ABSTRACT
What are the implications of postmodernism? Well, they are many and varied. But one key way in which postmodernism is most obviously seen is in writing. For anyone trained in writing and speaking with the certainty of the traditional hard sciences the fluidity, the porousness, the sheer slipperiness of postmodernist writing comes as a shock. But if one of the key tenets of postmodernism is that certainty is impossible then it is quite logical that this uncertainty be reflected in writing, particularly when writing about postmodern objects in postmodern landscapes. Here Alan Bryman considers some of the implications of postmodernism for writing.
Postmodernism … is an extremely difficult idea to pin down. In one sense, it can be seen as a form of sensitivity – a way of seeing and understanding that results in a questioning of the taken-for-granted. It questions the very notion of the dispassionate social scientist seeking to uncover a pre-given external reality. Instead, postmodernists view the social scientist’s account as only one among many ways of rendering social reality to audiences. The social world itself is viewed as a context out of which many accounts can be hewn. As a result, ‘knowledge’ of the social world is relative; any account is just one of many possible ways of rendering social reality. As Rosenau (1992: 8) puts it, postmodernists ‘offer “readings” not “observations”, “interpretations” not “findings” …’.
One of the effects of the impact of postmodernism since the 1980s has been a growing interest in the writing of social science. For postmodernists, reporting findings in a journal article is merely one means of getting across a certain version of the social reality that was investigated. Postmodernists mistrust the knowledge claims that are frequently boldly made when findings are reported and instead they adopt an attitude of investigating the bases and forms of those knowledge claims. While the writing of all types of social science is potentially in the postmodernist’s firing line, it has been the kinds of text produced by ethnographers that have been a particular focus of attention. This focus has led to a particular interest in the claims to ethnographic authority that are inscribed into ethnographic texts (Clifford 1983). The ethnographic text ‘presumes a world out there (the real) that can be captured by a “knowing” author through the careful transcription and analysis of field materials (interviews, notes, etc.)’ (Denzin 1994: 296). Postmodernism problematizes such accounts and their authority to represent a reality because there ‘can never be a final, accurate representation of what was meant or said, only different textual representations of different experiences’ (Denzin 1994: 296).
However, it would be wrong to depict the growing attention being focused on ethnographic writing as exclusively a product of postmodernism. Atkinson and Coffey (1995) have argued that there are other intellectual trends in the social sciences that have stimulated this interest. Writers in the area of theory and research known as the social studies of science have been concerned with the limitations of accepted distinctions between rhetoric and logic and between the observer and the observed (e.g. Gilbert and Mulkay 1984). The problematizing of these distinctions, along with doubts about the possibility of a neutral language through which the natural and social worlds can be revealed, opened the door for an evaluation of scientific and social scientific writing. … Atkinson and Coffey also point to the antipathy within feminism towards the image of the neutral ‘observer-author’ who assumes a privileged stance in relation to members of the social setting being studied. This stance is regarded as revealing a position of domination of the observer-author over the observed that is inconsistent with the goals of feminism … This concern has led to an interest in the ways in which privilege is conveyed in ethnographic texts and how voices, particularly of marginal groups, are suppressed.
The concerns within these and other traditions (including postmodernism) have led to experiments in writing ethnography (Richardson 1994). An example is the use of a ‘dialogic’ form of writing that seeks to raise the profile of the multiplicity of voices that can be heard in the course of fieldwork. As Lincoln and Denzin (1994: 584) put it: ‘Slowly it dawns on us that there may … be … not one “voice” but polyvocality; not one story, but many tales, dramas, pieces of fiction, fables, memories, histories, autobiographies, poems, and other texts to inform our sense of lifeways, to extend our understandings of the Other …’
Manning (1995) cites, as an example of the postmodern preference for allowing a variety of voices to come through within an ethnographic text, the work of Stoller (1989), who conducted research in Africa. Manning (1995: 260) describes the text as ‘periodically’ dialogic in that it is ‘shaped by interactions between informants or “the other” and the observer’. This postmodern preference for seeking out multiple voices and for turning the ethnographer into a ‘bit player’ reflects the mistrust among postmodernists of ‘meta-narratives’ – that is, positions or grand accounts that implicitly make claims about absolute truths and that therefore rule out the possibility of alternative versions of reality. On the other hand, ‘mini-narratives, micro-narratives, local narratives are just stories that make no truth claims and are therefore more acceptable to postmodernists’ (Rosenau 1992: pxiii).
Postmodernism has also encouraged a growing reflexivity in considerations about the conduct of social research and the growing interest in the writing of ethnography is very much a manifestation of this trend. … This reflexivity can be discerned in the way in which many ethnographers have turned inwards to examine the truth claims inscribed in their own classic texts. …
In the end, what postmodernism leaves us with is an acute sense of uncertainty. It raises the issue of how we can ever know or capture the social reality that belongs to others and in so doing it points to an unresolvable tension that will not go away … because, to quote Lincoln and Denzin (1994: 582) again: ‘On the one hand there is the concern for validity, or certainty in the text as a from of isomorphism and authenticity. On the other hand there is the sure and certain knowledge that all texts are socially, historically, politically, and culturally located. We, like the texts we write, can never be transcendent.’ At the same time, of course, such a view renders problematic the very idea of what social scientific knowledge is or comprises.
(Bryman 2001: 469–70) What's Next?Try taking an object and describing it first of all in a modernist writing style and then in a postmodernist writing style.
