Macbeth, D. - On Reflexivity in Qualitative Research (... )

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Qualitative Inquiry
DOI: 10.1177/107780040100700103
2001; 7; 35 Qualitative Inquiry
Douglas Macbeth
On "Reflexivity" in Qualitative Research: Two Readings, and a Third
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QUALITATIVE INQUIRY / February 2001
Macbeth / REFLEXIVITY IN QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
On Reflexivity in Qualitative Research:
Two Readings, and a Third
Douglas Macbeth
Ohio State University
Reflexivity has become a signal topic in contemporary discussions of qualitative research,
especially in educational studies. It shows two general inflections in the literature. Posi-
tional reflexivity leads the analyst to examine place, biography, self, and other to under-
stand howthey shape the analytic exercise. Textual reflexivity leads the analyst to exam-
ine and then disrupt the very exercise of textual representation. The purpose of this
article is to develop a critical reading of contemporary formulations of reflexivity in the
literature and then reintroduce an earlier discussion in social science, Garfinkels ethno-
methodological constitutive reflexivity. The author suggests that postmodern attach-
ments not withstanding, positional and textual reflexivities may have far more in com-
mon with Enlightenment certainties than is commonly allowed. As for constitutive
reflexivity, a brief analysis of a videotaped sequence froma fifth-grade classroomis offered
as an example of its alternative program and topics.
Inthe rushof interest inqualitative researchinthe past 15 years, fewtopics
have developed as broad a consensus as the relevance of analytic reflex-
ivity. By most accounts, reflexivity is a deconstructive exercise for locating
the intersections of author, other, text, andworld, andfor penetrating the rep-
resentational exercise itself. As with deconstruction more generally, reflex-
ivity has become an identifying move within a recognizable program of
premillennial social science. The programs consensus is not easily described,
and the play of reflexivity in the literature is far more diverse than a single, or
several, positions can account for. Andalthough this diversity assures us that
any account of it can only be tendentious, it may still be useful to try to build
one. The reflexive thesis (Ashmore, 1989) has become so well established
and nearly obligedas to be worthy of a critical review.
1
In this article, I want to build such a review of two of the prevailing dis-
courses on reflexivity in the contemporary literature, andthen compare them
35
Authors Note: The topics of this article were first presented to the American Educa-
tional Research Association, special interest group in Qualitative Research, Montreal,
Canada, inApril 1999. The author is indebtedto Mr. Minho Shonfor close readings and
discussions of a prior draft andto an anonymous reviewer for an exceptionally percep-
tive reading.
Qualitative Inquiry, Volume 7 Number 1, 2001 35-68
2001 Sage Publications, Inc.
toa thirdandearlier discourse inthe ethnomethodological literature (see But-
ton, 1994; Garfinkel, 1967; Garfinkel &Sacks, 1970; andLynch, 1993). I want to
recommend the earlier discourse as one that confers no privilege on the
reflexive exercise or otherwise reserves it to professional analytic purposes or
credentials. Bythis prior account, the reflexive exercise is a members exercise
first, and interest turns from issues of professional methodology or formal
theory to the practical, reflexive constitution of ordinary worlds. Thus, de-
pending on the reading, we may have in a same expression entirely different
recommendations for understanding the organization of social worlds.
CONTEMPORARY REFLEXIVITIES
With etymological roots in self-reflection and critical self-reflection, the
contemporary move to analytic reflexivity is marked in general parlance by a
turning back upon itself, for example, the turning back of an inquiry or a
theory or a text onto its own formative possibilities. Contemporary expres-
sions of reflexivity have attachments to critical theory, standpoint theory, tex-
tual deconstruction, andsociologies andanthropologies of knowledge, power,
andagency (see, e.g., Anderson, 1989; Ashmore, 1989; Bourdieu&Wacquant,
1992; Clifford, 1988; Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Collins, 1986; Fine, 1994; Har-
ding 1991; Lather, 1997; Marcus &Cushman, 1982; Olesen, 1994; Richardson,
1998; Smith, 1988; Stocking, 1983; Tyler, 1987; Woolgar, 1988). They have
emerged in pace with a progressive reading of the implications of a cultural,
and then radical, relativism. A radical relativism problematizes not only
meaning, value, and knowledge but representation as well, and much of the
contemporary expression and interest in reflexivity has followed on the dis-
covered crisis of representation in Western academic lifea crisis whose rec-
ognitionwas part of theopeningontothevast rangeof analytic deconstruction.
The crisis of representation is at once a crisis for objectivism, unified and
nomothetic sciences, and synthesizing, totalizing discourses. Relativismand
reflexivity are intimately bound up in the widely observed crisis, and these
may well be features of a postmodern condition (Lyotard, 1984). But by what-
ever genealogy, the very security and stability of the analysts footing in the
world(Goffman, 1981) have beendeeplyshakenandwiththemthe taken-for-
granted assurances and privileging of social science analysis. Realist repre-
sentation has been cast into radical doubt, and docile fields of inquiry (e.g.,
fields of rules, norms, and formal structures) have exploded into multiple,
cross-cutting, and contested attachments to identity, orientation, power, and
knowledge. Although Wittgenstein (1969) reminds us that doubt always pre-
mises certainty, it is as though the only certainties available to the qualitative
researcher were the shifting relations and sedimentations of biography, cul-
ture, habitus, and occasion. In this context of crisis, and borrowing from
36 QUALITATIVE INQUIRY / February 2001
Dewey (1929/1984), we can say that the discourses of qualitative research in
general have beentakenupwiththe problematics of certainty that have fol-
lowed on the dissolution of modernist programs and confidences,
ethnographic authorities included.
For territories such as these, a professionally disciplined reflexive analytic
that could attend the uncertainties of representation and competing knowl-
edge claims in the worlds we study has much to recommend. A reflexive
stance is widely recommended for crafting descriptions that might be
relieved of the gendered, cultural, rational, and still other hegemonies and
centricities that the crisis has brought into view. In this light, and against the
oppositional backdrop of a prevailing modernist representational regime,
reflexivity is recommended as a principal method for excavating new (anti)-
foundations for the analytic and representational exercise. It is as though we
would need to learn how to speak and describe and read and write all over
again, and for many of its iterations, reflexivity begins with a skepticism
toward how indeed we have been doing these things all along. Reflexivity
recommends an inquiry into the very possibilities of our unreflective knowl-
edge andpractices, andinthis way, the reflexive move is anaggressive one for
bringing more of an unsettled field into view.
2
TWO PROGRAMS
Assuming that this is a useful (or at least recognizable) account of the
reflexive discourse generally, I need to take some further liberties with it to
buildthe discussionpromisedinmytitle. Of the contemporaryexpressions of
reflexivity in qualitative research, I want to characterize andcritically discuss
two general and affiliated programs. I understand them as positional reflex-
ivity and textual reflexivity, where each heading represents a temporary col-
lection of arguments and literatures that permits me to make certain other
arguments and distinctions as well.
Both of these inflections on reflexivity are familiar in the contemporary lit-
erature of qualitative research and educational studies. My sketches of them
will be programmatic and brief and with the understanding that each inflec-
tion has a rich and productive literature beyond my account of it. Nonethe-
less, the discussion may be useful for examining the place of reflexivity in
premillennial social science and educational research especially. Although
the two programs are unavoidably presented in orderfirst the positional,
thenthe textualthis order of the text is not intendedas a code or continuum.
Rather, the objects that get turned back upon are different in each. Further-
more, and as with all such collections, the boundaries tend to become faint
when we begin looking closely.
Macbeth / REFLEXIVITY IN QUALITATIVE RESEARCH 37
Positional Reflexivity
With these caveats, I mean by positional reflexivity those formulations of
the reflexive exercise that treat it as a self-referential analytic exercise. Perhaps
most familiar in confessional discourses, experiments in authorial voice, and
standpoint theories (see Clifford, 1988; Collins, 1986; Crapanzano, 1986; Har-
ding, 1993; Hartsock, 1983; Lather & Smithies, 1997; Richardson, 1994; St.
Pierre, 1997; Travisano, 1998; Van Maanen, 1988), positional reflexivity takes
up the analysts (uncertain) position and positioning in the world he or she
studies and is often expressed with a vigilance for unseen, privileged, or,
worse, exploitative relationships between analyst and the world (cf. Ander-
son, 1989; Denzin, 1994; Lather, 1986; Lincoln & Guba, 1990).
Apositionallyreflexive viewof the fieldthus implicates a disciplinedview
and articulation of ones analytically situated self, and for some researchers
(cf. Ellington, 1998; Richardson, 1998; Ronai, 1998), positional reflexivity has
directly autobiographical and sometimes nearly clinical attachments. Reflex-
ivity leads the analyst to take up the knots of place and biography and to
deconstruct the dualities of power and antipower, hegemony and resistance,
and insider and outsider to reveal and describe how our representations of
the worldandthose wholive there are indeedpositionallyorganized(see also
Frieden, 1989; Haraway, 1988; Heron & Reason, 1997; Lather & Ellsworth,
1996). By interrogating the borders of the hermeneutic circle in this way and
recognizing those orders of analysis and interpretation that fail to transform,
positional reflexivity often intends to leverage emancipatory possibilities
from the unnoticed commitments and adhesions of nonreflexive agency and
worlds.
