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QIXXXX10.1177/1077800417704469Qualitative InquiryNordstrom

Article
Qualitative Inquiry

Antimethodology: Postqualitative
112
The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1077800417704469
https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417704469
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Susan Naomi Nordstrom1

Abstract
In this article, I explain antimethodologya creative and generative methodologyand its resulting research conventions
that were put to work in a study about an assemblage of humans, nonhumans, living, and nonliving in family history
genealogy. Antimethodology is a middle space that is created between reterritorializing forces (e.g., conventional qualitative
inquiry) and deterritorializing forces (e.g., poststructural and posthuman theories that throw positivist and interpretivist
theories that ground conventional qualitative inquiry into radical doubt). Antimethodology, then, cannot be replicated or
transferred to other studies. Rather, each iteration of antimethodology materializes from the forces at work in a research
context. I offer research conventions, or contingent meetings between these forces, as a way to rethink methods, data,
and other practices within qualitative inquiry/research.

Keywords
postqualitative, methodology, Deleuze

This article begins with a series of events that have passed
through me beginning (I think, though I am not sure) in 2009
when I became methodologically responsible to a project
about nonhuman objects (e.g., photographs, documents, and
other artifacts) used in family history genealogy practices.
The movement of the events forced me to recognize the
entangled intersections among the what, who, how, and why
of inquiry (Kuntz, 2015, p. 17). The shifting intersections
among processes, people, objects, purposes, and so on, of
the project constitute an intermezzo that asked me to radi-
cally rethink the habits and concepts of qualitative research
as generative research conventions that operate in the middle
of the reterritorializing forces of conventional qualitative
research and the deterritorializing forces of posthumanist
theories. Antimethodology materializes in between these
forces. Because these forces are always moving, antimethod-
ology is multiple and refuses singularity (Koro-Ljungberg,
2016). Consequently, I make no grand claims toward a logi-
cal series of practices that other researchers can insert into
their work. I ask what else antimethodology can become in
the postqualitative moment. To do this work, the first part of
the article, A Series of Events, offers a stream of con-
sciousness of elastic, incipient, and tentative research events
that carry with them minor gestures, sites of dissonance,
staging disturbances that open experience to new modes of
expression (Manning, 2016, p. 2). The second part of the
article, Generative Conventions, theorizes those events.
The final part of the article, Antimethodology, offers a
series of procedures that aim to help readers make the mul-
tiple of antimethodology.
A Series of Events
The following sections contain a series of events that ask,
What can a study do? (Manning, 2016). In such a series
of events, the rigor must emerge from within the occasion
of experience, from the events own stakes in its coming-to-
be (Manning, 2016, p. 38). To maintain such a sense of
rigor, I do not overly situate the following events (Manning,
2016). The following events contain minor gestures, not-
yets that pulsate with rigorous in between movements that
carry with them virtual potential (Manning, 2016). The fol-
lowing series of events
may go nowhere. But what they will do no matter what, is
create a process and, even better, a practice, and it is this that
will have made a difference. For it will have made felt the urge
of appetition, and with it the works affirmation of the not-yet.
(p. 39)
And . . . And . . . And
Methodology came too late for my study that got to work in
an assemblage of humans, nonhumans, living, and nonliv-
ing in family history genealogy (St. Pierre, 2011).1 When I
1
University of Memphis, TN, USA
Corresponding Author:
Susan Naomi Nordstrom, University of Memphis, 101 C Ball Hall,
Memphis, TN 38152, USA.
Email: susan.nordstrom@gmail.com
2 Qualitative Inquiry 00(0)
wrote the research proposal in 2009 for the research that got
to work in an assemblage of humans, nonhumans, living,
and nonliving in family history genealogy, I quickly real-
ized that this assemblage disrupted conventional humanist
qualitative inquirys foundational conceptualizations of
humans, nonhumans, living, and nonliving. Conventional
qualitative research is subject-centered in that it primarily
uses methods such as interviewing and participant observa-
tion to draw information from people face to face to pro-
duce to knowledge about people and the meaning they
make of their lived experiences. If nonhumans such as doc-
uments, photographs, and artifacts are included within a
conventional qualitative research project, they are generally
viewed as secondary, ancillary data sources about people.
However, my study considered nonhumans and humans
(participants) to be equally important in the production of
knowledge. The human/nonhuman binary could not hold in
this study. Conventional qualitative research also relies on
living people in that living people are interviewed and
observed. However, my study focused on nonliving humans
and how nonhumans animate the nonliving humans. The
nonliving was equally important in knowledge production.
The living/nonliving binary could not hold in this study.
Conceptually, I assumed the human, nonhuman, living, and
nonliving to be operating in a logic of the and (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1987, p. 25, emphasis in original), and I wanted to
study the process of formation of these terms and the assem-
blage they create in family history genealogy. I wanted to
know what these processes did and the felt reality of
[those] relations (Massumi, 2002, p. 16) or the residues of
those relations. Because I conceptualized humans, nonhu-
mans, living, and nonliving differently, I had no methodolo-
gies, no methods that I could plug into the study. I only had
theories. I had to invent through repetition and differentia-
tion (Deleuze, 1994).2
Ontological Event
Deleuze (1991) wrote, Philosophy must constitute itself
as the theory of what we are doing, not as a theory of what
there is (p. 133). And, so, I set off with a plan to think,
live, and become with the logic of the and (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1987, p. 25, emphasis in original) among humans,
nonhumans, living, and nonliving assemblage in family
history genealogy. To think, live, and become with this
assemblage, I attended to the and of the assemblage and
what it did and continues to do in family history genealogy.
