theorize silence and to develop strategies to account for it in data from interviews and observations in the records of research that we name and collect in the doing of fieldwork (see, for example, Mazzei, 1996, 2004, 2007). While thinking with Derrida was very productive in that he had much to say about the absent present, I began to brush up against the limits of methodological thinking about voice with Derrida. Derrida helped me consider the trace, the always already absent present. In considering the absent presence, I began to account for previously unthought voices. However, such an accounting failed to help me interrogate why the absent present in the form of these previously unthought silent voices continued to inhabit the narratives of participants in my study. The problem vexing me had changed. Through an engagement with Deleuzian desire, I began to ask a different question, on a different plane. Why were there persistent silences in the data and what did they produce? (Mazzei, 2011).
Another way to think about following the contour of concepts can be found in my collaborative work with Alecia Youngblood Jackson (2012). In our thinking with theory, we worked with concepts to see what new connectives might be formed—creating a new path for thinking in an inquiry that is always becoming. We describe our work together as “follow[ing] the contours of what happens when the work of thinking with theory is done . . . which gives up static properties of linear method . . . in favor of dynamic becomings and generative differentiations” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2017). In discussing the becoming nature of concepts, Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) wrote that “A concept requires not only a problem through which it recasts or replaces earlier concepts but a junction of problems where it combines with other coexisting concepts” (p. 18). We go to concepts that emerge in the nexus of problems that demand our attention.
In the next section of the article, I will map the contours of the concepts presented by Deleuze and Guattari that they described as constituting a minor literature. As previously mentioned, the dogmatic practices of traditional research are patterned by method in a major language. That which I pursue in the form of a minor inquiry is provoked by a problem and transformed by the contour of a concept. A minor inquiry enacts the concepts in ways that create new orientations for thinking, beginning with and following the contours of concepts, tracking concepts as ontogenetic and emergent (Massumi, 2002). This minor inquiry follows the contours as I will detail in the next section; deterritorialization, political immediacy, and collective assemblage of enunciation. Following that, I will conclude with what a minor literature might offer in the making/doing of a minor inquiry
Making a Minor Inquiry
A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1975/1986, p. 16)
Deleuze and Guattari discuss the problem of expression in both A Thousand Plateaus (1980/1987) and Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975/1986). For my purposes here, I lean more heavily on their development of a minor literature and its characteristics, most notably the contours presented by a discussion of enunciation as a collective assemblage and the methodological interventions made possible in my reading of their discussion of Kafka’s work. I am interested in both how a minor literature is different from a major language and what this offers in thinking traditional social science inquiry (i.e., major) and the contours of inquiry provoked by concepts (i.e., minor inquiry). Furthermore, I examine the multiple concepts or characteristics entangled in what they describe as Kafka’s enactment of a minor literature.
Three characteristics are presented by Deleuze and Guattari as differentiating a minor literature from a major language. The first is that a minority constructs a minor literature within a major language affecting that language with a “high coefficient of deterritorialization” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1975/1986, p. 16). Within language, deterritorialization unsettles habitual usages of language that sediment thought. A major language is hegemonic, thereby reterritorializing by exerting a gravitational pull of sameness. The second characteristic is that everything in a minor literature is political. The individual concern is not confined to the individual but allied with the collective. All things, all individuals, all stories are claimed in a territory of connection. There are no discreet individual subjects that narrate or can be narrated apart from the collective. The third characteristic is that in it, all things assume a collective value, “There are no possibilities for an individuated enunciation” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1975/1986). All things are in and of the assemblage. They also explain that in a minor literature, “Every statement is the product of a machinic assemblage, in other words, of collective assemblages of enunciation” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 37).
Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) provide the following summation of a minor literature: “The three characteristics of minor literature are the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation” (p. 18). Before I map the contours of how a minor inquiry might function using the three characteristics Deleuze and Guattari use to describe a minor literature, I first discuss how these characteristics might be relevant to an inquiry provoked by concepts, in other words, the making of a minor inquiry and how voice is transformed. Next, I discuss, in order, deterritorialization, political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation.
