615618

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QIXXXX10.1177/1077800415615618Qualitative InquiryGuttorm

Article
Qualitative Inquiry

Assemblages and Swing-Arounds: Becoming

2016, Vol. 22(5) 353­–364
© The Author(s) 2015
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a Dissertation, or Putting Poststructural sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1077800415615618

Theories to Work in Research Writing qix.sagepub.com

Hanna Ellen Guttorm1

Abstract
This article, this porous writing, illustrates (and not) some parts of the becoming of the PhD thesis of the author. The PhD
and this writing discuss and challenge research writing and arguing, and fumble and experiment toward something slightly new,
open-ended and nothing-easy-or-needed-to-explain-or-understand. This writing/entanglement includes/materializes within
poems, or movements-toward-poems, and love letters, as well as digressions, and steps “back and forth.” This is done in
playful (and serious) joy with poststructural, postqualitative, and (new) materialist theories. This is (and is not) also a response
to Professor Graham Badley’s welcome response to the author’s earlier article. One, not-yet/ever-solved, and/but-always-
new question remains: What to think about/with the subjectivity of the writer/researcher, thus who/what is writing?

Keywords
research writing, becoming, Barad, Braidotti, Deleuze

I don’t “begin” by “writing”: I don’t write. Life becomes text
starting out from my body. I am already text. History, love,
violence, time, work, desire inscribe it in my body, I go where
the “fundamental language” is spoken, the body language into
which all the tongues of things, acts, and beings translate
themselves, in my own breast, the whole of reality worked
upon in my flesh, intercepted by my nerves, by my senses, by
the labor of all my cells, projected, analyzed, recomposed into
a book.
—(Cixous, 1997-1989/1991, p. 52)
Cut, swung and split.
Put to the sides and added/embedded/expanded in the
footnotes.
The messiness, the lines of flights, the zigzag, the dead
ends remaining, not cleaned out (not all of them).
With Rosi Braidotti (1994, p. 16), “The question of style
cannot get separated from political choices” and Patti
Lather (2007, p. 4), “[A] style that enacts what it announces.”
Braidotti (1994) continues,

Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said
yes to another molecule and life was born. However, before
prehistory, there was the prehistory of prehistory, and there was
the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I do not know
why, but I do know that the universe never began. (Clarise
Lispector, The Hour of the Star)
The nomadic, polyglot writer despises mainstream communication;
the traffic jam of meanings waiting for admission at the city gates
creates that form of pollution that goes by the name “common
sense.” Nomadic writing longs instead for the desert: areas of
silence, in between the official cacophonies, in a flirt with radical
nonbelonging and outsidedness. (p. 16)

One proclaims not to aim Deconstruction, deconstructing mastery, deconstructing

But of course one aims, let’s go back and observe the hesitations research/writing, deconstructing competence, decon-
To voice promise repeat structing dissertation, or no, making space for uncer-
Yes. (Hejinian, 2000, p. 400) tainty and fumbling, becoming and incompetence—

[S]he is always becoming, never completing (except for her Becoming a dissertation, becoming writing, becoming
PhD?). (Badley, 2014, p. 291) text, becoming language.