How do humans, nonhumans, living, and nonliving move
together in family history genealogy? How do other sys-
tems (e.g., theories, politics, and so on) work in this pro-
cess? How does this process produce residues of these
relations? How does this process create something else,
something new? These questions suggest a different onto-
logical framework that shifts away from conventional
qualitative inquirys focus on unitary being, a being that
exists (Simondon, 2009, p. 6) and can be known through
methodologies such as case study and narrative inquiry as
well as data collection methods such as interviewing and
observation. As I have stated elsewhere (Nordstrom,
2015b), conventional qualitative research rests on a realist
ontology, in which being is considered as consistent in its
unity, given to itself, founded upon itself, not created,
resistant to that which it is not (Simondon, 2009, p. 4). In
such an ontology, being is stable, can be known and
recorded, and works within binary divisions, such as Self/
Other. Moreover, such an ontology focuses on humans
rather than nonhumans and on living humans rather than
nonliving humans. The questions I posed suggested another
ontology of these termsSimondons individuation and
ontogenesis.
Simondon (2009) described individuation as consider-
ing as primordial the operation of individuation from which
the individual comes to exist and of which its characteristics
reflect the development, the regime and finally the modali-
ties (p. 5). In other words, the individual is grasped as a
relative reality (p. 5), a residue, a partial and relative reso-
lution (p. 5) of contingent and constantly shifting relation-
ships. Barthelemy (2013) explained, The living being . . .
possess[es] a complex and durable individuality; its associ-
ated milieu participates in its being, which is therefore a
theatre of individuation (p. 213). Simply put, an individ-
ual is a site of individuation and such a site is always in
motion and composing itself. For the purposes of my study,
individuals refer to both humans and nonhumans. As
Barthelemy explained, Simondons technical object also
undergoes the process of concretization through which
the technical object calls forth an associated milieu that it
integrates into its functioning (p. 213). Both human and
nonhuman, then, call forth a milieu that is always in motion
that contingently forms them. Human and nonhuman indi-
viduals, then, are in a constant state of genesis, always cre-
ating, always becoming. Simondon uses the term
ontogenesis to describe such a process. He claimed that
ontogenesis is genesis of the individual (p. 5), a becom-
ing, a mode of resolution that is rich in potentials (p. 6).
Becoming, then, is an ontological framework of movement
in which stasis of an individual is just a special kind of
movement (Massumi, 2002), a slowing down, a momentary
resolution of the relationships that contingently form an
individual (both human and nonhuman). Simondons onto-
genesis and individuation, however, focuses solely on the
living. To attend to the nonliving, I drew on Deleuzes
(1993) fold, a movement [that] cannot be stopped (p. 12).
While the physical body is no longer, the soul participates
in a whole dramaturgy of souls, which makes them rise,
descend, and rise again (p. 74). The infinite fold that is in
constant movement and flux pumps this dramaturgy with
vitality. The nonliving, the deceased, forge their new
Nordstrom 3
present (p. 74) through the constant folding between living
and nonliving. Becoming, then, has neither culmination
nor subject, but draw[s] one another into zones of proximity
or undecidability (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 507) for
humans, nonhumans, living, and nonliving. In other words,
an individual is always in movement, never completed,
never whole thereby making that individual nebulous, even
after death. Such undecidability, however, is not a lack.
Instead, undecidability overflows with potentiality gener-
ated by ever-shifting relationships.
In addition to disrupting conventional qualitative
researchs focus on unitary and living being, this ontologi-
cal framework fractures the classical logic of induction and
deduction that grounds conventional qualitative inquiry as
evidenced by practices such as coding (Bendassolli, 2013).
Simondon (1992) reminded us that classical logic cannot
be used to understand individuation (p. 312) and that clas-
sical logic reduces the study of individuation and ontogen-
esis. In other words, induction and deduction are perfectly
fine to use when studying unitary being. But, I was not
interested in unitary being. To study, live, and become in
ontogenetic relations, I had to engage in transduction, an
individuation in process (Simondon, 1992, p. 313).
Simondon (1992) described transduction as correspond[ing]
to a discovery of dimensions according to which a problem-
atic can be defined (p. 313). The problematic of my study,
the assemblage of human, nonhuman, living, and nonliv-
ing in family history genealogy must be studied in the
dimensions those terms (i.e., human, nonhuman, living,
and nonliving) create. Helmreich (2007) explained that a
transductive focus in ethnography would be a mode of
attention that asks how definitions of subjects, objects, and
field emerge in material relations that cannot be modeled in
advance (p. 632). In this way, transduction shifts Crottys
(2003) definition of methodology as a strategy or a plan of
action into a different space. The strategy or plan of action,
if one can call it that, is to get to work in the middle and
becomings. In other words, the strategy became a way of
seeing [the living, nonliving, human, and nonhuman
relationships and the residues of those relationships in family
history genealogy] in the middle rather than looking down on
them from above or up at them below, or from left to right or
right to left. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 23)
Seeing in the middle asked me to radically rethink the
supposed stability of statement of the problem and
research questions. These entities only function within
classical formulations of logic. In both induction and
deduction, the question comes first and in so doing stabi-
lize the context, participants, and the object of knowledge.
One must define these areas. What do you want to know?
Who will help you know that? Where will you go to col-
lect data? In effect, the statement and questions striate
context, participants, and the object of knowledge rather
than actively composing them as they materialize in a mov-
ing ontology. To help me think in this moving ontology, the
questions I posed worked with processes of formation and
how these processes worked in the assemblage of humans,
nonhumans, living, and nonliving family history geneal-
ogy. By simply asking about the work of this assemblage, I
was able to get to work in the middle (Deleuze, 1995,
p. 161) and follow the processes rather than predetermine
them.
Object-Interview Event
To help me work in the middle and follow the relationships
between humans, nonhumans, living, and nonliving and
what these relationships generate, I invented a method, the
object-interview (Nordstrom, 2013b). I had to invent
because no method in conventional qualitative research
would help me to attend to the relationships among humans,
nonhumans, living, and nonliving and what those relation-
ships might produce. The object-interview is a conversa-
tional space in which humans, nonhumans, living, and
nonliving are entangled together to produce knowledge. I
created an open-ended interview guide, mainly for the pur-
poses of appeasing the Institutional Review Board (IRB).
