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In Field-Based Hermeneutic Research

03/04/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"…the object is to create collaboratively a text that allows us to carry out the integrative act of reading, interpreting, and critiquing our understandings. This act is a grounding for our actions. The medium of this collaborative act is language. Phelps (1998:192) notes that in Ricoeur&39;s philosophy, 'language takes the place of the perceptual world of objects, so that texts become the objects from which human existence is indirectly understood or read.' A text (discourse fixed by writing [Ricoeur 1982:143]) and social actions that are recorded (Herda 1990:51) allow us to recognize, challenge, and evaluate our worlds of action as well as to envision new, possible worlds. Objectivity comes when we distance ourselves from the text. Practical use of our research data comes from the act of appropriating new ideas and ways of being from the text. In other words, in hermeneutic field-based research the focus is on our distanciation from and our appropriation of the text.

Our research analysis discloses a possible world from the text—the medium in which we understand ourselves. From a position of self-understanding in relationship to others we build new possibilities into everyday life. The most critical manifestations of such possibilities are the new personal and professional communities we build. Community-building in schools, corporations, hospitals, or wherever does not come about just from conversing about common interests and mutual problems bur rather from developing relationships based on trust, which is what it takes for a community to be more than a social enclave. A second manifestation is the learning that takes place. Learning here goes beyond knowing what one does not want or like, or inferring that a critical stance is an informed stance. Learning her entails entering into moral and political discourse with a historical understanding of the issues at hand; risking part of one's tradition and current prejudices; and, at times, seeing the importance of community and social cohesiveness over specific desires of the individual.

To make analysis possible, the spoken word in conversation needs to be fixed in a text. Ricoeur suggests that this fixation, distanciation, takes place in four ways: the separation of the event of saying from the meaning of what is said; the separation of the intentions of the speakers from the meaning of the text; the referential difference between spoken and written discourse; and the world that the text when read points to. The task remains to make the text one’s own after the act of distanciation takes place. This subsequent act is one of appropriation—an interpretive event. The discussion of distanciation and appropriation sets the context in which field-based research in a hermeneutic tradition takes place. The role of the researcher is far different than a collector of data, an expert, a neutral player, or a partner in a dialogue. The researcher’s orientation toward the research event as a whole gives opportunity for one to become a different person than before the research took place. It sets the researcher in a reflective and imaginary mode, thus opening new ways to think about the social problems that drew one to research in the first place” (Herda 1999:86-87).

Herda, Ellen A.
1999 Research Conversations and Narrative: A Critical Hermeneutic Orientation in Participatory Inquiry. Westport, CT: Praeger.

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The World of the Work (Ricoeur:1991)

30/03/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"To begin with, appropriation is dialectically linked to the distanciation characteristic of writing. Distanciation is not abolished by appropriation but is rather the counterpart of it. Thanks to distanciation by writing, appropriation no longer has any trace of affective affinity with the intention of an author. Appropriation is quite the contrary of contemporaneousness and congeniality: it is understanding at and through distance.

In the second place, appropriation is dialectically linked to the objectification characteristic of the work. It is mediated by all the structural objectifications of the text; insofar as appropriation does not respond to the author, it responds to the sense. Perhaps it is at this level that the mediation effected by the text can be best understood. In contrast to the tradition of the cogito and to the pretension of the subject to know itself by immediate intuition, it must be said that we understand ourselves only by the long detour of the signs of humanity deposited in cultural works. What would we know of love and hate, of moral feelings, and, in general, of all that we call the self if these had not been brought to language and articulated by literature? Thus what seems the most contrary to subjectivity, and what structural analysis discloses as the texture of the text, is the very medium within which we can understand ourselves.

Above all, the vis-á-vis of appropriation is what Gadamer calls 'the matter of the text' and what I call here 'the world of the work.' Ultimately, what I appropriate is a proposed world. The latter is not behind the text, as a hidden intention would be, but in front of it, as that which the work unfolds, discovers, reveals. Henceforth, to understand is to understand oneself in front of the text. It is not a question of imposing upon the text our infinite capacity for understanding, but of exposing ourselves to the text and receiving from it an enlarged self, which would be the proposed existence corresponding in the most suitable way to the world proposed. So understanding is quite different from a constitution of which the subject would possess the key. In this respect, it would be more correct to say that the self is constituted by the 'matter' of the text" (Ricoeur 1991:87-88).

