Methodological and Ontological Principles of Observation and Analysis

Following and Analyzing Things and Beings in Our Everyday World

François Cooren, Fabienne Malbois, François Cooren, Fabienne Malbois

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138706781
• eBook ISBN: 9781351782524
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Estudios de comunicación

In our daily experiences, we feel, perceive, designate, invoke or comment on a plurality of beings: people, artifacts, technologies, institutions, projects, animals, divinities, emotions, cultures, ideologies or opinions that are part of our world. While these beings are all part of our world, they present various forms of existence. Echoing recent developments in existential anthropology, Communication as Constitutive of Organization (CCO) research, and Actor Network Theory, here scholars from a variety of disciplines discuss how they study the types of beings that have been at the core of their respective research. Reflecting on the specific mode of existence, presence and action of the being they follow, they reveal the methodological innovations they deploy in order to analyze excerpts of field notes, filmed interactions, conversations, pictures, newspapers, narratives, etc.

1 Following and Analyzing a Human Being

On the Continuity and Singularity of an Individual

Marine Kneubühler and Albert Piette

It does not seem to bother researchers to have to follow and analyze a social group, a law, an organization, an institution or an object through people’s discourses or actions. However, the following of an individual seems troublesome or simply unwanted, as if it was too difficult or not necessary to observe a human being in detail. Whenever a particular individual arises in the description of a social scientist, it is generally in order to illustrate a common behavior, activity, representation or life course that is considered as typical in a given society or community. Without denying that crucial discrepancies or disagreements exist between all the different approaches endorsed in the social sciences, it appears that they are the same in one respect: none of them tackle the empirical unity that each human constitutes. Therefore, by looking at the same person in the same situation, researchers focus only on generic aspects of the human individual observed, depending on their chosen theoretical point of view. Among other possible examples, we can imagine that a Bourdieusian sociologist would show a dominant driven by his habitus; an interactionist would depict an actor playing a role on a scene, while others would describe a priest, whose actions fit well within Weber’s ideal type.

To put it differently, none of the existing approaches in social sciences are able to address the following questions: how can one know that Mister X is not Mister Y even though they belong to the same social class or have a similar career path? How can each of them know that he is not the other? And how do the so-called social and cultural dimensions of their beings really concern and affect their respective lives? In recent years, however, a specific method has been offered precisely in order to overcome this crucial shortfall (Piette, 2015a, 2016). This method is known as phenomenography and aims to take the continuity and the singularity of every single human being seriously.

Whereas Lévi-Strauss writes in his seminal book, The Savage Mind, “I believe the ultimate goal of the human sciences to be not to constitute, but to dissolve man” (1968, p. 247), the phenomenographer argues, on the contrary, for radical detailed observations and descriptions of the qualities and acts of one human, one at a time, in the process of moving from one place to another in order to include, in the writing of his idiosyncrasies, the density and complexity of his existence but also sometimes its banality and passivity.

Phenomenography is fundamentally based on an empirical principle and is a demanding, rigorous work of description, which can highlight, or even supplement, the incompleteness of philosophical or sociological theories with regard to the understanding of humans as they really exist. At every stage of research, a phenomenography retains the maximum number of details, as well as various elements that fall outside the scope of ideal types or overly exclusive concepts. These include those descriptive elements that usually end up in researchers’ dustbins, i.e., those reminders that a priori seem not relevant for the theory, in particular the individual characteristics of the persons described.

In other words, according to the phenomenographic perspective, when clarifying one single situation, it is preferable to add up and complement different theoretical paradigms, due to the focus on one individual, rather than apply one paradigm that excludes others to highlight one specific aspect of reality. Furthermore, beyond this adding-up and complementarity, or juxtaposition, there are still “leftovers” that are certainly essential regarding the human observed and thereby deserve renewed attention. As we will see, this phenomenographic work of description involves at least two important implications regarding ontology and methodology, which we propose to unfold throughout the present chapter.

Our first aim is to discuss several theoretical implications involved in our proposal, which consists of focusing more seriously on human beings. To do this, we will first start with a critique of the way social sciences and anthropology have been describing individuals so far, and we will then propose the notion of “volume of being” (Piette, 2017b) in order to clarify our understanding of individuals as human beings. We will also insist on the entirety of this volume of being, which is not simply a surface and entails various visible, invisible, inner, outer, pre-reflective and reflective elements. Therefore, we will argue for the necessity of integrating observations and descriptions from both a third- and a first-person perspective to grasp the different aspects of the volume.

