Notes on Lather
P. ' Against Empathy, Voice and Authenticity'
Reprinted from Transgressive Methodology,
special issue of Women, Gender and Research,
v. 4, Copenhagen, 16-25, 2000. and in Voice
in Qualitative Inquiry: Challenging
Conventional, Interpretive, and Critical
Conceptions, Alecia Youngblood Jackson and
Lisa Mazzei, eds. NY: Routledge.
[NB page numbers refer to Prof Lather's personal
copy sent to me very kindly]
The demand for empathy voice and authenticity in
feminism is central to the rejection of scientism,
but open to the critics of the coherent
subject. In particular, narrative and
representation of the other seems to be based on
things like empathy and mutual knowing, but risks
'imperial sameness'(1). What if we refuse
these conventional grounds and opt for 'messy
"spaces in between"'? Britzman is cited on
the effects of heroism and rescue in ethnographic
attempts to research the other through more
adequate methodology. Instead, we have to
admit that knowledge and understanding can fail.
It is scientificity that is the problem rather
than the actual practices of science.
Poststructural science through Britzman involves
instead 'the need to be wounded by thought as an
ethical move'. We should not respond to
demands for voice or standpoint. Qualitative
research still involves 'sacred objects to be
recovered, restored, centered' (3), an avoidance
of difficulties, the preservation of
research. There is a tendency to 'too easy
to tell story of salvation', continued reliance on
foundationalism and 'nostalgia for presence'[all
of this summarizing Britzman]. We need to
develop instead Nietzsche's gay science,
'splintering of the mechanisms of control and the
resultant incredulity about salvation', progress
and reason. We should research instead 'how
knowledge remains possible' after the demise of
value free science. Examples are to be drawn
from the book on women with HIV/AIDs.
Ethnographic representation is inherently
manipulative, but this book uses 'various layers
and shifts of register', requiring the audience to
actively try to hear, ignoring disciplinary
constraints, occupying 'the very space opened up
by the ruins of the concept of ethnographic
representation'(4). The text offers
'discontinuous bits and multiples', using the very
failure to represent as a way of conveying
experience, preventing both voyeurism and a sense
of difference.
Empathy is always related to sameness, so it
cannot reproduce discrimination. Ellsworth
sees empathy as offering '"the beautiful fit"'and
recommends instead 'querying, disidentifying
denaturalizing, defamiliarising: producing
differences instead of the same'. Empathy implies
a mirror relationship with the other. We
should occupy instead 'the abject space of the
between', and keep it unsettled, breaking with the
usual 'logic of identity and difference'.
This can be seen as Deleuzian becoming. It
denies underlying structures that everyone shares,
and presents into subjectivity as a riddle.
It implies competent readers, nonrhetorical
writing, and a move away from 'fantasies of
mutuality' and 'touristic invitations to
intimacy'(5).
Their text is 'less argued than enacted', refusing
mimetic desire, opening the distance between the
reader and the subject of research, refusing
empathy. This meets both epistemological and
ethical requirements, of reminding us not to
assume that we have the right to know, and
avoiding forcing identities and overlooking
differences. Those rejected techniques
involve 'a kind of violence', in the demand for
totality. Instead, we need to develop
modesty and respect before our desire to possess
and know. It requires careful listening
without presuming mutuality, withholding intimacy,
and trying to teach the reader to develop a
response that acknowledges difficulties.
Thought is always presented as inadequate to its
object. The comfort of the text is
denied. [So there are links with
discomforting pedagogy?]
Similar problems are addressed the issues of
authenticity and voice which are 'at the heart of
claims to the "real" in ethnography'(6).
Voice is sometimes granted a privileged
authority. These claims cover 'confessional
tales, authorial self revelation, multivoicedness
and personal narrative'. They challenge
scientism, but risk 'a romance of the speaking
subject and a metaphysics of presence'(7).
