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Practical work:
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Practical work:
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I don't propose to discuss post-modernism at length here. This section is really intended for those of you who feel fairly comfortable with the whole rather woolly area of post-modernism and are interested in its implications for your research. If you are not conversant with some of the main themes of post-modernism, it's probably not too late to follow up some of them now.
By this point of your course, you should be aware that a large number of cultural theorists, from a wide range of different perspectives, argue that the world is not simply present to us unmediated by our machinery for perceiving it, machinery which includes not only our sense organs, but also, and most especially, the machinery we use for interpreting, making sense of the data we have about the world.
You will by now be familiar with the argument from what is generally referred to as 'social constuctionism' or 'social constructivism' (a standpoint which is virtually all-pervasive in cultural studies) that the way we see the world is in large measure determined by the way our culture predisposes us to see the world. Gregory, for example, makes that argument for his understanding of the way that our experience of the Western 'carpentered world' has shaped our visual perception (see the section on perception and culture); a wide range of commentators have argued that the way we perceive the world is greatly influenced by the language we use (see, for example, the section on codes and ideology or that on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis); others have argued that the media present a systematically distorted view of the nature of the social world (see the various sections on ideology).
Underlying many of these claims about the culturally constructed nature of our experience of the world there is often what Jameson refers to as a depth model of one sort or another. Such a model proposes, for example, that, if we engage in a sufficiently rigorous analysis of the ideological distortions of media representations, we can reveal the 'true' or 'real' social relations which underlie them; if we can enlighten the deluded masses about the nature of their false consciousness, the scales will fall from their eyes, enabling them to turn their gaze to the gleaming classless Marxist paradise beckoning in the distance. Well, not quite that simplistic, perhaps, but by this point in your studies, you get the idea.
Such 'depth models', whatever complex philosophical arguments are used to justify them, must strike us as a common sense assumption about the nature of the world, once we accept, say, the proposition of systematic ideological distortion through the media. In order to be able to expose the media representations as distortions we must somehow be able to know what the really real reality is like. This is an assumption which typically underlies content analysis, for example. Content analysis is often used to support the claim of media misrepresentation by comparing, say, the number of housewives featuring in a given soap opera with the number of housewives there 'really' are in society, as evidenced by, for example, official statistics. A similar assumption presumably underlies your research for your project, research which supposedly reveals the 'true' nature of your audience, who are then defined by your neat spreadsheets showing that 82.9% believe we live in a classless society and 73.6% of them believe in fairies. These statistics are all duly converted into tables and charts and presented at your oral to show how your project artefact's content and design derive logically from the 'facts' you have established about your audience.
This brings me to the 'epistemology' and 'ontology' bits in the sub-heading of this section. Epistemology is the study of how we know: what are the rules that enable us to know? Ontology is the study of what we know: what are the facts of the world? To summarize much of the received wisdom of cultural studies, we may then say that 'epistemology determines ontology', or, as James Curran put it, 'believing is seeing'. How I see determines what I see. 'Facts' are not even 'facts' unless my interpretive framework provides for the recognition of them as 'facts'.
Isn't there, then, a mismatch between that point of view and the essentially positivist research methods which we examined in the sections on research, audience research and validation? Jürgen Habermas (1983 : 30) has briefly sketched the failure of the modernist project of the social sciences: sociological research was unable to measure up to the requirements of the comprehensive theory established by Parsons; Keynesian economics failed politically; learning theory, the social sciences' foremost example of an 'exact science' failed to keep its universally explanatory promises. Out of this failure has grown what we can broadly refer to as post-modernism. From a post-modern perspective, there can be no ultimate foundational 'truth', only the complex interplay of competing 'truth-games', 'stories', 'narratives' of the way the world is, yet we encourage you to conduct your research as if you were discovering and revealing 'truths' about your audience.
James Scheurich, professor in Educational at Administration at the University of Texas proposes the acceptance of what he refers to as 'social or postmodernist relativism':
What I mean by this term 'social or postmodernist relativism' is the unabashed recognition that all epistemology, ontology, and the ways of thinking that yield such categories as epistemology and ontology are socially conditioned and historically relative or contextual. More simply, 'ways of knowing are inherently culture-bound and perspectival' (Lather, 1988, p.570).