The second aim of this chapter will consist of presenting empirical methods and research techniques, which allow us to follow and analyze the continuity and singularity of an individual. We will introduce this methodological part by defining the radicalism of the phenomenographic approach compared to methods developed by recent phenomenological approaches in anthropology. This will offer the opportunity to provide basic principles of phenomenographic observations. To illustrate these various methodological proposals, we will draw from the first author’s PhD research, which is based on a close collaboration with LK, a rapper from the French-speaking part of Switzerland, over more than five years. We will mostly focus on what she calls a “videophenomenography” (Kneubühler, 2017), which corresponds to the moment where LK agreed to film himself, alone, during the creation of a verse.

What about Human Beings

This first part of our chapter entails a theoretical scope regarding our very idea whereby it is important to consider human beings seriously. More precisely, we will develop our argument under three successive sections. In the first section, we will address three restrictions observed within the social sciences that prevent researchers from seeing human beings as such. In the second section, we will propose an ontological argument in favor of following and analyzing human individuals. And finally, we will expose in the third section the core of our proposal by defining the notion of “volume of being” and presenting its empirical implications.

The Human Individual as What

To those who would raise the objection that social sciences in general, and anthropology in particular, look directly at humans, we would answer that they do indeed look at them, but that they are steeped in three decisive restrictions, which prevent them from seeing human beings as such, even in a minimal sense. First, they are restricted by homogenizing operations, often very early in the research process, through which humans are described and analyzed as sharing a set of sociocultural traits. Malinowski is very explicit on this subject, saying that his goal is to work on people not “as individuals” but “as members of a human community” (1922, p. 23). This is a way of working on human beings without them, without each of them.

The second restriction is the reduction of humans to a few skills (interactional, cognitive, psychological), which are themselves able to be homogenized among all members or actors of the entity that is supposed to be described and detailed: an action, an activity, an event, a group. Each individual, absorbed along with others, is linked directly to an as: not only as a member of a group but also as he or she performs an action, as he or she is governed by a social or cognitive structure or even as he or she uses one mental schema or another. Furthermore, depending on the approach, this restriction can reach the point where the human himself is suspended and circumvented in favor of actions or relations that have become the very objects of intelligibility. These first two restrictions indicate the persistent lack of a proper theoretical definition of what a “human being” consists of in social sciences, besides the fact that they are social beings—a “social” itself often non-defined—which seems to come from nowhere.

By observing this situation as a spectator, one might wonder whether a shift is not in fact operating with the emergence of the so-called ontological turn in social anthropology. Unfortunately, far from being interested in human beings as beings or even in humans at all, the authors committed to that turn fall into the third restriction we wish to outline, which concerns the weight given to nonhumans (e.g., collective beings, gods, objects, cosmologies, scientific facts) in recent years. Despite the diversity of goals pursued (Kelly, 2014), what is clearly at stake in that turn is the gathering of relativist standpoints regarding the existence of an objective world and the status of human beings vis-à-vis other kinds of being.

The attention is therefore directed toward themes as the difference of “worlds,” the narratives and discourses uttered to depict and create those worlds, or relations between beings (or directly between their actions) rather than beings themselves. In short, humans are always a pretext to study something else, something either nonhuman by definition or something that is considered to have the same properties as humans, who are seen as a type of being, among other things. The phenomenographic approach seeks to overcome those three restrictions, which generally prevent social scientists from seeing the human individual as an empirical unity that deserves a specific attention.

Ontological Argument in Favor of Following and Analyzing a Human Individual

Against these relativist, and mostly narrative, approaches, our claim is that human beings are fundamental for anthropology and social sciences, and we will address in this section what we consider to be a serious ontological argument in order to underpin that claim. First and foremost, let us outline the necessity to keep separated ontological inquiries from methodological injunctions at the beginning of the research since they both are completely mixed up within the debate generated by the ontological turn. For instance, in a recent book written by Holbraad and Pedersen (2017) on this debate, we can read this: “As such, the ontological turn asks ontological questions without taking ontology (or indeed ontologies) as an answer” (p. ix), it “is the methodological injunction to keep this horizon perpetually open” (p. x), and it also “poses ontological questions to solve epistemological problems” (p. x).

This problematic mirroring between ontology and methodology might remind us of an old proposal developed by Latour (1993), who argued for a methodological symmetry whereby every being or thing need to be treated without discrimination or hierarchy in order to show their common “variable geometry.” According to this position, objects as well as humans are all the result of specific assemblages and trajectories. As such, even though all beings are not equally strong with respect to their different relational constitutions, they all are equally real. One risk of this proposal, when pushed to its limits, is to forget that the attention was initially focused on assemblages and, therefore, to confuse the constituting relations with the very essence of beings. Although we would not reject altogether Latour’s methodological proposal, which rightly encourages researchers “to follow the actors,” we strongly reject its ontological counterpart, since we do not consider human beings to have a variable geometry along with “air springs,” “society,” “matter” or “consciousness,” which all are considered as social actants by Latour (1993, p. 86).

