I'd like to thank eveyone for the useful comments on my paper. I have
taken a deep breath over the weekend, and now I'm ready to write on this
again.
When I wrote the paper I was trying to do what Judy summarized in her
first message: to provide a set of analytic tools for studying
interactional positioning in narrative performances, including complex
emotional and relational patterns. I realize that this level of
interaction has deep connections to patterns (sometimes traumatic) that
are most often dealt with in intimate conversations and psychotherapy.
In fact, I was thinking that this sort of work could introduce a more
human, relationally-embedded approach to studying discourse in
narratives, classrooms and elsewhere -- as opposed to simply analyzing
the rational action and "pure" symbolic content of talk.
So I see myself as opposed to purely cognitive, objectivist approches to
human behavior (ie, approaches that construe humans as primarily
rational actors or primarily manipulators of symbols). I am trying to
provide analytic tools for studying more relational and emotional
patterns systematically.
As various people have pointed out, correctly, there is a sort of
contradiction in this work: I'm studying such emotional and relational
patterns as a phenomenon, but my own stance in writing about it is
emotionally and relationally distanced. There are various possible
explanations for this. (1) A systematic, scientific approach may yield
information useful to people who are ultimately interested in
understanding, celebrating, and/or intervening in relational and
emotional patterns. (2) Such an analytic approach may provide
legitimacy for an ongoing project of making the human sciences more
humane (ie, less focused on rational economic actors and "pure"
denotational content). (3) A scientific approach may simply be the most
productive way for some of us to do our work in the human sciences,
admitting that there are certainly other important projects that diverge
radically. (4) There may be something about me personally that draws me
to this more distanced position. I am not willing to discuss (4), which
amounts to my countertransference, in public.
In explaining my positioning in the paper, I would say that there is
something of each of these four things going on. If my purpose were
simply to win an argument, of course, I would undoubtedly select one and
use it as a club to beat up on people.
Nate points out that there are certain parallels between my own
positioning as analyst and particular roles and positions in the data
themselves. This is fair, as it's applying my own sort of analysis back
to me. And it's true that Margaret's second voice -- the more active
and distanced one that she discovers at 13, but that in fact recurs
throughout her narrative -- is more analogous to my own distanced
analytic voice in writing the article. But I did not mean to position
myself as more sympathetic to Margaret's active voice. (I may have done
so without realizing it, of course). It's not as simple as: I'm doing
distanced science and thus I like her when she's distanced. Her
positioning in the whole narrative in fact oscillates several times from
passive and vulnerable to active and distanced -- although readers of
just this paper can't see that because the rest of the narrative is not
analyzed here. (See the book). I am trying to say that Margaret's
interactional poisitioning from passive to active and back is an enacted
developmental pattern. But it's not development in the usual sense of
once and for all accomplished -- but instead the social construction of
development, the repeated enactment of a "developmental" transition that
fits particular cultural stereotypes about what counts as development.
So I do not mean to uncritically valorize the more active or rational
voice.
Two more brief issues. I appreciate Eva's note about how an
interactional analysis might presuppose doubt about the veracity of
Margaret's denotational claims. This had not occurred to me. I come
from a tradition in linguistic anthropology that takes for granted that
speech is multifunctional, such that the existence of interactional
positioning does not presuppose that no true content is communicated,
but Eva is certainly right that the more commonsense view is different.
In this respect and others I will amend the text to take these reactions
into account.
Finally, about "science." I'd like to think that postpositivist
philosophy of science has offered a way to think about science as
Genevieve is, without having to choose between relational embeddedness
and scientific rigor. In theory, I think we can make that argument
work. But in practice, in contexts like this one, I often find myself
having to choose.
-- Stanton Wortham Graduate School of Education University of Pennsylvania 3700 Walnut Street Philadelphia, PA 19104-6216 (215) 898-6307 http://www.upenn.edu/gse/fac/wortham/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jan 11 2000 - 14:04:07 PST