Cultural Studies and the Politics of Representation: Experience Subjectivity Research

Keith Berry
University of WisconsinSuperior

John T. Warren

Southern Illinois University

This essay examines Joan W. Scotts (1991) essay The Evidence of Experience in light of cultural studies scholarship that uses personal, experiential evidence, and/or innovative/critical methodologies. The authors argue that the situated, (inter)subjective, and complex nature of this inquiry conscientiously has brought to life Scotts call for historicizing experience, rather than blindly using it as foundational, and enthusiastically continues doing so to date. In this way, these critical methods already seek to problematize and complicate experience, even as it is used to talk toward and/ or against cultural norms.

Keywords:

evidence of experience; subjectivity; Joan W. Scott; autoethnography; performative writing; historicizing

On the Loss of My Grandfathers House 11 Years After His Death: An Experiential Introduction It was four oclock on a Friday. I remember because I was surprised to get home after a busy day and discover the one message on the machine was my mother. Her voice on the machine seemed stressed, as if she was going to drop some bad news. I am always aware of this voice, this tired and strained voice that draws me back to the death of my auntSweetie, Aunt Pat has cancer. Its bad. I fear that this voice is calling to tell me about my grandmotherShe is not well. My grandmother is almost completely overtaken by the Alzheimers nowShe has no memory of my grandfather who died of cancer 11 years ago, the home my grandfathers hands built when they moved to Michigan, nor the members of my family who now struggle to remember who she was before she became who she
Authors Note: The authors wish to thank Norman Denzin for his support of this special issue as well as Bud Goodall and Lenore Langsdorf for their reflective assistance during the writing of this essay. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, Volume 9 Number 5, October 2009 597-607 DOI: 10.1177/1532708609337894 2009 SAGE Publications 597

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has become. So it is the voice of death I hear on the phone, and I think of my grandmother who I suspect has joined my grandfather not on Paw Paw Avenue but in Memorial Gardens. My heart has prepared for this call, but I am unsure of how to feel. I pick up the phone and call home, already beginning to imagine how I can arrange to get to Michigan for the funeral. Hello? my mothers voice is tired, but it has lost some of the sorrow that coded the message, still blinking on the machine. Hi, Mom. Whats up? I ask. Oh, Im glad you called. Theres something I need to tell you. We knew it would happen, although we hoped it wouldnt. Her voice is shaking a bit, but I am confused. In my mind I have had this conversationthe death callwith my mother countless times, and this does not sound like I suspected it would. Its gone. Grandpas house. Bea called and its gone. Bulldozed. His house. And they did it on his birthday. For a second I am relieved. My grandmother, although still in the gray fog that causes her so much anguish, is still there. We still have her material body to hug and her physical hand to touch. I am relieved as I listen to my mother fight the tears. She is fighting the tears I know she has already spent. Crying for the house my grandfather built with his own hands. Crying for the barn that once held his tools, his tractor, his workbench. Crying for the home she grew up in and home my brothers and I trekked to every holiday for large family gatherings. Crying for my grandfathers bathroom, pea green with ivory tile. Crying for what was his, but hasnt been for over a decade. Crying for what was sold, rented, scavenged, and demolished. Crying for the now lack of physicality that allowed her to glance and remember. She is crying. And while she is crying but not, I begin to understand the impact of what has happened. Its gone. That place so vivid in my memory is gone. I remember the Old Spice smell of his bathroom. I remember the feel of the white sand between my toes as I walked through the back yard where the peach trees grew. I remember the mustard carpet in the living room that made the slightest sound as the weight of a body moved board against board. I remember the taste of Pepsi from the bottles my grandmother would buy as I sat in front of the television on the back porch. I remember my grandfather sleeping in his favorite olive green chair, his false teeth hanging precariously from his mouth as he peacefully snored. Yes, I remember this place and begin to more intimately grasp the loss of my grandfathers house 11 years after his death. I understand the reason for its destruction. Whirlpool, the large corporation that has its headquarters on the same block with dreams of owning and expanding to cover the vast land surrounding their corporate offices, has included my grandfathers house in the destruction of five other houses. The houses to them are just raw material that stands in the way, but to my mother, these houses represent families and histories; they embody those people who owned them. The bathroom, living room, kitchen, front step, the door with the Grear G, and the creaky floor is just stuff reduced to trash to be carried away making way for new