However, I never once used that guide because that guide
would have attempted to anticipate individuation and onto-
genesis rather than engage in these processes as they mate-
rialized in space and time. My work consisted of freeing up
spaces for individuation and ontogenesis rather than suc-
cumb to traditional methods of data collection that unify
being and stultify individuation and ontogenesis. My task
was not to succumb to the allure of a unitary sense of being
that desires interpretive questions (What do you mean?) or
phenomenological questions (How did that make you feel?
What was that like when you encountered that object?). The
conversational object-interview became both a physical and
linguistic space of exploring connections among humans,
nonhumans, living, and nonliving. The physical spaces of
the object-interviews became overwhelmed with relations
and the residues of those relations. Piles of photographs,
artifacts, and documents populated tables in participants
homes where we conversed. Those piles steamed with the
movements among humans, nonhumans, living, and nonliv-
ing. These movements materialized a language dripping
with the residues of the associations and relations between
those terms (Deleuze, 1991) in each object-interview.
Each object-interview created its own unstable structure of
relationsits own language of associationismamong
these entities. No one object-interview was the same, even
with the same interviewee. The invented object-interview
was not even replicable in the study for which it was
invented. This invented method was itself a product of
ontogenesis, a becoming method.
4 Qualitative Inquiry 00(0)
Data Data Event
The object-interviews connected to other data (e.g., theories
I used to help me see in the middle; theories that material-
ized in the object-interview transcripts; weather, dreams
[St. Pierre, 1997]; spectral data [Nordstrom, 2013a]; and so
on) in what I call a data assemblage (Nordstrom, 2015a),
yet another invention (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Manning
(2016) reminded us that an assemblage has too often been
read as an object or existent configuration, rather than its
potentializing directionality (p. 123). The data assemblage
is not a thing or object, rather, it caries within itself a sense
of movement and connectability (p. 123). The data assem-
blage focuses on what data do rather than how they can be
organized (Manning, 2016).
As a moving entity of ontogenetic residues of transduc-
tion and individuation that somehow functions together
(Bogue, 2003, p. 98), the data assemblage made it possible
to think data relationally instead of categorically, which, as
Foucault (1977) reminded us, reduces being. As data move
together, they work together to produce knowledge, in what
Bennett (2010) might call an agentic assemblage. Each con-
stitutive line of the assemblage is vibratory in which both
the membership changes over time and the members them-
selves undergo internal alteration (p. 35). In other words,
the various data are always changing; as they modulate,
they shift the assemblage. It is useful, then, to think of the
word data as a verb. The data data as they move in modulat-
ing ontogenesis. As the data data (or whatever it is that they
do), they contingently structure themselves, to grow and
morph in different and unanticipated connections. The data
assemblage, therefore, is a veritable invention (Deleuze
& Guattari, 1987, p. 406), a moving constellation of data
dataing that is pumped by individuation and ontogenesis.
Knowledge Event
Most of the existing studies on family history genealogy use
humanist categories, such as subject-centered identity, to
describe family history genealogists and their work. For
example, the existing literature focuses on family history
genealogists identities (e.g., Hackstaff, 2009a, 2009b,
2010; Nash, 2002; Tutton, 2004; Tyler, 2005), family his-
tory genealogists research practices (e.g., Bishop, 2008;
Duff & Johnson, 2003; Lambert, 1996; Veale, 2004), mem-
ory work (e.g., Harevan, 1978; Lambert, 1996, 2002, 2003;
Parham, 2008), and family history genealogy and its rela-
tion to the field of history (e.g., Rosenzweig & Thelen,
1998). Clearly, these humanist categories are both known
and assumed (Colebrook, 2002). The data assemblage,
however, seeks to create linkages not yet assembled, to
produce ways of becoming, to invent new modes of exis-
tence (Manning, 2016, p. 124). What knowledge does a
data assemblage produce about family history genealogy?
The concept ensemble of life manifested from the data
assemblage that allowed me to create new ways of think-
ing (Colebrook, 2002, p. 17) about family history geneal-
ogy. I explain the concept in more detail elsewhere
(Nordstrom, 2013b, 2015a). Here, I provide a definition in
movement: An ensemble of life is a loose grouping of
objects that continuously moves with an ancestor and is
open and connectable to other objects, ancestors as well as
social, historical, and cultural milieus, just to name a few.
To create this concept, I moved between examples from the
data assemblage and theories, specifically Deleuzes (1990,
1993, 2006) fold, event, and a life.3 Elsewhere (Nordstrom,
2015a), I explain how theory was always already moving
about in the data assemblage. The fold, events, and
Deleuzes (2006) a life were already moving and shifting in
the assemblage. As I read Deleuzes writings on these con-
cepts, the concepts amplified and pulsated with new vitality.
Deleuzes writings, then, were not a system of signs or
conventions that we impose upon the world in order to
organize or differentiate our experience (Colebrook, 2002,
p. 20). I did not insert these Deleuzian concepts into the data
assemblage. Instead, Deleuzes writings about these con-
cepts became actions, or constant questions and creations
in response to experience (p. 20) in the data assemblage. In
other words, Deleuzes concepts responded to the data
assemblage and the data assemblage responded back in a
constant relay. The concepts became entangled with the
data assemblage and creat[ed] a future (p. 21), a future
that had already announced itself in the data assemblage.
Because the concept manifested itself from a generative
data assemblage, the ensemble of life has moved and shifted
as I put different examples together to see what those exam-
ples might do in other writings. Each time I write about the
ensemble of life, it becomes something else, something
subtly different from other iterations of the concept. To do
this day, I am surprised to see the work of this concept as it
moves and shifts, always responsive to new, different, and
sometimes unanticipated experiences and theories.
Writing Event
As ontogenesis churns a contingently structuring assem-
blage, I can never anticipate ethical events. Deleuze (1990)
wrote, Either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what
it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of
what happens to us (p. 149). Each thought and piece of
writing about this study is an attempt to not be unworthy
of this study. Deleuze and Parnet (2002) and his notes about
his and Guattaris (1986) book on Kafka guide this work.
