So now it's time for me to blog one of my own articles. It's called 'Distinction, intentions, and the consumption of fiction: negotiating cultural legitimacy in a gay reading group' (DOI: http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1177/1367549410396002) and it appeared this month in European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 14, no. 2. If your institution doesn't have a subscription, you can ask me for a copy.
It's an important paper for me, because it's on the cusp of so many things: balanced between my earlier interest in literary theory and my current interest in cultural sociology, my earlier commitment to a specific methodology for analysing qualitative data and my current frustration with the sheer pretentiousness of all methodologies for analysing qualitative data. (I don't care any more whether it's Discursive Psychology, Critical Discourse Analysis, or Grounded Theory... just tell me something you think you found out about the world. Positivist, me? Actually, no -- but that's another story.) Also, as the title makes clear, I have again found myself writing about sexuality: a topic that I have never set out to research, but which perennially springs up in the margins of whatever I'm doing. The fact that I didn't set out to research it is probably responsible for the unintended ambiguity of the title: the 'legitimacy' at issue in my article is not (as the non-specialist reader might expect) the legitimacy of homosexuality as a lifestyle choice, but legitimacy as in 'legitimate' (ie. highbrow) culture. The reading group I focused on was of such interest to me not in the first instance because it was composed of gay people, but because its reading preferences were so extraordinarily poised between the highbrow and the not-quite-so-highbrow. Throughout the article, I focus in depth on its discussions of a single work of gay fiction, My Lucky Star by Joe Keenan. Some of the group members liked it, some of them didn't, but that's not really the point.
So what is it that I think I found out? First, that the group's gayness was in large part the explanation for its poise: it was formed to discuss books 'of gay interest' regardless of how intellectual those books might be. Second, that this did not mean that the group didn't care how intellectual the books it discussed actually were: group members debated the intellectuality of individual books in depth and with passion (and returned to earlier discussions on that point both when talking to one another and when interviewed by me). Third, that expressing appreciation for a book that other members deemed insufficiently intellectual had the potential to put group members in an awkward position, because of the necessary connection (if you'll forgive the theoretical abstraction) between one's own cultural capital and the cultural capital associated with the things one likes (see also Kathryn Grafton's PhD thesis, which I blogged earlier in the week). Fourth, that group members could validate their appreciation of a book of the not-quite-so-highbrow sort both by arguing that one should 'take it for what it is' (sociologists, recall Richard Peterson's omnivore thesis!) and by reading it against a body of specifically 'gay' cultural knowledge (ie. by displaying subcultural capital). Fifth, that perceptions of authorial intention can play a key role in discussions of the cultural legitimacy of books: not perceptions of the author's intention to communicate some particular meaning or other, but perceptions of the author's intention to write a 'serious' work of literature or (conversely) an entertaining piece of popular fiction.
I happen to think that this last point has significant implications for literary theory, but I haven't had the opportunity to spell them out yet. Cf. my earlier argument that the important kind of intention is the intention to produce an artefact of a particular kind (ie. genre) having socially acknowledged success and failure conditions - an argument that (speaking as an inveterate self-citer) I unaccountably forgot to cite in the current article. Ah well, there's always this blog!
Saturday 28 May 2011
Tuesday 24 May 2011
Commentary as genre as social action
I started this blog with the best of intentions, but lo and behold, it's well over half a year since I last posted. Blame it on the day job. But I'll try to get things back on track now. Throughout those seven months, I've been meaning to blog one particular work of reader study: Kathryn Grafton's PhD thesis, Paying attention to public readers of Canadian literature: popular genre systems, publics, and canons, which was successfully defended last year. So here we are.
Grafton's thesis belongs to what I like to think of (although to paraphrase the 'immortal' Mandy Rice-Davies: I would, wouldn't I?) as the new school of reader research. If this is a form of reception study, then it is reception study that refuses to reify reception, seeing the traditional materials of reception study (statements about texts by people who claim to have read them) as an aspect of cultural production. The primary inspiration for this turn is surely Pierre Bourdieu, who counted among cultural producers all those who contribute to the production of the value of literary or artistic works, and not merely those identified as the 'creators' of such works (Bourdieu 1993). If this is accepted, then 'receiving' the work is producing the work - and there is no such thing as 'reception'. Perhaps the sort of research I'm talking about should be called 'reception studies post-reception' or even 'post-receptionism'. Perhaps that's what I should have called this blog. But I digress.
Grafton's starting point is more or less the same as the one from which I started my own PhD research, ie. that what a person says or writes about a text must be analysed as a piece of speech or writing that he or she has produced, rather than as evidence of a mental event that previously occurred during an individual act of private reading. Her and my research draws on quite different traditions in order to theorise such words on words, however: while my PhD work was founded in a mish-mash of discursive psychology, literary theory, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics, Grafton's arises from a sustained engagement with genre theory, which also led to her 2009 chapter 'Situating the public social actions of blog posts' and her 2008 article with Elizabeth Maurer, 'Engaging with and arranging for publics in blog genres'.