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material that will be erected in its place. And knowing this, I am sad, angry, and empty. This material, now absent, creates a hole in me that I find hard to ignore. But I know it is just stuff, just wood, paint, cement, carpet, porcelain, and tile. But I also know I hold on to those materialistic bits like I am holding on to the person. Like if I can keep that house, that stuff, I can keep something of the man who created it. But this is fantasy. Sure, that stuff has meaning, but only because I (and others) allow this significance. I allow stuff to run and function as my memory of those experiences and people who are a part of my past. I take photos, protecting them in frames and mounting them on the refrigerator and on my walls. I display the penthe one that fell out of my grandfathers pocket the day he diedon my bookshelf next to his photo. I place toys, books, and other items on my office desk, storying them to anyone who has a passing minute. I do this because I depend on those things. For some reason, the time, the people, and the experiences I enjoyed need some object to make their existence memorable. I need these things because I fear I have lost the ability to remember without them. I so clearly buy into the logic of this materialistic sense of things that I lack the ability to knowto rememberwithout them. Its all gone, my mother says after a long silence. No, as long as we remember it will always be there. Yes, I suppose you are right. I suspect neither of us really believes it. After all, it is gone. ***** We begin this essay in narrative, building from an experience from one of the authors, using it to build a context for discussing how experience is used in critical, qualitative methods in cultural studies. On some level, it serves as a reminder to ourselves of the kind of possibilities we see in narrative; however, it also poses a question about the value of experience in cultural studies research. Does the personal, the situated, move our scholarship and our pursuit of knowledge forward? As in the narrative above, how does experience open certain kinds of knowing to others? How does such writing preclude others from entering it? And whose responsibility is it to make the most of personal experiencethe author or the reader, as Pollock (2007) so powerfully reminded us? We are properly communication scholars, though like so many find our disciplinary homes are less and less clear as fields lose their borders and categories of knowledge leak. Each of us incorporate interdisciplinary scholarship, often forgetting what was written by someone in sociology, philosophy, anthropology, and history. This ambiguity illustrates both the value of cultural studies as it breaks and recasts scholars and our writing, as well as a potentially troubling part of larger cultural patterns of forgetting the past and how the past generated the present. This essay is our attempt to generate a space for talking about the role of experience in experimental and innovative research methods. We here take to heart the warnings of scholars like Joan W. Scott who question the role of experience in scholarship, who productively trouble how subjects who are constituted

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by experience can concurrently maintain experiences that stand as stable and unquestionable truths of those subjects. Specifically, we ask how cultural studies methods have responded and incorporated this critique in our work and question the work still needing to be done. Complicating Experience and Its Subjects Joan W. Scotts (1991) The Evidence of Experience examines qualitative research on difference and, more broadly, subjectivity, in which scholars prioritize their lived experience as evidence. Scotts interrogation, largely grounded in historical scholarship, focuses on how scholars commonly rely on experience in limiting ways, allowing such usage to stand as beyond critique. She called out historians whom she felt allow experiences (often of marginalized and historically underexamined populations) to stand in for a more complex historicization of subjects and their lives. She underscored the seriousness of critical inquiry for all conscientious researchers of social life; particularly, her examination speaks to cultural studies scholars whose interest is studying the complexities of subjectivity. Of particular concern for Scott are the ways using lived experience implicates our understanding of experience itself. Scott argued, When the evidence is experience, the claim for referentiality is further buttressedwhat could be truer, after all, than a subjects own account of what he or she has lived through? (1991, p. 777). The fear is that experience (in historical writings) can get framed as privileged, natural, and self-evident evidence on which one can gain access to the true lives of the people in the narrative. This framing, in turn, postures researchers in particular ways and skews our perception and overall discernment of evidence. Scott described how experience makes possible a heightened perception of authority, legitimacy, and autonomy among experienced scholars their stories stand alone as foundational and removed from debate. She argued that experience serves as uncontestable evidence and as an originary point of explanation [that] becomes bedrock of evidence on which explanation is built (p. 777). Examining experience used in these unproductive and unreflective ways reminds us that to argue from personalized positions does not mean our work is immune to critique, as Medford (2006), Ellis (2007), and Berry (2006), among others, rightly reminded us when they warned that writing the personal has implications beyond the solitary self writing the story. Scott (1991) renders central concern about experience as follows: The evidence of experience works as a foundation providing both a starting point and a conclusive kind of explanation, beyond which few questions can or need to be asked (p. 790). Scott, in turn, works to unsettle this foundation and resist the uncontestable location of experience in scholarship. Scotts argument raises important questions concerning authenticity and opens up spaces to investigate how narrators rely on lived experience and, in effect, write as if their claims are not available to those who did not have the exact same experience. The implications for cultural studies research are important to acknowledge:

