Semiotics and the Future in/of Qualitative Research

• In Event: What Methods Do: New Materialisms and the Consequences of Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Objectives:
The transformation that poststructuralism worked on 20th century social science methodology can arguably be traced to its emphasis on the semiotic nature of meaning, inquiry, and representation. Drawing on the linguistic semiotics of Ferdinand de Saussure, scholars such as Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Butler introduced a highly precise and influential anti-foundationalism into a wide variety of fields of social inquiry—including, of course, educational research.

Recently, however, qualitative researchers in a variety of disciplines have been expressing ambivalence about the limitations of a primarily linguistic conception of meaning (Lather, 2013). This paper takes up two theoretical strands of this movement—contemporary revisionist pragmatism and new feminist materialism—and compares their implications for methodological theory and practice.

Theoretical Frameworks
Scholars such as Charlene Haddock Seigfried (1996), Cornel West(1989), Scott Pratt (2002, 2004), Lee McBride (2012), Erin McKenna & Scott Pratt (2013) and others have recently revised the historical canon of pragmatic philosophy to include the influence of interactions between indigenous Americans and European settler society, early feminists, Harlem renaissance intellectuals, ecological activists, and others. This revision of the pragmatist philosophical cannon has precipitated a renaissance of interest in pragmatism’s relevance to social science. Of particular interest has been pragmatism’s realist version of reflexivity and its location of the ontological significance of research in the horizon of possible consequences that might follow from our inquiries.

This reflexive realism and future-oriented ontology share many features with Karen Barad’s (2003, 2007) feminist materialism that is also inspiring considerable qualitative methodology innovation (Coole & Frost, 2010). Barad, a physicist turned feminist philosopher of science, uses a detailed analysis of quantum mechanics experiments to challenge both naïve empiricism and poststructuralist relativism. She highlights the way both of these approaches to inquiry overlook the fact that our modes of inquiry establish a partial relation with the materiality of the world (physical or social) that always exceeds our representational activity. Western conceptions of science she argues, has taken a procrustean view of inquiry that avoids responsibility for the long term consequences of the material relations it puts into motion.

Modes of Inquiry
This paper compares and contrasts the way these two theoretical frameworks approach the semiotics of inquiry. Barad, in the interest of avoiding poststructuralism’s linguistic reductionism, rejects semiotics entirely as a starting place for inquiry. This paper argues, however, that putting any kind of moral or political reflexivity into methodological practice depends on having a theory of semiotics (a theory of how meaning is mediated). It looks to the founder of pragmatic philosophy, Charles Sanders Peirce, for a semiotic theory grounded not in linguistics that can do this work.

Scholarly Significance
The emerging new empiricism is shifting methodological conversations from debates about the exclusive accuracy of or the problematics of representation, to debates about the plausibility and desirability of narratives about the future. This, shift is potentially revolutionary in its consequences. It offers the future as a site of post-representational methodological warrant. This paper explores the details of what such an analysis would look like.

Author

• Jerry L. Rosiek, University of Oregon