Interpretive Methods (Modules 4, 8)
Monday, June 15; Tuesday, June 16
Eggers Hall, Room 060
Lisa Wedeen (University of Chicago) and Yuna Blajer de la Garza (Loyola University Chicago)
This two-module sequence provides students with an introduction to interpretive methods through a discussion of various modes of discourse analysis and ideology critique. Students will learn to “read” texts and other artifacts while becoming familiar with contemporary thinking about interpretation, narrative, genre, and criticism. In the first four sessions we shall explore the following methods: Wittgenstein’s understanding of language as activity and its practical relevance to ordinary language-use analysis; Foucault’s “interpretive analytics” with hands-on exercises applying his genealogical method; and various versions (two sessions) of cultural Marxism—with specific attention to “ideology critique.” The last two classes will consider the differences between interpretivism and positivism, attending to the ways in which an ethnographic sensibility uses empirical research to elucidate how people interpret, navigate, and challenge the social and political worlds they inhabit.
Book to Purchase: Lisa Wedeen, Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Preface, Introduction, Chapters 1, 3, and 5.
Participants may enter the module sequence after it has begun, but their doing so is discouraged.
Interpretive Methods I (M4, June 15)
8:45am - 10:15am – Ordinary Language Use Analysis
Lisa Wedeen
This session introduces participants to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s thought and its relationship to ordinary language-use methods. We shall focus on several key ways in which Wittgensteinian- inspired methods can be used in ethnographic and analytical research. Among the questions we shall ask are: What is the “value added” of concentrating on language? Why is understanding language as an activity important? How can social scientists grapple with vexed issues of intention? What does “performative” mean, and how do political theories about language as performative differ from discussions of performance? How can social scientists uninterested in taking on new jargon use this kind of political theory to further their theoretical and empirical work?
Required readings:
Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice: On the Significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Social and Political Thought, (University of California Press, 1972), chapter 8 “Justice, Socrates and Thrasymachus,” pp. 169-192. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520343023
Wittgenstein, The Philosophical Investigations (Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe), (Blackwell Publishers, 2001), Paragraphs 1-33; paragraph 154; pages 194-195.
1:30pm - 3:00pm – Foucauldian Discourse Analysis
Lisa Wedeen
This session introduces participants to the techniques of Foucauldian discourse analysis or “interpretive analytics.” Participants will learn how to conduct a discourse analysis, what the underlying assumptions of such an analysis are, and how these techniques can be used to advance political inquiry. The session will consider both the power and limitations of the method, the ways in which it differs from other modes of interpretation, and its advantages over content analysis.
Required readings:
Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited, with an introduction by Donald F. Bouchard ; translated from the French by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Cornell University Press, 1977),” Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” pp. 139-164.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, translated from the French by Robert Hurley, Vol. 1, pp. 1-35 and pp. 92-114.
King, Gary, Keohane, Robert O. and Verba, Sidney. Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994 – please revisit this text and have it ready for a class exercise. If you are unfamiliar with this book, we shall discuss that too—from a Foucauldian discourse analysis perspective. (Please note that the 2021 “new edition” is identical to the 1994 text, except for the addition of a new foreword and some different page numbering.) If you do not want to identify with the discipline of political science, there will be an alternative exercise. (That brief reading will be available in class.)
Suggested readings:
- Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), Part Two. (ebook pdf is available at SU library)
3:30pm - 5:00pm – Ideology, an Introduction
Yuna Blajer de la Garza
What is ideology and how does it structure everyday life? We begin this session by discussing Marx’s views on ideology, in particular what may be deemed his critical account of ideology, one aiming to liberate individuals from false and misleading forms of understanding. We will then discuss the ways in which an attention to ideology offers an interpretive tool to approach contemporary society. What is the relation between ideology and media, and between ideology and power? How does ideology enable or interrupt desire, imagination, and attachment?
Required reading:
- Michael Rosen and Jonathan Wolff, 1996, “The Problem of Ideology”, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 70(1): 209–242. Available here.
Suggested reading:
- William Mazzarella, The Mana of Mass Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), “Introduction.” Available here.
Interpretive Methods II (M8, June 16)
8:45am - 10:15am – Ideology Critique
Lisa Wedeen
This session continues our exploration of ideology by attending to the political commitments and intellectual genealogies that have made the concept both important and vexed. We conclude by considering how we might apply a repurposed understanding of ideology “as form” to both authoritarian and liberal political orders. This session will involve hands on exercises.
Required readings:
Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (short version, PDF)
Lisa Wedeen, Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Preface, Introduction, Chapters 1, 3, and 5. (book to obtain).
NOTE: We shall also screen excerpts from “The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology” featuring Slavoj Žižek
1:30pm - 3:00pm – Interpretivism and Positivism
Yuna Blajer de la Garza
How does interpretivism differ from positivism? Where do these approaches overlap and when do they pull in opposite directions? This session aims to provide methodological guidance for scholars who are not only interested in using interpretive methods, but who aim to better understand the ways in which positivism and interpretivism differ, and, more specifically, what are the virtues (and shortcomings) of interpretive approaches.
Required readings:
Frederic C. Schaeffer, “Why Do Concepts Need Elucidating?” In Elucidating Social Science Concepts. New York: Routledge, 2016, 1-25.
Erica Simmons and Nicholas R. Smith, “Comparison with an Ethnographic Sensibility,” PS: Political Science & Politics 50, no. 1 (2017): 126-129.
Suggested reading:
- Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” The Review of Metaphysics, 25 (1971), 3-51. Here is a JSTOR link.
3:30pm - 5:00pm – “Objective” Interpretations?
Yuna Blajer de la Garza
In this last session, we build on a topic briefly touched on during the prior session: can interpretivist scholars be “objective”? Should they aspire to be? Moreover, is it possible for a scholar to access and successfully interpret others’ worlds? This session involves hands-on exercises.
Required readings:
Jessica Allino-Pisano, “How to Tell an Axe Murderer: an Essay on Ethnography, Truths and Lies,” in Political Ethnography, ed. Edward Schatz (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009), 53-73.
Jessica Marie Falcone, ‘“I Spy…”: The (Im)possibilities of Ethical Participant Observation with Antagonists, Religious Extremists, and Other Tough Nuts,’ Michigan Discussions in Anthropology 18 (2010): 243-282.