Fragments With the Dissertation

1
Sámi University College, Kautokeino, Norway

Corresponding Author:
PhD dissertation. Ready and not-ready as no text ever.
Hanna Ellen Guttorm, Sámi University College, Hannoluohkka 45, 9520
For many times assembled, written, edited. Kautokeino, Norway.
(And not.) Email: hannaeg@samiskhs.no
354
Becoming porous language.
Thinking and writing as lingering and becoming, as an
event. Not as a thing (dissertation) or a person (“me”) or a
personal act. Nor a representation on/about the world. Not
talking or writing about something, but writing in-between,
not (about) this, nor that. Just fumbling and becoming and
being open for the “new.” And/but a necessity to undo the
dominant and the pre-existing, the self-evident. To experi-
ment and play with something “new” (and never new).
Becoming in intra-action with the (often latest) read arti-
cles/books, with the (often latest) met colleagues, with
the cats, with the tables, computers, suns and darknesses,
with human and non-human others, which are not “oth-
ers” (than me) but we all together something rhizomatic,
becoming with intensities of the encounters (see Barad,
2007; Braidotti, 2011, 2013).
(Every paper, every page, every article becoming a sur-
prise, something unexpected.)
(T)here it happens.
(T)here it materializes.
(In the Finnish-and-partly-English-written PhD thesis.)
How can research writing be thought and written (about)
in the era of this university,
this educational research, this neoliberal knowledge policy,
where we are conditioned to receive “knowledge”
wrapped up in propositional arguments and clear and
complete sentences and chapters?
Or, how can the social, cultural, relational, and material
construction of knowledge get materialized in research
writing?
How does a PhD thesis (or an article) become?
What finally gets reported?
What (can) get(s) included and what (we/they think) has
to get excluded
(in order to repeat the image of a research)?
And, how and what do we know about (poststructural)
knowing?
Isn’t it nomadic, messy, controversial, multilayered?
Where lurks the body, she asks with MacLure (2013) and
Clark/Keefe (2010)?
When do we deconstruct the body-mind-dichotomy in
(research) writing?
And, what and how are the conditions of (im)possibilities—
“poststructuralist theory suggests that agency, rather
than being a product of the individual will, lies in the
conditions of possibility to provoke new thought”
(Davies, 2010, p. 55, referring to Bodiou, 2000)—to
make these kinds of questions?
Here and Other Invitations
This, as well as my PhD dissertation, is an experiment on
and with putting Deleuzian (and some other poststructural
Qualitative Inquiry 22(5)
and new materialist) concepts to work in research writing,
in the material act of writing about and in the research.
Especially, the concepts “becoming” and “event” (e.g.,
Deleuze, 1990/1995; Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/2004) have
brought me to see the research process as something, which
always is happening and changing in its singularity. The
process, or event with a Deleuzian concept, becomes,
moves, and swings around, gets assembled again and again
in-between. Always a new assemblage, a new writing in the
middle of the process, a piece of text for a conference or a
seminar, for the supervisors or for an article. Then one reads
something more and the text and thinking turns around or
moves direction again at least. That all I think is becoming.
Often, the becoming of the thinking is not documented, and
so, only the last thoughts stay (in an article or a book).
I also write in lines with Maggie MacLure (2013), who
assumes “that there is more [much] work to be done on the
status of language itself within a materialist research prac-
tice” (p. 663). When the materiality of both the research
process and language itself gets taken seriously, writing—
describing/illustrating/following the movements of think-
ing (and other acting, for example, looking out of the
window)—becomes porous and fumbling:
Writing, which becomes with the moment of writing, with
haecceity (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/2004), writing, which
becomes—and stops—and continues again—and stops.
Immanent writing, immanent as going around with the
wandering and wondering thought.
Writing, which is never satisfied with the words and con-
cepts it uses, and so writes alternatives, words after each
other.
Writing, which doesn’t know how to write the next sen-
tence (and says it aloud).
Writing, which thus deconstructs competence and mas-
tery, while letting parts of the becoming and the fum-
bling thought visible.
Writing, where the words and sentences struggle, get lost
and messy (see Lather, 2007).
Writing, which asks itself again, what it is, and immediately
changes its mind and looks for an other not such a represen-
tative word—asks differently: How is this (this writing)
here and now functioning, when (not) describing/illustrat-
ing something, but inviting the reader to read further on?
So the thesis illustrates a becoming of a research and an
onto-epistemological–methodological paradox: When the
poststructural theories/writings/thoughts on language, dis-
courses, subjectivities, agencies, differences, and decon-
struction (Derrida, 1967/1976; Foucault, 2010; Jackson &
Mazzei, 2009; St. Pierre, 2000; Stronach & MacLure, 1997
. . . ) get turned to the researcher and what the researcher is
doing, research writing (t/here) gets shipwrecked. With
which words, namings, and concepts to write about the
