…writing reads is their affective relationality in terms of what a body, in this case a body of writing, can do. For Spinoza this is a fundamentally important question: What can a body, any body, do? Multiple examples and considerations of this question, rather than what does something mean when it says, p.7
Mirka’s validity and aporia
The credibility of research or findings might have more to
do with choices researchers make rather than established and
documented procedures. p.606
even the most rigorous implementation or direct application of textbook analysis approaches does not guarantee increased value of research, trustworthy conclusions, representativeness, or validity. Mechanical application of analytical steps and decontextualized implementation of analysis processes might still avoid the question
of responsibility and decision making, even though situatedness and complexity of analysis processes ask researchers to decide when, how, and why to begin and conclude analysis or other interactions with the data. p.607
“The decision to conclude data analysis is, therefore, always arbitrary and uncertain. There exists no exact way to know or illustrate when analytical processes are finished, saturated, and explanatory of the entire data set. Similarly, it is impossible to say when new themes, linguistic elements, discourses, or insights will no longer emerge or cannot be further identified. At the same time, there exists urgency to report the findings, publish, and write summary reports to funding
agencies. It is with uncertainty that researchers decide analysis does not need to be continued or no more analytical insights might emerge at the moment. This decision becomes even more challenging if researchers continue to interact with data and study participants after systematic or “official” data collection has ended.” p.607
Koro-Ljunberg (2010). Validity, Responsibility, and Aporia. Qualitative Inquiry, 16(60). DOI: 10.1177/107780041037
Butler “Undoing Gender”
The Hegelian tradition links desire with recognition, claiming that
desire is always a desire for recognition and that it is only through the
experience of recognition that any of us becomes constituted as socially
viable beings. That view has its allure and its truth, but it also misses
a couple of important points. The terms by which we are recognized
as human are socially articulated and changeable. And sometimes the
very terms that confer “humanness” on some individuals are those that
deprive certain other individuals of the possibility of achieving that status,
producing a differential between the human and the less-than-human. p. 2
” I may feel that without some recognizability I cannot live. But I may also feel that the terms by which I am recognized make life unlivable. This is the juncture from which critique emerges, where critique is understood as an
interrogation of the terms by which life is constrained in order to open
up the possibility of different modes of living; in other words, not to
celebrate difference as such but to establish more inclusive conditions
for sheltering and maintaining life that resists models of assimilation.” p. 3
“The human is understood differentially depending on its race, the legibility of that race, its morphology, the recognizability of that morphology, its sex, the perceptual verifiability of that sex, its ethnicity, the categorical understanding of that ethnicity. Certain humans are recognized as less than human, and that
form of qualified recognition does not lead to a viable life. Certain humans are not recognized as human at all, and that leads to yet another order of unlivable life. If part of what desire wants is to gain recognition, then gender, insofar as it is animated by desire, will want recognition as well.” p. 2
My comment: it gets recognition!
“If I am someone who cannot be without doing, then the conditions of my doing are, in part, the conditions of my existence. If my doing is dependent on what is done to me or, rather, the ways in which I am done by norms, then the possibility of my persistence as an “I” depends upon my being able to do
something with what is done with me.” p 3
Foucault “Masked Philosopher” Interview 1984
The masked Philosopher Foucault Kritzman 1988
“Our attention tends to be arrested by the activities of faces that come and go, emerge and disappear.
