Games and Methodological Obsessions With Meaning

• In Event: Working Through Methodologies Without a Proper Name

Abstract

Objective and significance: Proper names can streamline complex systems and reduce multiple nuances and differences to few essences. On the contrary, the awareness of contextualized linkages, linguistic and material traces, and different uses of labels can make researchers more sensitive to differentiating research processes and always present (language) games. Some of these language games are more normative and others are shaped by individuals’ resistance toward normativity and structured practices (see also Browning, 2000; Lyotard, 1999). The principle of postmodern knowledge “is not the expert’s homology, but the inventor’s paralogy” (Lyotard, 1999, p. xxv). In this presentation I argue that by working against overly normative ways of reasoning and fixed linguistic structures scholars are able to dissent language that manages and governs which, in turn, can lead to linguistic creation and conceptual movement also within methodological practices.

Perspective: Searching for meaning can be important especially for scholars operating from interpretivist traditions (see e.g., Heidegger, 1996; 2010; Merleau-Ponty, 1974; 2004; Polkinghorne, 2005). It is also possible that for some qualitative researchers locating and describing the meaning have become a dismissive epistemological obsession and the ultimate task in every qualitative project. To problematize qualitative researchers’ obsessions with meaning, St. Pierre (2009) wrote that she no longer believes in meaning as a portable property. Similarly, Jackson and Mazzei (2012) referred to the representational trap associated with meaning seeking and try to avoid the desire to reduce participants’ words and stories into coherent narratives and pure meaning. Derrida (1997) also worried about readers and writers’ desire to think through meanings.

In this paper I ask what happens and what scholars could do in the absence of meaning. How do some (language) games function and prompt scholars to move toward unanticipated directions? For example, once meanings begin to multiply, surprise, relationality, or virtuality replaces meaning the ‘nature’ of research, games, and research activities changes. Knowledge is no longer tied to the search for (right, true, singular, or universal) meaning (in meaning’s strict or objectified sense), but knowledge can be found in living, experiencing, material interactions, intuition, and in subject-object relations without clear or direct signifier signified links. These interactions and experiences might generate references or linkages to meaning but they do capture or represent it. Additionally, ‘language goes on holiday’ as Gutting (2011) puts it. Unexplained terminology and methodological connections that do not make sense create a game I play here. I draw examples from qualitative research terminology and concepts (e.g., triangulation, reflexivity) to show how hermetic methodologies cut themselves off from the very issues they seem to represent as the connections they are trying to establish become loose and ill-defined.

Conclusion: Following Deleuze (1995) one might find it debilitating to become a foreigner in one’s or each other’s meaning, language, and situational contexts. Texts, labels, meanings, and research projects can be written, rewritten and erased. Subjects and their meanings are (at least) temporarily lost and the absence of meanings creates a void that could be potentially filled with differentiating matter and various layers of difference.

Author

• Mirka E. Koro-Ljungberg, Arizona State University