Voice in Qualitative Inquiry

Challenging conventional, interpretive, and critical conceptions in qualitative research

Alecia Y Jackson, Lisa A Mazzei

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134107902
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Voice in Qualitative Inquiry is a critical response to conventional, interpretive, and critical conceptions of voice in qualitative inquiry. A select group of contributors focus collectively on the question, "What does it mean to work the limits of voice?" from theoretical, methodological, and interpretative positions, and the result is an innovative challenge to traditional notions of voice.

The thought-provoking book will shift qualitative inquiry away from uproblematically engaging in practices and interpretations that limit what "counts" as voice and therefore data. The loss and betrayal of comfort and authority when qualitative researchers work the limits of voice will lead to new disruptions and irruptions in making meaning from data and, in turn, will add inventive and critical dialogue to the conversation about voice in qualitative inquiry. Toward this end, the book will specifically address the following objectives:

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• To promote an examination of how voice functions to communicate in qualitative research

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• To expose the excesses and instabilities of voice in qualitative research

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• To present theoretical, methodological, and interpretative implications that result in a problematizing of voice

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• To provide working examples of how qualitative methodologists are engaging the multiple layers of voice and meaning

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• To deconstruct the epistemological limits of voice that circumscribe our view of the world and the ways in which we make meaning as researchers

This compelling collection will challenge those who conduct qualitative inquiry to think differently about how they collect, analyze, and represent meaning using the voices of others, as well as their own.

Part I

Straining notions of voice

Chapter 1
Against empathy, voice and authenticity

Patti Lather

The demand for feminist research to be centered on such concepts as ‘empathy,’ ‘voice’ and ‘authenticity’ has been central for the movement away from scientistic thought. This demand is much troubled by critiques of the coherent subject that presupposes subjects who speak for themselves; subjects capable of knowing others; and subjects in charge of their desires and identifications. This essay presents a genealogy of knowing as narration and representation of the other based on comfortable and comforting, empathetic, mutual, dialogical knowing, critiquing such knowledge practices as violence, as imperial sameness once again. It asks, what is it to claim voice, authenticity and empathy as the grounds of research? Can there be a research that refuses such grounds, residing in messy ‘spaces in between’ (Robinson, 1994) where centers and margins are both situated and yet constantly changing intersections of interpretation, interruption and mutuality?

To explore the contemporary demands for feminist research to be a space where the researcher practices empathy and offers or facilitates the voice of the researched and the researcher toward more ‘authentic’ knowing, I make three moves. First, I unpack poststructuralism in order to challenge the typical investments and categories of ethnography so as to put under theoretic pressure the claims of scientism. I do so via a move away from what Britzman (1997) refers to as the wish for heroism and rescue through some ‘more adequate’ methodology and toward a learning that can tolerate its own failure of knowledge and the detour of not understanding. Second, grounded in my ‘postbook’ thinking,¹ I trouble the ethnographer as ‘the one who knows’ whose task is to produce the persuasive text that elicits reader empathy, in this case, for women living with HIV/AIDS. Finally, I probe what is at work in the concepts of ‘voice’ and ‘authenticity’ in ethnographic work.

Against scientism: A (gay) science ‘after truth’

Scientism is not so much the actual practices of science as the infusion of the standard elements of scientific attitude into all aspects of the social world (Hayek, 1952; Sorell, 1991). Many logically distinct positions can be called scientism: claims that the laws of physics can subsume everything which, in turn, can be studied best using an idealized, ahistorical and formalized notion of the methods of the physical sciences; objectivism, pseudo-exactitude and de-contextualization; and the capacity of science for leadership in the development of social values. Poststructuralism troubles the foundational knowledges that undergird such claims (Haraway, 1997; Hollinger, 1994; Lather, 2007).

What do we speak of when we speak of a poststructural science? Rather than heroism or rescue through some new methodology, Britzman (1997) argues that we may be in a time and place where we are better served by research if it is a means to see the need to be wounded by thought as an ethical move. ‘Incited by the demand for voice and situatedness’ (p. 31), she writes about the curious history of research’s mistaken identities. How do we come to think of things this way, she asks, and what 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.