Ricoeur, Paul
1991[1986] From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson, trans. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

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“Message and Hearer” (Ricoeur 1976:31).

20/02/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“At the opposite end of the communication chain the relation of the textual message to the reader is no less complex than is the relation to the author. Whereas spoken discourse is addressed to someone who is determined in advanced by the dialogical situation-it is addressed to you, the second person-a written text is addressed to an unknown reader and potentially to whoever knows how to read. This universalization of the audience may be expressed in terms of a paradox. Because discourse is now linked to a material support, it becomes more spiritual in the sense that it is liberated from the narrowness of the face-to-face situation.

Of course this universality is only potential. In fact, a book is addressed to only a section of the public and reaches its appropriate readers through media that are themselves submitted to social rules of exclusion and admission. In other words, reading is a social phenomenon, which obeys certain patterns and therefore suffers from specific limitations. Nevertheless, the proposition which says that a text is potentially addressed to whoever knows how to read must be retained as a limit on any sociology of reading. A work also creates its public. In this way it enlarges the circle of communication and properly initiates new modes of communication. To that extent, the recognition of the work by the audience created by the work is an unpredictable event.

Once again the dialectic of meaning and event is exhibited in its fullness by writing. Discourse is revealed as discourse by the dialectic of the address, which is both universal and contingent. On the one hand, it is the semantic autonomy of the text which opens up the range of potential readers and, so to speak, creates the audience of the text. On the other hand, it is the response of the audience which makes the text important and therefore significant. This is why authors who do not worry about their readers and despise their present public keep speaking of their readers as a secret community, sometimes projected into a cloudy future. It is part of the meaning of a text to be open to an indefinite number of readers and, therefore, of interpretations. This opportunity for multiple readings is the dialectical counterpart of the semantic autonomy of the text.

It follows that the problem of the appropriation of the meaning of the text becomes as paradoxical as that of the authorship. The right of the reader and the right of the text converge in an important struggle that generates the whole dynamic of interpretation. Hermeneutics begins where dialogue ends” (Ricoeur 1976:31-32).

Ricoeur, Paul
1976 Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Forth Worth, TX: Texas University Press.

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“Language is the House of Being because Language, as Saying, is the Mode of Appropriation” (Heidegger 1971:135)

06/01/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“In order to be who we are, we human beings remain committed to and within the being of language, and can never step out of it and look at it from somewhere else. Thus we always see the nature of language only to the extent to which language itself has us in view, has appropriated us to itself. That we cannot know the nature of language-know it according to the traditional concept of knowledge defined in terms of cognition as representation-is not a defect, however, but rather an advantage by which we are favored with a special realm, that realm where we, who are needed and used to speak language, dwell as mortals.

Saying will not let itself be captured in any statement. It demands of us that we achieve by silence the appropriating, initiating movement within the being of language-and do so without talking about silence.

Saying, which resides in Appropriation, is qua showing the most appropriate moment of appropriating. This sounds like a statement. If we only hear this statement it does not say to us what is to be thought out. Saying is the mode in which Appropriation speaks: mode not so much in the sense of modus or fashion, but as the melodic mode, the song which says something in its singing. For appropriating Saying brings to light all present beings in terms of their properties-it lauds, that is, allows them into their own, their nature. Hölderlin sings these words in the beginning of the eighth stanza of ‘Celebration of Peace’:

Much, from the morning onwards,
Since we have been a discourse and have heard from one another
Has human kind learnt; but soon we shall be song.

Language has been called ‘the house of Being.’ It is the keeper of being present, in that its coming to light remains entrusted to the appropriating showing of Saying. Language is the house of being because language, as Saying, is the mode of Appropriation.

In order to pursue in thought the being of language and to say of it what is its own, a transformation of language is needed which we can neither compel nor invent. This transformation does not result from the procurement of newly formed words and phrases. It touches our relation to language, which is determined by destiny: whether and in what way the nature of language, as the arch-tidings of Appropriation, will retain us in Appropriation. For that appropriating, holding, self-retaining is the relation of all relations. Thus our saying-always an answering-remains forever relational. Relation is thought of here always in terms of the appropriation, and no longer conceived in the form of mere reference. Our relation to language defines itself in terms of the mode in which we, who are needed in the usage of language, belong to the Appropriation” (Heidegger 1971:134-136).

Heidegger, Martin
1971[1959] On the Way to Language. Peter D. Hertz, trans. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc.

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