Blurring BoundariesKatherine Evans

University of Exeter

Image: Bob and Roberta Smith

A methodology written from practice (Childers, 2008)

A study in empirical philosophy (Mol, 2002)

‘Getting lost’ with Patti Lather…being accountable to complexity…breaking down

expectations…producing knowledge differently…producing different knowledge…working with

uncertainty…engaging with messy spaces…stumbling…bringing tensions and stuck places to

the fore

What counts as data?

“There seems to be a tension between data fragments that are able to be ordered and tamed by codes as they are accumulated,

alongside data that rebelliously issues itself from the chaos of the school, crawling under my

skin.” (Holmes, 2014, p783)

“…other events that connect to this playground event may include the histories and practices of observation, genetics, figured worlds, sereology,

architecture, entropy, imagined bodies, astronomy, enculturation, technologies,

calculus, myology, all articulations of a machinic assemblage, a series of intensities, flows and

speeds.”

(Holmes, 2014, p784)

‘Theory as Data’ and ‘Data as Theory’

Contesting a perceived divide between philosophy and empiricism.

Deleuze conceives of theory as enquiry; “a practice of the seemingly fictive world that empiricism describes; a study

of the conditions of legitimacy of practices in this empirical world that is in fact our own” (Deleuze, 2001, p36)

Empirical philosophy

Understanding theory as living, both in the bodies

that do the theorizing and the bodies that are

theorized about (Clark/Keefe, 2014), can shift understandings of

‘data’ from “something I see, catch or capture to

something I sense it doing.” (Clark/Keefe,

2014, p791)

Philosophy in practice

Approaching philosophy as “an open system, rather than a

totalizing structure that must be taken as a unified system of belief.” (Hickey moody and

Malins, 2007, p2)

Philosophical concepts as “a collection of potentialities, the

value of which is affirmed in their use” (ibid).

Banksy, 2013Brooklyn, New York

SensationSensation is an important, but sometimes

overlooked, aspect of experience.

In experience, often “the body responds with something powerful before we can articulate awe” (Hickey Moody and Malins, 2007, p8)

Attending to sensation takes us beyond abstract form, which “is addressed to the

head and acts through the intermediary of the brain” (Deleuze, 2002, p31), to

something that acts directly and immediately on the nervous system (ibid).

A ‘Logic of Sensation’ is “neither cerebral nor rational.” (Smith, 2003, pxv)

Marc QuinnEmotional Detox : The Seven Deadly Sins IV, 1995, Sculpture, Cast lead and wax

Art, sensation and methodology

Deleuze and Guattari (1994) identify a close relationship between artwork and sensation.

They explore the sensations produced by a body’s relation to works of art, and consider that, if these sensations are

complicated or interesting enough, they are capable of generating thought (Grosz, 2008).

“Sensation impacts the body, not through the brain, not through representations, signs, images or fantasies, but directly, on the

body’s own internal forces, on cells, organs, the nervous system.” (Grosz, 2008, p73)

An aesthetically based research methodology

(Hickey Moody, 2013)

Cornelia Parker. Cold Dark Matter: An exploded View, 1991

Everyday aesthetics: Propelling a political agenda

Art is a mode of producing subjectivity that propels a political agenda and creates a sensory landscape

through the ways in which a work of art can mke it’s observer feel and the connections it prompts that

observer to make (Hickey Moody, 2013).

“…art can readjust what a person is or is not able to feel, understand, produce and connect” (Hickey

Moody, 2013, p88).

‘Aesthetic validity’

Validity is multiple, partial and endlessly deferred, rather than a guarantee of epistemological truth (Lather, 2007).

“Sensations, percepts and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds and lived”

(Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p164).

The only law of creation is that the concept or art work created must cohere and stand on it’s own (Deleuze and

Guattari, 1994).

References• Childers, S. M. (2008). Methodology, Praxis, and Autoethnography: A Review of Getting Lost.

Educational Researcher, 37, 298–301.• Clark/Keefe, K. (2014). Suspended Animation: Attuning to Material-Discursive Data and Attending

via Poesis During Somatographic Inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 20, 790–.• Deleuze, G. (2001). Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. New York: Urzone, Ltd.• Deleuze, G. (2002). Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press.• Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What Is Philosophy?. New York: Columbia University Press.• Grosz, E. (2008). Chaos, territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia

University Press.• Hickey Moody, A. (2013) Affect as method: Feelings, Aesthetics and Affective Pedagogy. In,

Coleman and Ringrose (Eds) Deleuze and Research Methodologies, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp79-95.

• Hickey-Moody, A., & Malins, P. (2007). Introduction: Gilles Deleuze and Four Movements in Social Thought. In A. Hickey-Moody & P. Malins (Eds.), Deleuzian Encounters: Studies in Contemporary Social Issues (pp. 1–24). Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.

• Holmes, R. (2014). Fresh Kills: The Spectacle of (De)Composing Data. Qualitative Inquiry, 20, 781–.• Mol, A. (2002). the body multiple: ontology in medical practice. London: Duke University Press.• Smith, D. W. (2003). Deleuze on Bacon: Three Conceptual Trajectories in The Logic of Sensation. In

Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (pp. vii–xxvii). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.