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Researchers lived experience can and does certainly come to play in the writing of our research; however, how scholars use experiential evidence must be considered carefully as its purpose should be to open that experience up for dialogue, not shut it down. Experience can counterproductively preclude a productive dialogue between researchers, readers, and ideas; its uses can thwart necessary and critical exploration in the service of being right or true. Scott continued,
And yet it is precisely the questions precludedquestions about discourse, difference, and subjectivity, as well as about what counts as experience and who gets to make that determinationthat would enable us to historicize experience, and to reflect critically on the history we write about it, rather than to premise our history on it. (1991, p. 790)

Rightly, she reminds us that it is the job of scholars to locate experience (like all evidence we might bring to bear on a topic) within its contextsto historicize experience means we come to see how that understanding is constituted by the cultural experiences embedded in the research. Scotts critique carefully asks us to reorient the ways we understand experience and its relationship to/with subjectivity. Historicizing experience entails representing it as a subjective and discursive process, which, as she argued, is always contextual, contested, and contingent (p. 796). Experience, argued Scott, cannot be understood as distinct from the actual process of reflection on that experience (that is, one cannot separate what one experienced from how one understands that experience). An experience is always spatiotemporally rooted in (or informed by) given locations (physical, emotional, thoughtful contexts), subject to divergent meanings, and is necessarily subject to change over time as reflection (and further reflection) changes what happened more and more toward how what happened has made me who I am. What is at stake in the questioning of experience extends far beyond whether using experience is a good or bad idea; for her, the central problem is how scholarship that locates experiential evidence as uncontestable obscures how the experiencing self is produced through the experiences he or she undergoes. Scott wants us to see subjectivity as a discursive phenomenon, not only in terms of the ways undergoing experience produces subjects but also the ways the telling of these experiences also produces subjects: It is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience (p. 779). Indeed, contrasting widely accepted positions regarding human identity that portray communicators as being more static and predetermined selves (i.e., being more stable and formed outside of experience), we come into being by participating in complex, emergent interactional processes or cultural performances. This, in turn, renders cultural representation (e.g., scholarly writing using experience) a complex and often less-certain enactment, which, consequently, prompts a consistent reminder for cultural studies researchers to amplify the depths of our analyses. Historicizing experience and its malleable subjects means resolutely directing ourselves to the conditions that make both possible and necessary, or, according

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to Scott, attend[ing] to the historical processes that, through discourse, position subjects and produce [our] experiences (1991, p. 779). She continued,
Experience in this definition then becomes not the origin of our explanation, not the authoritative (because seen or felt) evidence that grounds what is known, but rather that which we seek to explain, that about which knowledge is produced. (1991, pp. 779-780)