Grafton's main theoretical contribution is to argue that 'contemporary canons are discursive spaces comprised of publicly circulating and re-circulating literary texts and talk about these texts.' (Grafton 2010, p. 7) To some extent, that's the point I tried to make in my 2006 reception study of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. In the aforementioned article, I first adopt Michel Foucault's conception of canonical literary texts as speech acts taken up and re-spoken through speech acts of commentary, and then use Michael Billig's theory of arguing as thinking in order to make sense of the relations between specific commentaries. The closer I look at that article, the more I commonality I can see between literary critics (as I theorised them) and the various old and new media commentators that Grafton studies; moreover, the ongoing production of canonicity is at the heart of my analysis, which even recognises the link between this and the publishing industry. It all makes me wonder whether I slipped off track between 2006 and the submission of my PhD thesis - a work limited by (and constantly chaffing against) a certain idealism. I could have studied the material basis for the production of academic literary criticism, and investigated the work of criticism as a contributor to the production of institutional status both for the critic and for the object of criticism. Then my thesis might, I think, have become the equivalent of Grafton's brilliant exploration of the interactions between the blogosphere, the library system, civic authority, and the broadcasting and publishing industries in contemporary Canada - and of the circulation of texts and of symbolic capital across those interlinked systems. That exploration is Grafton's main empirical contribution - and as you can see, I'm impressed.
I suspect that this says something about the theoretical and methodological foundations of my PhD research, which diverted my energies from the research itself to the extent that their construction became my research. I hope I'm not too immodest in supposing that my own PhD thesis makes empirical contributions of its own. But what empirical claims it does make come close to getting lost in all the theoretical and methodological hand-wringing, added to which I was never quite sure whether to do the interesting thing (generalising through comparison with other studies) or what is often taken for the rigorous thing (insisting that everything one finds is specific to the particular text or spoken interaction that one happens to be analysing). This makes me wonder about the following as tests for social theory:
Just a thought.
Grafton's thesis belongs to what I like to think of (although to paraphrase the 'immortal' Mandy Rice-Davies: I would, wouldn't I?) as the new school of reader research. If this is a form of reception study, then it is reception study that refuses to reify reception, seeing the traditional materials of reception study (statements about texts by people who claim to have read them) as an aspect of cultural production. The primary inspiration for this turn is surely Pierre Bourdieu, who counted among cultural producers all those who contribute to the production of the value of literary or artistic works, and not merely those identified as the 'creators' of such works (Bourdieu 1993). If this is accepted, then 'receiving' the work is producing the work - and there is no such thing as 'reception'. Perhaps the sort of research I'm talking about should be called 'reception studies post-reception' or even 'post-receptionism'. Perhaps that's what I should have called this blog. But I digress.
Grafton's starting point is more or less the same as the one from which I started my own PhD research, ie. that what a person says or writes about a text must be analysed as a piece of speech or writing that he or she has produced, rather than as evidence of a mental event that previously occurred during an individual act of private reading. Her and my research draws on quite different traditions in order to theorise such words on words, however: while my PhD work was founded in a mish-mash of discursive psychology, literary theory, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics, Grafton's arises from a sustained engagement with genre theory, which also led to her 2009 chapter 'Situating the public social actions of blog posts' and her 2008 article with Elizabeth Maurer, 'Engaging with and arranging for publics in blog genres'.
Grafton's main theoretical contribution is to argue that 'contemporary canons are discursive spaces comprised of publicly circulating and re-circulating literary texts and talk about these texts.' (Grafton 2010, p. 7) To some extent, that's the point I tried to make in my 2006 reception study of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. In the aforementioned article, I first adopt Michel Foucault's conception of canonical literary texts as speech acts taken up and re-spoken through speech acts of commentary, and then use Michael Billig's theory of arguing as thinking in order to make sense of the relations between specific commentaries. The closer I look at that article, the more I commonality I can see between literary critics (as I theorised them) and the various old and new media commentators that Grafton studies; moreover, the ongoing production of canonicity is at the heart of my analysis, which even recognises the link between this and the publishing industry. It all makes me wonder whether I slipped off track between 2006 and the submission of my PhD thesis - a work limited by (and constantly chaffing against) a certain idealism. I could have studied the material basis for the production of academic literary criticism, and investigated the work of criticism as a contributor to the production of institutional status both for the critic and for the object of criticism. Then my thesis might, I think, have become the equivalent of Grafton's brilliant exploration of the interactions between the blogosphere, the library system, civic authority, and the broadcasting and publishing industries in contemporary Canada - and of the circulation of texts and of symbolic capital across those interlinked systems. That exploration is Grafton's main empirical contribution - and as you can see, I'm impressed.
I suspect that this says something about the theoretical and methodological foundations of my PhD research, which diverted my energies from the research itself to the extent that their construction became my research. I hope I'm not too immodest in supposing that my own PhD thesis makes empirical contributions of its own. But what empirical claims it does make come close to getting lost in all the theoretical and methodological hand-wringing, added to which I was never quite sure whether to do the interesting thing (generalising through comparison with other studies) or what is often taken for the rigorous thing (insisting that everything one finds is specific to the particular text or spoken interaction that one happens to be analysing). This makes me wonder about the following as tests for social theory:
- to what extent does your theory enable you to get on with your job of investigating how the social world works? (Or conversely: to what extent does it tie you up in questions of ontology and epistemology?)
- to what extent does your theory enable you to draw meaningful links between case studies? (Or conversely: to what extent does it limit you to a fragmentary series of expositions of local contexts?)
Just a thought.
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