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International Journal of Social Research Methodology
ISSN: 1364-5579 (Print) 1464-5300 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tsrm20
New materialist social inquiry: designs, methods
and the research-assemblage
Nick J. Fox & Pam Alldred
To cite this article: Nick J. Fox & Pam Alldred (2015) New materialist social inquiry: designs,
methods and the research-assemblage, International Journal of Social Research Methodology,
18:4, 399-414, DOI: 10.1080/13645579.2014.921458
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2014.921458
© 2014 The Author(s). Published by
Routledge
Published online: 06 Jun 2014.
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New materialist social inquiry: designs, methods and the
research-assemblage
Nick J. Fox
a
* and Pam Alldred
b
a
ScHARR, University of Sheffield, 30 Regent St, Sheffield S1 4DA, UK;
b
Division of Social
Work, Centre for Youth Work Studies, Brunel University, Uxbridge UB8 3PH, UK
(Received 22 October 2013; accepted 2 May 2014)
This paper discusses issues of research design and methods in new materialist
social inquiry, an approach that is attracting increasing interest across the social
sciences as an alternative to either realist or constructionist ontologies. New
materialism de-privileges human agency, focusing instead upon how assem-
blages of the animate and inanimate together produce the world, with fundamen-
tal implications for social inquiry methodology and methods. Key to our
exploration is the materialist notion of a ‘research-assemblage’ comprising
researcher, data, methods and contexts. We use this understanding first to explore
the micropolitics of the research process, and then – along with a review of 30
recent empirical studies – to establish a framework for materialist social inquiry
methodology and methods. We discuss the epistemological consequences of
adopting a materialist ontology.
Keywords: assemblage; Deleuze and Guattari; methodology; new materialism;
ontology; research-assemblage; social inquiry
Introduction
‘New’ (or ‘neo’) materialism has emerged over the past 20 years as an approach
concerned fundamentally with the material workings of power, but focused firmly
upon social production rather than social construction (Coole & Frost,
2010, p. 7).
Applied to empirical research, it radically extends traditional materialist analysis
beyond traditional concerns with structural and ‘macro’ level social phenomena
(van der Tuin & Dolphijn,
2010, p. 159), addressing issues of how desires, feelings
and meanings also contribute to social production (Braidotti,
2000, p. 159; DeLanda,
2006, p. 5). New materialist ontology breaks through ‘the mind-matter and culture-
nature divides of transcendental humanist thought’ (van der Tuin & Dolphijn,
2010,
p. 155), and is consequently also transversal to a range of social theory dualisms
such as structure/agency, reason/emotion, human/non-human, animate/inanimate and
inside/outside. It supplies a conception of agency not tied to human action, shifting
the focus for social inquiry from an approach predicated upon humans and their
bodies, examining instead how relational networks or assemblages of animate and
inanimate affect and are affected (DeLanda,
2006, p. 4; Mulcahy, 2012, p. 10;
Youdell & Armstrong,
2011, p. 145).
*Corresponding author. Email: n.j.fox@sheffield.ac.uk
© 2014 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis.
This is an Open Access article. Non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original
work is properly attributed, cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way, is permitted. The moral rights of
the named author(s) have been asserted.
International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 2015
Vol. 18, No. 4, 399–414, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2014.921458
These moves pose fundamental questions about how research should be con-
ducted within a new materialist paradigm, and what kinds of data should be collected
and analysed. This paper addresses the methodological challenges facing those who
wish to apply new materialist ontology to social research. Our point of entry is by
considering research as assemblage, a key concept in the materialist ontology that we
discuss in the first part of the paper. The research-assemblage (Fox & Alldred,
2013;
Coleman & Ringrose,
2013, p. 17; Masny, 2013, p. 340) comprises the bodies, things
and abstractions that get caught up in social inquiry, including the events that are stud-
ied, the tools, models and precepts of research, and the researchers. In conjunction
with a review of 30 empirical studies using new materialist ontology, this analysis
suggests principles for new materialist research designs and methods.
New materialism and the ontology of the social
There has been a significant materialist thread throughout the history of empirical
social inquiry, for instance, in Marxist and structuralist sociology, which emphasised
the contribution to the social world of forces such as the economic system, industri-
alisation, bureaucracy and governance (Giddens,
1981, pp. 53–55), and in structural-
ist anthropology (Levi-Strauss,
1986, p. 10). These perspectives were frequently
criticised as determinist, leading to a humanistic reaction that sought to more fully
account for the part that human beings play in producing and reproducing reality
(Berger & Luckmann,
1971, p. 208; Giddens, 1987, p. 215), although this humanist
move has in turn kindled doubts over the assumptions underpinning anthropocentric
social inquiry (Tamboukou,
2003, p. 211), and the culture/nature dualism it evokes
(Barad,
1997; Clough, 2003; Thacker, 2005).