Deterritorialization
Philip Goodchild (1996) emphasized that Deleuze and Guattari enact the deterritorialization of language in their writing. “Although they may use some of the same words, ideas, and concepts, these are always ‘deterritorialized’—their meanings are changing, following lines of flight” (p. 42). Deterritorialization in the context of inquiry is the process of uncoding habitual relations, experiences, and ordinary usages of language to separate the constructs of a major language that orients dogmatic thought and thereby method in a specific manner. An example of this in the context of voice is a refusal to assume that researchers can always know what participants mean or that participants mean what they say as expressed through language. Clare Colebrook (2002) offers the following example:
Deterritorialisation occurs when an event of becoming escapes or detaches from the original territory. Think of the way humans organize or territorialise themselves through language. Language can then become inhuman or deterritorialised in art: no longer meaningful, controllable or recognizable. (p. 59)
Articles in two recent special issues of journals illustrate this kind of deterritorializing. Inquiry in the new (see, for example, the special issue of Cultural Studies↔Critical Methodologies 16(2), 2016 on new empiricisms and new materialisms) and rethinking what constitutes data analysis (see, for example, the special issue of Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 2014 on postcoding) are examples of the deterritorialization or uncoding of habitual relations to escape the original territory of method. In my article, “Voice Without a Subject” (Mazzei, 2016a), I deterritorialize the subject, reimagining voice that starts with an ontological unit no longer that of the individual subject. As a further example, when Alecia Youngblood Jackson and I (2017) write about a new analytic for qualitative inquiry, we also deterritorialize the major language of qualitative research methodology by refusing a method with a script and instead position analysis as a process of thinking with concepts. Approaching inquiry as thinking with concepts as method, the topic of this special issue, is also a deterritorialization.
Political Immediacy
Deleuze and Guattari (2007) link political immediacy to an assemblage. In an assemblage, there are no singulars, only connectives. The individual speaker speaks from the collective assemblage:
The minimum real unit is not the words, the idea, the concept of the signifier, but the assemblage. It is always an assemblage which produces utterances. Utterances do not have as their cause a subject which would act as a subject of enunciation, any more than they are related to subjects as subjects of utterance. The utterance is the product of an assemblage—which is always collective, which brings into play within us and outside us populations, multiplicities, territories, becomings, affects, events. (Deleuze & Parnet, 2007, p. 51)
Such an approach to voice in qualitative inquiry therefore refuses “a” singular subject, narrating instead the whole contained within it. The utterance is not treated as the product of the individual, but of the assemblage. It is not that individuals do not speak, but in a minor inquiry, “Direct discourse is a detached fragment of a mass and is born of the dismemberment of the collective assemblage” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 84). A minor inquiry then would not narrate a past or an experience in the authentic voice of a unique individual as is done in qualitative methodology but would instead present the past in an entanglement of bodies, histories, and times. In other words, an epistemological voice of an enduring being can only ever be a narration of a subject of enunciation that speaks with an authoritative truth. That voice of truth would be the voice of qualitative methodology in a major language. Narration in a minor inquiry, however, is ontological, not reliant on the particular voice of a unique human being as the ontological unit of inquiry but is an entanglement of “the constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which I draw my voice” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 84). Narration of voice in a minor inquiry is a process of writing the murmur that constitutes the assemblage. It is voice or narration as a process of couplings and connections of an assemblage. Furthermore, it is voice or narration as an enactment of forces that are not necessarily human. It is voice that exceeds language and is more than (un)vocalized words emanating from a speaking subject (see Mazzei, 2016a; Mazzei & Jackson, 2016, for a more detailed discussion). This ontological voice is not found in the habits and practices of the major inquiry of conventional qualitative methodology. Those habits and practices would have us return to the voice of a subject, bound to a place and time. Instead, voice is always an assemblage of forces, bodies, affects, and things that produces utterances.
