Page 92 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

ETHNOGRAPHY 81

It is in these moments also that there can be a distinctive relationship with a
specifically Marxist form of analysis. The terrain uncovered and explored during
this reflexive stage is likely to concern contradictions and tensions, both within
the field of study—contrasting moments of subjective experience, tensions
between what is said and done, differences between what collective forms or
materials seem to say or promise and what actually happens or is experienced—
and between the researcher’s expectations, codes and cultural forms of
understanding and those which he or she is uncovering. It is likely to be a
difficult field of contradictions, picked up at this point precisely because it is the
notion of contradiction which the traditional ‘naturalistic’ technique is unable to
register or registers only as a weakness or breakdown in its method, or as the
‘limit case’ to the researcher’s effectivity in the field—beyond which lies only
‘going native’ or withdrawal. With only a notion of ‘what follows’ taken from
the surface reality of the ‘object’ and picked up transparently in the universal
codes of ‘science’, contradictory messages, conflicts or breakdowns between
codes and broken communication can only be understood as ‘failures’, to be
transcended ultimately by better technique.
However, if these moments of crisis can be seen as a creative uncertainty,
entered through a structured social relationship, indicating and arising from
important contradictions, then further theoretical and methodological options
become available. For the theoretical understanding developed through what I am
characterizing as a more active and reflexive method can be in the form of a
reformulation and more precise articulation of what I called earlier the larger
theoretical ‘confession’ and, in particular, a more concrete extension of the way
in which larger determinations and categories are seen to relate to the particular
relationships and patterns of determination within the regional area under study.
And often this must be through recognizing a necessary unevenness and
complexity in the way that external forces or ideologies pattern a given area.
This is a non-mechanistic, non-reductive view of the relationship between levels,
which may wish to leave some scope for reciprocal effectivity between located
cultural forms, subjective experience and larger structures or may insist on
indirect or mediating processes, but which is still concerned with determination.
This greater theoretical elaboration, extension and specification— especially
within a theory which recognizes the play of contradiction—will then allow the
better grasp and explanation of the now more complex and layered subject of
study and the nature of the relationship which has uncovered it so far. It should
also suggest particular questions and difficulties which renewed and more
unconventional methods can seek to clarify. There is thus the possibility of a
circular development between a progressively more specified ‘theoretical
confession’ and the specific contradictions and tensions of fieldwork on to, in the
return sweep, reconstituted forms of theory and back to the specifics of the
fieldwork relation. This is the project of producing, finally, a fuller explanatory
presentation of the concrete.