3
Especially in educational studies, positional reflexivity has become insin-
uated into the very methods of qualitative methodology. It is recommended
as of a piece with methodological discipline, informing the very possibility of
postpositivist and/or poststructural analytic rigor (Ball, 1990; Hertz, 1996;
Lather, 1994). It figures into research policies that aim to manage and/or
finally explode positive-science attachments to, for example, objectivity,
totalizing discourses, or neutral observation languages by (re)materializing
the analyst in the discourse on methods (cf. Altheide & Johnson, 1994;
Ellington, 1998; Lather, 1996; Lincoln, 1995; McLaren, 1992; Scheurich &
Young, 1997; see also Sparks, 1989, on the residual positivism that inhabits
much of the qualitative research literature). Thus, for Ball (1990), analytic
rigor is tied to the analysts reflexive engagement in the world.
Self conscious engagement with the world . . . provides the possibility of techni-
cal rigor in the ethnographic process. The basis of this rigor is the conscious and
deliberate linking of the social process of engagement in the field with the tech-
nical processes of data collection and the decisions that that linking involves. I
call that linking reflexivity. (p. 159)
The achievements of this rigor are not then only technical. Locating rigor in a
disciplined consciousness, wherein analytic agency shapes the very social
activities and organizations it would disclose, reflexively positional research
aims to bring into view the engagements of the analysts agency as a first,
deliberate, and formative field for analysis. (See Denzin, 1994; Fine, 1994;
Fontana & Frey, 1994; Lather, 1997; Oakley, 1981; St. Pierre, 1997; Tobin &
Davidson, 1990; Villenas, 1996; and Wolf, 1992, for discussions and demon-
strations of positionallyreflexive agency.) Tomyreadingof the contemporary
literature, this order of reflexivity has nearly become an obliged topic, if not
method, for those who would do qualitative research.
Positional reflexivitythus aligns methodological rigor witha criticallydis-
ciplined subjectivity, decentering not only the sedimentations of the analyst
but (reflexively) those of the fielditself. Rather thanleveling the worldwith
a singular, objectivizing narrative voice, it preserves and recovers the
polysemy of multiple positions, interests, and agencies in the settings it ana-
lyzes. Yet positional reflexivity poses problems too. Perhaps most familiar are
the problems of recursion andregress for the reflexive exercise (see Ashmore,
1989; Platt, 1989; Woolgar, 1988), although they may be the least interesting
among them. Although regress has been the bane of foundational philoso-
phies, in the absence of foundational commitments the postmodern condi-
tion suggests a different trajectory. Where regress traces a linear recursion,
postmodernity sets aside the assumptions and comforts of clear lines and
destinations.
4
In other ways, however, positional reflexivity shows some striking conti-
nuities with foundational projects and Descartess especially. Centrally, both
articulate a programfor securing disciplinedknowledge via rigorously skep-
tical inquiries into the very possibilities of knowledge, and both situate
knowledge in agency. Both projects premise a contested territory of truths,
facts, andcommitments for whichaskeptical self-reflectionis the compass, and
the opening onto the possibility of rewriting the epistemic landscape. Each
promises a new grounding and warrant for knowledge production, as exem-
plified in their skeptical-reflexive inquiries. And because it tends to be an
explicitly partisan epistemic program, as was the modernist programbefore it,
positional reflexivity also tends to reproduce the competitive spirit of the mod-
ernism that it would deconstruct. I want to briefly develop each of these
themes, beginning with the last, first.
As withEnlightenment skepticism, positional reflexivitygoes intocompe-
tition with commonsense worlds. (See Garfinkel, 1967; Latour, 1988; Lynch,
1993; and Zimmerman & Pollner, 1974, on the competitive program of social
science vis--vis everyday life.) At least since Platos allegory of the cave, dis-
ciplined skepticism has promised an epistemic and methodological advan-
tage over our naive knowledge of worldly appearances, and in many of its
expressions, positional reflexivity reissues this venerable ambition of seeing
through the naiveand even falserealisms of ordinary experience. Each
seeks a critical understanding of ordinary worlds by reference to larger but
unnoticed arrangements and conditionsalthough now to reveal unseen
power, discourse, andhegemony rather than Enlightenment themes of order,
reason, or consensus.
The analytic locus is also similar. Unlike unreflexive analysts who naively
read knowledge and meaning off the world, the reflexive analyst locates
knowledge in agency. Positional reflexivity is not then simply an inward
looking, although it is that too. Reflexive agency lives as much in public
spaces as inbiographical sedimentations. But as it was for Descartes, reflexive
agency assigns a distinctive task and authorization to the singular analytic
ego: the deconstruction of the possibilities of knowledge by the interrogation
of the analysts positional cogito. Insofar as the analyst becomes a disclosing
mediumonto the fields of actionshe studies as bothananalyst andanexpres-
sion of unseen order and interests, the site of knowledge production for posi-
tional reflexivity is fundamentally ego analytic. Tiedto a singular, disciplined
exercise andauthorization, positional reflexivity is epistemic fromthe outset,
and in this light, we could say it recommends a revision of the modern ana-
lytic gaze, in common pursuit of an ever more penetratingandin that sense
foundationalfield of view.
Furthermore, although motivated by a program that would dissolve
binary structures andoppositionsfamiliar objects andarmaments for mod-
ern social science and targets for the postmodern critiquepositional reflex-
ivity tends to insinuate themas well as part of the very cogency of its descrip-
tions and arguments. In the measure that the distinctiveness of the reflexive
exercise owes to its naively positional other, oppositional binaries are
implicit throughout. However, rather than the binaries of modern formal
analysis (e.g., those of structure and function, subjective and objective, sci-
ence and common sense), we find binaries of power-knowledge, structure-
agency, andreflexive-unreflexive, andit maybe that binaries are unavoidable
whenever methodological discourses are taken up to promise formal knowl-
edge and/or demarcation criteria.
Finally and perhaps central among its continuities with modern formal
analysis, positionality also tends to rely on fields of autonomous structure.
This follows from its critical-theoretic attachments, whereby worldly posi-
tions are located within landscapes of power, knowledge, and difference. If
only as a prelude to transformative action, positional reflexivity objectifies
structure in its own way, at least insofar as autonomous structures premise
the interrogation of difference and the disruption of privilege. Said differ-
ently, the impossibilityof a unifiedsubject identity (Clough, 1998, p. 7) is an
impossibility built not of the dissolution of formal structure but rather the
recovery of multiple cross-cutting structures, discourses, and attachments.
Autonomous structure now organizes difference and disruption rather than
order and legitimacy (see Anderson, 1989; Harding, 1991; Heron & Reason,
1997; Lather, 1986; Lenzo, 1995, and Lincoln &Guba, 1990, for the play of for-
mal structures inpositional analyses). The place of structure as the fieldthat is
prior to any actual expression of agency, difference, or practice is much as we
find it in modern social science.
In these several ways, the positionally reflexive discourse may preserve
more of its oppositional genealogy than we commonly imagine. Notwith-
standing affirmations of heteroglossic knowledge claims to the worlds we
study, it organizes a professional gaze that locates the foundations for knowl-
edge production and methodological rigor in the skeptical-analytic ego. The
reflexive move inthe positional mode thus works as a methodological demar-
cation exercise that can warrant the value of an inquiry and the knowledge it
produces, and as it was for Enlightenment programs, positional reflexivity
can be made out as seeking special warrant for its knowledge claims too.
That we unavoidably own worldly interests andattachments to the affairs
we study is not itself the distinguishing insight of the contemporary reflexive
discourse; the play of position has been a topic for prior generations of social
science (e.g., see Becker, 1967; Bohannan, 1964; Gouldner, 1968;
Powdermaker, 1966; also see Mannheims [1936] sociology of knowledge).
Rather, positional reflexivity locates these shifting relationships very near the
center of the representational exercise, in the moves and methods by which
representations are produced and consumed. In this way, positional reflex-
ivityand the crisis to which it respondsvery soon finds its way into the
problematics of textual representation.
Textual Reflexivity
In American social science, the reflexivities of the text first came to atten-
tion in anthropology. Clifford and Marcus (1986), Crapanzano (1986),
Rabinow (1977), Rosaldo (1987), Stocking, (1983), and Tyler (1987) produced
some of the early, formative investigations. The textually reflexive move
arrives on the deconstruction and seeming collapse of the respectability of
representational language games, although still and again, insofar as doubt
requires a first certainty, arguments for textual reflexivity routinely deploy
and, in this sense preserve, the certainties they deconstruct.
