Page 93 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

82 NOTES ON METHOD

I am not necessarily arguing that the final account should show the several
stages of this often tortuous process, or that these stages are necessarily always
self-conscious: I would argue that it is something of this sort, often unconscious
or even denied, which has taken place in the research work of those ‘naturalistic’
accounts which do have explanatory power. Nor am I denying that, as in the
more classical notion of the Marxist method, this circular movement cannot occur
after fieldwork is finished or upon secondary data, through the principles of
search and selectivity on existing or received materials. What I am arguing, in
the context of ‘qualitative’ methods, is that significant data are collected not
through the purity or scientificism of its method, but through the status of the
method as a social relationship, and specifically through the moments of crisis in
that relationship and its to-be-discovered pattern of what is/what is not shared:
the contradictions within and between these things. And, furthermore, that where
the fieldwork is really extensive or where the researcher, in whatever form, can
theorize, so to speak, on his/her feet, for all the difficulties and disorientations,
reflexivity can allow the progressive constitution of the concrete in relation to
theory, not merely as an analytic protocol but as a dynamic, dialectical method.
This can give a concentration and an obstinate capacity to penetrate through
successive layers of ‘blank’ data in the pursuit of particular themes not available
to other methods. Not only the quality of the data, nor even its (however
qualified) capacity to ‘surprise’, but this potential, at least, for a cyclic control
and focus of method in the rich veins of ‘lived’ contradiction is what can most
distinguish the ‘qualitative’ approach.

On technicism
The notion of a reflexive methodology, then, takes us beyond a simple concern
with techniques of data-gathering. It is often stated as a truism that forms of data
collection and analytic procedures are profoundly interconnected. I am arguing
that it is precisely a theoretical interest which induces the researcher to develop
certain kinds of technique, to make comparative forays, to invent or invert
methodological canons, to select certain ‘problems’ for analytical explication.
Though techniques are important, and though we should be concerned with their
‘validity’, they can never stand in the place of a theoretical awareness and
interest arising out of the recognition of one’s role in a social relationship and
its variable patterning. Without this theoretical quickening, the techniques
merely record uncritically only the apparent outward face of an external ‘reality’.
We should resist, therefore, the hegemonizing tendency of technique. It seeks
to take command whenever there is uncertainty. It disguises the creative
potential of uncertainty. In particular, we should deconstruct the portmanteau,
heavily mystified notion of PO, whose mere invocation and taxonomical
description seem to guarantee the quality of an account. We should break down
and detail its parts, along with a number of other techniques, to give us a flexible