> One question I've been asking myself over the past few years is what an
> analysis is intended to produce. Theory? And what is theory-a set of
> assertions? An abstraction from the concrete? Academic capital? Or, as
> Alan Blum has suggested, is it the theorist reinventing him/herself?
This is an interesting question, though I wonder whether the analysis must be
seen as productive of any object/product. Is that question rooted in some sort
of industrial paradigm? To consider the question, though - might it be
possible to say that analysis might hope to produce insight (rather than
theory, which seems grander) or reflection with some hope of transforming
practice, as you hoped to do? What is produced, for example, when one
interprets a work of literature or a film? I woudn't say it's theory, though I
wouldn't say it's only relevant to the artistic object, either. Maybe the
interpretation of data isn't substantively different - except that the reader
doesn't have equal access to the ur-text in the case of research (something
people who do microethnographies try to fix, however successfully). I suppose
really the product could be said to be a turn in a conversation within a
particular discourse community. That this is also academic capital is probably
beyond dispute, but we all hope we're doing something beyond that, too.
> It's said that the
> two major modes of discourse are assertion/argument and narrative: I've
> chosen the second. I'm writing a *story* about the community schools.
>
> Here's one attempt I've made to explain and justify this:
>
> "Any narrative is shaped by the benefits of hindsight, but it also captures
> the unfolding of events in time. It is informed by a sense of the whole,
> by an understanding, achieved in retrospect, of the larger social and
> historical contexts in which people acted, when they themselves necessarily
> lacked this awareness. But at the same time it can reconstruct the
> unfolding, the twists and turns of events, the surprises and
> disappointments, that agents experienced. This juxtaposition of the
> limited viewpoint of the agent and the larger forces that cannot be seen
> clearly at the time is the power of narrative, and it is precisely this
> two-sided approach-partial understanding of agent; larger social/historical
> system-that a critical socio-cultural analysis of human development seeks."
>
> I might add that in a narrative I can locate myself, as something other
> than the omniscient but hidden-by-the-third-person academic.
>
> As I write this story I make endless decisions about what to higlight and
> what to background, and I've come to see this *as* analysis, of a kind that
> doesn't reduce the complexity of events to theoretical abstraction. And
> I'd like the people I worked with to read what I've written and say, 'yes,
> that's right, and we now understand a little better what we were trying to
> do, what went wrong, and what we can do next.' A narrative (I hope) can
> do this in the way that a quantitative analysis, for example, can't.
Seems to me that the decision to write in a textual genre mostly structured as
narrative is a huge decision with _almost_ total paradigmatic implications - at
least as far as the qualitative/quantitative split is concerned. But no text,
of course, is all one mode of discourse, even if the genre is structurally
unified chronologically as a narrative. Most thoughtful novels have expository
prose within them, and some novelists's styles (take Kundera or Musil as famous
examples) are essayistic or expository. What I mean is that as you write your
story, you not only choose emphases and omissions, but you also comment on
things you think are important. And I have read some research that is
structured as narrative that I thought would have been more clearly structured
categorically, especially since the balance of expository and narrative tipped
toward the expository, the outside-of-time, the always-true. (I don't know why
they chose narrative, except as an academic statement of affiliation -
something else that's always true of genres.) And sometimes it's just as
useful to think of the text one is making as principles exposed with narrative
examples: "here's a theme in the data, and here's a story that illustrates
it."
I thought you raised some really interesting questions about genre. Also,
Martin, I checked out your web site, and I like your work very much.
Randy Bomer
Queens College, CUNY