Scotts orientation for doing critical research (the emphasis on process, interpretation, contingency, etc.) advocates a constitutive understanding of experience and subjectivity. Her move toward Foucault at the end of her essay situates the use of experience firmly within the logic of genealogy, that is, a shift from this is my experience and is therefore not anyone elses to critique to this is my experience, and, in the telling, I show how social and political forces are at play with how, why and to what end I tell it. In this way, experience is problematized, not taken for granted; we consider not only the story but also the diverse influences that govern our crafting of the story in the first place. In addition, as Pollock (2007) wisely reminded us, the reader/audience cannot just back away from their responsibility either: A reader who chickens out is not a writers problem. In the next section of this essay, we describe how Scott has informed the work undertaken by cultural studies scholars who use experience as a foil to examine culture. Although Scotts work is self-described as a questioning of how we might write history, its publication not only in Critical Inquiry but later in her coedited collection (1992) Feminists Theorize the Political suggests a reading across disciplines (feminism, critical theory, cultural studies, anthropology, etc.) is both possible and warranted. Indeed, we find much of her concerns responded to in the work of scholars in journals like Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies. Perhaps, as a result of her efforts, we have learned and grown, locating the personal within the critical and innovative methods that guide our scholarship. Responding to the Call: Autoethnography and Performativity as Discourse We are interpretive qualitative researchers of communication. Keith uses hermeneutic phenomenology and ethnomethodology, along with diverse ethnographic research methods to study identity negotiation as creatively constituted through everyday sites of cultural and intercultural communication. John examines culture (gender, sexuality, race, and difference generally) through (auto)ethnographic methods, seeking to locate the constitution of culture within communication norms commonly used in everyday contexts. As a result of our own commitments, we move now to how we have witnessed scholarship that uses (and, we argue, historicizes) experiencial evidence to examine culture. Autoethnography is an interpretive research method through which scholars seek to evocatively narrate the selves experiences in diverse cultural settings. The approach is diverse due to the multiple definitions that conceptualize the method

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(Ellis & Bochner, 2000) and the varying ways scholars enact its inquiry (e.g., dialogic formats, poetry, photography, other artistic approaches, and the more traditional linear design in writing; Bochner & Ellis, 2002). Autoethnographers pursue a better understanding of culture and subjectivity by examining cultural experiences (and, as a result, themselves as cultural agents). Often, such work is directed toward alleviating suffering of the author (Berry, 2007; Ellis, 2004), the reproduction of power (Warren, 2001), and posing the possibility of healing (DeSalvo, 2002). Performative writing, while related, is a way of conceptualizing writing that constitutes that which it describes. Pollock (1998) defined performative writing as doing; that is, writing becomes itself, becomes its own means and ends, recovering to itself the force of action (p. 75). Performative writers often use autoethnography as a vehicle for writing their stories, but the two are not the same. Indeed, performative writing can take on many forms, such as dialogue (Warren & Fassett, 2002), fiction (Corey & Nakayama, 1997), embodied writing (Tillmann-Healy, 1996), collage (Kilgard, 2005), and combinations of multiple performative genres (Miller & Pelias, 2001; Pelias, 2004). Autoethnographic and performative writing approaches, following Scott, represent especially discursive processes (see Berry, 2006; Ellis, 2004; Goodall, 2000; Pelias, 2004; Warren & Fassett, 2002). This discourse is processual in nature and, thus, is a temporal phenomenon governed by influences of persons past, lived present, and anticipated future experiences. Working in contrast to fixed positions regarding the nature of experience and subjects, the process is ongoing, often complex, and uncertain. That is to say, what is at stake in both autoethnography and performative writing is the production of culturehow identities and culture are produced through representation. This work highlights the mechanisms of production, asking how the self/story/culture in the narrative is produced through the cultural experience as well as the telling of those experiences. Often the telling of these narratives not only documents certain pasts (historicizing of an experience) but also sketch possible futures (hence, multiplying the possibilities for understanding brought to our attention through this historicizing). This possiblizing serves as a political aim, aligning these methods to critical theory and the desire to create contexts for change. Several key assumptions shape the discursive nature of autoethnography and performative writing (i.e., what it means to produce the research and, in so doing, constitute the experience and subjects of involved persons). We follow by describing each separately: Experience is a situated, cultural phenomenon. Representations of cultural experiences are grounded or located in distinctive sociocultural contexts, along with the communicative practices comprising those cultural scenes (Carbaugh, 1996). In this sense, representation is governed by researchers descriptive practices, which, in that we forever are subjective beings, are governed by the varying and diverse realms of lived experience informing our lives. Experience situated in this fashion calls into question social scientific positions limitedly pursing generalizability and