Guttorm
world, when all the words get slippery? What happens in a
research? And who/what is writing t/here?
With Rosi Braidotti (1994, 2011), Karen Barad (2007),
Gilles Deleuze (1968/2004; and his writing companions,
Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/2004; Deleuze & Parnet,
1977/2002), and many many others (e.g., Guttorm, Hohti, &
Paakkari, 2015; St. Pierre, 2011; Lather, 2007, 2010; MacLure,
2010), it became possible to think about writing as rhizomatic,
with threads and gaps, and as happening here-and-now (haec-
ceity) and as responsible in producing of meanings and their
material and discursive consequences. Especially, the respon-
sibility made me both careful and clumsy in saying or arguing
for almost anything. I didn’t want to know more (than others)
or argue for others, but to squirm away, just think aloud (qui-
etly and lightly). Not to argue, but ask and fumble.
Hence that form of writing which is nothing but the question
“what is writing?,” or that sensibility which is nothing but the
question “what is it to sense,” or that thought which asks “what
does it mean to think.” (Deleuze, 1968/2004, p. 245)
Or a shipwreck of a/the language.
With Braidotti (1994) mixing “the theoretical with the
poetic or lyrical mode” and “resisting the pull toward
cut-and-dried, formal, ugly, academic language” (p. 37)
Multiplying the academic discourse/language,
blurring the dualisms: matter and language, theory and
practice,
theoretical and non-theoretical.
towards a flattened “methodology,” towards flat writing
(with Barad’s, 2007, flat ontology).
Bliss of not-knowing.
Love of uncertainty (with Braidotti, 2011; Lather, 2010;
MacLure, 2010, and others).
Lightness with/in critics of the prevailing discourses and
practices, and creation of something new (Braidotti, 2011).
Pronouncing, performing, and provoking the positivity
of differences.
Writing with and from the affecting and affected body.
This singular, tiny small piece of matter, this nomadic,
not-knowing subjectivity, or how would we call it, the
luggage to carry with allover.
This all she was desiring to do in her PhD. (Or happened
to start to write alike and to seek “arguments” for. As a
side note: While seeking the arguments, the lightness
was not always there . . . )
But why should research writing be/come porous? Isn’t
porous and entangled writing impossible to follow? How
does the argument get constructed, and mediated to the
reader? Is there any recognizable argument at all? Doesn’t
the reader get lost? Deleuze and Guattari (1980/2004) write
about minor-science and becoming-minotarian—shouldn’t
355
we researchers just make our argument clear, to be able to
change the world and the inequalities in it? How could that
be made by becoming minotarian? Who would listen to us
then? What would we be doing at all and why then? What is
the meaning of research; why do we inquire and write,
again and again? Don’t we want to understand the world
more and more? What does research do?
Matter and meaning are not separated elements, writes
Barad (2007). When seeing, feeling, and thinking the world
as socially, culturally, and historically constructed (most
often into separate entities, institutions, inclusions, and
exclusions) and real and material and in a continuous pro-
cess of always-becoming-different, the producing of “infor-
mation” on that all becomes slippery. First, it gets impossible
to write “about” anything “somewhere out there,” because
everything is continuously moving and changing, and also
“here.” We can’t set ourselves at the distance, while we are
in the same world we are researching (see Barad, 2007). We
are constructing and shaping the “here” as we write, it actu-
alizes as we write. In addition, all kinds of analysis are at risk
of becoming still pictures, still pictures, already gone and
old as being written about (see also Oksanen, 2004). Second,
it enables one to write and think about the different, becom-
ing, and always-changing conditions of possibilities for
“knowledge” production; thus, the different research com-
munities, seminars, conferences, friends, and families get
performed in the changing texts, or in the courage of produc-
ing different texts. I was not alone, but a moving, searching,
fumbling part of the different discursive societies. Third, it
allowed me to think about the conditions and contracts of
research writing as constructed too, and to perform “other-
wise” (with Butler, for example, 1990; as Holbrook, 2010,
see also Badley’s, 2011, critique on Holbrook’s ability
betraying). For me, illustrating and materializing—for me
writing is materializing—the social and material construc-
tion of knowledge have also meant writing with and in the
world, in the occasional, boring, anxious moments, in the
everyday life, pain, and joy, of a researcher. How does this
everything, which surrounds and entangles me, move and
produce my writing? So how does the writing become? Fifth
(or how many they already are, never mind), I see and think
writing as a material act (with Barad, 2007; Davies &
Gannon, 2012), whereby all the entities1 separated by lan-
guage are intertwined with meanings:
•• letters, most often black figures on most often white
paper
•• words made/assembled with letters—sometimes or
often they have relatively consistent
•• computers (own, borrowed, or company), on which
keyboards I move
•• my fingers with the muscles (and and and) of wrists,
arms, and shoulders (and and and)
•• my spine (and and and) to hold up my body
356 Qualitative Inquiry 22(5)