He wrote,
Think of the author you are writing about. Think of him so hard
that he can no longer be an object, and equally so that you
cannot identify with him. Avoid the double shame of the
Nordstrom 5
scholar and the familiar. Give back to an author a little of the
joy, the energy, the life of love and politics that he new how to
give and invent. So many did writers must have wept over what
has been written about them. (p. 119)
In many ways, this quote illustrates what I try to do when I
think and write about this study. Each piece of writing is
driven by a power of creation [and the] cultivation of joy
(Sellars, 2006, p. 166). Each piece of writing attempts to
give back what participants, theorists, and other scholars
have so generously given me. Each piece of writing aims
not to make these people weep over my writing. Each piece
of writing aims to cultivate joy through different ways of
thinking. Deleuze and Parnet (2002) went on to write, I
hope that Kafka was pleased with the book that we did on
him, and it is for that reason that the book pleased nobody
(p. 119). As I continue to write about this study and, in par-
ticular, the ensemble of life, I hope to please the partici-
pants, their ancestors, my ancestors, Deleuze, and other
authors I cite. My writing hopes to create joy by affirming
the ontogenesis that continues to pump through this study.
Writing about ontogenesis and the residues that it pro-
duces is always an approximation, always working at the
border which separates our knowledge from out ignorance
and transforms the one into the other (Deleuze, 1994, p.
xxi). Writing about this study is a way for me to keep sur-
prising myself at that border. I suspect that I give other
scholars headaches. Why wont she just say what she did?
What is so damned difficult about it? Why cant she just sit
still? Why cant this study she keeps writing about keep
still? These questions gesture toward what Lather (2015)
called the gravitational pull of humanism (p. 100); such a
pull is weighted by implications that pin down and nor-
malize a process so that others can replicate a study and
draw sure knowledge from it. And, if that gives people a
headache, well, then, I suppose I am okay with it. I cannot
anticipate what the rhythms of ontogenesis will create. Much
like the etymology of the word implication, ontogenesis
entangles me and generates life-affirming difference.
Six years now have passed since I formally collected
data. During those 6 years, however, the study has kept
assembling itself. For example, I am still in contact with the
11 family history genealogists. The genealogists still contact
me when they find new objects associated with their ances-
tors. One genealogist sent me a book she wrote about her
genealogical work. I still read and reread theories to help me
think differently about the study. This study, it seems, will
not end. When there exist no other drives than the assem-
blages themselves (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 259),
studies never begin or stop. The beginning and ending still use concepts such as methodology, data, interview, and
points of a study became arbitrary markers of space and time
that momentarily pause around the points that are usually
determined by outside forces (i.e., graduation deadlines set
by universities). Data keep dataing. They always were
dataing and they will continue to data. Analysis, then,
becomes a constant series of Deleuzian unending encounters
that force us to think (Deleuze, 1994, p. 79). Thoughts
compose me, this study, as slow beings (Deleuze, 2006,
p. 283). We are always too late as ideas, conversations, and
entanglements continue to connect to each other. From the
residues of connections made possible by ontogenesis, I
attempt to map realms to come (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987,
p. 5) by imagining, creating, and inventing possibilities with
these connections.
Problematic Events
Manning (2016) wrote that agencement, or assemblage, is
not an action directed by an existing subject, but a force of
distributed directionality in the event (p. 137). The assem-
blage of humans, nonhumans, living, and nonliving at
work in family history genealogy generated known and
unknown forces that moved the research events described
above. Each of the research events carry forces with them
that move me to think differently to this day. I soon real-
ized that there was no researcher behind this study. The
research created me. In so doing, these research events
became momentary recognitions in which I discover[ed]
how [my] practices situated [me] (Stengers, 2011, p. 372).
Research concepts and practices learned in qualitative
research courses along with posthumanist theories collided
together in the assemblage. These collisions were produc-
tive, generative even though they operated in two different
ontologies. Practices were no longer pure mechanism(s)
or routine process(es) (Malabou, 2008, p. vii) as inter-
views became object-interviews (Nordstrom, 2013b) and a
data set became a data assemblage (Nordstrom, 2015a).
Practices became creative and generative tensions that
moved with questions and problems (Colebrook, 2002,
p. 21) that have no right answer. They have no right answer
because they are in an intermezzo, a generative middle
space, where things pick up speed . . . [that] is necessarily
constituted by the already familiar distinctions of social
science, and to pick up speed is to recreate its concepts
from within (Fugelsang & Sorensen, p. 6). A collective
collision of research events in an assemblage, then, asked
me to rethink the practicesthe habits and conceptsof
qualitative research.
Generative Conventions
Clearly, I have not le[ft] conventional qualitative methodol-
ogy behind, refuse[d] it (St. Pierre, 2015, p. 86) because I
so on, to describe the events of this study. Through research
classes, these concepts have formed a second nature
(Ravaisson, 2008), one that is difficult to refuse. MacLure
(2013) described the difficulty of refusing these practices,
6 Qualitative Inquiry 00(0)
these habits. She wrote that is difficult, of course, not to
sink into the old habits of humanism and hubris that promise
some kind of depleted mastery over the world through the
dogmatic exercise of methodological good sense or common
sense (p. 666). To help me think and occupy this undoing of
these acquired habits and concepts, I have found Ravaissons
(2008) essay on habits and Deleuzes singular and collective
work with Guattari on habits, concepts, language, and sci-
ence to be particularly useful.
