In my last post, I doubted the existence of something called “postrepresentational writing.” Foolish me! Here’s an editorial on just that topic. Apparently, that phrase means “writing about writing” (227)—at least in part. “[A]s postrepresentational qualitative researchers, we know the relationship between language and meaning to be fragile and thin,” Candace Stout writes (227). And rather than finding meaning and then writing up the results, qualitative researchers actually “conceive of writing as infused within the whole of the research endeavor” (228). Researchers are like poets, novelists, or essayists, writing to discover what they’re thinking, at least in the beginning of the research process (228). Writing collects or creates data, and writing is “an analytic, a tool that moves us in and out, fostering synergism between the researcher and the complex of data” (228). “The writing process clusters, maps, meanders around, wedges between/among data, exposing gaps in content and coherence, categorizing, creating relationships,” Stout writes (228). This is what it means to consider writing a method of inquiry.
“Imperatively, this conception of writing is not limited to the writing process alone, but lives vibrantly within the writing products—the ‘messy texts’ themselves,” Stout continues. “From a postrepresentational perspective, this is where the center shifts. Rather than imposing oneself upon the reader—my airtight interpretation, a representation of how things are—the researcher/writer moves alongside the reader” (228). The writer “‘gestures to the text, trusting that the narratives, metaphors, conversations, layered texts—those images will cultivate a space . . . where writer and reader might come together with unassuming natures to create new meanings on the grounds of reciprocity. Text as collaboration we can call it, where, predisposed for receptivity, researcher and reader sensibilities engage” (228). Stout cites Stanley Fish’s version of reader-response criticism, suggesting that “readers encounter the researcher’s writing and bring to that text their own methods of inquiry—asking questions, making assumptions, drawing conclusions, accepting, rejecting, judging, valuing, and inserting their own expectations and narratives” (228). “Eschewing representation, the self-conscious text suggests and reflects. It is critical, multiply situated, intertextual and open-ended, a gently demanding text, opening minds and communication about our social world,” Stout continues (228-29). Postrepresentational qualitative social science writing sounds like a novel by Phillipe Sollers. I wonder if such writing actually exists, except as an ideal, or as an unreadable failure. “Given the sensitive and myriad complexities of writing in the postrepresentational qualitative endeavor,” Stout concludes, “it is my hope that we, as art educators might follow along on this path, engaging in an ever proliferating conversation attentive to the nature and possibilities of the worlds within our texts” (229).
I must be old fashioned, or stupid, because while I agree that the representational function of language is complicated and messy, I can’t agree with claims that it doesn’t exist, despite the ongoing “crisis of representation” (227). When I saw “rabbit,” or “lapin,” or “conejo,” or “wapos,” I’m engaging in a representational activity: I’m using language to say something about a furry rodent with long ears and a mythical fondness for carrots, despite language’s fragile, thin relation to reality. So while postrepresentational writing might be something some people worry about, I would have to see examples that demonstrate such writing actually exists. Does anybody out there have any?
Work Cited
Stout, Candace Jesse. “Editorial: Postrepresentational Qualitative Research Writing.” Studies in Art Education, vol. 48, no. 3, 2007, pp. 227-29.