The ‘new’ materialisms that have emerged in reaction to humanist social science
have drawn together bizarrely disparate strands, including actor-network theory, arti-
ficial intelligence, biophilosophy, evolutionary theory, feminism, neuroscience, post-
humanism, queer theory, quantum physics and Spinozist monism (Ansell Pearson,
1999; Barad, 1997; Braidotti, 2006, 2013; Clough, 2008; Coole & Frost, 2010;
Grosz,
1994; Haraway, 1997; Latour, 2005; Massumi, 1996; Thacker, 2005). These
threads have in common that this is not a return to an earlier reductionist material-
ism that focused only upon macro structures and super-structures, but a project that
foregrounds an appreciation of just what it means to exist as a material individual with
biological needs yet inhabiting a world of natural and artificial objects, well-honed
micro-powers of governmentality, but no less compelling effects of international eco-
nomic structures. (Coole & Frost,
2010, p. 27)
As Braidotti (2013, p. 3) notes, the eclecticism in new materialism dissolves bound-
aries between the natural and the cultural, mind and matter, while for Coole and
Frost (
2010, pp. 27–28) materiality is plural, open, complex, uneven and contingent:
new materialist ontologies ‘understand materiality in a relational, emergent sense’
(ibid., p. 29), with a focus that extends from globalisation to issues of identity.
Barad’s(
1997, p. 181) ‘agential realism’ similarly dissolves the distinction between
nature and culture, rejecting an opposition found in both realist and idealist ontology
when she states that ‘constructedness does not deny materiality’. Matter is not inert,
nor simply the background for human activity, but ‘is conceptualised as agentic’,
with multiple non-human as well as human sources of agency with capacities to
affect (Taylor & Ivinson,
2013, p. 666).
400 N.J. Fox and P. Alldred
In this paper, we have chosen to focus on DeleuzoGuattarian ontology,
1
because
of its empirical focus on processes and interactions (Deleuze & Guattari,
1984,
p. 3), its nomadic politics and ethics of becoming rather than being (Braidotti,
2006,
p. 14; Conley,
1990), and its methodological capacity to move beyond structure/
agency and culture/nature dualisms (DeLanda,
2006; van der Tuin & Dolphijn,
2010, p. 154). These features have given it a significant role in the emergence of
new materialism (henceforth in this paper: ‘materialism’), with many scholars and
most papers in our review of materialist research studies explicitly referencing
DeleuzoGuattarian concepts, ontology or ethico-political orientation.
A few paragraphs are needed to summarise this ontology. Firstly, it shifts from
conceptions of objects and bodies as occupying distinct and delimited spaces, and
instead sees human bodies and all other material, social and abstract entities as rela-
tional, having no ontological status or integrity other than that produced through
their relationship to other similarly contingent and ephemeral bodies, things and
ideas (Deleuze,
1988, p. 123; Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 261). Assemblages
(Deleuze & Guattari,
1988, p. 88) of relations develop in unpredictable ways around
actions and events, ‘in a kind of chaotic network of habitual and non-habitual con-
nections, always in flux, always reassembling in different ways’ (Potts,
2004, p. 19),
and importantly, operate as ‘machines’ (Deleuze & Guattari,
1988, p. 4; Guattari,
1995a, p. 35) that do something, produce something. Assemblages develop at sub-
personal, interactional or macro social levels (DeLanda,
2006, p. 5), and have an
existence independent of human bodies (Ansell Pearson,
1999, pp. 157–159; ibid.,
p. 40).
The second move is to replace the conventional conception of human agency
with the Spinozist notion of affect (Deleuze,
1988, p. 101), meaning simply the
capacity to affect or be affected. In an assemblage, there is no ‘subject’ and no
‘object’, and no single element possesses agency (Anderson,
2010, p. 736). Rather,
an affect is a ‘becoming’ (Deleuze & Guattari,
1988, p. 256) that represents a
change of state or capacities of an entity (Massumi,
1988, p. xvi): this change may
be physical, psychological, emotional or social. Affects produce further affective
capacities within assemblages (Deleuze & Guattari,
1988, p. 400); and because one
affect can produce more than one capacity, social production is not linear, but ‘ rhizo-
mic’ (ibid., p. 7), a branching, reversing, coalescing and rupturing flow. Thus, for
example, a sexual desire is an affect that may have multiple an unanticipated effects
on bodies, resources, interactions and even social institutions such as monogamy.