Habits and Concepts
Ravaissons (2008) rethinking of habits positions them as
ontological dispositions with capacities of change. Rather
than thinking about research habits as permanent entities
that are somehow outside of transitory change (p. 25),
habits can be understood as a power of beginning
(Malabou, 2008, p. viii) that begin again and again in the
middle. Habits, Ravaisson argued, is a moving middle
term (p. 59) between a multiplicity of tendencies that occur
in transitory space and time. As research habits are put to
work in different multiplicities, they respond to a variety of
tendencies (e.g., theories, contexts, people, time, etc.). As
these habits respond to these tendencies, they momentarily
cohere between the living beings activities and its milieu
(Grosz, 2013, p. 218). Habits, then, move and shift in rela-
tionship to the multiplicities from which they manifest. As
habits are repeated, they may very well draw from repeti-
tion something new: difference (Deleuze, 1994, p. 70).
This difference then creates an aptitude for change
(Malabou, 2008, p. ix). Habits as middle spaces become
elaboration[s] of tendency, production[s] of potentiality
(Grosz, 2013, p. 223). Grosz (2013) wrote the following
about Ravaissons conceptualization of habits:
They entail a change, a new virtuality, a new tendency to act, a
new potentiality. They bring about a new ability, the capacity to
persist, thrive, change and grow in the face of a world that is
itself subject to endless and often random change. Habits
provide the ability to change ones tendencies, to reorient ones
actions to address the new, and to able to experience the
unexpected. (p. 221)
In a moving ontology, in a world in which being does not sit
still, habits contingently move between individuals and
milieus. As habits persist and change (Ravaisson, 2008) in a
moving ontology, they are at once both poison and rem-
edy (Malabou, 2008, p. xix). In sum, habits occupy a mid-
dle space that is constituted by movement. As habits repeat
and differentiate in this transitory space, they mobilize the
potential of doing and thinking the habit differently.
Habits, however, cannot be divorced from concepts. For,
as Deleuze and Guattari (1994) wrote, Wherever there are
habits there are concepts (p. 105). Deleuze and Guattari go
on to write that the habits are developed and given upon
the plane of immanence of radical experience (p. 105).
Habits and concepts, or habitsconcepts, then become
conventions (p. 105) that ask the question, What is the
habit that constitutes its concept? (p. 106). The term con-
ventions articulates a meeting, a contingent agreement,
between habit and concept. Conventions of research become
a way to think about how habits and concepts cannot be
thought apart from one another. Moreover, conventions of
research gesture to Ravaissons (2008) idea that habits are
dispositions manifested by virtual potential in a middle
space. Likewise, concepts, as Deleuze and Guattari (1994)
note, are neither stable entities nor the essence or the thing
(p. 21). Rather, as Colebrook (2002) suggested, concepts
create possibilities for thinking beyond what is already
known or assumed (p. 19) as they are incarnated or effec-
tuated in bodies (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 21). Because
conventions of research are not stable, they manifest them-
selves differently in each project. A new meeting, or an
unholy agreement, is always possible.
An Unholy Science
Deleuze and Guattaris (1987) thoughts about royal science
(or more sedentary practices of science) and nomadic sci-
ence (a more eccentric science) provide useful ways to
think about such unholy unions. In this instance, royal sci-
entific practices refer to conventional qualitative research
and its drive to normalize qualitative research through a
series of discrete processes that form an imperative.
Nomadic science, however, follows the connections
between singularities of matter and traits of expression, and
lodges on the level of these connections (p. 369). The con-
nective and elastic nomadic science generated by poststruc-
tural theories deterritorializes the more striated, or royal,
scientific practices, as I have attempted to demonstrate in
the previous sections. Nomadic science, however, can never
be disconnected from royal sciencea reterritorializing
practicethat continually imposes its form of sovereignty
on the inventions of nomad science (p. 362). In other
words, the eccentric and deterritorializing creativity of
nomadic science practices is reterritorialized by royal sci-
ence. Stengers (2011) wrote, The only who is dangerous,
irremediably destructive or tolerant, is someone who
believes himself to be purely nomadic, because he can
only define his practice in contrast to all others (p. 373).
Nomadic and royal science cannot be teased apart. Rather,
science, or research conventions, defines itself between the
complementary movements of a deterritorializing nomadic
science and a reterritorializing royal science. For example,
I named the data assemblage to gesture toward the connec-
tivity and elasticity between the two sciences. Research
conventions, then, are situated within these complementary
Nordstrom 7
movements with the and play[ing] the role of a tensor
(p. 99) among royal and nomadic forces.
Deleuze and Guattaris (1987) notion of continuous vari-
ation is useful to think about the complementary move-
ments between the two sciences and conventions those
movements produce. Research conventions built on a con-
tinuous line of variation create a new form of redundancy.
AND . . . AND . . . AND . . . (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p.
98), an atypical expression of all of the possible conjunc-
tions (p. 99) between royal and nomadic scientific forces.
Research conventions become residues of the and as well as
historical. Deleuze and Guattari wrote,
Not only are there as many statements as there are effectuations,
but all of the statements are present in the effectuation of one
among them, so that the line of variation is virtual, in other
words, real without being actual, and consequently continuous
regardless of the leaps the statements make. (p. 94)
For example, when the term methodology is built on the line
of continuous variation, it is at once all of its previous itera-
tions as well as possible future iterations. A continuous line
of variation does not erase the history of methodology, for
example, the forces of its colonialist and imperialistic itera-
tions (Tuhwai Smith, 2012). Rather, building methodology
on a line of continuous variation asks researchers to be
accountable for all its iterations, even as a concept moves
along the line. In this sense, A variable can be continuous
over a portion of its trajectory, then leap or skip, without
that affecting its continuous variation (Deleuze & Guattari,
1987, p. 95). As methodology becomes a mobile concept
and is deployed in certain contexts, it carries with it a his-
tory of previous actualizations and virtual possibilities of
doing research differently. On a line of continuous varia-
tion, the practices of these terms are not pure reiteration
(Manning, 2012, p. 56), but instead, are repetition with a
difference (p. 56). In this way, research conventions, such
as methodology, materialize a particular repetition and dif-
ference that is responsive to the research project at hand. A
materialized research convention thus becomes a series of
questions. How does a research convention repeat and dif-
ferentiate in a study? How do research conventions move
through movement again (Manning, 2012, p. 56)? What
remains of a repeated change, the residue of repetition
(Malabou, 2008, p. viii) in a study? How might these resi-
dues create glimpses of research conventions that are in
fact constituted by a resource of possibilities (p. viii)?