Collective Assemblage of Enunciation
In a minor literature, Deleuze and Guattari (1975/1986) wrote that everything takes on a collective value. “There isn’t a subject; there are only collective assemblages of enunciation” (p. 18). No longer beginning with “a” subject who speaks with “a” voice, the utterance as noted above can only speak of the whole that constitutes it. This whole, this experience, is spoken and stands in for a truth. Lecercle (2002), on the contrary, described the utterance as “not merely the locus of a speech-act (a promise, for instance), but of a social act” in that utterances are a “collective assemblage of enunciation, that mixture of bodies, instruments, institutions and utterances, which speaks the speaker” (p. 88). That is, the utterance is not simply spoken words emanating from a conscious subject but is inseparable from all elements (human and nonhuman) in an assemblage. “An assemblage of enunciation does not speak ‘of’ things’ it speaks on the same level as states of things and states of content” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 87). It is never only an enunciation or a speech-act, “it is also a machinic assemblage of bodies. . . . utterances are immersed in a world which they express and in which they are uttered . . . they are ontologically an integral part of the assemblages that make up the world” (Lecercle, 2002, p. 88). Utterances, are one part of an assemblage that includes multiple, heterogeneous elements, both material and discursive—objects, signs, physical acts, utterances, bodies.
If all utterances are of a collective nature, the possibility of inquiry that relies on a participant to give an account is no longer thinkable, which is, of course, the assumption that grounds conventional qualitative methodology. It is not that the individual bodies disappear, but the importance we attach to speech-acts linked to those specific bodies is diminished. According to Todd May (2005),
One way to approach Deleuze and Guattari’s politics is to see them as offering a new political ontology . . . Why should we assume that individual human beings are the proper ontological units for [inquiry]? Is it possible to start with some other unit? (p. 121)
A Deleuzian ontology provides a shift away from the individual as the unit of inquiry to inquiry that presupposes the subject as a relational process. Voice is no longer something to be retrieved to provide an account of a participant’s experience, rather it emerges through relationality. That is, individual elements in the assemblage are not single sources of knowledge. Following the contours of Deleuze and Guattari’s politics, collectivity emerges. No longer a personal account constrained by a body, a space, a time, or an individual utterance, voice in a minor inquiry is an entanglement of all these relations.
In this section, I have described the three characteristics offered by Deleuze and Guattari in their making of a minor literature: deterritorialization, political immediacy, and collective assemblage of enunciation. In the next section, I map how I have used those characteristics in my own work to create a minor inquiry. The major and minor modes, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987), “are two different treatments of language, one of which consists in extracting constants from it, the other in placing it in continuous variation” (p. 106). A major mode of traditional qualitative research fixes meaning by extracting constants through the act of representation. A minor mode in the inquiry that I have imagined refuses such fixity. The minor mode of inquiry that I am mapping follows the contour of a minor literature that breaks with the habit of a major language of research in continuous variation, suggesting the possibility of new practices and modes of thought on a new plane of inquiry.
Mapping a Minor Inquiry
Minor languages are characterized not by overload and poverty in relation to a standard or major language, but by a sobriety and variation that are like a minor treatment of the standard language, a becoming-minor of the major language. The problem is not the distinction between major and minor language; it is one of a becoming. It is a question not of reterritorializing oneself on a dialect or a patois but of deterritorializing the major language. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 104)
In what follows, I map the enactment of a minor inquiry provoked by the problem of voice in the major language of traditional humanist research. By the problem of voice, I refer to an assumption that voice can speak the truth of consciousness and experience as has been practiced within an interpretivist project. Voice is not a problem to be solved per se, but a minor inquiry invites a different enactment that problematizes notions and practices that further reinscribe the inadequacies and deficiencies of voice.