Practically speaking, of course, all of our published topics are available as
the cogencies of a text. However, I want to sidestep, as best I can, an inquiry
into the textual habits of this article to use textual reflexivity to refer to those
studies and discourses that directly address the work of writing representa-
tions. The literature is substantial, and a close review of it is well beyond my
purposes. Of its different voices, I have in mind Ashmore (1989), Clifford
(1988), Clifford and Marcus (1986), Denzin (1997); Derrida (1978),
Hammersley andAtkinson (1983), Lather andSmithies (1997), Nelson, Megill,
and McCloskey (1987), Richardson (1988, 1994), Tyler (1987), Van Maanen
(1988), Wolcott (1990), and Woolgar (1988). Although not all positionally
reflexive analyses are textually reflexive (e.g., confessional texts tend to be
realist), virtually all textually reflexive analyses are positional insofar as
authors are unavoidably implicated in the representational exercise. How
they are implicated is a central, identifying theme for the textually reflexive
discourse.
It has been a critical and productive theme in the literature, remarking on
the disembodied voice of the modern analytic text and wondering how the
analyst manages to portray the cultural realities of other peoples without
placing [his] own . . . at risk (Clifford, 1988, p. 41). Beyond wondering, a col-
lection of revealing analyses have emerged, taking up the literary arts and
narrative practices of venerable social science texts to see how indeed their
simulacra of objective narrative have been achieved (see Bazerman, 1987;
Campbell, 1987; Clifford, 1983; Stocking, 1983). Clough (1998) observes of the
playof the realist narrative, The narrative logic works byerasingthe ethnog-
raphers presence fromthe picture of those studiedwhile making the ethnog-
raphers absence felt (p. 5). To these erasures and felt absences, the reflexive
critique is a remedy via the analysis and disclosure of unnoticed authorial
and textual workings.
Like positional reflexivity, much of the discourse is again grounded in a
skepticism, now about the naive or realist text, whose first move is to frame
realist representation as a correspondence exercise and whose second is to
demonstrate how any actual text, and especially professional analytic texts,
will fail to achieve it. The reflexive critique of naive, scientific, and other
nonreflexive texts thus begins by positing a more and less formal representa-
tional exercise as the normative modern program of writing representations.
Although nuanced and built to a larger analysis of the reflexive discourses,
Woolgars (1988) analysis goes at it in just such terms, and we can see in his
account howthe premise of a correspondence betweenthe text andthe affairs
it speaks of anchors the possibility of the reflexive critique.
By Woolgars (1988) analysis, the several voices of reflexivity follow from
differently critical readings of the perceived relationship between our sys-
temof representationandthe properties of representedobjects (p. 20). Using
the photographas his exemplar, he recovers the different readings as different
inflections on this first relationship. Depending on the reading, the adequacy
of representation can be said to depend on
1. the distinction (or distance) between representation (image) and research object
(reality), and
2. the similarity of these separate entities. (p. 20)
Woolgar uses the schema to locate and analyze a range of reflexive move-
ments, fromradical constitutive reflexivity to benign introspection (p. 21).
5
But more to our purposes, what canbe seenacross themis that the continuum
of reflexive critique is leveraged on the shoulders of a first-correspondence
realism. Arealist binary of the separate entities of representations, objects,
and their relationships is first on the scene and affords the reflexive criti-
cism. More telling for the critique, however, and perhaps for criticism per se,
not only does realism premise the reflexive critique but a realist exercise
seems inescapable for doingit. As Ashmore (1989) observes, Inquiryrequires,
to be inquiry . . . a realist practice of realist writing, even if such a practice is
presented as a mere heuristic (p. 110). Woolgar (1988) sharpens the point.
Taking up Stockings (1983) careful analysis of Malinowskis (1989) objec-
tive narratives, and Cliffords (1983) treatment of the specific inventions of
ethnographic authority, Woolgar (1988) proceeds to show how the reflexive
critique owes to the self-same exercise it would disrupt:
Both Stocking and Clifford ironicize the ethnographers claim to correspon-
dence between representation (ethnographic record, report) and object (the
native, his views andbeliefs etcetera). Yet they accomplish this irony by advanc-
ing a correspondence between their own representation (comment, meta-analy-
sis) and object (the ethnographers claims). In relativizing the ethnographers
practice but not their own . . . the central critical moment of this project depends
crucially upon the critics own claimto authority. . . . Scepticismof the ethnogra-
phers claim depends upon our accepting the critics claim. (pp. 26-27)
6
Thus, however much the reflexive critique would stand against the
authority of the realist text, its own project unavoidably relies on it. But this
may only be a problem for criticism and not for the larger textually reflexive
project, which still may have its recommendations, as it does for both
Woolgar (1988) and Ashmore (1989). Criticismalone is not the project; reflex-
ive analyses of the fieldthe productionof the reflexive analytic textis, and
this calls for a reflexive textual practice. Such a practice would be reflexive in
its course, (re)producing the representational exercise differently, reflexively.
In short, we need continually to interrogate and find strange the process of
representation as we engage in it [italics added]. This kind of reflexivity is the
ethnographer of the text (Woolgar, 1988, p. 29). Woolgars ethnographer of
the textthe reflexive monitoring of the text in its productionthus flags a
turn from criticism to the textually reflexive exercise itself. Latour (1988)
speaks of it very directly: I use reflexive to denote any text that takes
into account its own production andwhich, by doing so, claims to undo the
deleterious effects upon its readers of being believed too little or too much
(p. 166).
7
Latour offers an even-handed assessment of the representational
problematic. More commonly, the hazards of the textthe thing that the
reflexive exercise intends tounmaskandbringintovieware those of believ-
ing too much. Beyond the reflexive critique, then, a central theme of the
reflexive text is thus one of writing the disruption of realist assurances about
representation and textual coherence into the text and, often enough, the
disruption of the text itself by various devices and experiments in textual
display.
8
AN EXEMPLAR
Experiments in authorial voice, and especially experiments in textual
array, articulate the opposition to realist representation most clearly, and
Lather andSmithies (1997) offer a carefully craftedexemplar. Their interview
study of a support-group community of women living with HIV/AIDS
wrights a graphic organization of the page across the womens voices, their
own, and still other intertextual discourses and registers. They do so to resist,
if not defeat, the normal complicities and expectations of a text that is avail-
able for realist readings, and it yields a distinctive textual array. Graphically,
the bookis organizedalonga hemispheric divide: Inthe northernspace of the
page and across the binding, we hear the words of the women, collected in
group settings and on those special occasions of birthdays and mournings
that are part of the life of the support groups. Edited for purposes of theme
development [and] dramatic flow (p. xvii), the text of the womens voices is
presented plainly and in their own voices. The authors purposes were, in
part, toproduce a K-Mart book, a bookthat is widelyaccessible toHIV-pos-
itive womenlike themselves, their families, andthose withwhomtheywork
(Lather, 1996, p. 530).
9
In the southern space of the page, we hear the authors voices remarking
on and considering the project itself; taking the measure of their own posi-
tions in the world, their relationships to the women and to each other, their
divisions of labor and not always congruent interests; and otherwise report-
ing on the work of relationship and reporting. Crafted to do the work of a
reflexive text, I want to consider further the spatial and discursive organiza-
tion of their pages as reflexive, articulating, and disrupting intertextual
arrays.
The North
The divide between the north and the south is striking, both graphically
and narratively. The north, the womens edited voices, is organized within a
thoroughly realist caption. Not only is what these women are saying engag-
ing, revealing, compelling, andsometimes arresting, but their interviewfrag-
ments are (re)presented as transparent documents of lives lived. These are
native, first-person accounts, realist fragments of a language game wherein
what is saidis a faithful narrative of what is livedandknown. By implication,
these accounts are not, for example, local productions fitted to the occasions
of the interviews and group meetings that produced them, but are rather
more like vivid frames lifted from larger fields of lived experience, whose
faithfulness and correspondence to those larger fields premise their textual
powers rather than problematize them.
10
Through the edited narratives, we hear these women living with
HIV/AIDS, and a realist representational exercise would seem to be as evi-
dent as the lives theyreport. There is a directness andclarityto their accounts,
and we can say that natives are permitted to speak that way. Their voices are
unmarked by reflexive annotations, and the ethnographic power of the
edited interviewstheir believability, whether too little or too muchis in
this sense reflexively unmediated. The women themselves are speaking out-
side of a reflexive register, at least as far as the cogency of their text is con-
cerned (they are themselves a collection of very thoughtful, and in that sense
reflective, women).
Acertain directness and realism thus seems to be the textual mark of the
native. Not that there is no eloquence, poignancy, or higher thinking in
these voices; these things are abundant. Rather, the women are not account-
able tothe professional-reflexive exercise. Theyare not troubledbytheir ways
of speaking and often display a confidence and, almost always, an eloquence
intheir powers to account for their lives. Their voices become counterpoint to
larger, professional-reflexive purposes, andinthis way, theyco-constitute the
hemispheric divide wherein the native or nonreflexive voice is both subject
and then object for a next (reflexive) reading. Their voices are part of an ana-
lytic sequential organization wherein they are not the last words of the text
but rather its first.