These questions gesture toward the tension-limit[s]
between the two kinds of science (Deleuze & Guattari,
1987, p. 364). Conventions of research hence became prac-
tices of thinking with AND, instead of thinking IS, instead
of thinking for IS: empiricism has never had another secret.
Try it, it is quite extraordinary thought, and yet it is life
(Deleuze & Parnet, 2002, p. 57, emphasis in original). This
shift in conventions began to express ones openness to the
future, along with ones relation of connection to the past:
[they] express the continuity of ones attractions and desires,
a cohesion that is endlessly open to modification (Grosz,
2013, p. 224). In this way, methodology, for example,
becomes a series of balancing acts (Braidotti, 2011,
p. 284) in an assemblage that is out of joint but also
engaged with the times, to be vowed to the future but active
in the here and now (pp. 284-285). These balancing acts
generated different actualized research convention possi-
bilities that always carry with them virtual potential.
Strategic Enactments of Royal Science
I cannot simply pretend royal science away or assume that I
am somehow outside of its reterritorializing forces. As
Deleuze and Guattaris (1987) wrote,
The State does not give power (pouvoir) to the intellectuals or
conceptual innovators; on the contrary, it makes them a strictly
dependent organ with an autonomy that is only imagined yet
sufficient to divest those whose job it becomes imply to reproduce
or implement of all of their power (puissance). (p. 368)
In order for me to do research with humans, the study has to
be sanctioned by the IRB at my university. The IRB oper-
ates firmly within positivism, a royal science that, as many
of us know, sometimes does not even recognize qualitative
research as a scientific methodology. Deleuze and Guattari
(1987) suggested that Royal science is inseparable from a
hylomorphic model implying both a form that organizes
matter and a matter prepared for the form (p. 369). Specific
to IRB, I have to organize the study, the matter, into particu-
lar practices, specifically positivist epistemologies and
ontologies. For example, I have to clearly delineate research
questions even though I anticipate and know they will
change with individuation and ontogenesis. Likewise, I
have to position the methodology and methods of data col-
lection as static entities. I have to anticipate all the data I
will collect and all the ethical issues that might arise during
the study. I have to anticipate how participants might
respond to interview questions and any possible discomfort
and gains from participating in the study. Simply put, I have
to both discursively and materially produce a study within
positivism so that it will be sanctioned by those in power, in
this instance the IRB.
I call this work strategic enactments of royal science.
These enactments help me navigate the politics of my
present-based practices of [my] everyday life (Lather,
2015, p. 111). I cannot pretend the neoliberal academy that
is grounded in royal scientific practices away. The forces of
royal scientific conventions thereby reterritorialize much of
my work. As many qualitative researchers know, we still
have to defend qualitative research to others. I have to use
8 Qualitative Inquiry 00(0)
words like data and methodology to situate my research
so that others can understand it. For example, I carefully
write about my research in job applications, research award
dossiers, yearly evaluations, and so on, so that it can be
sanctioned by those (e.g., department chairs and deans) in
power. Moreover, I cannot pretend away the colonialist and
imperialistic history of research (Tuhwai Smith, 2012),
especially given my positionality as a White researcher who
is situated in the academy. As I strategically enact royal sci-
ence, I must be careful and aware about how research con-
ventions materialize in a research study. How might research
conventions mobilize and materialize dangerous colonial
and imperialistic forces? How might other forces bring
about different iterations of research conventions that are
antioppositional? Strategic enactments of royal science help
me to navigate not only my everyday politics but also the
larger politics of research.
A + Researcher + To Research
I have titled this section, A Researcher to Research to ges-
ture toward a collective researcher subjectivity of traitor
prophets, insofar as they perform a treachery in relation to
our more dominant affective/signifying regimes (OSullivan,
2009, p. 248). This collective subjectivity is in between the
forces of nomadic and royal science and working on continu-
ous lines of variation. This collective is political, problem-
atic, pastpresentfuture, and undefinable. This collective,
then, does not offer a reassuring mirror reflection of a sub-
jectivity in place (p. 248). Instead, it diffracts, shakes up,
cracks, and fissures any sense of stability. To make this col-
lective subjectivity, I draw from Deleuze and Guattaris
(1987) becoming grammar of indefinite article + a proper
name + infinitive verb (p. 263).
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) began their discussion of the
above formula of becoming with the infinitive verb. To
research situates the action of research in Aeon, the floating,
nonpulsed time (p. 263) rather than chronological time that is
pulsed and linear. In Aeon, there is no singular past, present,
and future. Rather, all these times indeterminately coexist
together. To research becomes indeterminate, a sum of all
its past, present, and future iterations. To research, then,
enables us to get to work on lines of continuous variation. In
this way, to research and its constituent research conven-
tions open to the virtual. To research becomes an event,
something that passes through us, something we must try and
figure out later, something that cannot be codified, because
another event is always possible and even the same event may
very well pass through us differently.
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) explained the proper name
as follows:
The proper name does not indicate a subject; nor does a noun
take on the value of a proper name as a function of a form or a
species. The proper name fundamentally designates something
that is of the order of the event, of becoming or of haecceity. (p.
264)
In other words, the proper name does not do the verb to
research. Simply put, we have never done research. Rather,
to research happens to us, moves through us, and marks us
with events and becomings. Researcher becomes charac-
terized by events and becomingsthe speeds that compose
them and the affects that fill them (p. 264). Researcher is
always already decentered in tenuous movement. She
becomes a shuttlecock in a game of badminton between
reterritorializing royal and deterritorializing nomadic forces.