•• and and and with traces of otherness . . . Research/science and everything

•• my brain, my stomach (to breath until there), chairs,
tables, lamps, printers, papers, books, printed arti-
cles, houses, all different kinds of them, and and and
•• with which I write and which sometimes have their
own will (or thought or affect . . . )
Becoming Doctoral Thesis
To be with the one I love and to think of something else: this is
how I have my best ideas, how I best invent what is necessary
to my work. Likewise for the text: it produces, in me, the best
pleasure if it manages to make itself heard indirectly; if, reading
it, I am led to look up often, to listen to something else. I am not
necessarily captivated by the text of pleasure; it can be an act
that is slight, complex, tenuous, almost scatterbrained: a
sudden movement of the head like a bird who understands
nothing of what we hear, who hears what we do not understand.
(Barthes, 1975, pp. 24-25)
The doctoral thesis became with Patti Lather an “in-pro-
cess-work that produce[s] rather than protect[s]” and an
assemblage, which is based on “assort of etch-a-sketch ear-
lier writing that has been erased imperfectly before being
written on again” (Lather, 2007, p. x). The texts written in
different times got assembled together. With interruptions
and squirming like a snake, Lather (2007) describes it as “a
text that both interrupts itself and gathers up its interrup-
tions into its texture” (p. 4, quoting Derrida commenting on
Levinas in Bennington, 2000). Patti Lather’s (2007) central
argument (yes, she argues!—for me finding the will and
courage to argue at all has been a long way to go . . . ) is that
“there is plenty of future for feminist methodology if it can
continue to put such ‘post’ ideas to work in terms of what
research means and does” (p. x).
The doctoral thesis also became with Anne Reinertsen
(2007) and love:
This is a writing that is ad hoc, multiple, delineated,
de-authorized, active, incoherent or disconnected but inscribed
and anything connected with it not. Becoming and everything
and anything connected with it not. (Reinertsen, 2007, pp. 6-7)
Rather my ambition is to create a text that gives it back:
Evocative writing, writing as a method of inquiry into both
research and reform and an attempt, through playing, of
documenting becoming, but not as what is but a becoming of
practices that love other. Such writing is always new and can
never be copied. (Reinertsen, 2007, p. 21)
With Karen Barad (2007),
A performative understanding of discursive practices
challenges the representationalist belief in the power of words
to represent preexisting things. Unlike representationalism,
which positions us above or outside the world we allegedly
merely reflect on, a performative account insists on
understanding thinking, observing, and theorizing as practices
of engagement with, and as part of, the world in which we have
our being. (Barad 2007, p. 133, cursive hg.)
With Bronwyn Davies (2010),
An ethics based on immanence, where immanence means to
remain within. In a Deleuzian philosophy this does not mean
within the bounded self, but within life; not just human life, but
all life, organic and inorganic, which Deleuze refers to as
Being. (Davies 2010, p. 55)
With Rosi Braidotti (2011),
Nomadic philosophy is the discursive practice with the highest
degree of affinity to the mobility of intelligence: it is both
physical, material, and yet speculative and ethereal. (Braidotti
2011, p. 3)
Thinking, like breathing, is not held into the mold of linearity,
or the confines of the printed page, but it happens outside, out
of bounds, in webs of encounters with ideas, others, texts.
(Braidotti 2011, p. 233) 2