11
The South
Bordering the north is the southern textual space. The divide inverts our
familiar geopolitical sense for the possessions and dispossessions of north
and south. Here are the voices of the authors, and as reflexivity requires its
objects and attachmentsthe intelligibilities to be disruptedthe south
works as a meta-discourse, operating ona first naive field(including the lives
of the women and their support groups and the practical life of the study
itself) and laying out still othersfor example, boxed inserts from the popu-
lar press, fragments of medical and governmental reports on the experience
of HIV/AIDS in society, and poems and letters from the women. As the
authors intend it,
We wanteda bookthat useda flood of too muchtoo fast, data flows of trauma,
shock and everydayness juxtaposed with asides of angel breathers to break
down the usual codes we bring to reading. Hence the book works by not
working the way we expect a book to work. (Lather & Smithies, 1997, p. 48)
By and large, the womens voices are not themselves a target for reflexive
deconstruction. Rather, their voices are positionedwithinthe analytic project,
joined and punctuated by a leitmotif of angel intertexts that bring moments
of sociology, history, poetry, popular culture, anddeterminedpolicy talk, into
a network of levels andorders (Lather, 1996, p. 538).
12
The south is thus a pro-
fessional territory (Lather is a university professor; Smithies is a feminist psy-
chologist in private practice), whose professionalism includes reflexively
positional analyses of the project andtheir places withinit. The reflexive com-
mentaries and textual juxtapositionsthe disciplined exercise of individual
author-analysts inopendialogue withtheir ownrepresentational productions
are indeed the ethnographers of the text, and the authors purposes over the
course of the project are perhaps the most regular objects of their reflexive
skepticism. They and the disciplined troubling of intertextual compositions
of history, poetry, images, the womens voices, andtheir ownare the identi-
fying registers of the south.
The hemispheric distinction is thus professionally organized. It falls to the
professional work of qualitative research to produce reflexively analytic
texts. As a self-conscious engine of troubling knowledge production, and per
its studied professionalism, the reflexive text unavoidably promises a more
critical and revealing textual field of view, even when what is revealed are
constantly shifting and contested relations of difference. A reflexive text is
then crafted, in our exemplar, to disrupt the comforts of familiar knowledge
representations and to warrant and incite new ones. It is a text that will
not be exhausted by the meaning given to it by any one person, be they readers
or the authors or the women themselves. Using a kind of speaking out ahead of
itself, the book addresses the beyond of what we think we believe through the
multiplication of layers of meaning that trouble what we come to such a book to
understand and what it means to know more than we are able to know and to
write and read toward what we dont understand. (Lather & Smithies, 1997,
p. xvii)
The task is to confound what we know and thereby wright what we do not
understand, and again, the epistemic ambition is substantial. The reflexive
text is thus an openly epistemic exercise; and in the hands of social science, a
methodological one too, wherein the ethnographic or quasi-ethnographic
field is located equally, if not centrally, in the field of the text itself (Lather,
1996, p. 530).
13
At the same time and central to what is instructive about the
study, it is quite clear that the women live elsewhere, outside of the text, and
speak very differently. They have doubts but not reflexively representational
ones. In ways mindful of the voices in Agees (1940/1969) proto-reflexive text,
their doubts are compelling in an entirely different way.
14
There are then multiple moves for the reflexive text, beginning in a skep-
ticism toward the logic of realist representation. The realist binary of sign
and referent is established as the modernist sensibility, and it is to it that
reflexive skepticism owes its object.
15
Correspondence realism is the analytic
competitionthe ground on which the reflexive text cuts its figureand
problematizing the representational binary of things and our accounts of
them organizes the reflexive project. But here, and no less than positional
reflexivity, we can see a deep tie and debt to the modernismthat the reflexive
text would eclipse. The textual other for reflexive skepticism reenacts our
most familiar versions of a formal representational language game. That mod-
ernismdeploys a realist representational engine andthat nonreflexive texts are
written to work that way are virtual taken for granted in the literature.
16
Yet on reflection, the array of textual work in the world is vast, from laun-
dry lists to case law. Fromwithinanotherwise heteroglossic landscape of dis-
course and difference, we could expect to find multiple organizations for
understanding the achievements of representation in the world. As Watson
(1997) recommends, we could take interest in the work of texts for all their
diversity, and once we do, very different organizations may come into
vieworganizations whose foundations are neither inrepresentational bina-
ries nor singular egos, but in communities of practice that do indeed afford
the evident sense of menus, musical notations, and letters from home.
17
We
canfindtexts, suchas e-mails andbulletinboards, for whichthere is noappar-
ent binary at all. They are rather things themselves, cogent in and as the local
ecologies of practical action that organize their use. Rather than objects for
deconstruction, they are objects embedded in action, purposes, order, and
meaning. As Lynch (1996) observes,
The problemof howdescriptions correspond to their objects . . . remains a prob-
lemonly insofar as we demandthat descriptions shoulddo what descriptions
are not ordinarilydesignedtodo: give complete, self-contained, representations
of reality. . . . It begs the questionof why a particular model of linguistic repre-
sentation (signs standing for objects or meanings) should provide the initial
framework for [the reflexive project]. (p. 33)
Said differently, that the professional analytic text can be shown to fail as a
direct representational mediumauthorizes the reflexive inquiry to fill the now
missing grounds. But the scare quotes are to remind us that what might be
thought is missing may not have been there to begin with. Realism, or the
natural attitude of everyday life, may not be leveraged on representational
language games at all. There are endless textsinstructions, directions, or
writings on the blackboardwhose sense and organization are inseparable
from the occasions of their production and use. Rather than objects for con-
templation, these texts are first and routinely objects embedded in the practi-
cal achievements of common understanding. Once we find no surprise in the
missing grounds of realist representation, we couldbe ledto inquire into how
indeed texts have been working all along, and not by turning to theoretical
skepticism but to the public workings of evident worlds that are reflexive to
our practices for pulling evident worlds and textual expressions into view.
Onconsiderationof the diversity of textual work inthe world, we couldwon-
der how the professional analytic text has gained its appointment as a repre-
sentational form sui generis. Ironically, perhaps, although the reflexive cri-
tique has alerted us to the question, the reflexive text tends to reinscribe the
appointment.
At least by the terms of my argument, positional and textual reflexivities
thus organize their analyses of nonreflexive worlds in parallel fashion. The
enterprise begins in a skepticism toward innocent speaking (Lather, 1996;
Van Maanen, 1995) and moves to a professional analytic program to disrupt
it. As has long been the mark of modern social science, these reflexivities pro-
pose a winning competition with the natural attitude of commonsense worlds,
and a penetrating gaze that promises to see, as Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992)
would have it, the unthought categories of thought which delimit the think-
able and predetermine the thought (p. 40). The ambition is nothing less than
the eclipse of worlds of everyday life, seeing through them to grasp the
unseen organizations that give them sensea task distinctively suited to a
professionally authorized epistemic station.
18
Yet notwithstanding programmatic claims to explode and/or dissolve the
formal structures and binaries of objective narratives and representations
andthus organize a poststructural analyticthese reflexivities tendto (re)pro-
duce their ownbinaries, withdifferent fields. Reflexive agencyhas needfor
the nonreflexive, just as the reflexive text is leveraged on a first stipulation to
representational correspondence themes.
19
And for each, and perhaps most
telling of Enlightenment continuities, there is the promise of methodological
advantage andevennewlymintedknowledge tobe gainedbythe disciplined
move to the reflexive space. The move promises new ground to stand on,
shifting and unstable but, for that very reason, possessing a field of viewthat
could delineate the order and structure of first worlds and the conditions of
their possibility. My argument is not that these wouldnot be remarkable van-
tage points if we could have them. Rather, they and transformative leverage
tend to be the promise of Archemedian projects, and my worry is that there
may be no roomin the world (Garfinkel &Sacks, 1970) for such spaces and
places to stand.
20
To lay claimto themwould seemto reproduce an epistemic
programnoless promisoryor privilegedthanthe discourses of order andrea-
son that the reflexive move intends to disband.
THE CONSTITUTIVE REFLEXIVITIES
OF EVERYDAY LIFE
To these reflexive programs, ethnomethodology (EM) proposes an
entirelydifferent understandingof reflexivityas botha constitutive organiza-
tion of everyday life and a practical organization that is available for study
and description. Rather than a competitor to everyday life, reflexivity in an
EM mode recommends the study of social members ordinary practices for
assembling intersubjectively accountable worlds that are reflexive to our
ways of making them accountable (cf. Button, 1989; Czyzewski, 1994;
Garfinkel, 1967; Garfinkel &Sacks, 1970; Livingston, 1987; andLynch, 1993).