Even if phenomenography as a method needs to be based on an extremely detailed description of a human as an empirical unity, it entails, if not an overall “ontology”—and if so, a necessarily “asymmetrical ontology,” to put it in a Latourian terminology—at least a minimal conception of the human being that enables us to differentiate him or her from other beings and to regard them as the background of social “stuff.” As reflected in philosophy’s classic debates, an anthropology that sets out to be anthropo-focused cannot separate an action, connection or experience from the person who performs and lives it. Not without irony, Russell mentions what he considers an obvious fact posited by Aristotle, a position that can be useful to highlight our view:

Suppose I say ‘there is such a thing as the game of football,’ most people would regard the remark as a truism. But if I were to infer that football could exist without football players, I should be rightly held to be talking nonsense. Similarly, it would be held, there is such a thing as parenthood, but only because there are parents; there is redness, but only because they are red things. And this dependence is thought to be not reciprocal: the men who play football would still exist even if they never played football; things which are usually sweet may turn sour; and my face, which is usually red, may turn pale without ceasing to be my face.

(Russell, 1995, p. 176)

Consequently, a good starting point for us seems to be to attribute a lower ontological status to social configurations or objects than to human beings, on the basis that it is impossible to discover such organizations without humans.

In the context of human and social sciences, we thereby consider a social organization or a collective being to be an indication of the presence of humans, instead of the reverse. Therefore, even when we want to follow a collective being, an idea or a project, we inevitably have to follow humans, because the latter create the former. Contrarily to these other kinds of beings, humans exist per se and not through something else. This is the reason why we argue that a human being is a specific being who has to be studied and followed as such, in order not to fragment his or her entirety. We can then push further the comment from Russell by adding the fact that the same person who plays football also does other things before, after and even, to a certain extent, during the game. In other words, he or she constitutes a full-blown unity. As Cavell (1999) puts it, “we are, each of us, bodies, i.e., embodied; each of us is this one and not that, each here and not there, each now and not then” (p. 369), and each of us always continues to be so throughout all lived situations. In sum, the very principle we wish to defend is twofold: on the one hand, an irreducible singularity, namely that there are individuals—those ones, each one—which anyone can identify and designate as such, and on the other hand, an inescapable continuity in which every individual is taken.

The Volume of Being: A Concept to Grasp the Singularity and Continuity of Humans

As should have become clear by now, our perspective consists of focusing on the continuity of one individual, neither fragmented nor absorbed a priori in other beings or entities. In pursuing this goal, it is crucial not to follow only a role, a trajectory, an action or even the experience of an event. In these cases, we run the risk of missing the entity on which we request a specific focus: the human individual. This entity we name the “volume of being”: this individual here, that individual there. We will now define this concept of “volume” in order to offer minimal theoretical clarifications with regard to our conception of human beings. This idea of volume will allow us to outline the entirety of an individual and the different points of view we need to consider within the scope of a phenomenographic observation, which seeks to do justice to this entirety.

The meanings of Latin root words can shed light on the characteristics of a volume. Volumen designates a roll of papyrus forming a book or part of a book. Other meanings of volumen are coil, twist or convolution. In Latin, the verb volvere indicates a set of actions that could be tracked as essential to the movement of a human volume: rolling, unfolding time and months, but also being moved in one’s heart and meditating in one’s mind. According to the Oxford Dictionary of English, the word “volume” was initially “a scroll of parchment or papyrus containing written matter.” Other meanings were added: all the notebooks joined by binding; “a single book or a bound collection of printed sheets”; a written work; or the portion of space occupied b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• How to Follow and Analyze a Diversity of Beings: An Introduction
• 1 Following and Analyzing a Human Being: On the Continuity and Singularity of an Individual
• 2 Following and Analyzing a Project: On the Intricacies of Shadowing a Messy Being
• 3 Following and Analyzing Public Opinion: Invention and Circulation of an Authority Figure
• 4 Following and Analyzing an Artifact: Culture-through-Things
• 5 Following and Analyzing a Divinity: God Speaks in Public, or Charismatic Prophecy from Intimacy to Politics
• 6 Following and Analyzing an Identity: The Case of the Public Specular Appearances of Chelsea (Bradley) Manning
• 7 Being Followed by an Organization: A Hauntological Perspective on Organizational Ethnography
• 8 Following and Analyzing an Idea: What Does It Mean To Do So for a Communication Researcher?
• Index