Porous and Moving: Writing Movements-Toward-Poems and Love Letters

Writing here (and there) and now, towards the not yet known
Fumbling towards the thoughts, which are just emerging,
creating a thought while writing
Emerging in relation to the just read and with-lived thoughts written by someone else
                    (theories)
Writing towards the questions, towards the next question and next and next
(writing as a methodology, Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005)

All the time writing towards a PhD thesis—and an/this “article”/piece of text
Becoming-a-fumbling-PhD-thesis all the time
Guttorm 357

. . . switching the row or the chapter when the thought brakes down . . .

Thinking while writing

Writing while thinking
The text emerging with the thought

Also lines of flight:

letting the digressions take the writing suddenly somewhere else
    (writing with the night, writing with the soughing leaves,
    writing with the child playing, writing with the washing machine)

Thinkfeelsensing
(I/she also would like to bring something else than just thinking to knowing)
that writing in a poetic form (or writing towards a poem) leaves space
for hesitation
for questions and questioning
for wondering
for resting
for failing
for starting again  
for inquiring again and again
for leaving the process/becoming of the becoming of the thought visible
(and not)

Writing with the body, writing with the aching shoulders, writing with scratching the chin
“language is in and of the body; always issuing from the body; being impeded by the body; affecting other bodies”
(MacLure, 2013, p. 663)
writing with/in the world:

maailma on yhtä me kaikki olemme yhtä samaa materiaa3

alma mater
stabat mater
olemme maailmassa
materiaa maassa ja maailmankaikkeudessa me pienet
ihmiset pikkuriikkiset materian kiteytymät ohikiitävässä ajassa
ihmettelemme, miksi olemme maailmassa miten maailma makaa miten
yhdessäolomme täällä rakentuu
tai miten kaukana tähdet ja miten aurinko toimii
nimesimme lehtivihreän, nimesimme kuukaudet, nimesimme
tähdet ja planeetat, nimesimme ja muokkasimme yhteiskunnan ja
yhteiskuntarakenteen
saman taivaan alla, saman planeetan, materian pinnalla
yhdessä massassa, maan vetovoimassa kiinni ollen
mikä onkaan pisin lentokoneella, entä ihmisvoimin
miten pitkään voi olla irti maan massasta. (Guttorm, 2014, p. 93)