Why did I suggest that we use anonymity? Out of nostalgia for a time when, being quite unknown, what I said had some chance of being heard. With the potential reader, the surface of contact was unrippled. The effects of the book might land in unexpected places and form shapes that I had never thought of. A name makes reading too easy.” p. 323, 324
“Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity is seen as futility. However, I like the word; it suggests something quite different to me. It evokes “care”; it evokes care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to through of familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental.” p. 328
“I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means; the desire is there; the people capable of doing such work exist. So what is our problem? Too little: channels of communication that are too narrow, almost monopolistic, inadequate. We mustn’t adopt a protectionist attitude, to stop “bad” information from invading and stifling the “good.” We must rather increase the possibility for movement backwards and forwards. This would not lead, as people often fear, to uniformity and leveling down, but, on the contrary, to the simultaneous existence and differentiation of these various networks.” p. 328
“…what we are suffering from is not a void, but inadequate means for thinking about everything that is happening. There is an overabundance of things to be known: fundamental, terrible, wonderful, funny, insignificant, and crucial at the same time. And there is an enormous curiosity, a need, a desire to know.” p. 327
“Books, universities, learned journals are also information media” p. 329
“The problem is to know how to exploit the differences [between teaching and popularization, see two paragraphs above], whether we ought to set up a reserve, a “cultural park,” for delicate species of scholars threatened by the rapacious inroads of mass information, while the rest of the space would be a huge market for shoddy products.” p. 329
“The right to knowledge must not be reserved to a particular age-group or to certain categories of people, but that one must be able to exercise it constantly and in many different ways.” p. 329
“What is philosophy if a way of reflecting, not so much on what is true and what is false, as on our relationship to truth?” p. 330
Philosophy in activity: “the movement by which, not without effort and uncertainty, dreams and illusions, one detaches oneself from what is accepted as true and seeks other rules–that is philosophy. The displacement and transformation of frameworks of thinking, the changing of received values and all the work that has been done to think otherwise, to do something else, to become other than what one is–that, too is philosophy.
(…) it should also be added that [philosophy] is a way of interrogating ourselves: if this is the relationship that we have with truth, how must we behave?” p. 330
“Those who, for once in their lives, have found a new tone, a new way of looking, a new way of doing, those people, I believe, will never feel the need to lament that the world is error, that history is filled with people of no consequence, and that it is time for others to keep quiet so that at last the sound of their disapproval may be heard…” p. 330
Multiplicity
Assemblage
“In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification. Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture.
All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an assemblage.
A book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is unattributable.” pp 3, 4
“A Thousand Plateaus”
Trans. Massumi 1987, ISBN 0-8166-1401-6
Rhizome
“The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available— always n – 1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted). Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write at n – 1 dimensions. A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether: the question is whether plant life in its specificity is not entirely rhizomatic. Even some animals are, in their pack form. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all of their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over each other. The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or the weed. Animal and plant, couchgrass is crabgrass. We get the distinct feeling that we will convince no one unless we enumerate certain approximate characteristics of the rhizome.
Barad Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter
“The belief that grammatical categories reflect the underlying structure of the world is a continuing seductive habit of mind worth questioning. Indeed, the representationalist belief in the power of words to mirror preexisting phenomena is the metaphysical substrate that supports social constructivist, as well as traditional realist, beliefs.” p.802
“A performative understanding of discursive practices challenges the re-
presentationalist belief in the power of words to represent preexisting
things. Performativity, properly construed, is not an invitation to turn
everything (including material bodies) into words; on the contrary, per-
formativity is precisely a contestation of the excessive power granted to
language to determine what is real. Hence, in ironic contrast to the mis-
conception that would equate performativity with a form of linguistic
monism that takes language to be the stuff of reality, performativity is
actually a contestation of the unexamined habits of mind that grant lan-
guage and other forms of representation more power in determining our
ontologies than they deserve.” p.802
Mazzei on “voice” in interpretivism
Mazzei, L.A. (2017). Following the contour of concepts toward a minor inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry pp. 1-11,
DOI: 10.1177/107780041772535
“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.” p. 5
“A Deleuzian ontology provides a shift away from the indi-
vidual 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 expe-
rience, rather it emerges through relationality. That is, indi-
vidual elements in the assemblage are not single sources of
knowledge. Following the contours of Deleuze and
Guattari’s politics, collectivity emerges. No longer a per-
sonal account constrained by a body, a space, a time, or an
individual utterance, voice in a minor inquiry is an entan-
glement of all these relations.” p.5
“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.” p. 5
Paul & Marfo (2001) POI
Paul, J.L., Marfo, K. (2001) Preparation of educational researchers in philosophical foundations of inquiry. Review of Educational Research 71(4). 525–547
“…researchers’ beliefs about scholarship cannot be separated from beliefs about themselves and their colleagues as scholars. Researchers’ values and the nature of their work create the community in which they live. Pluralistic views of knowledge, interests in construction and narrative, beliefs that unexamined tacit understandings privilege and shape behavioral norms in an academic culture, and a conviction that all uncritical discourse about inquiry may be considered morally suspect, will incline researchers to focus on themselves as members of an academic learning community.