[One example is a fraudulent autobiography written
with full authenticity and voice. Uncle
Tom's Cabin was also not just a series of
narratives by the slaves, but one that had
intertextuality and authorial contributions. Note
that Hargreaves has also criticized the reliance
on teachers voices -Hargreaves A 1996.
'Revisiting voice'. Educational
Researcher 25,1: 12-19].
Authenticity has been much discussed by Adorno who blames
Heidegger - Lather offers a more generous reading
of his efforts (8) and then summarizes Adorno's
critique of the cult of authenticity.
Apparently, there was a link to Benjamin on the
loss of the aura and how we might live afterwards,
with no transcendent dimension. Benjamin
also showed that the 'ruins of theology' were
still present current efforts to gain knowledge,
especially in 'post kantian modernity'.
Modernism and secularization eventually produce
'get[ting] lost at the limits of representation',
where the old signifiers remain as mere empty
shells
To get back to the book on women with HIV, there
was an effort not to take advantage of emotion,
especially sentimentality, by constructing 'a
questioning text' (10). The women were
described as angels as 'the shell for the ghost of
meaning', trying to use theological symbols to
preserve otherness, and to refer to Benjamin's
angel of history. This will apparently help
escape 'from the general cliches of the Frankfurt
school' and start new thinking about otherness
that remains as traces. The angel represents
'unassimilable otherness' haunting reason and
subjectivity, an effect, producing ' a less
bounded space where we do what we can'.
Jameson was wrong to predict the waning of affects
-emotional responses and feelings are more
widespread than ever, as in first-person public
discourses, therapies, talk shows, moral panics
and so on. Benjamin and others tried to
avoid such subjectivist thinking by considering
affect as dynamism and complexity. The turn
to affect can turn into 'the return of "sentiment
and sobs"' (11) [citing Stockton], including the
reactions to AIDS. Even academic cultural
critics seem to embrace '"emotional
extravagance"'. There is a tendency to
perform '"teasing out sobs"'to connect with
public sentiment, developing a transgressive
personal form. Stockton instead recommends
'personal writing that is scandalous, excessive
and leaky but based in lack and ruin rather than
plenitude' by including the loss of aura argument.
In the 'frenzy of demands to show emotion, voice
is an authorizing disclosure'. The '" validity of
tears" is a concept arising from discussing
audience reception of the book [a critic said
this? She responded to a critic with this?]
. It is based on 'the abjection of theory
and the reinscription of presence'. Instead,
the intention was to produce authoritative
interpretations 'to construct a different
relationality' (12) beyond excessive
subjectivity. However, voice can also be
linked to a demand for the acknowledgement of
subjugated knowledges, as in Spivak on the
subaltern.
The main problem is not so much to oppose it then,
as to guard against a process of 'assimilation
into sameness', to oppose mimesis
pragmatically. Various 'de-authorizing
devices' are required - counter voices,
'subtextual under-writing which ruptures the
narrative and forces reading in two directions',
dialogic openness, variable meanings that prevent
rhetorical claims that the authors are the one who
know, 'partiality, chunkiness and deferral' to
deny that representations are simply depicting the
real, a refusal of closure, especially one that
turns on recuperation. These techniques can
be seen as a contribution to an effort to rethink
science and culture based on difference, but there
is no claim to be 'romantic god-artists who create
sublime moments of unity and totality'. It
was informed by attempts to develop a new
ethnography which did not claim authorial
knowledge: pages were split into women's voices
and authors', poems were produced without
authorial judgement. The aim was to trouble
'authority in the telling of other people's
stories'. Interpretation could still take
place, but the author could no longer appear 'as
either priest or prophet' (13). The
intention was to get lost and reveal unease.
There is no simple style or popular appeal,
despite what readers might think in a book that
honours victims, no 'consumption, a too-easy,
too-familiar eating of the other'. The work
is 'emotive, figurative, inexact, dispersed and
deferred', showing responsibility and
truth-telling within indeterminacy.
NB there are some useful references to Britzman,
various pieces in Qualitative Studies in Education
in the late nineties.
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