Possible worlds, Deleuze and Guattari tell us, have a long history, and it has certainly taken me some time to think voice in a minor inquiry. Although I have followed contours and concepts over the course of many years in my work,
this history zigzags, though it passes, . . . through other problems or onto different planes. This is inevitable because each concept carries out a new cutting-out, takes on new contours, and must be reactivated or recut. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994, p. 18)
What I illustrate here is how my work could be said to follow the contours of a minor literature. While I provide discreet examples below, each is related to the others, all necessary to enact a minor inquiry. I make use of voice in what follows, not to produce new understandings of voice, but to show how following the contours of a minor inquiry has produced new practices. As previously stated, a minor inquiry does not begin with the humanist subject or its voice but with the problem of voice, working the contours of concepts necessary for a minor literature as I will illustrate with the three conditions presented by Deleuze and Guattari. I return to these conditions that I introduced in the previous section, but here with the purpose of mapping these enactments and how I have approached voice differently as a result.
Deterritorializing Voice: Or Voice Without an Image
Enacting Deleuzian concepts is a deterritorializing act. As previously mentioned, one of the hallmarks of the writing of Deleuze and Guattari is their creation of a new language. They stretch language by intentionally using words to designate something other than what we ordinarily take them to mean as a way to interrupt and rupture our ways of thinking; deterritorializing. Deleuze does this through creating concepts that “reach beneath the identities our world presents to us in order to touch upon the world of difference that both constitutes and disrupts those identities” (May, 2005, p. 19). Philip Goodchild (1996) explained that “Deleuze and Guattari’s writing . . . instead of directly throwing aside theoretical norms, . . . offers a whole range of digressions and alternatives that carry thought elsewhere, shattering the coherence of hegemonic discourses” (p. 2). The major language of qualitative research concerns itself with meaning, truth, and interpretation which represent its theoretical norms. Deleuze and Guattari give us a new language and new concepts with which to interrogate signifiers such as data, voice, and ethics that have served as organizing concepts of the major language of qualitative methodology.
As I’ve struggled to rethink and deterritorialize voice in my work over the years, I posited silence in research narratives—stories told by participants—as “speech.” In doing so, I went first to Deleuze’s writings in Cinema I (1983/1986) and Cinema II (1985/1989) and his philosophical concept of the “image” of the speech-act in cinema. In these books, Deleuze discusses the ways in which cinema presents conditions by which language is aesthetically conveyed. Considering language or narration as an aesthetic expression helped me think of how voice in qualitative methodology is conveyed in a cinematic sense, particularly if one considers voice in silent films as Deleuze does in Cinema I, as being transmitted indirectly through actions, intertitles, out-of-field cues, and other means.
Such a re-imaging encouraged/permitted a thinking of the “speech-act” as an “image” in keeping with the visual because, as Deleuze (1985/1989) wrote, “The heard speech-act, as component of the visual image, makes something visible in that image” (p. 223). To think with the “image” of speech-acts and how voice is conveyed in a cinematic sense, particularly if one considers silent films, is to deterritorialize the very notion of speech. Speech (or voice) is no longer considered only an utterance that one hears. In silent films, we don’t actually hear the voice, we see it, and so the voice too becomes an image. Similarly, this translates to how we listen to participant voices or read interview transcripts, permitting me to consider “viewing” voice in qualitative inquiry, and how such viewing might make it possible to “read” the image of voice from a multidimensional perspective. In other words, it provides an imaging of voice that is not restricted to a voice that is spoken but voice expressed through other means, again, a deterritorializing of the conventional meaning of voice in qualitative methodology producing voice in a minor inquiry. In his writing on cinema, Deleuze compared the components of the silent image or indirect discourse with the talking image or direct spoken discourse, and in so doing, made it possible for me to question the “visible” (that which we hear) in the image of voice or the speech-act broadly defined. It was the discussion of how voice was constituted in silent films (that which is not audibly heard but vocalized nonetheless) and a deterritorializing of the image that allowed me to make this methodological move from merely listening to viewing, or “hearing” differently.
