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The Birth of Mr. Messy: Post-Qualitative Inquiry, Rhizoanalysis and Psychogeography

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Mental Health and Wellbeing in the Anthropocene

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Abstract

This chapter explores creative and more radical alternatives to inquiry. It invites the reader to think with post-qualitative inquiry, using psychogeography, rhizoanalysis and verbatim theatre to map the temporal assemblages of people/environments, in order to explore mental health and wellbeing as a distributed process. Post-qualitative inquiry is suggested as a suitable (non-)methodology to conduct research that has a posthuman foundation and is especially significant due to its non-dualistic approach to mental health and wellbeing.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A ‘method assemblage’ is an ‘adhoc contingency of a collage’ (Law, 2004, p. 41).

  2. 2.

    Transcendental empiricism is not ‘an abstract, supplementary framework into which immanence can be fitted; it is not ‘the transcendent’ (Deleuze 2001, p. 26)’ (Coleman & Ringrose, 2013, p. 10). Instead, Deleuze (2001) describes it as ‘a haecceity no longer of individuation but of singularisation: a life of pure immanence’ (p. 29), allowing for the possibility of an ethics of immanence regarding the construction of a self.

  3. 3.

    Deleuze and Guattari (2004) use the metaphor of the face to explain their view of signification and subjectification. They describe faciality as the substance of expression, the icon proper to the signifying regime, what gives the signifier substance fuelling interpretation; ‘look, his expression changed. The signifier is always facialized’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. 127).

  4. 4.

    Transgression is an act that disrupts traditional codes of conduct and overlaps boundaries unconformably. St. Pierre (1997) has previously used ‘transgressive data’ (emotional, dream, sensual and response data) to ‘shift the epistemologies that define the possibilities of qualitative research’ (St. Pierre, 1997, p. 175) and Eagleton (1981) highlighted its radical potential to counter, criticise, disrupt and denaturalise the existing social order (cited in O’Neill & Seal, 2012).

  5. 5.

    Although Barad’s and Deleuze’s ontologies have been criticised as being incompatible and incommensurable due to fundamental differences between Deleuze’s immanent and Barad’s transcendent thinking (see Hein, 2015), I find them both extremely useful in their performativity.

  6. 6.

    Decalcomania is an artistic/decorative process of transfer from prints or engravings to pottery or glass. Deleuze and Guattari (2004) used this concept to highlight the arborescent tracings of representational thought/practice rather than the cartographic mapping of novel lines of flight (what I might call a tatau).

  7. 7.

    Hauntology is a Derridean term denoting the lost futures of modernity (Fisher, 2014) and an ontological spatiotemporal disjunction: a time out of joint (Derrida, 1994).

  8. 8.

    The concept schizoanalysis ‘does not promote mental illness; rather, it is used as a way of offering up the possibility of multiple voices and alternative worldviews, among other factors’ (Richardson, 2015c, p. 192).

  9. 9.

    That is, by presuming ‘social’ environments to be the sole domain of humans.

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  1. Science, Natural Resources and Outdoor Studies, University of Cumbria, Ambleside, Cumbria, UK

    Jamie Mcphie

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Mcphie, J. (2019). The Birth of Mr. Messy: Post-Qualitative Inquiry, Rhizoanalysis and Psychogeography. In: Mental Health and Wellbeing in the Anthropocene. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3326-2_4

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