The Poetics and Politics of Social Research and Cultural Studies

John Sundholm

Alison Lee and Cate Poynton, editors. Culture & Text: Discourse and Methodology in Social Research and Cultural Studies. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. xix + 225 pages. Bibliography and index. $65.00 (cloth); $24.00 (paper).

Culture & Text is a stimulating book that sets out to explore the space between “method” and “writing.” The focus is mainly on discourse analysis, and the authors criticise it for lacking an awareness of the research method, how it is presented and “en-acted.” The lack is supplemented by a post-structural move, which all writers in the book more or less support. What is offered is not a method, because that would be a way of suppressing the “textuality” and the awareness of the research process. Hence, the proper way of proceeding is to make a move, not to follow a method, not to aim at fixed systematicity, but to explore different ways of proceeding.

The editors, Cate Poynton and Alison Lee, define the agenda in a dense and clear introduction, which neatly makes space for the articles that follow, mostly different case studies that generally adhere to a post-structuralistic ideology. Poynton and Lee frankly call for a linguistic turn in the social sciences in order to deal with the question every serious researcher has faced and will face: how to deal with the relation between your own writing and the thing you are writing about? If that relation—between “thing” and “language”—is seen as being mutually constitutive with language, how to proceed so the thing will not be turned into something pre-existing “out there,” and the language into a neutral, transparent, and de-materialised medium? The solution that is offered is to call for research practices that are diverse and rich; that consider the relations between individuals, institutions, and forms of knowledge and practices; and which therefore are more appropriate. The move is sympathetic, as the rightness of an approach is grounded in a value, in cultural difference, and heterogeneity, and not in a technique that guarantees reason. The point is also emphasised, I think, by Lee’s and Poynton’s preference for the concept “situated knowledges,” instead of the more scientifically and rhetorically strong but textually weak “context.”

Two metatheoretical chapters follow the lucid introduction: Cate Poynton’s history of discourse analysis according to the Anglo-American academic culture, “Linguistics and Discourse Analysis,” and Terry Threadgold’s “Poststructuralism and Discourse Analysis.” Poynton’s essay is mainly descriptive as Threadgold has a fixed agenda. Because theory and material are inseparable, there is no method, argues Threadgold, there is only an open space, and: “mapping such a terrain requires a new kind of geography and a different sort of map—one that will allow simultaneity and difference, parallels and overlaps—a mapping of at best processual and transient moments” (p. 41). As Threadgold can write safely from her metatextual position it is Jackie Cook who has to take up the task so well argued for in earlier chapters, but never displayed in action. Cook analyses radio talk in her essay, concentrating on “the staged spontaneity of talk shows.” The material is interesting, but the theory weak and shallow. Cook begins her essay by stating that she wants to argue for the fact that “contemporary Australian talk radio is producing diverse, complex, heterogeneous and multilayered texts” (59). But, were not the earlier chapters in the collection arguing for the case that that is what all texts are? Gillian Fuller comes up with a similar trivial result in relation to the earlier metatheoretical texts when she is applying functional linguistics in order to show how the rhetoric of popular science and environmentalism works. The point is that these succeeding chapters are well researched and well written according to standard practice, but I have difficulties with seeing them as really being a part of the imperative and agenda of the book as a whole, as “situated practices.”

On the other hand, I find the next two contributions very interesting. Carolyn D. Baker writes about membership categorization and Hermine Scheeres and Nicky Solomon about the relation between funding, economics, and the results that are produced by the research community. Baker analyses talk among schoolchildren, teachers, and parents in her essay, “Locating Culture in Action: Membership Categorisation in Texts and Talk,” which has a clear and thorough methodological introduction. She shows convincingly how membership categorization constitutes an ethnomethodological approach where culture is “in-action” and even “internal to action.” The chapter is really able to put the finger on the topic of the puzzling space between “thing” and “language.” Scheeres and Salomon are addressing the very political question of how to do complex, post-structuralistic research when the academic market is ruled by the ideology of performativity (maximising output and minimising input). As they show in their chapter titled “Whose Text? Methodological Dilemmas in Collaborative Research Practice,” language and discourse have become key factors in studying social change. However, research that is ordered by the funding authorities seldom allows one to display all of the complexities of the research process and hence the contingent and open answers, or results. They quote Robin Usher’s straightforward question: “Is it possible to use textuality against itself and write in a way which exemplifies openness and multiple meanings but which yet is still about something?” (125), but without giving any clear answer. I think the question is worth posing over and over in many books and in relation to practical case studies, as the question and the answer must be seen as situated practices, unique to any moment and every research process.