The theoretical and methodological competitiveness of ‘successor régimes’ (Harding, 1991) that continues to characterize social inquiry often positions qualitative research as some sort of savior. To the contrary, Britzman (1997) points out that qualitative research is filled with sacred objects to be recovered, restored and centered. There is a tendency to avoid the difficult story, to want to restore the good name of research with these ‘new’ and ‘better’ methods. But research ‘can’t seem to get it right’ (p. 35), and, she writes, too often our efforts fall back into the too-easy-to-tell story of salvation via one sort of knowledge practice or another. As Britzman goes on to note, what is at stake when research is at stake is whether research can be a mode of thought that refuses to secure itself with the consolations of foundationalism and nostalgia for presence, the lost object of correct knowledge, the security of understanding. This is a move out of the sort of ‘devotional scientism’ that underwrites the Christian-capitalist-industrialist creed and toward what Nietzsche (1974) termed a ‘gay science,’ a science based in the very splintering of the mechanisms of control and the resultant incredulity about salvation narratives of scientific progress, reason and the over-administered world. Hence, my argument is that the research of most use is that which addresses how knowledge remains possible, given the end of the value-free notion of science and the resultant troubling of confidence in the scientific project, a science ‘after truth’ (Tomlinson, 1989). To explore what such a practice might look like, I turn to Chris and my efforts in our book on women living with HIV/AIDS.

Against empathy: A methodology of getting lost

Western feminist ethnographic traditions of romantic aspirations about giving voice to the voiceless are much troubled in the face of the manipulation, violation and betrayal inherent in ethnographic representation (Visweswaran, 1994). At the limits of intelligibility, Troubling the Angels works across various layers and shifts of register in order to construct an audience with ears to hear. This was Chris’s and my task as we live out the ambivalent failure of the uses of research toward something more productive than an enabling violation of its disciplining effects. Inhabiting the practices of its rearticulation, ‘citing, twisting, queering,’ to use Judith Butler’s words (1993b, p. 237), we occupy the very space opened up by the ruins of the concept of ethnographic representation.

‘The too easy to tell tale’ (Britzman, 1998) would have delivered the women to the reader in a linear, tidy narrative. Instead, refusing easy identifications, the reader comes to know through a form of textual dispersal of discontinuous bits and multiples of the women’s stories. Thus the text works to elicit an experience of the women through the very failures of the book to represent them in order to set up a different economy of exchange that interrupts voyeurism and the erasure of difference.

AIDS activist and theorist Douglas Crimp (Caruth and Keenan, 1995) argues that empathetic understanding gets constructed in relation to sameness. Empathy, then, actually ‘solidifies the structure of discrimination’ (p. 264) and diffuses any confrontation with death. Similarly, Elizabeth Ellsworth (1997) speaks against empathy as ‘the beautiful fit.’ Instead, she advocates counter-practices of queering, disidentifying, denaturalizing and defamiliarizing: producing difference instead of the sameness. Reading for some empathic union of two selves in a mirroring relationship is NOT helpful in unfixing categories. Instead, Ellsworth argues, we need to act from the abject space of the between, to make that space material so that we keep it unsettled. Here, our task is to not remain within the same logic of identity and difference from which we presume to escape. Rather, the task is to produce processes and movements beyond the fixedness, or limited mobility, of presently conceptualized categories of difference.

In Deleuzean language, this is not about empathy so much as about becoming (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983). To argue against empathy is to trouble the possibilities of understanding as premised on structures that all people share. The issue is the limitations of cognitive access to other individuals and what one can experience of another, ‘the riddle of intersubjectivity’ (Sawicki, 1997, p. 126). It is also about audiences and issues of resisting competent readers and intentionality, some rhetoric outside of persuasion, some focus on what we cannot know, a move away from fantasies of mutuality, shared experience and touristic invitations to intimacy.

