Four: Methodology
swaying to the music.
this picture truly says who i am…i find the real “me” when i am out with my friends…yes, in the nightlife! love to dance, love to be surrounded by my friends, love to dance like no one is watching (as you can tell by the pic). This is obviously not a self-portrait..since someone caught me off-guard. silly, non-chalant, off in la-la land, face that just describes me to a tee. you can tell that i am surrounded by tons of people, but i am still doing my own thing and owning the camera! no matter how silly i think i look…i am still having fun…and i think i am all about fun…errr something! (hope this helps Anna) Bettie
Notwithstanding this being a theoretical dissertation I would like to include in it a chapter regarding methodology that formed a work-frame with which I approached this problem. That is partially because I believe any sociological work, even strictly critical, is always necessarily subjective and this intrinsic subjectivity needs to be reflexively examined by the author. As Foucault observed “even if our language surreptitiously uses us, no discourse writes itself; we are still ‘obliged to begin’ (…) in the first person singular, whether I appears on the page or not” (Spellmeyer K, 1989: 718). Secondly it is because over 3 years of my studies I came to associate my methodology strongly with the work-frame that emerges from entirety of the thought of Michael Foucault. Again I am aware that this is a subjective choice, however informed by my previous researching practice. “The ‘I”, as Foucault affirms, speaks only in those moments when it overcomes the rules designed to contain it” (Spellmeyer K, 1989: 716). This is highly relevant both for the reflections upon the subject of my critical research and for the examination of the way in which the act of research is conducted.
Foucault’s notion of discourse, I argue, is important to any sociological research because the objects of any research (whatever they might be) are necessarily socially constructed if only by the token of what the focus of the science is. Social construction, or rather social materialisation of any subject is through a discourse. There are several examples that Foucault summons up to illustrate this process – among others that of gay people who came to social existence via the discourse of normality and abnormality of sexual behaviours. Even though their position within this discourse was in its beginning quite obviously negative (as the abnormal), it nonetheless identified them and thus made them a subject in their own right (Foucault M, 1998). As Judith Butler observed in regards to this emergence of subjects in discourse of gender and sex “the paradox of subjectivation (assujetissement) is precisely that the subject who would resist such norms is itself enabled, if not produced, by such norms” (Butler J, 1993: 15). Our individuality, as we take it for granted today, crystallised in discourse of freedom and repression, self-expression and loyalty. Self-identification, or in more Foucoudian terms self-fashioning, is a process that is enabled by social discourse as well – discourse around the “I”, an individual constantly looking for a role within systems of knowledge, to which Foucault refers as “games of truth” (Spellmeyer K, 1989: 716).
What is important for a critical endeavour like this one is to remember that “while discourse has become the object of practices intended to contain it and make it safe, Foucault alleges that our predecessors understood it to be an act of transgression or limit-breaking”. Discourse is always dynamic and so its objects (that is all objects of sociological interest) should be approached dynamically as well. In the practice of this dissertation it meant that I ventured into research by creating a map of concepts, authors, issues and theories that then revised and developed as I was progressing. It was only later, based on the map that I developed a linear order for the text of the essay. When one disembarks on the journey into the unknown, a map can always come handy. And reading Foucault I learned to appreciate uncertainty as necessary condition of critical enterprise, rather than associating it “with the miscarriage of thought, with error or carelessness” (Spellmeyer K, 1989: 716).
ana added these pithy words on