Working the Ruins

Feminist Poststructural Theory and Methods in Education

Elizabeth St. Pierre, Wanda Pillow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781135961466
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

From some of the leading feminist scholars in education comes a collection of writings discussing how they use feminist poststructural theory in their classrooms and research. Drawing on real-life situations in their work, they show how using this theory has transformed their work. Topics covered include theory in everyday life, ethnography, writing the body, emotions in the classroom, qualitative research, and gossip as a counter-discourse. The range of topics, processes, and styles presented provides the reader with a variety of examples, illustrating the diversity and power of the effects of poststructural theory, as well as showing the possibilities of work still to be done.

PART I
INTERRUPTIONS

Chapter 1
“The Question of Belief”: Writing Poststructural Ethnography

Deborah P.Britzman

The things to look at are styles, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, not the correctness of representation nor its fidelity to some great original.

(Said, 1978, p. 21)

Edward Said advises readers encountering the texts of culture to consider both the structure of the narration and what it is that structures its modes of intelligibility. Such advice may seem strange when the text being examined is an educational ethnography. At first glance, ethnography seems to promise “fidelity to some great original,” that is, to the original of culture. For those engaged in the doing and the reading of mainstream educational ethnography, more often than not, it is the “ethno” and not the “graphy” that seems to be the focus of attention. As a genre of research, I would note just three of its attractive and mythic “ethno” qualities. First, ethnography is both a process and a product; there are methods for how to go about narrating culture, and these social strategies promise a text. Second, good ethnographic texts tell stories that invariably embody qualities of a novel. Implicitly, ethnographies promise pleasure or at least new information to the reader. Third, an ethnography takes the reader into an actual world to reveal the cultural knowledge working in a particular place and time as it is lived through the subjectivities of its inhabitants. Such access persuades readers that they can imaginatively step into this world and act like a native, or, at the very least, understand the imperatives of cultural assimilation. These textualized qualities appear seamless because they blur traditional distinctions among the writer, the reader, the stories, and how the stories are told.

Such qualities are seductive in the power they bestow. There is a belief and expectation that the ethnographer is capable of producing truth from the experience of being there and that the reader is receptive to the truth of the text. In both instances, experience is “the great original.” Ethnography assures us that there is both a “there” and “beings” who are there. Indeed, ethnographers claim to transpose their language onto something from “out there.” In this way, the ethnographic text intends to translate, even as it is meant to stand in for, social life. The reader learns to expect cultural secrets and may well suppose that outsiders can become vicarious insiders. An ethnography offers moments of empathetic power in the ways it positions cultural knowledge and in the ways it positions readers of culture. Private moments are rendered public, and the goal of understanding—albeit through secondhand knowledge—is assumed to be within the reach of readers. In this mainstream and modernist version, ethnography depends upon the rationality and stability of writers and readers and upon noncontradictory subjects who say what they mean and mean what they say. This is the straight version of Ethnography 101.

With the advent of poststructuralist theories, these understandings need to be examined. The ground upon which ethnography is built turns out to be a contested and fictive geography. Those who populate and imagine it (every participant, including the author and the reader) are, in essence, textualized identities. Their voices create a cacophony and dialogic display of contradictory desires, fears, and literary tropes that, if carefully “read,” suggest just how slippery speaking, writing, reading, and desiring subjectivity really are. In poststructuralist versions, “the real” of ethnography is taken as an effect of the discourses of the real; ethnography may construct the very materiality it attempts to represent. Poststructuralist critiques begin with assumptions of historicity and define ethnography as both a set of practices and a set of discourses. As an interpretive disturbance to the promise of representation, poststructuralists read the absent against the present. Thus, the ethnographic promise of a holistic account is betrayed by the slippage born from the partiality of language of what cannot be said precisely because of what is said, and of the impossible difference within what is said, what is intended, what is signified, what is repressed, what is taken, and what remains. From the unruly perspectives of poststructuralism, ethnography can only summon, in James Clifford’s (1986) terms, “partial truths” and “fictions” (p. 5). In this ethnographic version, the authority of ethnography, the ethnographer, and the reader is always suspect.