In a book less argued than enacted, Chris and I have written an ‘uncooperative text’ that refuses mimentic desire. It constructs a distance between reader and subject of the research, producing a kind of gap between text and reader. Refusing the liberal embrace of empathy that reduces otherness to sameness within a personalized culture, casting doubt on our capacity to know, it refuses the mutuality and dialogue that typify an empathetic approach to understanding.

As Sommer (1994) notes, these points are double-faced, both epistemological and ethical. They are about what we can know but also what we, perhaps, ought not to assume we have the right to know. What Sommer terms a recalcitrant rather than a persuasive rhetoric questions enlightenment views of understanding as necessarily liberating (p. 542). Forcing understandable identities, overlooking differences ‘for the sake of a comforting, self-justifying rush of identification,’ the will to understand the Other is therefore a kind of violence, ‘an appropriation in the guise of an embrace’ (p. 543). This is how empathy violates the other and is part of the demand for totality. A recalcitrant rhetoric is about inaccessible alterity, a lesson in modesty and respect, somewhere outside of our desire to possess, know, grasp. Here, ‘interpretive reticence’ makes sense (p. 548) as we learn to listen to what the Other has to say without the mutuality presumed by empathy. To withhold the anticipated intimacy that invites conquest, teaching the reader how to read at some distance, with respect for the distances: this is the readerly response our text tries to constitute, a defiant book that teaches unanticipated lessons by being ‘hard to read.’²

Defying our personalized culture, easy identifications and sentimentalizing empathy, this argument foregrounds the inadequacies of thought to its object. Empathy is situated in relation to sameness and ‘solidifies the structure of discrimination’ (Caruth and Keenan, 1995, p. 264). Denying the ‘comfort text’ in moving away from fantasies of mutuality, shared experience, dialogue and touristic invitations to intimacy, the book declines the too easy to possess knowledge and reader entitlement to know.

Against voice and authenticity: Representation and the new ethnography

Questions of authenticity and voice are at the heart of claims to the ‘real’ in ethnography. Indeed, in the ‘new’ ethnography, which comes after the crisis of representation (Marcus and Fischer, 1986), the authority of voice is often privileged over other analyses. Confessional tales, authorial self-revelation, multivoicedness and personal narrative, all are contemporary practices of representation designed to move ethnography away from scientism and the appropriation of others. At risk is a romance of the speaking subject and a metaphysics of presence that threatens to collapse ethnography under the weight of circumscribed modes of identity, intentionality and selective appropriation (Atkinson and Silverman, 1997; Hargreaves,³ 1996).

But one example is The Education of Little Tree (1976), a so-called autobiography by ‘Forrest Carter.’⁴ In writing of authenticity and voice in his discussion of Carter’s fraud, Henry Louis Gates (1991) castigates ‘the ideologues of authenticity’ (p. 2) and explores concepts of true lies, pseudoslave narratives, ‘the real black writer,’ the authority of experience in policing genre boundaries,⁵ and the intertextuality of Uncle Tom’s Cabin where slave narratives were influenced by Stowe and Stowe by slave narratives. The key, Gates argues, is to see ‘the troublesome role of authenticity’ (p. 2) as linked to ‘imputations of realness’ that elide how, while identity indeed matters, ‘all writers are “cultural impersonators’’’(p. 3). Whatever it means for a writer to speak ‘as-a’ (Miller, quoted in Gates, 1991, p. 4), authenticity is much more complicated than singular, transparent, static identity categories assumed to give the writer a particular view.

Given such complications, how are we to think of the problematics of ‘authenticity?’ ‘Heidegger instituted authenticity,’ Adorno (1973, p. 17) argues disparagingly, at least in its second generation which betrayed Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in its systematic ontologizing of authenticity as a philosophical concept (Golomb, 1995). To read Heidegger most generously, invested in displacing the dominance of the subject in thought and language, Heidegger’s effort was to think on the question of authenticity and voice, turning the question, ‘thinking in an aporia’ (Scott, 1996, p. 84) of the question. While getting lost is set up as some other way of ‘homing in on our being’ (ibid.: p. 16), it is Heidegger who thinks the thought of a tradition beginning to overturn itself within itself, in this case, a move away from transcendence or, perhaps better said, a thinking within the aporia of the loss of transcendence.⁶