21
Perhaps best known for its interests in situated action and the essential
indexicality of social order, structure, and meaning, EM has self-consciously
pursued an asymmetric alternative to formal theory and analysis
(Garfinkel & Wieder, 1992). Rather than theorizing its topics, EM has pro-
duced a wide-ranging corpus of studies of diverse settings and practices, for
example, studies of work, studies of science, and studies of classroomeduca-
tion. (For examples of the later, see Amerine & Bilmes, 1988; Baker, 1997;
Cicourel et al., 1974; Heap, 1982, 1990; Hestor, 1985, Hestor & Hughes, 2000;
Heyman, 1986; Lynch &Macbeth, 1998; Macbeth, 1991, 1994, 2000; Maynard&
Marlaire, 1992; McHoul, 1978; Mehan, 1978; Payne, 1976; Payne & Hustler,
1980; Sharrock & Anderson, 1986; and Watson, 1992).
These classroom studies share an interest in describing the situated pro-
ductions of order, discourse, and actionand thus the teaching and learning
that goes on thereas local ensembles of competent practice and practical
orientations by students and teachers alike. EM may be distinctive for its
insistence on a praxiological understanding of meaning and structure in situ,
and in taking up the analysis of intelligible actions performed on singular
occasions (Lynch &Bogen, 1996, p. 265), it makes a decisive turn away from
representational theories of language and other sign systems. It shares with
the later works of Wittgenstein (1958) an interest in understanding natural
languageuseas multiple, constitutivegrammars of social order andmeaning.
Central amongits formulations has beenthe notionof constitutive reflex-
ivity, perhaps most familiar as the essential reflexivity of accounts or how it
is that our accounts of the world reflexively constitute the very affairs they
speak of (Garfinkel, 1967, passim). Rather than a reflexivity of professional
self-reflection, textual deconstruction, or methodological procedure, reflex-
ivity in an ethnomethodological mode stands on behalf of indefinitely dis-
tributed practices of world making.
22
Rather than belonging to the exercise
of professional analysis, ethnomethodological reflexivity points to the orga-
nization of ordinary sense and meaninghow order, fact, and meaning in
everyday life are produced as practical objectivities, reflexively made of the
social technologies for producing and detecting them (as in the production
and detection of the at-risk, or gifted, student). As Lynch (1996) understands
it, The term reflexivity alluded to the procedures through which any pub-
licly observable, intersubjectively reportable, account of action becomes an
action in its own right (p. 11). This reading of reflexivity decisively rules out
of relevance correspondence language games of any kind by demonstrating
how formulations of what happened (e.g., in reporting a playground dis-
pute) are, at once, a constitutive feature of what happened. What happened is
available as its accountabilityour ways of findingit, pointingtoit, speaking
of it, making it sensible, typical, unreasonable, and so forth. This order of
reflexivity is thus a topic in the organization of cogent worlds rather than a
site within a professional methodological discourse. It is among the
sense-making practices of natives and, without remedy, analysts too.
For EM, reflexivity thus has no distinctive professional or methodological
attachments. It owns no special province and is rather part of the unrelieved
organization of the routine grounds of everyday life (Garfinkel, 1967). It
works as a place holder for descriptions of the constitutive reflexivities of
everyday life in their local diversities and circumstantial detail, as practical
grammars of the social-constructive exercise. Although a same term is
deployed, EMs reflexivity thus points to an entirely different poststructural
analytic program, and my purpose has been, in part, to read this other
reflexivity into the discourse on qualitative research and educational studies.
I have attemptedto do so by arguments andcitations. But exhibits canbe use-
ful too, and I want to conclude the discussion of EMs reflexivity with a brief
analysis of a videotaped and transcribed sequence of a fifth-grade class
returning from recess.
AN EXHIBIT
23
The reflexive construction we are interested in herethe practical
achievement of these students and this teacher on this occasionis nothing
more (or less) than the normal order of the room. Built of their sustained
co-orientations to the practical contingencies of hearing andproducing it, the
order of the room is a local, interactional order, and in this sequence, we can
see something of the work of its reflexive production. And should we think
the routine order of classrooms is too modest an achievement to sustain our
interests, we couldbe remindedthat whatever our hopes for classroomteach-
ingandlearningcouldbe, producingandreproducingthe interactional order
of the room is overwhelmingly the first practical task for every lesson,
throughout its course.
The videotape shows the students entering the room following a recess,
noisily taking their seats, arranging books, and talking to one another openly
andwithanimation. The teacher writes the page number of their lessononthe
board, and in the course of her opening remarks and questions, we begin to
see a noisy assemblage of kids becoming the class, a deeply familiar
interactional organizationfor teachers andstudents alike. The workof classes
beginning can be found in endless iterations, and the normal order of the
roomthat they achieve routinely shows a two-party organizationof speaking
and listening. The two parties are (a) the teacher and (b) the students as a
cohort, and we can say that the identifying order of classrooms is reflexive to
these occasion-relevant identities. Each organizational achievementorder,
identity, and their respective identitiesis co-constitutive of the other. (See
Payne & Hustler, 1980, for an instructive discussion of classroom cohorting.)
This kind of reflexive work is deeply public and witnessable in the measure
that discourse and interaction are built to be public and witnessable. As the
parties jointly produce and implicate one another in their understandings of
the occasion, and in the developing detail and interactional horizons of their
ongoing engagements, they reflexively assemble the order and structure of
the lesson and the room.
24
The analysis works from a transcript, and transcripts of every kind are, of
course, intentional texts. This one is developed from prior work in the
sequential analysis of natural conversation (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson,
1974). Without doubt, everytranscript owns its conventions andcoherence as
an analyzable text, formatted to shape the possibilities of its writing, reading,
and analysis. Fundamentally, these things are so without thought of remedy,
and by some accounts, this immutably intentional condition assures the rela-
tivismof all attempts toproduce anduse them. (See Mishler, 1991; Ochs, 1979;
and West, 1996, for discussions of discourse transcripts.) In some sense, this
must be true.
25
But giventhat assurance, this transcript alsoattempts torecord
the temporal, interactional production of the scene, for howthings were said
anddone in concert over its course. Order, meaning, andstructure are among
the achievements of situatedaction, andwhat we can see in the record, by my
account, is the practical production of a class that is coming to order, this time
around. The argument is that the order of the roomis reflexive totheir compe-
tencies to hear andproduce the public, contingent course of a familiar organi-
zation. And the analysis intends to show these hearings and productions as
their competent analyses of the developingdiscursive andinteractional orga-
nization of the room.
26
To seed the analysis, as you read the transcript, note
the shape of the chatter. (See the appendix for transcript conventions.)
LR:5th grade math
((Students are arriving from recess; T. is at the board, speaking over their
several conversations.))
1. T: Kay:::. Page two hundred, an twenty two.
2. (8.0) ((chatter))
3. Kay, up till now::,
4. (1.0) ((chatter))
5. youve been tawking about jus- reg:ular fractions that equal
6. each other, right?
7. (1.0) ((chatter))
8. Can enyone give me two frac:tions that equal each other?
9. S: Um, two- two
10. T: // Two fractions that mean same thing.
11. (2.5) ((chatter))
12. T: Any two fractions that mean the same thing.
13. S: One an two fifths.
14. (2.5) ((chatter))
15. S: Equal fractions?
16. (1.5) ((chatter))
17. T: Any two fractions. =
18. S: = Two, two, two.
19 (5.0) ((chatter, singing))
20. T: Lets start with one hhalf, maybe.
21. (2.0) ((writes on board))
22. Who remembers a fraction that- equals one half?
23. (2.0) ((chatter drops))
24. S: * One fifth. * (1.0)
25. T: Who remembers a fraction that equals one half. (0.5)
26. Rmember we can make it do any:thing.
27. (3.0) ((slowly rising chatter))
28. What do we do to make an equal fraction, Mario...
The transcript begins withthe teachers first remarks, saidover the several
conversations that are ongoing in the room. She is speaking to everyone,
while some substantial number of them are engaged in talking with one
another. This is the chatter that continues unabatedthroughmuchof the tran-
script (andincludes some singing in line 19). But in andaroundline 23, by my
account, there begins anorganizational transformation. Fromthe several con-
versations in the room, a single conversation begins to emerge, an
interactional organization that shows the normal classroom organization of
two parties to a single discourse: the teacher and the class.
27
We can hear this emergence in the falling chatter of students voices that
follows the teachers question of line 22, Who remembers a fraction that
equals one half? My claim is that across this turn and the next, the students
and teacher are hearing and producing the first expression of the normal
order of the room, and that this coming to order is entirely a matter of their
competent interactional practices, both for hearing the organization of the
room and reflexively producing the order they hear.
To analyze the transformation requires a posit: As the students are con-
ducting their several conversations, they are also listening to the teachers
remarks to everyone.
28
They are listening to what is said both within and
across the conversations in the room, and while we have little access to the
students talk among themselves, the teachers remarks show a series of
reformulations of her first prefacing question of line 8, Can enyone give me
two fractions that equal each other? Prefaces can do several things.
