Between-ing: Collaborative writing and the unfoldings of relational space

In conversation with Claire Parnet, Deleuze is quoted as saying, “(w)e were only two, but what was important for us was less our working together than this strange fact of working between the two of us”. Deleuze’s concept of ‘between-the-two’ has been used by ‘Gale and Wyatt’, first, as the title of their first book written together and then, increasingly, discursively perhaps, as a leitmotif for the collaborative writing with which they have engaged ‘between the two’ of them and also in collaboration with others. The persistence and longevity of this usage has led to the possibility that an ‘image of thought’ has been brought to life which is constitutive of the ‘us’ rather than the ‘betweened’. In this, have ‘Gale and Wyatt’ continued to swim in the calm, unquestioning and welcoming waters of qualitative inquiry? Have they, in so doing, avoided those eddies, swirls, rip currents and deep, dark waters of post qualitative inquiry that might be working to pull them out into the turbulent seas of free and wild concept making where, in becoming, their writing might move away from the applications and representations of simply human centric thought and action and be of a more immanent doing.

In this article ‘Gale and Wyatt’ address their alertness to the doing of this image of thought. They ask, does their collaborative writing rest more on the ‘two’ of them, the people doing the writing, than on the ‘between’ that talks more the materiality of relational space(s) unfolding amidst them? In this paper, they affirmatively critique this possibility. They ask provocative questions that concern them: Between the two? What is that? What is there? What about the ‘us’ that is betweened? How does this betweening work? How does betweening spatialise and actualise? What does this betweening do? Is the writing of an immanent ‘between the two’ plausible or ever possible? Only two?