Wild reading: this madness to our method

Abstract

My paper theorizes the possibilities of a qualitative method that engages with promiscuous aspects of human existence and difference foreclosed by established research methods and representations. I locate the not known of knowledge in the unconscious time of the maternal relation where the infant is put upon to wildly and without symbolic resources make sense of others and the world around her. Engaging with the “wild” aspects of interpretation can provide us with an analytical space to forge a sustained inquiry into suppressed desires producing dominant representations of human existence. I look to J.M. Coetzee’s short story, “The Humanities in Africa,” as a text that might support feminist researchers’ unorthodox efforts to commune with the less rational processes of thinking and being driving representation. Reflexive to what remains unthought in our representations of knowledge, we might develop new modes of analysis that are open to unconventional and unorthodox research orientations and methods.

Keywords:

• qualitative research
• interpretive practice
• representation
• literature

Notes

1. My use of the words “we” or “our” in this work refers to “we” (learners, thinkers, educators). By using this word, I do not wish to universalize singularities. Instead, as with Lyotard (1991), I use “we” to signal that modern processes of subject formation happen not only to me; “I am not the only one, which is why I write ‘us’” (p. 4). My use of “we” or “our” also follows the convention of psychoanalysis that operates through the power of suggestion to supplement truth claims. The reader is invited to identify with or recognize the suggestion of truth according to her own circumstance rather than as a universal claim. The strategy intends to provoke and open the reader’s mind toward the possibility of thinking with or against the underlying (wild) motivations for constructing the paper.

2. In my paper maternal does not refer solely to the relationship between the actual mother and the infant. The maternal relation refers to the processes of identification, care, and symbolization by which the infant gains a sense of herself in relation to others. In my paper, I present these processes of becoming someone as essential to human existence without reservation. If the social context in which the baby becomes a person matters, the fact remains that all human beings are born to a mother and through the care of a (m)other will develop into a person. The maternal relation need not be essentially feminine although historically and somewhat universally social practices of child-raising are gendered. I use “(m)other” to refer to the maternal environment, which may or may not consist of females; and “mother” to refer to a “real” mother, the historically and socially constructed, female and gendered and actual figure of mother. Similarly I use other in its general sense as other than one’s self; and “Other” to signal the foreign and/or hated other of Western philosophy.

3. Winnicott (1995) did not subscribe to the biological determination of mother but to a role that a real person or persons played in the life and care of the child. Real mothers can be any gender but are maternal. The real mother is responsible for the child’s becoming a person and also for the stability of herself – both of these responsibilities are highly dependent on the mother’s personally and socially determined understandings and representations of motherhood, selfhood, and well-being.

4. Along with supporting the article’s argument, this section provides a model of interpretive engagement with fictional lives that I engage with my graduate students in a decolonizing methods course that explicitly takes up the problem of studying the lives of others. I consider the development of this pedagogical mode of reading as a form of research “training” through which my students learn to engage the humanist concerns embedded in social science method and findings that “close and not (so) deep” literary reading unearths (Love, 2010, p. 375). Social scientific engagements with late modernist and/or postcolonial fictional texts depicting fraught human relations inevitably surface complicated discussions on a myriad of themes of interest to researchers. Our primary and secondary readings of fictional self-other encounter offer my students an opportunity to test out and reflect upon the defensive processes by which they attempt to make identification to the lives of unfamiliar others as a way to develop the capacity for a deepened regard for the other’s unknowable life. Our discussions of social science methods are both philosophical and practical, involving the problems of subjectivity, ethics, history, colonial relations, injury, harm, desire, design, violence, and interpretation amongst other crises that arise when examining and representing the other’s life.