To think with the “image” of speech-acts, as Deleuze does, and how voice is conveyed in a cinematic sense, is to think about viewing voice in qualitative research so to speak, and how such viewing might make it possible to read the image of voice from a multidimensional perspective. Thinking with Deleuze’s philosophical concept of the “image” of the speech-act in cinema helped me frame silence in qualitative research as conveyed in these silent forms as mentioned above, thereby allowing a deterritorialized re-imaging of voice (see Mazzei, 2010, for a detailed discussion). The “viewing” prompted by deterritorializing did not produce literal attempts on my part to view voice as an image in the visual sense. What it did produce was the possibility of thinking voice as image as that which exceeds language. In other words, I no longer thought voice was what was spoken by an individual participant and witnessed by the researcher who records and transcribes the voice into words in an interview transcript, as is assumed in a major qualitative methodology, but that voice as an assemblage, a complex network of human and nonhuman agents that exceeds the traditional notion of the individual and of territorialized notions of voice. Such treatments of voice require a further exploration of agency and collectivity, given the ontological commitments of thinking with Deleuze and Guattari, which I will discuss in the next section.
Political Immediacy: VwO as the Whole Contained Within It
In a minor inquiry informed by Deleuze and Guattari, there are no singulars, only connectives. The individual concern is of concern because of the whole contained within it. In other words, the individual is of and is constituted by the assemblage. To account for the whole, it is necessary to think what agency might be in an assemblage. As described above, for me, deterritorialization provoked thinking voice differently, but the voice of the humanist subject in the major methodology of qualitative methodology relies on the agency of the individual subject, the cogito.
From a posthuman perspective, agency is distributed in a way that avoids hanging on to the vestiges of a knowing humanist subject that lingers in analysis informed by a major language. Voice in traditional humanist qualitative inquiry (major language) must be present—spoken, heard, recorded, and transcribed into words in an interview transcript. If agency and voice are to be thought as the whole contained within it, in other words, as an assemblage, what kind of voice, what kind of human being can be thought once voice no longer has to be present to itself with the agency to speak?
Using Deleuze and Guattari’s (1972/1983) concept of the BwO, I proposed a VwO to describe a different human being that enabled me to think voice differently (see Mazzei, 2013, for a detailed discussion). Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the BwO is one they use to enact thinking without a subject and to liberate thought from over coded images. Using this concept, I theorized a VwO as voice that does not emanate from a singular subject but one that is produced in an enactment between research-data-participants-theory-analysis. For Deleuze and Guattari, that kind of human being is an assemblage, an entanglement, a knot of forces and intensities that operate on a plane of immanence and produce a voice that does not emanate from a singular subject but from the collective assemblage of enunciation of the research project—all the voices that are entangled in relations and inseparable into “individual” voices.
As “voice” is not separate from the milieu in which it exists, it cannot emanate “from” an individual person—that would require defaulting to a major inquiry. There is no separate, individual person, no participant in an interview study to which a single voice can be linked. In Deleuzo–Guattarian ontology, there is no present, conscious, coherent individual who speaks with a singular enunciative authority. Thus, voice in a minor inquiry is decoupled—words spoken and words written in transcripts—from an intentional, agentic humanist subject. I, then, imagined VwO, voice as an assemblage, a complex network of human and nonhuman agents. For example, in interviewing first generation academic women, I developed interview questions and “talked” to the women but not to arrive at meaning, rather to map connectives, to think about how things worked together and how the VwO was being produced. The connectives in this instance may include geography, family, institutions, gender norms, aspirations, disappointments, and hopes that work together to produce a VwO. For example, when one of the women is speaking about growing up in a rural patriarchal environment, she also speaks of the histories and institutions that produce voice. This is not the voice of her as an individual, but of the assemblage, of other women in the academy, and how these histories and institutions speak to her and are spoken.
In Deleuze’s semiotic, material, and social flows, there is no longer a division between the three orders of reality, representation, and subjectivity which ground a conventional qualitative methodology as in a major language of inquiry. In other words, the conventional hierarchy of a reality that exists that the researcher can find and represent in language is not thinkable; that is, language stands between reality and the researcher. Rather the collective, or “an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 23). The utterance is not simply spoken but is an entanglement of the semiotic, material, and social. Any utterance by the women that I interviewed is one part of an assemblage made of all three: bodies, histories, geographies, institutions, genders, and so on. The three orders are thus entangled on the same plane, not on separate levels, and act on and produce one another simultaneously. “Every statement is the product of a machinic assemblage, in other words, of collective agents of enunciation” (p. 37), thus of a minor inquiry.
