Just for clarification, my sense of 'Old School' was certainly not that
they are a thing of the past -- very much alive and kicking, as you say. I
generally believe that social change proceeds, like evolutionary change,
not by one form or practice replacing another, but by long periods of (not
always easy) co-existence, in which only the extent of their networks
gradually shifts so that one becomes in many contexts more relevant than
the other. As in ecosystems generally, ecosocial systems are 'patchy' and
in each patch in the mosaic, on many scales, we find side by side older and
new forms, a mixed-age mosaic.
No, I don't suppose you did claim (but others I think do, and some these
days seem to make even wilder claims for the privileged status of
narrative, as others have for a privileged status for conversational
discourse forms) that narrative gets us closer to the insider view, but
rather as you say perhaps narrative is a form of expression of research
viewpoints that is easier for a wider readership to make use of.
Certainly both analytic-expository forms and lyric-poetic ones seem very
unfamiliar and uncongenial to the meaning-making habitus of many people.
Conversational-dialogic forms, of course, have also often been proposed as
a more accessible mode for researcher voices to speak/write in (Plato,
Galileo, Bateson).
I am cautious on this question. I have certainly seen avant-garde
narratives that would be very difficult to make familiar-sounding meanings
with, and probably you know literary theory's conundrums about 'readerly'
vs 'writerly' texts (Barthes' terms, but others have similar notions). So
it is not narrative as such, but some kinds of narrative, and familiar
forms can also, unfortunately, become traps for co-opting new content ideas
into old and comfortable ideologies. I think that part of what research has
to do is to make the familiar strange, or offer a slightly alien, but
ultimately useful new perspective on things. If Geertzian ideals of 'thick
description' or simpler ideals of 'emic fidelity' seem to mean that an
ethnography is unsurprising to local members, we have to remember that it
isn't really being written for them, but for us, to whom their familiar
should sound strange.
What happens then when we write analytical-narrative accounts primarily for
the members of a community we have in focus in our work? we want it to be
familiar enough in form to support a somewhat alternative viewpoint, but
perhaps also have to make the form itself a bit strange to embody that
viewpoint ... a dilemma that leaves us searching for creative compromises,
as I suspect you must know very well. Narrative is a good place to begin.
People also make films and dramatizations to do this; some are
experimenting with multimedia (familiar semiotics, unfamiliar genres and
technologies). A lot of narrative of the kind we're talking about
incorporates features of conversational and dramatic discourse forms, and I
don't see why it can't also incorporate some features from
analytic-expository forms, too.
Some people would like to re-shape the analytical-expository form as well,
adding features of the other 'pure' types. Personally, this is probably
more my own style, or would be if I had an audience for it and my ideas
were well enough developed to allow me more latitude in expressing them.
Certainly I have noticed lately both Diane Hodges and Eva Ekeblad making
good use of unconventional mixes of discourse strategies. Some parts of the
Postscript chapter in _Textual Politics_ represent a small variation on my
usual style, but I have always wanted to shift further. A lot of people
have encouraged me to write a more 'popular' style or account of some of my
ideas. I admire the styles of Geertz and Bruner, but I think that their
topics make it a bit easier to adopt those styles than it would be for me
in saying some of what I would want to talk about.
The connections between form and content are not _completely_ arbitrary and
historically contingent matters of convention -- there are some strong
semantic constraints, at least given what has come to sound coherent to us
(which is, granted, more completely arbitrary in the very long run -- but
not alas on a time scale on which I can work!). So I would be constantly
looking over my shoulder as I wrote a coherent-sounding narrative,
wondering how my meanings were being subtly co-opted into a form that all
but requires certain notions about individual agency, protagonists and
antagonists, dramatically meaningful development, sequential causality,
articulation of evaluative and descriptive perspectives, and something that
can count as an 'ending' that retrospectively seems to make coherent sense
of most of whatever preceded it. And who knows what else?
At least narrative structure is very well analyzed, which is a blessing to
the reflective, innovative writer who chooses it as a base genre. For my
part I think I understand the conventions of analytic-expository rhetoric a
lot better than I do those of narrative, and I feel safer riding a horse
whose 'pull' I'm used to.
I would _really_ like to hear from people their candidates for 'popular'
works (written in language and style relatively easily accessible to a
relatively wide readership) that they think have also made a significant
number of readers begin to make sense of some social phenomenon in
genuinely new or different ways?? work that goes against the comfortable
and familiar ideological grain, but does so in language that seems easy and
accessible ...
Such as ...?
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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