Toward a Research Un/Done
Into an assemblage, where at least part of the expectations
on “research” and “new information” get betrayed. Into a
scribble (see Badley, 2011), a becoming-minotarian-text?
Into an assemblage, where she fumbles and remains asking,
whether she can write that way. Into an assemblage, into a
cluster of heterogenic texts, into a dissertation thesis, which
gets/got published as uncompleted, in the middle of a pro-
cess, in the midstream.
Toward something, which she never could imagine,4
while beginning the PhD. In the in Finnish written thesis the
(writer-)I “bring(s) you through the streets of London” /
Oxford / Manchester / Champaign–Urbana (see also
358
Guttorm, 2012) and back to Helsinki (or where ever you/s/
he read(s) it). It is not following the structure or content or
ways of argumentation that the reader may be used to or that
s/he may expect. The writing takes the poststructural theo-
ries and writings as its own, both implicitly and sometimes,
as usual in scientific writing, also explicitly.
The dissertation has four (or five) parts:
First part5 works as some kinds of openings, or “coming
to writing” (Davies, 2000), where she writes about some of
the poststructural theories and concepts, with which the
research/report/ representation (and not, but writing)
finally becomes possible to get started. The writing thus
starts somewhere in the middle of the process, where she
finds the flows and concepts, which inspire her thinking (or
this molecular in the stream of Life) to creativity and
performativity.
The second part works as an era of coming to not-know-
ing, where she “shows” (or erases imperfectly) some texts/
writing spaces (1. about craft and gender, her “original”
research theme, and ethnography, 2. around representation
crisis and the multiple voices in/and her as a craft teacher
and an ethnographer, 3. one discourse analytic article manu-
script on the teacher journals and their craft discourses, 4. a
collection of poems written with the craft education lessons
data, and 5. a collection of texts written in her research
diary, filled with anxiety about the sticky and striated
research writing practices) written before the “turn” or
“swing,” before the joy of finding the Finnish translations
of the “original” poststructural French philosophies/theo-
ries/writings (see Guttorm, 2012). Some of these texts get
performed side by side, while unexpected encounters and
connections become possible.
In the third part, she writes and shows the flow of ques-
tions in the process with some more readings and writings
with the poststructural texts. All the way long she’s asking,
what is happening (t)here. The questions, most often dated
and verbatim, or fixed a little, flow in a form of “move-
ments-toward-poems” and “thinkings-aloud” on the
reverse, and the reading-writings on the right side of the
spread. The reading-writings are not round-ups or summa-
ries or definitions on, for example, Derrida’s deconstruc-
tion (he doesn’t write them either . . . ), but writing while
reading theory, often on the borders of her “understanding”
(that’s why she became so happy, when Deleuze,
1990/1995, p. 8, wrote, that it’s not needed to “understand”
any meaning, just see, how a concept could work), or won-
dering or rejoicing “aloud.” Also, these writings (like most
of the others) get written in a moment, or on a slippery
plane of immanence, “on an immanent plane of composi-
tion and discarding the self-conscious ‘I’” (Davies, 2009,
p. 198), the self-and-aim-conscious researcher, as throwing
“oneself” to the lines of flights of associations, among
other things. In many diary-writings in this part, especially
while coming nearer to the idea of the “end product” of the
Qualitative Inquiry 22(5)
process, an “assemblage-assemblage,” she asks aloud,
whether that/this writing really suits to a PhD thesis . . .
Bliss of Writing: Love Letters and Manifestos
The dissertation ends within the bliss of writing (with
Barthes, 1975) where she writes love letters to the pupils
and teachers she had met/“observed”/interviewed in two
schools. She had been participating lessons in two primary
schools and had some research questions, which later on
had become impossible and unimportant to answer (see also
Guttorm, 2012). She had encountered the pupils and the
teachers, they became part of her life, she became part of
their life—they had encountered, became each other for a
short time.
Instead of knowing over, on, or about them, “there is
nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to inter-
pret”6 (Deleuze, 1990/1995, p. 8), she ends up writing love
letters to her research participants.
Something must always remind us of something else, make us
think of something else. (Deleuze & Parnet, 1977/2002, p. 46)
One only writes through love, all writing is a love-letter: the
literature-Real. (Deleuze & Parnet, 1977/2002, p. 51)
To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point
where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We
are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been
aided, inspired, multiplied. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/2004,
pp. 3-4)
Write! What? Take to the wind, take to writing, form one body
with letters. Live! Risk: those who risk nothing gain nothing,
risk and you no longer risk anything. (Cixous, 1997-1989/1991,
p. 41)
With these (and other) affected and affecting quotes, she
writes letters to the pupils and teachers, writes about the
time she’d been there, writes (about) how long ago it was,
writes (about) her(self) asking difficult questions, not
knowing what to do with the videos . . . At the end, she also
writes and wishes every nice and beautiful things for the
future, for the coming time. (As I mentioned, the coming to
the writing of the letters had taken such a long time, that the
pupils already had flown out of the elementary school, also
out of high school, if been there. So I could not reach them,
Those Real Pupils, whom I wrote them to, but I hope that
some of them find them sometime, and if not, some other
pupils sometime and somewhere researched can read . . .
The teachers instead I could reach, and they thanked for the
letters and greeted for the PhD. One of the teachers wrote a
longer letter and thanked for a supportive reading and
rejoiced about that I had not “deboned the interview com-
ments so thoroughly; maybe it really would not have been
Guttorm
very justifiable, when everything happened so in the middle
of rush and everyday work.” Also, she wished me success in
the future and signed the letter with the anonymity name I
had given her. An encounter.)
She also writes one love letter to other researchers:
This became a long love letter, dear academics, but that’s
something we are used with the PhD reports, aren’t we?
I love you, I really do.
We are alive.
You are living you.
You.
Let’s take that opportunity and that responsibility for meet-
ing the universe halfway (Barad, 2007), and doing neo-mor-
ally lasting choices and moves and de- and reconstructions.
Hillevi Lenz Taguchi (2013,) writes that we should
deterritorialize qualitative inquiry’s habitual ways of think-
ing and practicing for new and different researcher practices
and subjectivities to emerge, and continues,
This is not something that can be done only once, but it has to
be done over and over again, in an ongoing flow of
differentiation. Our research practices can never be fixed, but
must be invented again and again. (p. 715)
With Braidotti (2011) and nomadic theory and nomadic
writing, and Barad (2007) and intra-action with and in the
world, she writes a little manifesto on writing from within
“my”/your moving space:
(I) write (and produce) a positive, provocative difference
(I) write a difference without an identity and confrontation
(I) write and inquire, not-answer, but experiment
(I) write as dedicatedly incompetent, incompetently
(I) write as a manifesto of fragility and naivety (Cixous [about
and with Derrida], 2008, p. 173)
(I) write in zones of uncomfortable
(I) write and search for other ways of expression and other
phrase structures (Guttorm, 2014, p. 174, translations from
Finnish to English, hg)
At the end, she composes some kind of “coming together,”
some writing-movement toward and with the connections
They/I/we want that a dissertation has a final discussion, some kind of recapitulation
or maybe I wouldn’t like to have it anymore
“there’s no beginning, nor an end, in a rhizome”—
Or, is a book still that kind of entity, where there is an end and the last pages at the end,
the last                     sentences
you can’t leave the last sentences unwritten
Writing and thinking (willing to write so that there’s no individual agent)
where there is no more difference between the thinking, the thought and the thinker
where willing to perform movement and intra-action,
359
and intra-actions, for example, after having found Gannon’s
(2006) article on poststructural autoethnography, which she
somehow recognized she had been doing:
An argument and a deconstruction of an argument.
An enacting argument.
Not knowing “as something,” but knowing/seeing/think-
ing/tickling more (or/in less) (?).
Knowing about the limitations of our knowing.
Creating (not-)knowing or knowing otherwise, here, for
a fleeting moment, while waiting for the (next)
not-yet-known.
A molecular (a knot) in the rhizome of (be)coming writ-
ings (with/in educational/human research).
Just a. Or maybe d. Or p.
So sure in this unsureness. So sure with Susanne Gannon
(2006):
Autoethnographic writing within a poststructuralist frame
leans toward the ancient imperative to care for the self in a
constant practice of reflexive attention to the past, present,
and future moments of subjectification within complex and
contradictory discursive arenas. Autoethnographic
performance texts are dialogic rather than self-contained. . . .
Poststructural autoethnography would emphasize
discontinuities, search for disjunctures and jarring moments.
It would commit to “personal writing that is scandalous,
excessive and leaky . . . based in lack and ruin rather than
plenitude” (Lather, 2000, p. 22) and eschew seamless linear
stories of coming to “know” our hidden [researcher, adds hg]
selves. (p. 480)
Or, waiting for . . . [Godot (Beckett, 1984)] . . . a research
that never (and all the time) comes . . . The/a question
remains (and changes): How can research (writing) be
thought and materialized?
[W]hat would be made possible if we were to think research
otherwise, as a space surprised by difference into the
performance of practices of not-knowing? (Lather, 2009,
p. 18)
No, no, no, a thesis could not end with/in the bliss of
writing. It is/was a PhD thesis, and at the end, there has/had
to be a discussion, a recapitulation, kind of pulling (the
threads) together, as we say in Finnish.
360 Qualitative Inquiry 22(5)