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universality in research and prompts consideration of cultural phenomena as being far more contingent than we might ordinarily presume, which prompts Goodall (2000) to conceptualize all ethnographic discourse as partial, problematic, and partisan (p. 55). Returning to the opening narrative for a moment, one can see how the event of the destruction of the childhood home is situated within the discursive construction of memory and commodification. However, the grieving subject and the loss itself are situated within the contextual frame, producing a self-reflexive narrative that already problematizes these experiences even as the author narrates it. Subjectivity is a complex outcome of diverse cultural experiences. This is to say, we come into being within cultural performance, within the (re)productive, collaborative enactment of our lives. Just as everyday interaction is an interdependent process, the formation of selves is enacted in cooperation with others. An apt description of our situatedness is that we are intersubjectively constituted; as Calvin O. Schrag (2003) writes, No I is an island entire of itself; every subject is a piece of the continent of other subjects, a part of the main of intersubjectivity (p. 125; see also p. 132). Thus, understanding ourselves through cultural studies research, and, for that matter, all research, is an undertaking of discerning situated subjectivities or selves who are dynamically crafted in the production of everyday experiences. Again, the narrative that begins this essay can be seen as a window into the production of the self, the making of a subject (a grandchild, for example) through cultural performance of that self and in relation to others. The introspective and descriptive practices of autoethnography and performative writing enable researchers to perform as skillful artists who portray descriptive and evocative snapshots of cultural life. Often as idiosyncratic as the persons who create the research, these methods join the desire and need to conscientiously report on aspects of social life that matters most to us and also remains resolute in privileging (inter)subjectivity(ies) over objectivity, dialogue over monologue, and rich description over dogmatic explanation. Doing cultural studies scholarship in this way renders scholars, to varying extents, vulnerable and inquiring or processing subjects (Berry, 2008). One becomes a cultural critic swept up and influenced by the crafting of our research. The opening narrative, in as much as it serves as a space for others to view their own cultural production of memory, is potentially evocative of how one mourns and how materiality is linked to cultural practices of loss. Gannon (2006) argued, Writing about oneself is risky writing. It is difficult to write about the self and to be an escape artist from the self at the same time (p. 484). Both autoethnography and performative writing share a commitment to risky writing, often using the personal (indeed, offering the fragility of a self willingly to others) to both bear witness to how culture has been experienced, while also situating those experiences within complicated social and political contexts. This writing is not meant to let the self off the hook as it goes about the work of historicizing the constitutive mechanisms of everyday life; rather, it places the self on the line, knowing that those experiences are out of their control as they enter the space of public debate. That risk means that Scotts (1991) critique of how

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experience often stands as unassailable (p. 797) has contributed to how cultural studies scholars have modified their work to turn experience into possibility. Implications Scotts (1991) pointing toward subjectivity as a central point of contention within experiential scholarship requires a continuing process of questioning and challenging of those aspects of critical/cultural inquiry we might tend to take for granted. What we learn the most from Scotts experience of experience in scholarship (for her concern is, ultimately, based in her experience of how experience is proffered in research) is the need for increased reflexivity in our critical scholarship. That is, when we forget that all research is filtered through a subject constituted through culture, we easily slip into a kind of essentialism that erases complexity in favor of easy claims. Scott, like Foucault whom she cited, wants us to always situate the present within a framework of the pastthat is, the now as a product of past communicative acts. Like a story about the bulldozing of Grampas house on his birthday, experience is always a representation, a collage, a simulation of the actual past. By extensively historicizing our work, we, in turn, render scholars, properly, people; we become persons whose ways of being as cultural critics are forever inseparable with the conditions that make possible and necessary cultural phenomena. Still, considering Scotts call, we are reminded that, by privileging lived experience, autoethnographers and performative writers respond to historical traditions of objectivist research that has avoided the subjective nature of scholarship. They provide previously silenced voices with an impressive and welcoming intellectual space for describing cultural phenomena to others through the viable lenses of our own everyday experience. Marginalized voices based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and other underrepresented groups have a safer space to explore ourselves and others, and in diverse ways, which has helped to create a richly diverse community of scholars with a wealth of experiences from which to draw. What remains less clear are issues associated with the actual practice of historicizing, particularly with respect to writing ourselves and cultural experiences. With Adams (2009, [this issue]), we believe that historicizing, depending on its use, makes especially vulnerable those researchers whose selves are already especially vulnerable. Researchers thus get located within a space of desiring complexity, while concomitantly longing to cultivate and communicate a voice that feels fitting to them. And so this uncertainty prompts us to ask the following: How much historicizing is enough? That is, to what extent can/should we excavate the varying conditions that make our experiences and representations possible, while not undermining the creative work endemic to these methods? Moreover, in that doing cultural studies scholarship is, in its own right, a viable cultural experience through which, following Scott, researchers/subjects get constituted, how might magnifying the extent to which we historicize complicate our experiences? As cultural studies scholars who continue to advance unique conceptual focuses as