The three following chapters are also methodologically stringent. Penny Peather and Threadgold offer a chapter on feminist methodologies in their “Feminist Methodologies in Discourse Analysis: Sex, Property, Equity” in order to make an argument for an approach that pays attention to historical and material conditions. Jan Wright and Jennifer Biddle are performing their methodological discussions in relation to empirical studies on a physical education lesson and how Warlpiri Aborigines use the alphabet. Wright’s task in, “Disciplining the Body: Power, Knowledge and Subjectivity in a Physical Education Lesson,” is to investigate how language works to position speakers in relation to certain discourses and with what effects. The essay on “embodied subjectivity” is theoretically well argued, but the material is used more as a way of illustrating the discussion presented and does not therefore convincingly adhere to the principle of the linguistic turn, of the mutual constitutiveness of theory and material, language and thing. But, Biddle does that in her intriguing piece, “Writing Without Ink: Methodology, Literacy and Cultural Difference,” partly, of course, because her subject and material are exactly to the point: the use of the alphabet, the writing of a culture in relation to the Warlpiris. Biddle is also doing something that is lacking in some of the other chapters: she is beautifully blending material and matter with method and high theory a la Butler, Derrida, Foucault & Co, although she begins her essay with some doubting and highly rhetorical questions—“How can I turn my eclectic, eked-out-of experience and necessarily experimental scribblings into procedures, plans, regularity? Can I write about what belies my own practice? Am I expected to lie?” (170).

Alison Lee ends the book with the chapter “Discourse Analysis and Cultural (Re)Writing.” It is a text that continues where the introduction left off, and Lee continues to demand a linguistic, cultural, and textual turn in social research. She also clearly points out the contradiction that the textuality of the object text is often foregrounded, while the textuality of the analytic text is not. This she considers as an opposition between science and literature, which can be overcome only by recognising that writing cannot be ignored. “Writing produces and positions; texts are social facts” (199), she writes, and she supports the Barthesian idea by quoting his notion that what we are talking about is not so much “analysis,” but “practices of reading and writing” which never can “yield up ‘not a “result” nor even a “method” . . . but merely a “way of proceeding”’ (200).

Culture & Text is a very rewarding and inspiring book, despite its weaknesses. All essays are not of the same quality. Since my background is in the humanities some of the points do not seem that groundbreaking to me. Textuality is both method and matter in humanities. But I am more critical about the lack of cultural awareness in the writers’ own metatheoretical efforts. For a Scandinavian reader it is disappointing to see how narrow the Anglo-American consciousness is. Cultural difference is discovered in one’s own backyard, but the “European” is still a very schematic view of something that is French, British, and a little German. Also, the historical awareness is short, the history of the linguistic turn is mainly French (with Bakhtin as the father figure beyond boundaries) and the birth of critical theory is also more or less an Anglo-American affair (we can also trace it back to Karl Marx or Max Horkheimer’s essay on “Critical and Traditional Theory” from the 1930s), and such impressive work in social theory regarding rhetorics as that of Richard Harvey Brown (beginning in the 1970s) are outside the reading and writing practices of the authors in Culture and Text. These shortcomings cannot be ignored as they underscore, on a theoretical level, how ahistorical and uncultural social research and cultural studies often are when it comes to cultural methodology, but also because the value that post-structuralism is arguing for is cultural difference and heterogeneity. Why is a theoretical tradition not seen as a situated and local intervention? Why are Butler and Barthes free-floating global signifiers that are turned into universal academic signals? It is the merit of Culture and Text that such questions pop up.

John Sundholm is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, Division for Culture and Communication, Karlstad University, Sweden.