29
Here,
they project next topics and activities and organize ways of finding next
speakers who will carry them forward. The teachers prefaces are each
projectable for an answer (I can) and then for a next question (What are
they?) addressed to that same answerer. (In classrooms, hand raising is rou-
tinely the reply to prefacing questions.) But the prefaced question, the ques-
tion, will not be at hand until an answer to the prefacing question has been
found, and throughout her several remarks, the teacher is constructing the
interactional resources with which to find a student who might answer her
preface in a way that permits the real question and its answer. If achieved,
she andthey wouldthenbe two questions into the first topic of the lessonand
well on their way to constructing the familiar order of the room.
These first questions by the teacher (lines 8, 10, 12, and 17) do not them-
selves nominate next speakers. Rather, they rely on and cannot work without
the engagement of those addressed. Practically, the engagement includes
how it is that as the students pursue their conversations with one another,
they are performing sustained analyses of their own conversations for how
places for speaking and listening are organized, while hearing as well how
the teachers remarks are shaping still other places. Their conversations are
mutually contexting, andthat the students are listening this way canbe heard
in and around line 23.
Inline 23, the students chatter appreciablydrops. Chatter is onlya gloss
of their several conversations, but evidently, hearably, and without consult-
ing one another, their other conversations are suspended, at least for now.
30
The most local context or environment for these fading conversations is the
teachers questionof line 22, where we finda somewhat different formulation
of her first question (Can enyone give me two fractions . . . ?), hereafter
referred to as a who knows? question. After providing one item of the pair
she is after (Lets start with one half, maybe.), we find the following:
22. Who remembers a fraction that- equals one half?
23. (2.0) ((chatter drops))
Rather thana whoknows? question, line 22 is a whoremembers? ques-
tion. And whereas who knows? is a question whose answer anyone might
know or might not, who remembers? is a question that carries a history on
its back. Who remembers? is not only a question of knowledge, it is a ques-
tion that mobilizes a circle of membersthose who were there last time and
could indeed be expected to remember a fraction that equals one half or at
least be asked if they could (see Payne & Hustler, 1980, on the uses of last
times). Reflexively, for those whocanhear it, whoremembers? organizes a
cohort of candidate respondents, made of their occasion-relevant identities as
members of the class. This is the interactional work andachievement we hear
across lines 22 and 23.
Organizationally, the pause of line 23 shows anessential ambiguity: Given
that conversational pauses are collaborative constructions that can be ended
by anyone at any time, it cannot be known if the students are thinking about
the teachers question and thus do not speak, or if they are oriented to the
interactional context that the question reflexively producesthe context of a
cohort of candidates for the actual questionandthus do not speak. For either
hearing, however, the question of line 22 organizes a delicate interactional
environment for whatever talking might be done next. In this light, the ques-
tion who remembers? can be seen as an analytic move by the teacher,
shaped by her ongoing analysis of the talk in the room.
By analytic move, I mean that teachers analyze and interpret what stu-
dents make of their questions and reflexively reveal their analyses in next
questions and remarks. Because each of her questions (lines 8, 10, 12, and 17)
is produced in full view of what her last remark received, each next question
displays her assessment of the play of the last one, for example, that it yielded
misunderstanding, or confusion, or disinterest.
31
In this sense, her questions
are themselves reflexively tiedto the production of the discourse in the room,
and relative to her prior remarks the question of line 22 is produced quite
differently.
Who remembers? trades on the interactional orientations evidenced by
the several student conversations that are competing withher own, that is, an
orientation to not becoming engaged in the teachers interactional gambit of
whoknows? questions. Whoremembers? does sobyshapinga context of
choice for those who are competent to hear its terms; namely, for those of you
who were here last time, you may continue your other engagements at risk of
being nominated as one who might remember, or you may suspend your
competing conversations and find anonymity fromwithin the cohort organi-
zation of the class.
Reflexively, the choice urges the children to become ordinary students,
unremarkably there and without nomination-relevant features, and even to
hear the choice is to become implicated in the production of the normal order
of the room.
32
In their choices (each for himself or herself), and as their analy-
ses of these sequential organizations and interactional horizons, the students
produce themselves as the cohort. Reflexively and in concert, then, by the
organization of aversions to speaking next, and especially by the discursive
production and recognition of a next place to avert, the order of the roomand
the identityof the cohort is assembledbystudents andteacher alike. This is an
order of reflexive workthat attaches toeverydayworlds andtothe competent
practitioners who produce and sustain them. We could usefully say that they
are the first reflexive analysts on the scene.
33
CONCLUSION
My purpose in this article has not been to contest the good sense of critical
self-reflection of any kind or to question the discipline of the exercise. If any-
thing, part of the argument is that it is a venerable exercise inWesternintellec-
tual history and culture. Nor, as it turns out, can my purpose have been to
compare competing readings of a same social science concept, as though
reflexivity were a single gestalt object waiting for its one best interpretation.
Reflexivity is not that, nor is it clear that we have the wherewithal for a useful
comparison. Comparisons usually premise some beginning points of align-
ment or consensus, and these are difficult to find across the professional and
ethnomethodological reflexivities. We tend to find something more like an
incommensurability of use instead.
Practically, I wanted to produce in a more or less programmatic fashion
some critical andpossibly useful readings of the contemporary discourses on
reflexivity, and then use those readings to (re)introduce an entirely different
program. In this other program, we find an order of reflexivity that has no
special attachments to social science or its methodologies, or special claims or
warrants of knowledge production. Reflexivity in an EM mode not only dis-
solves binaries and representational language games, but reflexivity itself
dissolves into the practical achievements of diverse settings, occasions, and
practices. A constitutive reflexivity thus has no use for nonreflexive worlds
and makes no sense as a demarcation exercise. As Lynch (2000) observes, To
imagine an unreflexive action would be like imagining a sound without
amplitude (p. 45). This order of reflexivity owns no special province.
Instead, it is an inexhaustible practice, and thus topic, in the organization of
everyday life and very near the heart of the socially constructive exercise.
The criticisms of positional andtextual reflexivities may, of course, be only
a matter of disciplinary readings and disputes and, in that sense, provincial
too. But they may also have productive implications for how we think about
the naturalistic study of ordinary worlds. Positional reflexivity recommends
a methodological policy, and textual reflexivity has deep attachments to for-
mal theory. Yet theory and method are positive-science discourses, sine qua
non. As the analysts agency becomes a reflecting device onto its own forma-
tive, structural, and foundational relationships, positionalism confronts the
paradox of founding antifoundationalism on the recovery of autonomous
structures, for example, of power, knowledge, and others. The self-reflecting
analyst in possession of a disciplined skepticism toward the possibilities of
knowledge and structure is a deeply familiar proposal for the site and engine
of modern knowledge production.
Textual reflexivity leverages its antifoundationalism on the assign-
mentand perhaps even fetishized assignmentof ontic primacy to profes-
sional analytic texts and their representations. In doing so, the binary of
nature-representation is inverted but preserved: Rather than nature causing
representation, nature becomes representations consequence (see Lynch,
2000). Representation is, of course, a compelling topic and a familiar topic for
EM studies of the practical accountabilities of evident worlds. But for ethno-
methodology, representationlike reflexivityis a members practice first.
(For examples of EM studies of representation, see Goodwin, 1994; Jalbert,
1999; and Lynch, 1985.)
Said differently, facts of every kind have their contingencies, including
those recoveredby critical self-reflection. If epistemic advantage is difficult to
come by in antifoundational worlds, it is difficult to find a special warrant or
greater purchase for the reflexive text as over and against the other ones. To
the contemporary discourses on reflexivity, and as other than a discourse on
methods or theory, ethnomethodology proposes a nonskepticist inquiry into
the praxiologies of reflexively constitutedworlds. Although a modest project
to be sure, as is the promise of ethnography, EMs reflexivity aims to describe
the socially constructive exercise as practical and analyzable work in the
world. In these several ways, the reflexivities reviewed in this article own
entirely different projects and interests. As a very knowing reviewer of the
manuscript observed, we could puzzle over how this same term would be
taken up by such profoundly different programs and understandings. There
is, of course, roomenough for these and probably several more discourses on
reflexivity in the conversation. And we may alternatively turn to one and
then the other, depending on whose reflexivity, whose practices, and whose
worlds we hope to bring into view.
APPENDIX
Notations
Transcript notations are derived from the conventions developed by Sacks,
Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974). The aimis to render the sequential production of inter-
action as it sounds.
Punctuations (e.g., questionmarks, periods, andcommas) note intonations rather than
grammar.
Pauses are noted in seconds, for example, (2.5). Micro pauses are noted by (.).
___ [underlining] shows emphasis or loudness.
* * [asterisk] notes soft speaking.
[dash] indicates the point where a word is cut off in its production.
: [colon] indicates a sound stretch on a word or word portion, for example, no::
// [double slash] notes the point at whichone speaker begins, overlappinganother.
