Notes on: St Pierre, E (2008) Decentring Voice in Qualitative Inquiry. International Review of Qualitative Research, 1(3), 319 – 36 Dave Harris There is a phonocentric epistemology and methodology, and criticising it has implications of qualitative research. She has always had trouble with data in conventional qualitative enquiry. The methodology was both interpretivist and still dependent on positivism. Interview data pose particular problems, revealed in her own earlier studies on the construction of subjectivity in old white southern women. It is problematic to privilege voice as 'the truest, most authentic data and/or evidence' (319), especially for post structuralism and its anti-humanism, where conscious and coherent individuals express themselves in language. She also thinks it tiresome to celebrate voice, and that it gives 'the voices of our participants… too much evidentiary weight'. It is only one data source among many. Deleuze and Guattari on radical ontology, together with Butler and Derrida made her question whether it was possible to know participants or to describe them. She found that conventional ontology splitting mind and body failed to account for subjects — herself and the others. Troubles with language ensued, and post structuralism suggests that meaning is not transported unmediated by language between unified subjects. Additional questions of space and time compounded the difficulty — when and where is the voice present exactly? Only on the tape? What about the unofficial side conversations? She saw that the difficulty was with the notion of presence — '"being there"' (321). It is supposed to make face-to-face interaction especially valid, but it has been challenged by post structuralism, especially in the form of phonocentrism in Derrida [long quote follows, where the voice signifies consciousness and so becomes consciousness, expressing thought, requiring no mediation, uniting signifier and signified, and appearing transparent, referring to nothing other than what is present, nothing exterior. This has led to the construction of a conventional and persistent semiology]. Culler describes the notion of presence as something centring or grounding, giving authority, as in the Cartesian cogito where it is beyond doubt. In particular, signifiers are inseparable from thought — voice is 'pre-discursive' and just asserts the truth of an immediate understanding. We can allegedly hear the speaker in her voice, so speech becomes the most authentic form. This has clearly structured conventional qualitative enquiry and other humanist projects. There is a need to deconstruct the whole '"grid of intelligibility"' (322) (citing Foucault) of qualitative enquiry, its notions of subject, language, knowledge and reality. Problems that appeared elsewhere in poststructuralist qualitative research — Lather coming to doubt the validity and clarity, or Jackson doubting voice. Qualitative research means different things as a result, and poststructuralist qualitative enquiry might be incoherent. In 1985, publications developed the qualitative movement around the interpretive turn, initiated in cultural anthropology by the likes of Geertz. Some logical positivism remained, however — it was a correction rather than an escape, and, as Derrida notes, we cannot use concepts of metaphysics to attack metaphysics. We might need a new language, although there are difficulties in leading us to forget issues of truth, which matters in research. Thus some people have attempted to modify the notion of voice. Qualitative enquiry is no longer coherent. Poststructuralist researchers might not be recognised as qualitative or as doing proper research if they deconstruct too many humanist concepts. It might not get funded, given the current preferences for scientifically based research in education, research that works and so on — happily science is also being deconstructed. Poststructuralism has critiqued narrative. So have those who want to reintroduce randomised experimental trials as the only scientific research in education. They have also argued whether you can rule out rival narratives, or generalise from them, or how you might guarantee veracity [St Pierre adds her own sceptical questions such as why rival accounts should be ruled out in the first place, or whether science is not just another narrative]. Poststructuralism focuses instead on 'the narrative impulse' to fix reality and subjective identity, to make coherent disparate events and intentional actors (324), which goes back to Aristotle and the idea of a conventional plot. It 'smacks of the familiar Hegelianism triumph of Same over Difference'[? — It manages difference?], and overemphasises consensus. Narratives are deliberately closed by particular techniques, and we can criticise them in the spirit of incredulity towards metanarratives. However perhaps narrative is central to thinking. Some qualitative researchers fully embrace the narrative turn, '"the flight of intellectuals to "story""' (325), which would also avoid academic violence in the form of critique. Narrative was seen as a natural form above critique. It is however 'always already interpretation piled on interpretation'. For Haraway, there is a nostalgia for origins, '"the one true Word"', a return to the real, while for Jamison, it is a way of managing and forgetting the past. Some have been 'lovely' and theory laden.  However many stories are 'found' as part of the research work—this is called analysis.  It is common to abandon all the theory summarised in the introduction and simply describe the participants and then offer a series of stories.  This avoids issues of epistemology.  Simple stories do not replace rigorous analysis.  However, there is a belief that analysis would distort the purer and natural voices.  The usual layout separates theory from data as well.  Theory is often 'simply forgotten by the time the author presents data, voices' (326).  There is always a lack of fit between theory and data, but this should not lead us to abandon analysis. 'Experience' is another grounding concept, especially everyday lived experiences which become 'foundational evidence that warrants our claims'.  For Derrida, this is a metaphysical construct connected to presence, something that founds identity,  while Nietzsche argued that there is no being behind doing.  