Collective Enunciation
I used VwO to present the concept of voice as an unbounded entanglement. But what I did not fully take into account with VwO is the idea of collective enunciation and the ethical implications of an unbounded, collective voice. In following the contour of collective enunciation, I envision voice no longer as “a” voice of a humanist subject, but simply voice that cannot be disentangled from the forces of the semiotic, material, and social (see Mazzei, 2016a, for a more detailed discussion). This ontological voice, not found in the habits and practices of a major inquiry, can only be this assemblage of forces as described above. This voice in a minor inquiry is not necessarily one we can recognize as informed by our previous habits or research methods that produce transcripts and translations of experience.
To think then of the forces from which bodies are composed, or the forces from which voices are fashioned, is to leave a humanist voice behind, one bound to a specific body in a major inquiry. If in posthumanism, agency is distributed in a way that refuses the vestiges of a knowing humanist subject, then voice too must be thought as distributed in a minor inquiry. As Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) asserted, “There is no individual enunciation. There is not even a subject of enunciation” (p. 79). So the individual voice—“a” voice—which is linked to a single, discreet humanist subject, “a” voice that grounds major social science inquiry, especially qualitative methodology, cannot be thought. Instead, I use voice to point to assemblages of enunciation in a minor inquiry. Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) emphasize that “enunciation in itself implies collective assemblages” (p. 80), what they refer to elsewhere as collective assemblages of enunciation. All pasts, all truths are spoken into being in the social character of enunciation that implies a collective that authors the individual in the collective production of language and social interaction (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 88).
Conceiving voice as unburdened with signification and subjectification harkens back to Todd May’s question about the “proper ontological unit” for minor inquiry and a further consideration of the ontological commitments that produce such an unbounded voice. An epistemological voice of the subject of an enduring being that can be named and known, in other words a voice that belongs to me or you, or to those with whom we do research is voice of a major inquiry. Voice to which I refer and and is written in a research assemblage of minor inquiry can only ever be that of a collective, bound to and attributed to the “body” in its broadest sense (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 89). Not the body of a subject, but a body that is the assemblage unbound by the limits of a body. In other words, voice as an enactment of forces not all necessarily human.
I want to stress that I do not offer minor inquiry as another master, for Deleuze and Guattari (1975/1986) wrote that “there are no possibilities for an individuated enunciation that would belong to this or that ‘master’ and that could be separated from a collective enunciation” (p. 17). I offer minor inquiry as a process of attuning to the contours of the collective that attempts to construct different conceptions of voice. The individual enunciation of the major language of research where chunks of interview data stand in for the humanist subject in a research report is no longer possible because statements are not tied to a signifier and enunciation to a subject. Such practices arrest becoming, adhering to method instead of following the contours of concepts. “As long as linguistics confines itself to constants, whether syntactical, morphological, or phonological, it ties the statement to a signifier and enunciation to a subject and accordingly botches the assemblage” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 82).
In the final section, I continue to work with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the multiple, the assemblage, and the collective nature by which language is produced in social interaction. Utterances, Lecercle (2002) wrote, “are immersed in a world which they express and in which they are uttered” (p. 88). I focus on what method is made possible from a construction of a collective, in other words, I suggest we might think of voice in a minor inquiry as a collective assemblage of enunciation.
