Reflections on (No) Method
Jill has some good stuff to say about method. It takes me back to when I was working on my master's thesis, and my advisor asked me what my method was. I was frustrated and flummoxed, and thought, "I'm writing a freakin' essay! I guess that's it." Having a method for a critical reading of the ways that composition theorists have used Haraway's cyborg theory seemed utterly counterintuitive to me. Since then, I've learned that in some disciplines, "method" is a mechanical procedure, like "the sample was placed in a centrifuge and left on a petri dish for 5 days," and in others, it's more a basic question of what texts you're going to study, the basis of selection of those particular texts, and the theory and assumptions, the (to use the Burkean term) teministic screen, you're using to interpret the texts. For example, in my M.A. thesis, I went into my reading with the assumption that Haraway's theory is, of course, a way of looking at humans and technology, but indissociable from the theory are its political underpinnings; it is a socialist feminist social theory, and it has implications for activist practice, which Haraway has said in an interview with Gary Olson in JAC. I used my reading of "A Cyborg Manifesto," along with my assumptions/convictions about the argument's meaning to critique the way that composition theorists have used Haraway's theoretical framework (at times focusing too much on the implications for human-computer interaction, collaborative writing, and hypertext at the expense of the rich socialist, feminist, anti-racist aspects of the theory).
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no method
The article by Arild Fetveit sounds like something that would've been good to read in our applied methods course last semester. I agree that, oftentimes, asking someone in the humanities about their choice of method potentially creates a double bind. When we try to "change the terms," though, as Jill suggests, we wind up in other "binds" as well. How about this for the title of an article in the Chronicle: "Dude, where's my data?" :D
Eh, I like, "Dude, where's my
Eh, I like, "Dude, where's my method?" better. What are the other binds you are referring to?
no method
Well, I think that "refusing to answer" and changing the terms isn't that easy, though of course I advocate a move in that direction. To refuse to answer gets at very deep-seated issues of why we feel we need a "method," and who we’re trying to reach with our work in the first place. Jill quotes Fetveit, who says that humanistic research seeks to develop "a deeper theoretical understanding of one's field, through precise terms, stringent argumentation and an active dialogue with previous research." I'll make a rather incendiary point: I feel like we don't always engage enough with our own field; maybe we look outside more than we look within. If we sought to develop "a deeper understanding" of our own field, perhaps we wouldn't feel as compelled to employ methods that we think we need to employ in order to get certain groups to pay attention. Of course, this isn't always the case, but this point seems to be contentious enough to sustain ongoing deliberation. This also gets into that bigger question of "what is rhetoric’s subject," which has been debated since Aristotle. So I guess what I was getting at is that the "what’s your method" question is only the tip of the bind, so to speak, and is indicative of deeper-seated issues in the field. This is starting to sound a lot like last spring. Ha.