In such a game, Subjectivity is rather a process ontology of
auto-poiesis or self-styling, which involves complex and
continuous negotiations with dominant norms and values
and hence also multiple forms of accountability (Braidotti,
2012, p. 31). In this self-styling, there is no magic pill that
immunizes her from royal science. Nor is there a pill that
makes her purely nomadic. Perhaps the only magic pill she
might want to take is that of the Deleuzoguattarian proper
name Researcher, a pill to remind her that to research
happens to her and will forever change her.
The A in A researcher serves as an individuating
function within a collectivity (p. 264). The indeterminate
article A contingently positions researcher within the
researcher to research collectivity. The A becomes a
momentary recognition in the grammatical formation of the
subject, a marker of an event or a becoming. For example,
not once have I felt like or known with certainty that I was
a researcher or that I was doing research. I have always felt
like the research has carried me, taken me to places I could
not anticipate. I was never quite sure what or how I was
doing research. Research events passed through me,
changed me, and became part of me. These moments . . .
when the self is emptied out, dissolving into rawer and more
elementary sensationsmark heightened levels of aware-
ness and receptivity (Braidotti, 2011, p. 234) and beg ques-
tions. What particular iteration of habits and concepts
constituted a particular research convention in a particular
project? What was the work of those habits and concepts in
a research convention? As I began to think through these
questions, I was able to momentarily recognize myself
within the a researcher to research collectivity. Each
event, becoming, became a constitutive component that
[had] to be affirmed as part of [my]self (Sellars, 2006, p.
161). Not once did I feel threatened by these events (Sellars,
2006). Rather, these became affirmative moments of recog-
nition within the statement A + Researcher + To research.
Antimethodology
Lather (2015) explained that postqualitative research is
the passage of qualitative research beyond itself [as] it
Nordstrom 9
moves deeper into complication and accountability to
complexity and the political value of not being so sure
(p. 107). Each passage composes those interested in
postqualitative research differently and, consequently, the
practices they enact in their research. In this way, each
passage is a doing, rather than entity. The passage, the
series of research events and the theorization of those
events, articulated throughout this article have created
a particular ecology of practices, antimethodology.
Antimethodology resists an approach ordered definition
of reason and practices. Rather, it is a product of what
a study does. Antimethodology seeks to momentarily
contain the anarchy (Manning, 2016, p. 36) of a studys
doings. These doings, particularly in postqualitative
research, are always in passage as Lather describes above.
Rather than define antimethodology as a set of repeatable
and linear instructions, in this section I offer a series of
procedures, a set of conditions toward repeatable differ-
ence (p. 89). The following procedures seek to set a
path into motion that asks to be returned to, toward differ-
ent results (p. 89). This path, however, may fail and it
may not work in every study (Manning, 2016). This path
is one of experimental possibilities. This path asks, What
else can antimethodology do in the postqualitative? What
antimethodological experimentations might bring about
different ways of knowing and being?
Antimethodology is affirmative. Massumi (2002) wrote
the following about writing that I believe can be extended to
research. He wrote, If you know where you will end up
when you begin, nothing has happened in the meantime.
You have to be willing to surprise yourself writing things
you didnt think you thought (p. 18). When antimethodol-
ogy happens to me, I have no idea what is happening or
where a study is going. I have to trust in the surprises, the
research events, that radically alter how I do and think anti-
methodology. I have to trust in the assemblage that entan-
gles me. I have to resist that lure to think that I can somehow
step outside of the assemblage in wrestle it into categories.
I have to trust that I will eventually catch up to the doings of
a study. This is affirmative work. It affirms wild experience
and the possibilities for thinking and doing research at the
limits of thought and practice. This is joyous creation.
Antimethodology is an ongoing practice. Anti-
methodology is not a thing or an entity. As such, antimethod-
ology is not a successor regime, something that can be easily
replicated, or the answer to methodological questions in
postqualitative inquiry. Readers cannot simply plug this
methodology into a project. Each study will bring about
a new set of problems, which are, of course, linked to con-
cepts and habits that emerge from multiplicities. Because
each study is a unique and untimely conglomeration of
problems, there is no way to systematize antimethodology
(St. Pierre, 2015). If anything, antimethodology is an open
system that is available to constant modification.
Antimethodology treats the habits and concepts of quali-
tative research as elastic ontological entities with capaci-
ties to change. The use of anti in antimethodology
suggests the movement of methodology on that line of con-
tinuous variation as well as how methodology moves
between the complementary reterritorializing forces of
royal science and deterritorializing forces of nomadic sci-
ence that render research conventions malleable. As they
move, research conventions must remain on the plane of
composition (Manning, 2012, p. 10). On the plane of com-
position, a researcher can only think with AND (Deleuze
& Parnet, 2002, p. 57). The AND shifts questions. Rather
than asking what or why questions that focus on thinking
with IS (p. 57), antimethodology asks questions about
how to proceed (Foucault, 1983, p. xii) in the AND. How
does antimethodology move in between complementary
reterritorializing and deterritorializing forces? How does
antimethodology proceed and move in a study? How do
politics, desire, and so on, proceed in antimethodology?
How do previous iterations of antimethodology move in a
study? How might antimethodology contribute to coloniz-
ing practices (Tuhwai Smith, 2012)? How do virtual poten-
tials animate antimethodology differently? These questions
place antimethodology and its resulting creative research
conventions on a plane of composition so that they can
begin to express ones openness to the future, along with
ones relation of connection to the past: [they] express the
continuity of ones attractions and desires, a cohesion that is
endlessly open to modification (Grosz, 2013, p. 224).
Antimethodology is strategic. Antimethodology provides
a way for researchers to occupy an academic schizo-society.
Citing Buchanan, Kuntz (2015) wrote, we literally live
within a schizo-society . . . the incessant production of mul-
tiple and often contradictory truths that lead to our schizo-
phrenic state (p. 97). For those researchers doing
postqualitative work, we sometimes have to position our
work through strategic enactments of royal science so that
we get and retain jobs, for example. As such, multiple meth-
odological truths occupy us and we them. The forces of
these truths push and pull us, always positioning us in the
middle of them. The middle, however, is not a place of
paralysis or docility (Kuntz, 2015). In the middle of forces,
one can enact strategic enactments of royal science to
describe their work that may very well subvert those very
same royal scientific practices.