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well as the innovative methods through which these interests get represented, points of intrigue like these, which emphasize the need to more carefully and critically examine how we subjects convey ourselves, are of increased importance and worthy of extended discussion. References
Adams, T. E. (this issue). Mothers, faggots, and witnessing (un)contestable experience. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies. Berry, K. (2006). Implicated audience member seeks understanding: Reexamining the gift of autoethnography. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 5, 1-12. Retrieved July 25, 2007, from http://www.ualberta.ca/~iiqm/backissues/5_3/html/berry.htm Berry, K. (2007). Embracing the catastrophe: Gay body seeks acceptance. Qualitative Inquiry, 13, 259-281. Berry, K. (2008). Promise in Peril: Ellis and Pelias and the Subjective Dimensions of Ethnography. The Review of Communication, 8 (2), 154-173. Bochner, A., & Ellis, C. (2002). Ethnographically speaking. Lanham, MA: AltaMira Press. Butler, J., & Scott, J. (1992). Feminists theorize the political. New York: Routledge. Carbaugh, D. (1996). Situating selves: The communication of social identities in American scenes. Albany: State University of New York Press. Corey, F. C., & Nakayama, T. K. (1997). Sextext. Text and Performance Quarterly, 17, 66-77. DeSalvo, L. (2002). Writing as a way of healing: How telling our stories transforms our lives. San Francisco: Harper. Ellis, A., & Bochner, A. (2000). Autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexive-ty: Researcher as subject. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 733-768). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Ellis, C. (2004). The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press. Ellis, C. (2007). Telling secrets, revealing lives. Qualitative Inquiry, 13, 3-29. Gannon, S. (2006). The (im)possibilities of writing the self-writing: French poststructuralist theory and autoethnography. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, 6, 474-495. Goodall, H. L., Jr. (2000). Writing the new ethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press. Kilgard, A. K. (2005). Directing performances of border crossing: An allegory of turnst(y) les. In L. Lengel & J. T. Warren (Eds.), Casting gender: Women and performance in intercultural contexts (pp. 145-164). New York: Peter Lang. Medford, K. (2006). Caught with a fake ID: Ethical questions about slippage in autoethnography. Qualitative Inquiry, 12, 853-864. Miller, L. C., & Pelias, R. J. (Eds.). (2001). The green window: Proceedings of the giant city conference on performative writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Pelias, R. (2004). A methodology of the heart: Evoking academic and daily life. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press.

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Pollock, D. (1998). Performative writing. In P. Phalen & J. Lane (Eds.), The ends of performance (pp. 73-103). New York: New York University Press. Pollock, D. (2007). The performative I. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, 7, 239-255. Schrag, C. O. (2003). Communicative praxis and the space of subjectivity. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Scott, J. W. (1991). The evidence of experience. Critical Inquiry, 17, 773-797. Tillmann-Healy, L. M. (1996). A secret life in the culture of thinness: Reflections on body, food and bulimia. In C. Ellis & A. P. Bochner (Eds.), Composing ethnography: Alternative forms of qualitative writing (pp. 76-108). Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press. Warren, J. T. (2001). Absence for whom? An autoethnography of White subjectivity. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, 1, 36-49. Warren, J. T., & Fassett, D. L. (2002). (Re)constituting ethnographic identities. Qualitative Inquiry, 8, 575-590.

Keith Berry is an Assistant Professor of Communicating Arts at University of Wisconsin-Superior (kberry@uwsuper.edu). John T. Warren (jtwarren@siu.edu) is an Associate Professor of Speech Communication at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.