= [equal sign] notes speaker transition without gap or overlap.
(( )) [double parens] mark off scenic descriptions and accounts.
NOTES
1. See Ashmore (1989) for an encyclopedia and critical discussion of reflexivitys
programs andformulations. See also Woolgar (1988); see Lynch (2000) for a very differ-
ent discussionandreview. There andelsewhere (Lynch, 1993), Lynchs arguments have
been resources to this article in ways that require special acknowledgment.
2. The dissatisfactionwithrealist programs is vividlydisplayedinthose secondary
studies that have revisited the sites and personnel of benchmark ethnographic texts to
find a world differently remembered by the natives and/or different than what was
reported in the text of record (e.g., see Boelen, 1992; Denzin, 1990, 1997; Freeman, 1983;
Malinowski, 1989; Whyte, 1992). In each of these critical studies, nonreflexive research
practices were found as unseen players in the analytic and textual exercise.
3. Reason (1996) offers one of the more critical-theoretic reflexive programs.
Speaking of human inquiry as different from social scientism, he summarizes,
Such inquiry faces the people and is of use, arising out of the needs and
experiences of the people it serves, aiming to interrupt patterns of power that
define issues in the service of the powerful. . . . In addition to immediate pur-
poses, humaninquiryalsoaims . . . tostandcontinuallyagainst the development
of a new orthodoxy in inquiry.
As can be seen in the last sentence, maxims pose an unavoidable indelicacy: They tend
to reproduce the structure of opposition they would eclipse. Antiorthodoxy implicates
a will to orthodoxy. (The phrase borrows from Lynchs [1993] will to theory. See
also Wittgenstien, 1960, on the craving for generality.)
4. The image of regress in the contemporary literature may then be less a matter of
hermeneutic spiral than the indefinite play of a rhizome, with no well-established
point towards which the series seems to regress (Lynch, 1996, p. 20). Ashmore (1989)
sees a more practical closure tothe problemof regress: We canunderstandthe relevant
practical limitations which would prevent anything like an infinite metahistorical
regress ever occurring. . . . The theoretically infinite has a practical end (p. 104).
Goffman(1974), althoughno less practical, locates the play of reflexivity somewhat dif-
ferently: Methodological self consciousness that is full, immediate and persistent sets
aside all study and analysis except that of the reflexive problemitself, thereby displac-
ing fields of inquiry instead of contributing to them (p. 12).
5. Woolgars (1988) analysis organizes the several reflexive discourses by showing
howeachorients tothe relationshipbetweenobjects andtheir representations (the rela-
tions of distinction and similarity). Benign introspection, for example, as we find in
more conventional scientistic reflection, shows an affirmation of distinc-
tion. . . betweenrepresentationandstudiedobject, whereas radical constitutive reflex-
ivity, which Woolgar attributes to Garfinkels (1967) ethnomethodology, is marked by
its denial of distinction and . . . strong affirmation of similarity (Woolgar, 1988, p. 22).
My account of Garfinkels (1967) reflexivity will differ fromWoolgars (1988) at least on
the question of whether a radical constitutive reflexivity needs correspondence rela-
tionships to organize its analytic program at all.
6. Elsewhere, Woolgar (1988) offers an unintended example of the unavoidable
play he points to. Note how his critique of realism is unavoidably realist:
The conventions of the realist genre encourage the unproblematic and
unhesitant singular interpretation of the text, the unreflexive perception of a
reported reality [subject/object] and the essentially uninteresting character of
the agency involved in the reports generation. (p. 28)
The facts of the critique are no less certain than the reality claims it criticizes andwould
be unrecognizable as a critique were they not. Nonetheless, Ashmore (1989) sees a
small opening onto the problemof realist writing by a concentration on textuality and
by the articulation of a practice of wrighting . . . though the problem of developing an
adequate reflexive practice is unlikelytherebytobe solved (p. 110). (See alsoAshmore,
1989, on the tu quoque move, whereby the relativist-reflexive critique is targeted on
itself, as we have done here.)
7. Latour (1988) continues, These writers are fascinated by the presence or
absence of certain words as a tool for evaluating texts. They suppose that by including
characters like the framework or the author, they can escape the terrible fate of being
just a story, just another story (p. 171).
8. For Tyler (1987), the reflexive task is one of subverting and disrupting a textual
practice intended to obscure its textual practice (p. 90). Comfortable understandings
and familiar rubrics then dissolve to more than a blurring of genres. As Ward (1996)
understands it,
Since both truth and reality appear to be the products of discourse, there is little
needto write as if discourse must originate inthem. The only viable optionopen
for theory, or what is now better written as theory, is to recognize itself as a
formof literature and practice poetics or polemics. (p. 32, cited in Lynch, 2000,
p. 41)
Inthis way, classical wisdoms are recoveredfromthe collapse of modernist certainties.
9. Lather (1996) continues, Byrefusingtoproduce a tidy text, a comfort text that
maps easilyintoour usual ways of makingsense andgivingsense, Chris andI attempt
toreachtowarda generallyaccessible public horizonwhile movingfroma realist toan
interrogative text (p. 530).
10. The effect is part of the thematic and dramatic presentation of the interviews.
Realist transparencies are not otherwise well received in the reflexive text.
To speak so as to be understoodimmediately is to speak through the production
of the transparent signifier, that which maps easily onto taken-for-granted
regimes of meaning. This runs a risk that endorses, legitimates, and reinforces
the very structure of symbolic value that must be overthrown. Hence, for Lacan,
not being understood is an ethical imperative. (Lather, 1996, p. 529)
Perhaps this is true for Lacanbut not sofor the women; theydospeaktobe understood.
11. The idea that we would read them first (or that there is a first to a reading)
would seem to be part of what the reflexive text problematizes. But it can do so only
imperfectly. Reading still owns its unspoken agreements (Wittgenstein, 1958), as does
every competent practice. At the same time, in my reading at least, the page layout did
indeeddisrupt familiar ways of reading and/or inspire others, such that at times I read
several pages of the womens voices, then returnedto its first page to readthe authors,
and then at times not. Similarly, graphics, bullets, and boxed inserts invited their own
readings, andinthis sense, the book achieves a hypertext that invites multiple ways of
reading (Lather, 1996, p. 530). (For a very different account of reading practices, for
howreadings andtheir texts are joinedat the hip, andhowliterarycriticismtrades on
laic practice, see Livingston, 1995.)
12. The angels of Troubling the Angels recur throughout the text in images, literary
references, and poetic allusions. They work as an indefinite metaphor, inflecting the
expressions of the text across the reflexive-nonreflexive register.
The angels serve as messengers between the womens stories and the social
implications of the AIDS crisis via short engagements with slices from both
high and popular culture, returning again to the womens stories. They are,
hence, bridges between worlds. . . . Away to address what the poet, Rilke, terms
the Too Big, the too great, the work of the angels in this book is to mobilize
the familiar image of angels, but then to undercut it, trouble it. (Lather &
Smithies, 1997, p. 48)
The angel intertexts or breathers are placedas chapters at the endof eachof five story
series.
13. In his review of Clifford and Marcuss (1986) Writing Culture, Spencer (1989)
credits Geertz (1973) for an early remark on the reflexivities of anthropological writing
and an early move toward understanding the text as the primary, formative field of the
ethnographic exercise (Geertz, 1973, p. 19, note 3, citedinSpencer, 1989, p. 146). Spencer
goes on to observe that Geertz
managed to single out the one activity that does not differentiate anthropology
from any other kind of intellectual workanthropologists wade into paddy
fields, get sick and read bad novels rather than confront another day of mount-
ing misapprehensions; they also take photographs, make films and tape record-
ings; a privileged few even get to teach students. The fact that they mostly do it
by themselves in strange places is another oddity that passes unremarked upon
in Writing Culture. (p. 160)
Elsewhere, he remarks, The moment of writing is a rather late stage for the interpreter
to reveal his or her interpretations to the interpreted (p. 159).
14. Agees (1940/1969) exercise seems to have little to do with the skepticism that
marks the contemporary reflexive text. If anything, his textual descriptions seemdeter-
minedtorecover scenes themselvesscenic sensibilitiesina waythat bears nosuspi-
cion of the textand certainly no embarrassmentbut instead a confidence in the
intelligibilities, discipline, andcraft of densely texturedanddensely describedappear-
ances. See Lynch (1996) on speaking without embarrassment and Latour (1988) on
how a little relativism takes one away from realism; a lot brings one back (p. 173).
15. Citing Britzman (1995, p. 236), Lather (1996) announces the skepticism directly:
I have movedto ethnography as a site of doubt (p. 539). Andmore thandoubt, there
is suspicion of the manipulations, violations, and betrayal inherent in ethnographic
representation (Lather, 1997, p. 300). By Tylers (1987) account, the betrayal is more
originary still:
Postmodern anthropology seeks to atone for the original sin of language, that
separationof speechandworldwe knowas the disjunctionof words andthings,
andtomake the atonement bymeans of a returntothe commonsense, plurivocal
world of the speaking subject. (p. 127)
The passage works as a great assurance that the workings of language in the world are
already and well enough known. If they are not, then discourses on atonement may be
taking for granted the unstudied achievements of commonsense worlds.
