THE ART OF SOCIAL INQUIRY
I want to show how social theory in all disciplines has potential for eloquence in its research that is aesthetic in spirit because of its capacity to see topics visually as situations that raise problems that are ambiguous, contestable research opportunities.
If any object (and concept) is ambiguous its reality must reside in its ambiguity in ways that expose the limits of any system assumed to be unambiguous and closed and interpretively finalized. This ambiguity constitutes what we call the ethical collision that is the focus of our case studies.
We use Plato as a precursor of case study research despite academic classifications of his old-fashioned formalism, in a line of descent that we recreate and that includes many influences designed to reimagine reflective inquiry as if a canon that includes conventional approaches that dissent from doctrinaire empiricism and as such a body of work, distinguishes itself by its self-conception as an art of case study research.
Based on such an influence Peter McHugh and I with colleagues developed an approach to social inquiry over the years as one of querying the fundamental ambiguity of the background of thought and action. We proposed that social research can locate cases that expose this collision and that can observe efforts to solve it as if a problem-solving situation in its varied studies.
In writing and research and in interaction, we try to inject the spirit of dialectical interpretation into so-called qualitative research by encouraging participants (and readers) to focus on tensions and contradictions in verbal and written materials in order to explore and begin to describe the values that are in play as parts of a discourse oriented to specific problems. We always seek to translate such debates into conversational data for inquiry to analyze through particular methods that reveal how the ‘debate’ makes reference to a common problem that is unspoken.
In contrast to typical qualitative research that focuses on eliciting speech and opinions that can be characterized, tabulated, and converted into themes, this analysis uses its methods to go ‘beyond’ these surfaces of speech in ways specifically attuned to subjective and qualitative registers that are often held in abeyance. In the spirit of someone like Gertrude Stein, we suggest that words need to be recharged and enlivened, treated as ambiguous, unshackled from a single meaning attached to a noun that circulates as common currency.
I take the position that Lyotard spells out nicely as repeated in Mario Perniola’s eloquent study (Art and its Shadow (New York: Continuum Books, 2004), 62-3): “writing conceals some gesture, a remainder of gesture beyond readability….‘This excess….in thought denies the evidence of the given, excavates the readable’ and shows ‘that all is not said, written or presented’” (Forward by Jean-Francois Lyotard for Joseph Kosuth, Art after Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966-[1]. 1990, ed. with intro. by Gabriele Guerico (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1991), 18).