Less generously, Adorno (1973) situates the ‘cult of authenticity’ (p. 5) as an existential jargon that is part of the disintegration of aura. Creating a universal understanding that must be negated if we are to escape the ‘liturgy of inwardness’ (p. 70) and quest for pure identity that ‘devours everything’ (p. 139), Adorno’s disdain for Heidegger follows that of his mentor, Walter Benjamin. Benjamin’s interest was the loss of ‘aura’ versus Heidegger’s search for fullness of essence (Golomb, 1995). For Benjamin, what mattered was how to work the ruins of aura toward a living on. The loss of aura was the loss of transcendence under conditions of history as a permanent emergency. Trying to gather the weak messianic power of those who have been passed over by history, Benjamin (1939/1968) worked the ruins of theology to ask just how secular are our supposedly non-theistic forms of thought. The secularized discourse of post-Kantian modernity is not as different from earlier theological discourses as modernists would like to believe – this was Benjamin’s turn to theology – against the devaluation of truth in the name of knowledge (Nagele, 1991). To get lost at the limits of representation is to encounter the radical discontinuity of modernism and the secularization that is its basis. This is about the limits of knowledge where the old significance is shattered, ‘but the signifiers resist, empty shells for somber ghosts’ (Nagele, 1991, p. 195).

In Troubling the Angels, the angels circulate among many questions, sharpening problems, making insufficiencies pressing and marking the limits of any easy resolutions of issues around voice and authenticity. ‘Trying,’ as Derrida cautions, ‘not to take advantage of the emotion,’ (1976, p. 185) Chris and I mobilized the angel to use sentimentality against itself and to construct a questioning text that signals tentativeness and partiality. The angel, then, is a placeholder, a shell for the ghost of meaning. Our recourse to an old theological symbol insists on the otherness that remains outside of any reconciliation. Like Benjamin’s Angel of History, the various voices of our text are inverted and perverted, folded and refolded into some non-fixity. This sets up an escape from the general cliches of the Frankfurt School so that thinking might start over about the traces of otherness that cannot be erased by secularization or edified by the self-deceptions of a humanistic rhetoric (Nagele, 1991, p. 53). Hence the angel is the ghost of unassimilable otherness that haunts the house of Reason, self-reflexive subjectivity and historical continuity. Revising constitutive concepts of history and subjectivity, interiority and experience, this is an economy of displacements that condenses something other than individualized and psychologized motivations. Here the angel is an effect/affect that helps organize a less bounded space where we do what we can while leaving a place for what we cannot envision to emerge.

In spite of Fredric Jameson’s (1984) claim regarding the waning of affect in postmodernism, a new subjectivity seems part of the landscape that creates a renewed interest in affect, emotional responses, ‘feelings’ (Massumi, 1995; Sedgwick, 1995). Public discourse is full of first-person voice: AA, therapy, talk show public performance of private pain, affective epidemics of the Right, ‘moral panics’ that occupy pernicious structures of belonging and identification. This turn to affect is complicated by Benjamin’s moves against sentimentality and subjectivism. His historical and sociological impulses were toward a non-subjectivist thinking where affect becomes dynamism, complexity, aggregative capacity (Rochlitz, 1996).

Spivak (1994) asks how terrifying is this ‘contamination’ of subjectivity against technologism and capitalism. This turn to affect (Sedgwick, 1995) works the pathos of the ruins (Butler, 1993a), what Kathryn Bond Stockton traces as the return of ‘sentiment and sobs’ (1994, p. xxii). In the age of AIDS, she suggests, ‘emotional extravagance’ might seem fitting to academic cultural critics. As a way to join public sentiment, ‘teasing out sobs’ is about learning how to visit loss via a risk of the personal form that is transgressive in its sentiment. Her caution is that such ardor and not sacrifice shadows for sense as she endors...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• List of contributors
• Introduction: The limit of voice
• PART I Straining notions of voice
• PART II Transgressive voices: Productive practices
• Afterword: Decentering voice in qualitative inquiry