16. It is not that modernism and modern texts thereby actually achieve realism.
Rather, it is the maximor discourse of realist representation that is sightedfor criticism,
and then deconstruction, to show how social science texts are written to produce the
impression of realism or otherwise mock it up (cf. Clifford, 1988; Nelson, Megill, &
McCloskey., 1987; and Stocking, 1983).
17. Watson(1997) recommends that we take interest inthe textual practices of every-
day life:
Newspaper articles, road signs, shopping lists, and so on, are all, clearly, of the
everyday rather than the scholarly or professional kind of text. Their every-
day or common-sense status does not mean they are of any less significance:
quite the contrary. This is the most generic level of textual work and it is the
scholarly/professional one which is in many respects derivative. (p. 92)
How indeed everyday texts work and how they do ethnographically, meaning for
actual writers andreaders deployingtheir texts onactual occasions of use, is a rare topic
in the reflexive discourse.
18. The competition is implicit to the reflexivists and explicit for Bourdieu and
Wacquant (1992), who cite Durkheim (1895/1966) approvingly: [The sociologist]
must emancipate himself from the fallacious ideas that dominate the mind of the lay-
man; he must throw off, once and for all, the yoke of these empirical categories, which
fromlong continuedhabit have become tyrannical (Durkheim, 1985/1966, p. 32, cited
in Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 11). But rather than throwing them off, we could
take interest in how the empirical categories of everyday life work, and thereby avoid
the indelicacies of aligning culture with tyranny.
19. Because criticism is reflexively tied to its other in this way, truth and reality do
not dissolve altogether: they remain bound in relations of correspondence . . . but
instead of being placed in correspondence with knowledge they are placed in corre-
spondence with power (Lynch, 1996, p. 33). Haraway (1997) observes a related
continuity:
Reflexivity has been much recommendedas a critical practice, but my suspicion
is that reflexivity, like reflexion, only displaces the same elsewhere, setting up
the worries about copy and original and the search for the authentic and really
real. Reflexivity is a bad trope for escaping the false choice between realismand
relativism. (p. 16, cited in Clough, 1998, p. 13)
20. Following Deweys (1929/1984) transactionalism through Rorty (1991), Bredo
(1994) characterizes such moves as attempts to climb out of our minds (p. 54).
Arguing instead for analytic restraint, he offers Rortys (1991) advice that questions
which we should have to climb out of our own minds to answer should not be asked
(p. 7, in Bredo, 1994, p. 48). I take it that the point is not to prohibit such questions but to
remind us that sensible questions, and minds, implicate a worldliness that cannot be
left behind at will.
21. Although ethnomethodological studies are not a single program (see Clayman
& Maynard, 1994; Heritage, 1984; and Lynch, 1993, for reviews), they tend to show a
common interest in describing the constitutive practices and order-productive work of
familiar, competent worlds. Rather than proposing a realist or relativist program, they
tendto be nonskepticist andhave no quarrels with the natives as to whether they could
know what they are up to (Garfinkel, 1967).
22. Although borrowed from Goodmans (1978) title, I do not mean the phrase
world making quite as he does. Rather than theorizing its order, interest turns to the
local, witnessable, and accountably reasonable accomplishments of our made worlds,
for example, those of a classroom lesson.
23. These same materials were presented in Macbeth (1998) to demonstrate a kin-
dred argument about the difference between professional analytic interpretation and
ordinary interpretation. Both topicsinterpretation and reflexivityspeak to a same
territory: the organization of meaningful worlds of order, structure, and regularity and
how they take the shapes they do, not from above but from within.
24. As Payne and Hustler (1980) note, that classroom order is routinely produced
does not mean that it is any less contingent or achieved or oriented to that way by stu-
dents andteachers. See alsoMoermanandSacks (1988) andSacks, Schegloff, andJeffer-
son (1974) on howthe visible, public organizations of common understanding are pub-
lic for the analyst as well.
25. Mead(1964) reminds us of a relativismdifferent than the one we usually have in
mind, wherein comparisons across cultural settings and practices are made to demon-
strate that all moral practices are limitedintime andplace andlackanyultimate valid-
ity. She continues, This mischievous and uninformed use of cultural materials is
often mistakenly called cultural relativity but that is exactly what it is not, for cultural
relativity demands that every itemof cultural behavior be seenas relative to the culture
of which it is a part (p. 93). In this light, relativismis an endogenous relation. Mindful
of Mannheims (1936) andGarfinkels (1967) documentary methods, relativismis more
nearly a gestalt exercise than a comparative one. More telling, it is not a constraint for
analysis, by Meads (1964) account, but a resource or method for understanding. In the
materials at hand, relativismis thenaninvitationtolookfor howthe analysis assembles
and then speaks from its records.
There are indefinitely many ways of speaking from the record, for example, ordi-
narily, theoretically, politically, reflexively, and so forth. The way of speaking found
here is observational and naturalistic and with an orientation to the sequential order
and interactional work of a class that is coming to order. There is, of course, a realism
here, andnaturalistic study (andinquiry itself, by Ashmores [1989] account) presumes
it. But it is not that the record then simply speaks for itself. Rather, if we hold ourselves
to a close considerationof the pubic order the transcript records, ananalysis might then
be disputednot byreference totheoretical or methodological maxims but byanorienta-
tion to the developing order of the materials. Although an imperfect exercise, it can be
an instructive one. It can sharpen our sense for howwe are working and what we have
learned (Sacks, 1984b).
26. We might also call this account of itthat the scene shows the reflexive produc-
tion of classroom orderan interpretation, built of the analysts purposes and
positionings and/or the textual order of a transcript, andimagine still others, for exam-
ple, that it shows the play of institutional power, socialization, and/or resistance. The
characterizations are certainly recognizable in the materials: The teacher does indeed
have power, andthe students are not simply compliant. Althoughwe couldbuildthese
characterizations theoretically, if we want to understand them as the practical organi-
zationof comingtoorder that we findonanyactual occasion, the tapedandtranscribed
records have their recommendations. The difference, then, is not simply one of inter-
pretations but rather how we have use for the records and the order of interaction that
they record.
27. This two-party organization, wherein the teacher speaks and the class listens
and responds, provides our familiar sense of classroom order and instruction (see
Macbeth, 1991; McHoul, 1978; Mehan, 1978; and Payne & Hustler, 1980, on the organi-
zations of classroomdiscourse). There are, of course, other normal orders, for exam-
ple, those of small group work, cooperative learning, or games. The normal order I am
speaking of is that of the whole group lesson and is long lived in classroom education.
See Cuban (1982) and Hamilton (1980) for a sense of its stability.
28. We need only posit an orientation to the possibility of speaking next to provide
for how nonspeakers would be listening to what is being said. They must listen to dis-
cover just whenandwhere theymight competentlyjointhe conversationor be askedto
join it. (See Sacks, 1992, on the warrant to listen in natural conversation.)
29. Commonly, prefacing questions are heard for the question itself and are
answered that way, for example,
A: Do you have the time?
B: 4:30.
See Levinson (1983) for a review of findings in the analysis of ordinary conversa-
tion, including prefacing sequences.
30. Infull, the cohort is indeedconsultingitself tofindthe relevance of next places to
speak and listen. They do so, however, less by talking about it than by their demon-
strated analyses of the context of the talk in the room. On hearing anothers talk begin-
ning to quiet, we mount an inquiry and so quiet our own. Reflexively and as this
inquiry, we produce a fieldfor still others tohear andreproduce, andinthis fashion, the
chatter fades, and places of no talking emerge.
31. The actual sequence of questions shows anengaging kindof gradient or slope as
the teacher works to formulate a question that can be answered right now (see lines 8,
10, 12, and 17).
32. In Sackss (1984a) phrase, the teachers question encourages the students to
become engaged in doing being ordinary. Who remembers? works this way by
producing the nomination relevance of each member who was there the last time and
thus the occasion-relevance of their identity as a member of the class. Having estab-
lishednomination relevance, such places routinely become places for a teachers actual
nomination, as we see in line 28, where Mario is selected for the first direct question of
the lesson.
33. It may still be asked how durable this kind of order is, especially as we read on
and see rising chatter in line 27. But order, meaning, and interactional organization are
seldomin hand once and for all. These are not docile or theoretical objects. Rather, and
reflexive tothe practices that assemble it, the durabilityof classroomorder is made of its
moment-to-moment reproducibility throughout the lesson and the day.
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Douglas Macbeth is an associate professor in the School of Educational Policy
and Leadership of the Ohio State University. His teaching and research address
the interactional order of classroom discourse and instruction, the analysis of
situated action, and qualitative research.

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