contingency, line of flight,

or maybe also some “safe plot of land,” a plane,
from where to leap to the next unpredictable directions,
not necessarily this “me” here, maybe “you,” “s/he”

And also here, again, writing with the latest read, or still in the middle of reading, writing with
Bronwyn Davies (2011):
how could we at the university open us for [O]ther(s) and possibilities to become always-different,
“greet the other,” always different, “both human and not-human, organic and inorganic, not in
categorical or hierarchical terms, but with love.” (p. 40)
(Guttorm, 2014, p. 180, trans. hg)

That writing in verse/poetic form manages to apply the ongoing movement of the events without
grasping them
And that always only a selected part of the research gets illustrated in the report and that the choices
can also be made differently
And that the research becomes in intra-action with the research communities, read, and countless
(in Finnish also “unread”) books, animals, artifacts, e.g. writing materials
And that the texts always fail or never reach reality in its entirety, while at the same time they are
materials that can touch and participate in creating the world (Guttorm, 2014, abstract)

And that:
(Guttorm, 2014, p. 197, transl. hg)
like the love letters either—they are either w o r k i n g o r n o t”
everything,
and that we don’t need to write, to illustrate, or to summarize, not to mention,
“And that love, or should we say dignity, remains, when knowing ends
so much . . . ”
“The ever more differentiating expertise thinking prevents thinking. The experts know
“present.” (Spivak, 1976, p. xxxii)
philosopher, by an act of “forgetting” that knowledge, wins himself a
and that conceptions of a unified present are merely an interpretation, the
“Knowing” that there is nowhere an isolatable unit, not even an atomistic one,
Guttorm
Post Scriptum, Cum Scriptum, (Who
Is Writing?)
In conventional research, we are trained to make choices
and argue for them. So we have to represent ourselves as
autonomic, intentional, and reflective, something the post-
structural theories have been deconstructing for decades
(see St. Pierre, 2000, 2004). Often, it also means distanc-
ing oneself from the data, from the researched phenome-
non, as like the researcher could be(come) separate from
the world s/he is researching. So, how can the researcher-
subject get performed, as a liberal humanist subject-of-
will or a poststructural subject-of-thought (see Davies &
Gannon, 2012)? Or, as a subject-of-thought-and-affect?
The conceptual shift, from the subject-of-will to the subject-of-
thought, is a shift away from will, intentionality and repetition,
toward receptiveness to the not-yet-known (of itself and the
other), an toward emergent possibilities of thought and being .
. . It is not enough to decide to be a subject-of-thought; one has
to struggle against oneself, against the normative force on
language and everyday practice. It is a continuous struggle.
(Davies, 2010, p. 58)
I and s/he, writer and author, who is she, who is writing (t)
here, who has been writing (t)here? “Who am I to know/
argue from outside, from a distance,” this question turned
through undoing the subject (with St. Pierre, 2004) to a
variety of questions on who is writing, is it “me,” is it s/he,
we, society, culture, the norms, the language, the lines of
flight (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/2004), the rules of the
discursive formation (Foucault, 2010) of science. Or is it
the book who is writing me/her, as Barad (2007) writes,
“ . . . writing is not a unidirectional practice of creation
that flows from author to page, but rather the practice of
writing is an iterative and mutually constitutive working
out, and reworking, of ‘book’ and ‘author’ . . . ” (p. x)? Is
it the light coming from the candle, is it these letters on the
keyboard, the letters we can use for creating words and
sentences, is it this silent moment, when the kids are still
at their friends, isn’t it the haecceity, the thisness of this
always-unique moment, now already gone? And now here
again. Where is the subject, where is the aiming individ-
ual? Yes, “I” was there—“I,” the writer, named this last
chapter too; it was me who aimed to write after and with
the writing. “I” wanted to take the theme “subject” up,
although I don’t know yet/ever what to think about it.
(Also in the public defense the opponent, Professor Juha
Varto, asked me three times, why the subject/ivity of the
researcher is, or should be, a problem. I stumbled there
like here and now.) (And there with I’ll continue with the
post doc too, although “I” don’t know what and how to do
next. “It’s not easy to do what is not easy to do” (Guttorm
et al., 2015).) The subject is haunting.
361
And the big, risky, question is the one that enables all the rest.
If we give up “human” as separate from non-human, how do
we exist? Can there be there an instituting “I” left to inquire, to
know? Dare we give up that “I,” that fiction—the doer before
the deed? How are we anyway in entanglement? How might
we become in becoming? Isn’t this question affirmative?
Experimental? Ethical? Insistent? Are we willing to take on
this question that is so hard to think but that might enable
different lives? (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013, p. 631)
This is also a small response, a thinking with Graham
Badley’s (2014) kind and challenging response to my ear-
lier article (Guttorm, 2012), where Badley asked and won-
dered, why I talked about “becoming” (a) paper/presentation/
article—also in this article, I talk about “becoming (a) dis-
sertation” and other becomings—isn’t it a human act to
write an article, asks he. Yes, and not only. This is not made
by me and/or other humans, other texts from other authors,
but in an assemblage, in an entanglement with the non-
humans (and the universe, all the milliards of years old
atoms in us and all) too. It’s not me: Writing becomes pos-
sible (and impossible) in a specific assemblage. It’s not me,
not an active human act: The words flow and turn around
there somewhere in my brain—is it “my” brain, do I own it?
Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) write, “It’s the brain that
thinks and not man—the latter being only a cerebral crystal-
lization” (p. 210). And, “It is the brain that says I, but I is an
other” (p. 211). (And “my” brain, the brain in “me,” (in)
“the other,” struggles to think education, research, (post)
human, and subjectivity, again and again, with those quotes