Voice as a Collective Assemblage of Enunciation
Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience. It is a process, that is, a passage of Life that traverses both the livable and the lived. Writing is inseparable from becoming: in writing, one becomes-woman, becomes-animal or vegetable, becomes-molecule to the point of becoming-imperceptible. (Deleuze, 1997, p. 1)
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) described how a writer is invented by an assemblage at the very moment when, in the moment of originality, he or she is inventing and being invented. That which we consider the most original type of utterance, the literary utterance, what the author is attempting to convey, is always the product of a collective assemblage of enunciation. This is why Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) are able to claim “there are no individual statements, only statement-producing machinic assemblages” (p. 36). They continued, “Each of us is caught up in an assemblage . . . and we reproduce its statements when we think we are speaking in our own name; or rather we speak in our own name when we produce its statement” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987). Statements and utterances do not emerge from nothing, instead they are spoken from our bodies, our histories, our communities, our materialities. We don’t just speak of our own past, but of the past in an encounter in which our own and others’ voice flow and are entangled with other materialities.
In focusing on the problem of voice, I have, in following the contours of a minor literature, tried to rethink what constitutes an utterance in what I have named a minor inquiry. Deleuze and Guattari help me do this in their deterritorialization of language, the subject, the political, and the collective. In a minor inquiry, language cannot be thought to speak the truth of a subject that does not also at the same time speak of/from the collective. Deleuzian ontology provides a shift away from the unit of the individual to assemblage, and a minor inquiry presupposes the subject as a relational process. Following the contours of Deleuze and Guattari’s politics, collectivity emerges.
What method becomes possible in an attunement to and enactment of the contours of concepts and ontological commitments that I have been discussing? How might a different method emerge from these contours? Deleuze and Guattari (1975/1986) wrote that minor literature first expresses itself with a conceptualization to follow afterward. What I have presented thus far is how minor inquiry has expressed itself in my work over time, and how I have followed the contours of concepts in a reimagining of voice. In a continual attunement, I conclude with a conceptualization of method that will continue to propel this becoming-inquiry.
In her foreword to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1975/1986) text on Kafka, Bensmaïa emphasized that Kafka’s work is indeed revolutionary, not just by virtue of his creation of a minor language or of his subversion of a major language, “but of essentially proposing a new way of using it” (p. xvi). The deterritorialization that Kafka enacts short-circuits language. “Expression must break forms, encourage ruptures and new sproutings. When a form is broken, one must reconstruct the content that will necessarily be part of a rupture in the order of things” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986, p. 28). This is what Kafka succeeds in doing—rupturing the form of language. An example of this can be seen in Julie Otsuka’s (2011) novel, The Buddha in the Attic as described in the following review.
Otsuka’s characters emerged as particular individuals even as their concerns took us far beyond the particulars of the Japanese—American experience. In these nameless people, we confronted our own uncertainties about where we truly belong, where our loyalties lie, where we should place our trust. There are plenty of names in Otsuka’s new novel, but this time the cast is composed of an entire community of families. The voice that speaks to us here is the “we” of the Japanese women who arrived in California in the aftermath of World War I, most of them young and inexperienced, most bearing photographs of men they had agreed to marry, sight unseen: “On the boat we could not have known that when we first saw our husbands we would have no idea who they were. That the crowd of men in knit caps and shabby black coats waiting for us down below on the dock would bear no resemblance to the handsome young men in the photographs. That the photographs we had been sent were 20 years old. . . . That when we first heard our names being called out across the water one of us would cover her eyes and turn away—I want to go home—but the rest of us would lower our heads and smooth down the skirts of our kimonos and walk down the gangplank and step out into the still warm day. This is America, we would say to ourselves, there is no need to worry. And we would be wrong. (Becker, 2011)
In Otsuka’s novel, a sequence of linked narratives conveys the central figures as merely a girl, a mother, a daughter. 2 This narrative form is not restricted by the constraints of a body, a place, a space, a time, or the utterance of an individual. The bodies exist, but they are bodies without organs, spoken into being in the collective enunciation. The girl, the mother, the daughter’s “phrase or gesture doesn’t form statements, but only enunciation that plays the role of connectors” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1975/1986, p. 85). The statement may be individuated according to Deleuze and Guattari, but the enunciative property is of a social nature. “Bodies have an age, they mature and grow old; but majority, retirement, any given age category, are incorporeal transformations that are immediately attributed to bodies in particular societies” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 89). We must then, they caution, “distinguish between the actions and passions affecting those bodies, and acts, which are only noncorporeal attributes or the ‘expressed’ of a statement” (p. 80).