Antimethodology is a + researcher + to research. The
researcher is not in advance of the research. Rather, anti-
methodology decenters the researcher such that she asks,
Was that me? (Manning, 2016, p. 37). Each study creates
different generative research conventions that undoubtedly
position her differently and may very well render her imper-
ceptible to herself.
Antimethodology is a doing. Antimethodology con-
stantly makes, unmakes, and remakes itself as it travels
10 Qualitative Inquiry 00(0)
after individuation and ontogenesis, to see for yourself, go
check something, some inexpressible feeling deriving from
a dream or nightmare . . . to see if [something] really exists
[and how] it exists somewhere, out there (Deleuze, 1995,
p. 78). Antimethodology engages transduction as a way of
seeing, seeing in the middle, and seeing how methodology
materializes in space and time. Antimethodology invents
and connects. Antimethodology affirms ontogeneisis,
becoming, never-ending, ever-undulating potentiality and
possibility. Antimethodology moves between moments of
stasis and residues of movement (Massumi, 2002).
Antimethodology materializes from reterritorializing and
deterritorializing forcesforces that crack and fissure the
researcher. Antimethodology happened, happens, and con-
tinues to happen. Antimethodology creates and cultivates
rather than reproduces. Antimethodology is a creative con-
tagion (p. 19).
Acknowledgments
The author thanks the reviewers for their keen advice. She also
gives thanks to Dr. Jasmine Ulmer for her smart and supportive
readings of the many drafts of this article. Last, she thanks Dr.
Norman Denzin for his gracious support and advice during the
final revisions of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
1. Some readers might be confused by the term humans, nonhu-
mans, living, and nonliving. The combination of these terms
is taken from the following binaries: human/nonhuman and
living/nonliving. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) wrote, Arrive
at the magic formula we all seekpluralism = monismvia
all the dualisms that are the enemy, an entirely necessary
enemy, the furniture we are forever rearranging (p. 20-21).
In my study, the aforementioned binary relationships became
my very necessary enemies. The work of antimethodology,
then, became the constant arranging and rearranging of these
terms in family history genealogy. The process of arrang-
ing, organizing, fitting together (Wise, 2005, p. 77) of these
terms is not static. Rather, the process is always moving and
shifting. Simply put, binary terms are in constant movement
in an assemblage. The combination of humans, nonhumans,
living, and nonliving suggests their movement, and, at times,
undecidability, in the family history genealogy assemblage
that has entangled me for so long. As these terms move and
shift in an assemblage, they create a grammar of movement,
a metastable grammar in which the terms are more stable on
some [planes] [and] more active on others (Manning, 2012,
p. 11). For example, an ancestor is at once living, nonliving,
human, and nonhuman. An ancestors identity takes form
(p. 10) through language, materials, culture, nature, and so
on; the ancestor contingently stabilizes on a plane. In this
way, an ancestor might be more nonliving than living, more
human than nonhuman. The term humans, nonhumans, liv-
ing, and nonliving gestures to this contingent identity forma-
tion in a family history genealogy assemblage.
2. Without a doubt, qualitative researchers are masterful inven-
tors. For some time, we have taken methodologies and meth-
ods and shaped them to meet the needs of studies. However,
most of these inventions repeat rather than repeat and differ-
entiate. To do the work that this assemblage asked me to do, I
had to both repeat and differentiate methodology and methods
to design a study that could get to work in the assemblage.
3. Deleuze and Guattari (1994) wrote that a concept consti-
tutes a philosophical language within languagenot just a
vocabulary but a syntax that attains the sublime or a great
beauty (p. 8). Deleuzes (1990, 1993, 2006) fold, events,
and a life constitute the ensemble of life. Participants in the
study frequently referred to nonhuman objects (e.g., photo-
graphs, documents, and other artifacts) with proper names or
personal pronouns. In this way, the nonhuman objects (e.g.,
photographs, documents, and other artifacts) that living
participants shared with me folded, unfolded, and refolded
with nonliving ancestors such that nonhumans and humans
could not be thought apart. Halewood (2005) explained,
There is hence no distinction between the material and the
social, between subjects and objects; all existence is a com-
plex combination of the two (p. 75). In addition, the fold-
ing humans and nonhumans also connected to larger social,
cultural, and historical milieus. Participants used the folding,
unfolding, and refolding nonhumans and humans to intro-
duce verb-rich stories. These verbs express events. Deleuze
(1990) wrote,
All objects = x [the virtual] are persons and are defined
by predicates. But these predicates are no longer the ana-
lytic predicates of individuals determined within a world
which carry out the description of these individuals. On
the contrary, they are predicates which define persons
synthetically, and open different worlds and individuali-
ties to hem as o many variables or possibilities. (p. 115)
As participants shared verb-rich stories with me, the event
(e.g., birth, marriage, purchase of a home, and death) actual-
ized again. When I study the transcripts full of nonhumans
and humans, the events actualize again. A persons life then,
is not singular and cannot be exhausted. Each time a persons
life events are actualized, it conveys the possible. Something
new and different is always possible. Deleuzes (1995) a life
animates this possibility. A life should not be confused with
an individuals life. Rather, a life is a resource or reserve
of other possibilities, our connections (Rajchman, 2000,
p. 184). The productive force of a life animates the ensemble
of life. The ensemble of life, then, is a loose grouping of non-
human objects that ceaselessly fold, unfold, and refold with
nonliving humans. The event-filled ensemble of life is ani-
mated by a lifes possibilities.
Nordstrom 11
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Author Biography
Susan Naomi Nordstrom is an assistant professor of educational
research specializing in qualitative research methodology at The
University of Memphis, Tennessee, the United States. Her research
agenda includes poststructural and posthumanist theories about
humannonhuman relations and qualitative research methodology.