(1997 : 33)
I should perhaps mention in passing Habermas's famous attack on the conservatism of post-modernism. Whilst Habermas himself recognizes and frequently stresses the difficulties inherent in foundationalism, the impossibility the researcher faces of stepping over her own epistemological shadow, he attacks the relativism of post-modern approaches as 'neo-conservative'. Scheurich, however, counters that
Social or postmodernist relativism […] accepts that there are social and historical constraints on what can be claimed as truth, or whatever other word we use to designate knowledge, in any particular social and historical location. It does not accept, however, that such social and historical constraints cannot be questioned or altered. While the acceptance of such social and historical constraints may at first appear conservative, it is in fact the opposite. It specifically locates where the struggle for truth or knowledge occurs. Truth is a social, historical, and, therefore, a political struggle. Truth is not power-free; it is power-laden. 'Discourse and politics, knowledge and power are … part of an indissoluble couplet (Apple, 1991, p.vii). 'Power and knowledge directly imply one another ….' (Foucault, 1979, p.127). In the sense that this social relativist epistemology uncovers the truth-power relationship, it is radical rather than conservative.
(1997 : 34)
Clearly the objection can be made here that, if there is no possibility of a foundational truth (and most of us, I suspect, continue to hanker after some such truth, some way of distinguishing between the way we or others would like the world to be and the way the world 'truly' is), then 'might makes right', in other words those who can establish their truth game as the only game in town determine what the truth is - Lyotard's 'performativity principle'. Scheurich, however, points out that:
This argument […] depends on the positivist assumption that a non-power-related truth game is possible. It is doubtful, however, at least in the social sciences, that such a power-free truth game has ever existed.
(1997 : 34)
If you examined the remarks on reliability and validity you'll be aware of the difficulties of conducting an interview or survey which is likely to produce anything like the same results each time. These are difficulties which are recognized in 'conventional' research. You'll be aware from your work on semiotics and post-structuralism that the post-modern frame of mind emphasizes indeterminacy and ambiguity in the language-meaning relationship, so it is apparent that any research results must appear that much more uncertain and inconclusive to anyone working from within a post-modern frame. The survey or interview is unavoidably context-bounded. Both interviewer and respondent bring to it their conscious and unconscious assumptions and beliefs about the world, about each other, about themselves, about that moment in that place. What 'conventional' research attempts to do is to objectify that encounter, to decontextualize it, to apply to it all the formal procedures of codifying, quantifying, measuring so as to derive from it general truths about the survey population which can be confidently presented with a '+ or - 2% margin of error':
I take positivism (which I also call the 'traditional' or 'conventional' approach) to assume that the individual interview context (including, for instance, the personality or gender of the interviewer) is not a critical consideration and that a category-based reduction of the verbal text of the interview can be taken as a valid representation of the interview itself and of the perceptions of the interviewee. In contrast to positivism, I take post-positivism, following Mischler (186), to assume that interviews are highly contextualized events and, thus, the representations of such events must be contextualized. But both positivism and post-positivism make the modernist assumption that the appropriate research method will yield the real or best meaning of an interview. Postmodernism, in contrast, suggests that there is a radical indeterminacy at the heart of the interview interaction which cannot be overcome by any methodology.
(1997 : 75, note 1)
What are the implications of this for the research you have conducted? I don't think there are necessarily any implications. From what I have seen of A Level Communication Studies projects, you are expected to go through the procedures of 'conventional' research. It would hardly be reasonable at this stage of your studies to require you to do otherwise. After all, you are not expected to be a trained sociologist and, given that major surveys relevant to this area of study (for example the NRS research) are conducted 'conventionally', there can hardly be any reasonable expectation that you should produce something quite other. However, it is often students' experience that, having conducted all their research, they feel they 'really' know little more about their audience than they did before they started. With other students, it is quite apparent that they started their research with a certain agenda (for example to confirm the need for their project artefact) and that agenda itself led them to find the results they were looking for. All I would suggest is that, if you have doubts about the worth of the research you have conducted, go ahead and express them. And maybe this brief overview of post-modern doubts about the value of such research will help you to express yours.
Purpose
Research
Development
Presentation (i.e. the artefact you produce)
Validation
Arrangement
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