In this article, I have shown how following the contour of concepts has produced a minor inquiry in which voice might be rethought as a collective assemblage of enunciation, one that is an enunciative property of a social nature, distinguishing between the passions and pains of individual bodies and the noncorporeal utterances of the collective. In so doing, I have mapped my thinking about voice in a minor inquiry according to the contour of Deleuze and Guattari’s minor literature and its three characteristics: deterritorialization, political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation. Beginning with a deterritorialization of voice as not merely a spoken utterance, moving to thinking voice as an example of political immediacy or VwO as the whole contained within it, and finally collective enunciation as voice no longer “a” voice of a humanist subject, but simply voice. I conclude by continuing to follow the contours with an example of collective assemblages of enunciation and what it offers in terms of continuing to think voice in a minor inquiry.
In my most recent work, I have produced a narrative similar in form to that which I described in Otsuka’s novel, what I have named lines of articulation (Mazzei, 2016b). Lines of articulation, as I write them and as I am written, are what I envision as collective assemblages of enunciation. Lines of articulation are “written as an assemblage of disparate scenes . . . [in] a tangle of trajectories, connections, and disjunctures” (Stewart, 2007, p. 5). Lines of articulation are without origins or beginnings as they form a mapping of places, times, people, and becomings. They are presented as a series of arrested moments constituted as a living present. Lines of articulation are presented as a form of writing that goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience of a singular subject, unbounded by the constraints of a body, a place, a space, a time, an utterance, a voice. Although there is no beginning or origin, a beginning or attunement is presented, prompted, or provoked. Researchers in a minor literature do not enter the field in search of such provocations, the provocations exert a pull and an attunement is formed.
In presenting research narratives according to the characteristics of a minor inquiry, voice is additionally conceived as collective enunciation, without origins or beginnings. It is a series of tangled “narratives” that map a dynamic, changing typology, continually becoming. There are no singular subjects, or static places, or traceable times. There is no planned moment in the field or analysis of interview transcripts. Although I present text in the form of words in this experiment, they are not words to be read as a literary utterance spoken by an individual, nor are they accounts of psychological memories or instants. They are a result of hauntings and troublings following the “different lines that connect or traverse . . . looking for ruptures and differences that get made” (Lenz Taguchi, 2013, p. 713). Because voice in a minor inquiry is produced as an entanglement of forces, then voice in a minor inquiry must reflect these utterances as collective in nature. It is not that the individual bodies or utterances disappear, but narration must be thought that enacts the social and collective nature of language and the subject.
As I have illustrated in this article, my continued and continuing attempts to rethink voice has led to a mapping of a minor inquiry. Attuning to the contours of a minor literature and its characteristics, I have presented methodological interventions made possible on this new plane of inquiry. Following the contours of a minor inquiry as method does not mean that inquiry must be abandoned, nor does it mean that there are not bodies that laugh, and cry, and bleed, and sweat, and anguish. However, that contour certainly demands an entirely different conception of voice, representation, and the subject. In a minor inquiry, all things, all individuals, all stories are claimed in a territory of connection. In my continued pursuit of method that follows the contour of concepts, I will attune to further deterritorializations of method that do more than merely add new words to the major language of traditional humanist inquiry but instead transform the whole shape of inquiry itself. My purpose is not to definitively declare what voice is or isn’t, a project of major inquiry. Rather, I continue to pursue a minor inquiry that would approach voice differently.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Alecia Youngblood Jackson, Phillip Prince, and the editors of this special issue, Elizabeth St. Pierre and Hillevi Lenz Taguchi, for their generative responses to an earlier draft. A special thank you to members of the CSSE Wednesday Deleuze reading group for rich conversations: Matthew Graham, Emily Mathis, and Laura Smithers.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.