Three kinds of ethnographic authority are being questioned here: the authority of empiricism, the authority of language, and the authority of reading or understanding. In the first case, what does it mean to disrupt what Paul Smith (1988) terms the “simple empiricism” (p. 86) of ethnography, that there is a real out there to narrate and to read? When it comes to considering the authority of language and the seeming stability of meaning from which it derives, what happens to writing and to reading if we take as our place of departure T.Minh-ha Trinh’s (1989) warning about the effects of writing: “Words empty out with age. Die and rise again, accordingly invested with new meanings, and always equipped with a secondhand memory” (p. 79)? What happens to the authority of reading — the presumption that there is a direct relationship between the reader’s reading and the text’s telling—if we begin with Althusser’s (cited in Rooney, 1989) refusal of textual innocence: “There is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must ask what reading we are guilty of” (p. 37)? Can ethnographic writing provoke textual and methodological doubt when, as Paul Atkinson (1990) argues, “The ethnographic text depends upon the plausibility of its account” (p. 2)? How does one believe the ethnographer, when, as Peggy Phelan (1993) theorizes, “In doubting the authenticity of the image, one questions as well the veracity of she who makes and describes it” (p. 1)? If ethnographic authority depends upon a tacit agreement among the participants, the ethnographer, and the reader (that the story is real, the discourse transparent, and only the names have been changed to protect the innocent) and that agreement is always betrayed, how is the ethnographic pact effectuated? How does one understand plausibility and persuasion? If the relationship between the real and the representational is always in doubt, what is the basis of belief and identification?

These difficult questions surround the doing and the reading of educational ethnography. Recent educational ethnographies and writing about this genre are pushing at normative disciplinary boundaries in terms of what it is that structures methodological imperatives, the ethnographer’s stances, and the ethnographic voice; the kinds of theoretical traditions through which data are constructed, represented, and narrated; what are taken to be problems suitable for ethnographic research; and the problems of how one might read against the ethnographic grain (Brodkey, 1987; de Castell & Haig-Brown, 1993; Dippo, 1993; Fine, 1991; Lather, 1991). Questions of subjectivity move beyond the stance of knowing how others make sense and toward a consideration of how reflexivity can be practiced when making sense of oneself is understood as occurring through the construction of the other (Morrison, 1992; Phelan, 1993). Still other questions push against the very concept of reflexivity to consider the constitutive constraints of representation itself (Bakhtin, 1990; Butler, 1990; Owens, 1992). Ethnographic theorizing has become more tentative and less concerned with the old struggles of establishing authority as a way of research; it is more concerned with the archaeology of construction, the sedimentary grounds of ethnographic authority.

Poststructuralist theories raise critical concerns about what it is that structures meanings, practices, and bodies, about why certain practices become intelligible, valorized, or deemed as traditions, while other practices become discounted, impossible, or unimaginable. For poststructuralists, representation is always in crisis, knowledge is constitutive of power, and agency is the constitutive effect, and not the originator, of situated practices and histories (see, for example, Butler, 1993; Clifford & Dhareshwar, 1989; Feldman, 1991; Foucault, 1978; Ong, 1988; Pratt, 1992; Wolfe, 1992.) While it is beyond this essay to provide more than a sketchy account of poststructuralism, my purpose is to explore how particular poststructural considerations have challenged me to think differently about pinning “the real” onto the ethnographic account and to theorize, in explicit terms, the politics of recounting and being accountable. While it might be discomforting to leave a sentimental ethnography that desires to represent without looking back, because ethnography is always about a second glance, it is necessary to consider what precisely this second glance might imagine.

Given the ethnographic real as a contested territory, I examine what is at stake in writing and reading ethnography when one attempts to account for what Phelan (1993) terms “the question of belief” (p. 1) in the real and in the representational. Are there ways to think the unthought of ethnographic narratives? That is, is there an ethnographic unconscious that marks its constitutive limits? Is there a knowledge ethnography cannot tolerate knowing? My concern is with what reading with suspicion—for both writers and readers of ethnography—has to do with how one might imagine the construction of ethnographic narrative beyond the naive faith that seeing is believing. Rather than critiquing someone else’s study, this essay is a form of speculative self-critique. I take the odd position of moving behind the scenes of my own ethnographic work to elaborate the theoretical and narrative decisions I made in producing my text. As a “hidden chapter” in my own ethnographic text, I offer thoughts about the narrative dilemmas unleashed when one attempts to write a poststructuralist ethnography or when one attempts to take seriously the problem of producing an account of social life that bothers the writer’s and perhaps the reader’s confidence in truth, in the visible, and in the real. While I retain the hope that ethnography can offer education a more complicated version of how life is lived, my concern is with the thorny issues unleashed when representation, however emancipatory, is acknowledged as crisis. Hence, I move back and forth between two related themes: conceptual issues in the study of the meanings of teaching and theoretical issues in the production of narratives structured within poststructuralist perspectives.