Finally, assemblages can be seen as ‘territories’ (Guattari,
1995a, p. 28), pro-
duced and disputed by the affects between relations. Affective flows within assem-
blages render them constantly in flux, with territorialising flows stabilising an
assemblage, while others de-stabilise or de-territorialise it (Deleuze & Guattari,
1988, pp. 88–89), sometimes leading to dis-assembly and ‘lines of flight’ by constit-
uent elements (Ansell Pearson,
1999, p. 172). These territorialisations and de-
territorialisations are the means by which lives, societies and history unfold, ‘in a
world which is constantly becoming’ (Thrift,
2004, p. 61).
Materialism and social inquiry
We turn now to the implications of this materialist ontology of assemblage, affect
and territorialisation for social inquiry, and the methodological and ethico-political
challenges it produces.
International Journal of Social Research Methodology 401
First, with the unit of analysis firmly shifted from human agents to the assem-
blage, the concern is no longer with what bodies or things or social institutions are,
but with the capacities for action, interaction, feeling and desire produced in bodies
or groups of bodies by affective flows (Deleuze,
1988, p. 127). Social inquiry must
remake its vocabulary to reflect this shift from agency to affect, and adapt its meth-
ods to attend to affective flows and the capacities they produce. The tools of inter-
pretive research such as interviews or diary and narrative accounts, which
conventionally attend to human actions, experiences and reflections, must be turned
decisively to efforts to disclose the relations within assemblages, and the kinds of
affective flows that occur between these relations (Fox & Ward,
2008b, p. 1013;
Juelskjaer,
2013, p. 759; Renold & Mellor, 2013, p. 26).
Second, the processual character of assemblages undermines any conception of a
determining social structure that shapes bodies or subjectivities. Both the exercise of
power or control and the capacity to resist such power and control must be explored
as socially and spatiotemporally specific occurrences within continual and continu-
ous flows of affect in assemblages (Buchanan,
2008, pp. 16–17). An important dis-
tinction may be made in terms of what we here call ‘aggregative’ and ‘singular’
affects,
2
and the capacities they produce in bodies and assemblages. Aggregative
affects (such as a sexual code of conduct) assemble and systematise bodies and
things into collectivities, smooth out differences and divergences to generate classifi-
catory concepts such as gender and race; and underpin broad social and cultural for-
mations such as patriarchy, nationalism and heteronormativity (Clough,
2008,p.2;
DeLanda
2006, p. 72; Deleuze & Guattari, 1984, pp. 286–288). By contrast, singu-
lar affects (for instance, a caress during a sexual encounter, or a kind word from a
stranger) possess no aggregative capacity, and on occasions may de-territorialise and
fragment assemblages, producing ‘lines of flight’ away from stable or organised for-
mations or classifications.
Third, the dissolution of both agency and structure means that the relations in
assemblages cut across a material/cultural dualism (Barad,
1997, p. 180), and conse-
quently, across micro, meso and macro levels of analysis (Taylor & Ivinson,
2013,
p. 668). There is nothing to prevent a relation conventionally thought of as ‘micro’
(e.g. a consumer transaction) and a ‘macro’ relation (e.g. a nation-state) to be drawn
into assemblage by an affective flow; consequently, an assemblage may contain dis-
parate elements from these different levels. For instance, Fox and Ward’s(
2008a)
study of the pharmaceuticalisation of erectile dysfunction suggested an assemblage
that incorporated the sexual performance of men and the financial performance of
global pharmaceutical companies. Social inquiry must be open to the possibility that
assemblages comprise elements from these different ‘levels’ or orders of magnitude,
and that the affective flows between these elements are rhizomic rather than either
‘top-down’ or ‘bottom-up’.
Fourth, this is a dynamic materiality, filled with affects, forces and desires, flows
and intensities, assemblings and dis-aggregations, territorialisation and de-territoriali-
sation, of becoming rather than being (Deleuze & Guattari,
1988, p. 275). Though
the ‘macro-politics’ of Deleuze and Guattari’s work is exposed most floridly in their
polemics against capitalism, psychoanalysis and familialism/Oedipus in Anti-
Oedipus (Deleuze & Guattari,
1984), and more broadly in antagonism to ‘state’
forms of science, art and philosophy (Deleuze & Guattari,
1988, p. 109, 376), the
foundation for this stance (and its utility in social inquiry) must be sought at a
micropolitical level. Power resides in the affective flows between relations in
402 N.J. Fox and P. Alldred