[Xmca-l] Re: The Science of Qualitative Research 2ed

[David Kellogg]

Martin:

I'm not sure to what extent your bepuzzlement is genuine misunderstanding
and to what extent it is simply a polite form of disagreement. There is
always a lot in what I write that is opaque and even obtuse. For example, I
always seem to have a lot of trouble writing clauses that have more than
one sentient actor in them: I can't get the names and the pronominal
reference right (I also have that strange mental disability where when you
are driving and your wife tells you to take a left, you turn right, and
vice versa). For example, I wrote: "He even speculates that Goldmann does
this because he is writing for worker autodidacts and not other
professors." I should have written: "He even speculates that Lukacs does
this because he is writing for worker autodidacts and not other professors."

But of course we politely disagree too. You are an anthropologist and a
professor; I am a linguist and a translator. Both callings require a
modicum of courtesy and decency towards opponents (as in boxing); both
involve "sciences of a natural whole" given by the environment rather than
by some act of analysis (unlike boxing); but our two sciences are as
different as the methods must inevitably be. As I said, I think I "get" the
point of anthropological study, at least to the extent that outsiders
usually get it ("Oh, right--he joined a gym in South Chicago to see what
boxing felt like...."). You, on the other hand, said you didn't get the
point of looking at grammar, and I was trying to explain.

I'll try again. I can understand South Chicago English, although my wife
cannot, and even has trouble understanding the "eye dialect" which Wacquant
uses to quote his data, even though she reads texts in seventeenth century
English with great ease. There are interesting historical reasons which
explain this difference between me and my wife, but they will only
make sense if we understand what exactly the difference is. The fact that
the data comes to us AS WRITTEN SPEECH in Wacquant's article means that we
are not simply talking about dialect, because dialect is overwhelmingly
phonological in its variation. Something else is varying which impedes
comprehension for her and facilitates it for me. I think it is not dialect
but register, and I think the variations are not simply phonological but
grammatical and ultimately semantic. The existence or non-existence of
semantic variation is the key issue which divided Hasan and Labov, and
without it we cannot really make sense of the debate over "deficit
linguistics" which appears briefly in the lchc polyphonic autobiography.

But I am happy to discuss what you find interesting instead. In fact, I too
find it interesting (and I even find that it is the same issue, because my
wife's inability to understand the data and my own ability to understand it
is a much more measurable and much more operational way of talking about
"point of view"). I just disagree. To me (and to Vygotsky, because I am a
linguist and a translator), it's very important to make an analysis
replicable; it's what makes analysis understandable, teachable, scientific,
and ultimately democratic. I don't think that you can do that by
approaching interview data as a literary critic, whose task is to interpret
the text for the (non-)layman; I think you can do it by uncovering the
regularities that make the data comprehensible to the participants
themselves. I don't think you can do it by trying to identify "tropes".

For example: what I said about Wacquant dismissing class refers to
Wacquant's own text: see p. 494. He may have written otherwise elsewhere
(very likely, as the position he takes on p. 494 is utterly incoherent).
But we also disagree on what a working class job is: I don't think that a
security guard or a rent-a-cop or a night watchman is a working class job,
and in the context of South Chicago I see it is as being a lot closer to
gang life than the participants seem to.

David Kellogg

Recent Article in *Mind, Culture, and Activity* 24 (4) 'Metaphoric,
Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A
Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”'

Free e-print available (for a short time only) at

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full


On Mon, Jan 8, 2018 at 12:24 AM, Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net> wrote:

> Well, David!  I am once again puzzled. I suppose you might say that that’s
> just my “subjective reaction” to what you have written. But even subjective
> reactions are aspects of the interpretation of a text, are they not? So let
> me try to explain my confusion. It arises afresh from each of the 4
> paragraphs in your message:
>
> #1. Yes, Goldmann identifies some differences between Heidegger and
> Lukacs. That would not be difficult for anyone to do, would it!? The main
> point of his book, however, is that there are fundamental similarities
> between existentialism and marxism, and between Heidegger and Lukacs in
> particular. (Heidegger rejected the label ‘existentialist,’ but let’s leave
> that to the side.)
>
> Let’s stick close to Goldmann’s actual language. His principal thesis is
> that "between 1910 and 1925 a true philosophical turning-point occurred,
> which resulted in the creation of existentialism and contemporary
> dialectical materialism.”
>
> As a consequence, one can find several “fundamental bond[s] between Lukacs
> and Heidegger.”  Central among these is "the rejection of the
> transcendental subject, the conception of man as inseparable from the world
> which he is a part of, the definition of his place in the universe as
> historicity.”
>
> Yes, there are "differences which put the two philosophies in opposition
> to each other, but on this common foundation.” What is the common
> foundation, again? It is the recognition that "Man is not opposite the
> world which he tries to understand and upon which he acts, but within this
> world which he is a part of, and there is no radical break between the
> meaning he is trying to find or introduce into the universe and that which
> he is trying' to find or introduce into his own existence. This meaning,
> common to both individual and collective human life, common as much to
> humanity as, ultimately, to the universe, is called history.”
>
> This is indeed the rejection of dualism that you have noted. It is also,
> as I have noted, key to Wacquant’s project, which begins with the
> assumption that a boxer is not ‘opposite’ the world of boxing, upon which
> he acts; he is a part of this world; there is ‘ontological complicity’
> between person and world. And it’s worth noting, I think, that this
> rejection of dualism must call into question the seemingly self-evident
> distinction between ‘subjective reaction’ and ‘objective analysis.’
>
>
> #2. Yes, Goldmann proposes that "for Heidegger the historical subject is
> the individual where­as Lukacs... conceives of history as the action of the
> transindi­vidual subject and, in particular, of social classes.”  But in my
> opinion this is based on a questionable reading of Heidegger (but that
> doesn’t make it nothing more than a ‘subjective reaction,’ does it?).
> Heidegger’s concept of Dasein - “being there” - is a general term for human
> being, whether an individual or a group. Division 2 of Being and Time (with
> “living-unto-death”) is about *individualization*: how one can *become* an
> active individual agent of history. But Vygotsky was also interested in
> individualization, wasn’t he? This seems a difference in emphasis, not
> unimportant but possible only on the background of a shared foundation.
> (Note that this is in no way intended as a defense of Heidegger, whose
> personal life was deplorable and whose philosophy is fundamentally flawed.)
>
>
> #3. You write that "I don't accept that an anthropologist who codes
> interviews in terms of "tropes" is doing anything more than coding his or
> her own subjective reactions to the data.”
>
> First, Wacquant doesn’t “code” his data at all. What he does do is
> identify and then interpret the tropes that the boxers use when talking
> about their occupation. You’ll find an argument against the common
> assumption that qualitative analysis involves coding in chapter 3 of my
> book. Second, you seem to be suggesting that paying attention to tropes -
> metaphors and other figures of speech - is somehow merely a subjective
> reaction. I assume then, that you don’t have much sympathy for George
> Lakoff’s analysis of the recurrent metaphors in everyday talk, in Metaphors
> We Live By? Or for Hayden White’s massive analysis - what he calls
> “tropology” - of grand historical narratives - those of Marx, Hegel,
> Nietzsche and others - in his book Metahistory?
>
>
> #4. You suggest that social class and employment are not of interest to
> Wacquant. But Wacquant has written widely - and I mean *widely* - on the
> mechanisms of reproduction of social class, on the intersections of class
> and race, and on the way class is handled in sociology (he’s a sociologist,
> not an anthropologist).
>
> In this article, for example, he points out “That boxing is a
> working-class occupation is reflected not only in the physical nature of
> the activity but also in the social recruitment of its practitioners and in
> their continuing dependence on blue-collar or un-skilled service jobs to
> support their career in the ring” (p. 502).
>
> In addition, he insists that his analysis of what the boxers say is
> necessarily informed by his knowledge, as a researcher, of various aspects
> of the form of life of boxing that they boxers themselves cannot grasp:
> "(i) the objective shape of that structure [of the social ‘field' of
> boxing] and the set of constraints and facilitations it harbors; (ii) its
> location in the wider social spaces of the ghetto and the city; and (iii)
> the social trajectories and dispositions of those who enter and compete in
> it” (p. 491). This approach seems to me hardly to ignore class, its
> inequities, or its economic necessities.
>
> I guess we simply have different 'subjective reactions' to this article!
> :)
>
> Or, in a more serious tone: when you ask me to "Compare:
>
> a) "Phonology is variable but semantics is invariant."
> b) "Phonology is variable but semantics invariant."
> c) "Phonology variable, but semantics is invariant."
>
> What is the difference between a) and b)?”  are you not asking for my
> “subjective reactions”? Or are there “objective reactions”? Aren’t we
> talking about consciousness, always an aspect of our being-in-the-world,
> mediated by material representations?
>
> cheers
>
> Martin
>
> > On Jan 7, 2018, at 3:07 AM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I read it, Martin. What Goldmann says is that Lukacs accepts
> subject-object
> > dualism in a way that Heidegger would find unacceptable. He even
> speculates
> > that Goldmann does this because he is writing for worker autodidacts and
> > not other professors. He also notes that they supported different sides
> in
> > World War II, and to his credit considers this a difference and not a
> > similarity.
> >
> > But the chiefest difference Goldmann notes is that Heidegger is
> essentially
> > interested in the fate of the individual and not the social; Dasein is
> > really an individuation of Sein, and "living-for-death" is clearly
> > individualistic. Lukacs is the other way around: he's interested in the
> > individual job only in so far as it is a token of the mass and the class.
> >
> > Let us get back in the ring. I agree that there is very little analysis
> of
> > the actual language, which to me means that there is very little analysis
> > of the actual data. I don't accept that an anthropologist who codes
> > interviews in terms of "tropes" is doing anything more than coding his or
> > her own subjective reactions to the data. This is why Vygotsky rejects
> the
> > "objectivist" accounts of development (e.g. that of his friend Blonsky,
> > based on teething, or accounts based on sexual maturation) as being
> > essentially subjectivist: he says that the choice of this trope or that
> one
> > is subjectivist.
> >
> > For example. Wacquant doesn't even bother to notice that a huge
> proportion
> > of his informants are night watchmen or security guards or rent-a-cops.
> He
> > even says at the outset that out-of-the-boxing-ring jobs in particular
> and
> > the class status in general are not factors in his study. But I think you
> > can see that boxing is not exactly irrelevant to professions which
> involve
> > the use of violence in defence of private property. Isn't it subjectivist
> > to simply write this off?
> >
> > David Kellogg
> >
> >
> >>
>
>