differently.)
The “I” who writes a Deleuzian-inspired play [isn’t an article
also a play, hg] is not the accomplished object of reflection with
an identity to reveal in the writing, but a place where thoughts
can emerge. The writing itself thus opens the writer to becoming
what is not yet known and to what can never be contained in
words, or known completely. (Davies, 2009, p. 198)
And/or, what is research? Or, what is the end product of a
research process? Knowledge? Information? “A research-
er’s task is to produce new information.” Can the end prod-
uct be thoughts, thinking aloud? Remaining asking? The
process (not the whole, or any authentic, but parts) of com-
ing to knowing, not-knowing, and writing? Is it interesting
or necessary to hear about the process at all? Does the pro-
cess exclude the reader? Especially when there is no “pro-
cess” in a conventional way of thinking at all, no beginning,
no end?
And what would be the implications to educators, other
researchers, asks a reviewer and the editor. Thinking aloud,
thinking aloud through the rhizomes of both sticky and slip-
pery threads? Light-arguing, light-writing, light-knowing,
writing and talking with questions, with wondering and
362
wandering. What would those make possible in an encoun-
ter between students and teachers, between researchers and
researched, or between researchers? Couldn’t that leave
space for thinking along, for different subjects-of-thought
to emerge? I’m not sure whether a perfectly finished and
argued knowledge or opinion can always do it.
Could it also enhance appreciating the researched, when
not awaiting them to do something differently; but being the
“first” oneself (and never first), who does differently, says or
writes something unexpected, meets the researched halfway,
meets the universe halfway, takes the moving, uncertain
and becoming (dis)position—could that invite others to the
halfway too? “The world and its possibilities for becoming
are remade with each moment” (Barad, 2007, p. 396). What
all could become possible? Isn’t ethicality space and invita-
tion for something unexpected, fumbling, uncertain, and
unfinished—thoughts, ideas, acts, movements—to come?
A delicate tissue of ethicality runs through the marrow of
being. There is no getting away from ethics—mattering is an
integral part of the ontology of the world in its dynamic
presencing. Not even a moment exists on its own, “this” and
“that,” “here” and “now,” don’t preexist what happens but
come alive with each meeting. The world and its possibilities
for becoming are remade with each moment—Meeting each
moment, being alive to the possibilities of becoming, is an
ethical call, an invitation that is written into the very matter of
all being and becoming. We need to meet the universe halfway,
to take the responsibility for the role that we play in the world’s
differential becoming. (Barad, 2007, p. 396)
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 financial support for the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article from Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth
Foundation.
Notes
1. Oh, Barad and Deleuze (and others), as there is no separated
subject, no separated entity, which would reduce to an indi-
vidual self or one individual life, there is neither any other
separated entity, but the “being” of language is persistent (or
unrelenting; Foucault, 2010, p. 357). With language we sepa-
rate things to separated entities, with language we do it. And
with the holes between the words.
2. And there, outside the text, it also encounters the resis-
tances and fears and mourning. Differences can make the
examiners and gate keepers think: “What if . . . How can we
anymore recognize, and assess, and know . . . ?” Deleuze
(1967/2004) writes:
Qualitative Inquiry 22(5)
“Something in the world forces us to think. This something
is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental
encounter. It may be grasped in a range of affective tones:
wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its
primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed.” And
“that which can only be sensed moves the soul, ‘perplexes’
it—in other words, forces it to pose a problem: As though
the object of encounter, the sign, were the bearer of a
problem—as though it were a problem” (Deleuze,
1968/2004, p. 176).
3. Cixous (1997-1989/1991) writes and I think this text lived in
me—maybe my movement-toward-a-poem is some kind of
translation, or a metaphorical, not verbatim, transfer/becom-
ing of this: “We have forgotten that the world is there prior
to us. We have forgotten how things have preceded us, how
mountains grew up before our gaze existed, we forget how
plants are called before we think to call them and recognize
them, we have forgotten that it is plants that call us, when
we think about calling them, that come to meet our bodies in
blossom” (p. 65).
4. “I” could, says and smiles one of the author-ly (and/or non-
authoritative) voices.
5. All of the parts consist of parallel texts, split texts, up there
and down here, in footnotes . . . And both here and there the
researcher self, subject-of-thought-and-affect leaks to and
disrupts the comfort of the text.
6. I think this quote also illustrates this “article”—“I” don’t
explain all the choices, all the becomings(-to-writing-this-
or-that-way-or-with-these-or-those-always-different-words-
and-concepts-and-tenses-and-so). There’s nothing to explain,
nothing to understand, nothing to interpret.
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Author Biography
Hanna Ellen Guttorm has completed her PhD in education in
2014 and after that worked as a post doc at the Agora for the Study
Qualitative Inquiry 22(5)
of Social Justice & Equality in Education, University of Helsinki,
Finland. She has published in Qualitative Inquiry and Inter-
national Review of Qualitative Research on (post) qualitative
epistemology and research writing inspired by post structural and
new materialist theories, both single-authored and joint-authored.
Currently she works as an associate professor in education in
Sámi teacher training in Sámi University College, Kautokeino,
Norway. She is interested in equality and diversity both in
between human and across human-nature-divide in indigenous
living and education. Additionally the experiments towards
different/becoming/minotarian (post qualitative) research writing,
both collaboratively and (never) alone, bring her research energy
and joy.