Poststructuralist concerns haunt my ethnographic research, writing, and reading. In my ethnographic study of secondary student teachers, Practice Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach (1991), I began working poststructurally. With ethnographic data in hand, I decided to study these data (and hence the problem of learning to teach) as if I were reading a novel and, consequently, as if narratives of teaching were primarily a complex of contradictory interpretations and competing regimes of truth. I wondered what would it mean to read student teaching as if it were a text. Looking backward, my narrative desire was to write a “Rashomon” of student teaching, an ethnographic opera where voices argued, disrupted, and pleaded with one another; where the high drama of misunderstandings, deceit, and the conflicting desires made present and absent through language and through practice confound what is typically taken as the familiar story of learning to teach. I tried to write against the discourses that bind the disagreements, the embarrassments, the unsaid, and the odd moments of uncertainty in contexts overburdened with certain imperatives. I tried to do this by provoking and contradicting multiple voices: the ethnographic voice that promises to narrate experience as it unfolds, the hesitant voices of participants who kept refashioning their identities and investments as they were lived and rearranged in language, and poststructuralist voices that challenge a unitary and coherent narrative about experience.

In studying the lived experience of actual individuals but not wanting to individualize or render as a psychological problem the social disarray these individuals lived, I wanted to move beyond the impulse to represent “the real story of learning to teach” and attempt to get at how “the real” of teaching is produced as “the real story.” Additionally, while the people in my study were actual persons, my intent was not to represent their actuality. Rather, taking the work of Foucault (1978) seriously, I wanted to trace how student teachers became an invention of the educational apparatus. Given the inordinate amount of research about this population, given the way the subject of student teacher is “an incitement to discourse,” I became curious about how student teachers became a historical problem for education, how student teachers became constituted as a problem population. My interest, then, was to trace the “invention” of the student teacher, to explore how this invention became viewed as synonymous with “experience” in education; how the subject position of student teacher was lived and fashioned in education; and why certain modes of intelligibility, such as the binary of theory and practice, became a central problem.

The tension I felt given these approaches to the study of teaching was between working with these theories and still writing an ethnography. That is, while educational ethnography promises the narrative cohesiveness of experience and identity and the researcher’s skill of representing the subject, poststructuralist theories disrupt any desire for a seamless narrative, a cohesive identity, or a mimetic representation. Poststructuralism disturbs the ethnographer’s confidence in “knowing” experience or in possessing the writerly power to do anything else but borrow discourses and tack them onto other discourses. For the poststructuralist, “being there” does not guarantee access to truth. Thus, the tradition of ethnographic authority derived from participant observation becomes a site of doubt, rather than a confirmation of what exists prior to representation. These positions undermine the ethnographic belief that “reality” is somehow out there waiting to be captured by language.

In poststructuralist versions, subjects may well be the tellers of experience; but every telling is constrained, partial, and determined by the discourses and histories that prefigure, even as they might promise, representation. To fashion narration with the imperatives of poststructuralism means that the researcher must become overconcerned with experience as a discourse and with competing discourses of experience that traverse and structure any narrative. The ethnographic narrative must somehow acknowledge the differences within and among the stories of experience, how they are told, and what it is that structures the telling and the retelling (Brodkey, 1987). Borrowing poststructuralist theories that bothered my ethnographic confidence, then, required that I work with language differently, that I admit how my own telling is partial and governed by the discourses of my time and place. These recountings cannot, however, ease or resolve the contradictions born in language, the discourses that bind and unleash meanings, and the real made present and absent by my efforts. Given these discursive boundaries, my writing could only point to the contradictions that structure the uneasy dialogue between humanism and poststructuralism, between what is taken as lived experience and the afterthought of interpretive efforts, between the real subjects and their textual identities.

I confess that I still have difficulty uncoupling myself from the persuasive promises of ethnography. I desire to construct good stories filled with the stuff of rising and falling action, plots, themes, and denouement. And yet, within the narrative tropes I chose to employ, there is a contradictory point of no return, of having to abandon the impossible desire to portray the study’s subjects as they would portray themselves. Thus, I positioned myself behind their backs to point out what they could not see, would not do, and could not have said even as I struggled against such omnipotence. I tried to hold tightly to the ethic of not producing these subjects as persons to blame or as heroes of resistance. Instead, my concern was one of questioning how the categories of blame and resistance became discursively produced and lived. In textualizing their identities, I held on to the hope that readers would be compelled to ask the dangerous questions: What is it that structures my own stories and my own intelligibility? What do my moral imperatives cost?

Here, then, were my contradictory desires: to textualize identities at their most vulnerable moments, to speak about and for individuals by juxtaposing their words with my own, to dramatize the ordinary days that make time seem like no time at all, to narrate development as a creepy detour, and to persuade readers of the credibility of my interpretive efforts. I wanted to warn them that all I could offer were partial truths and my own guilty readings of other people’s dramas. The space I attempted to open was one where experien...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Inquiry Among the Ruins
• Part I: Interruptions
• Part II: Disciplines and Pleasures
• Part III: Figurations
• Contrlbutors