Butler took this up arguing that performance does not express prior intentions or simply tell us about the doer behind the deed.  Experience constitutes subjects—'it is also discursive' (327) in the Foucault sense.  Overall 'experience is a valorized regulating fiction, and a "shaky basis for epistemology"'. In qualitative inquiry it still serves as a final warrant, something authoritative, celebrated rather than problematized :Althusser  takes experience to be evidence of the workings of ideological practices, post structuralists see the linguistic as more important, while Foucault questions the long emphasis on introspection or lived experience as indicating the presence of consciousness.  Humanism has not addressed its paradoxes. She wants to produce different knowledge and to produce it differently.  Many of the central concepts in qualitative inquiry have already been seen as 'over coded with presence', and we have attempted to provide alternatives like 'messy texts'to challenge transparency, or to ask students to reflect on their subjectivities.  We still positivistically code data as analysis.  We rarely describe this process, however,  'perhaps because it would be virtually unrecognisable as what we now think of as analysis'(328).  We acknowledge that there might be fractured or shifting subjects, but still make them humanist subjects, sometimes with names, and with rich personalities and experiences.  We make them 'as whole as possible for our readers, believing that richer and fuller descriptions will get us closer and closer to the truth of the participant'. We might practice deconstruction subsequently, but perhaps 'we might just stop doing it'and tried to produce different knowledge 'by "rupture and restructuration"'[quoting  Derrida].  This will not be easy to do because we are still gripped by the metaphysics of presence, and we might produce something that would not be recognized as inquiry or science. Derrida himself said that we should begin wherever we are in a text, and her own attempts at deconstruction has occurred in texts she has written where she has tried to refuse categories like the subject or data.  This goes with Foucault on refusing to accept what we are.  She thinks that 'writing is thinking—analysis if you will' [and so it should be the site of her struggle][A ref toher collabprative work with Richardson here] It is almost impossible to avoid using 'I'and the whole language of humanism.  Butler has said we should recognise the difficulties and the possibilities excluded.  She has tried to resignify theories of subjectivity and as a result 'I no longer think of myself as I did before post structuralism'(329)  Rorty was apparently 'pivotal'.  [Long quote follows where he says that the descriptions we use are contingent, not necessary, and this would dispel notions of progress or metaphysical comfort].  She now sees herself as 'a very real effect of a description', one among many others.  This was 'terrifically freeing' although she knows you can never escape the notion of I.  However, we look at any structure object or subject as a description 'that can, has been, and will be rewritten with more or less ease'.  She means rewritten deliberately, to refer to her own analysis of her own writing—in one case, she did not write a separate literature review section followed by a data section, but mixed the two [example follows, page 330, working in words from participants alongside conventional literature review—homonyms beckon again so that  Eagleton saying that words do not always have precise meanings in specialist languages is followed by a quote from one of her participants saying that 'you have to learn the lingo so you can get the expertise to read'] [this was a project about expert readers tackling hard texts].  She attempted to think 'simultaneously with every one's ideas' [how did that go?] so separating comments into sections made no sense.  She's not assuming that participant comments were somehow more present or more authentic.  Her unusual writing style is 'an unintended effect of many years of attempting to refuse presence.  Deconstruction just happens '. Yet we still write about voices 'as if they are originally and present even though they can never be', for example where we render philosophical argument as something that 'Plato says'.  Writing is repressed and replaced by speech or its surrogate, and so its practices are still not examined [Derrida of course]. She insists that she has not studied participants, but rather investigated a topic—subjectivity or expert reading.  She used 'comments from everyone I could find' including theorists, participants, even 'characters in film and and fiction' to help her think.  'Thus, I believe all those comments are data'[risks reductionism].  We should not isolate data in different sections when we write up. She's also used old data, dream data, or emotional data and memory data.  'Some escape the human/non human binary'.  She tries to escape chronological time because time is always out of joint, and we can experience events which have not yet taken place [quoting Deleuze].  This deferred data simply 'cannot be thought in the economy of phonocentrism'.  We should be more than steeped in post structuralist theories—we should make deliberate ruptures, partly as an ethical obligation.  Foucault helps [a quote saying that thoughts can appear as an object of thought so we can question its meaning], and we might use the notion of description to think differently.  In particular, qualitative inquiry should be seen as 'simply another description, a useful but inadequate fiction—one that may have reached the limits of its effectiveness' (332). We're not questioning the rigour of qualitative inquiry from a positivist point of view, but rather because it is obsessed with the voices of participants as authentic data, which means that other data is not accounted for, which means in turn that we get a 'weak analysis and the recycling of old ideas'.  We should think with Derrida to overturn the hegemony of presence, or consider with Lather, post methodology where we begin to do something radically differently.  'Whether we will call this work "qualitative" remains to be seen. back to Lather page