International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education Vol. 19, No. 2, March-April 2006, pp.

133146

Dialectical imagery and postmodern research

Kevin G. Davison*
The National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland
Kevin.Davison@nuigalway.ie KevinDavison 0 200000March-April of 19 2006 & Francis Original Article 0951-8398 Francis Ltd International Journal2006 10.1080/09518390600575899 TQSE_A_157572.sgm Qualitative Studies in Education Taylor and (print)/1366-5898 (online)

This article suggests utilizing dialectical imagery, as understood by German social philosopher Walter Benjamin, as an additional qualitative data analysis strategy for research into the postmodern condition. The use of images mined from research data may offer epistemological transformative possibilities that will assist in the demystification of illusory modernist methodological frameworks, and invites postmodern interpretations of subjective experiences recounted in qualitative research.

Introduction Postmodern and poststructural theories, across many disciplines, have disrupted traditional and modernist methodological approaches to research. Attempts to rethink methodologies within the postmodern condition have proposed various diverse strategies. For example, Scheurich suggests that researchers play around in the margins of chaos/freedom (1997). Denzin insists that research be performative, not simply informative (1997b). He argues that performing research data can untangle and expose the very structures that make any situated version of reality a historical fiction (Denzin, 1997b, p.198). These suggestions interrogate assumptions both about how the researcher and the researched are subjectively positioned in the postmodern, and about the interpretive process of research. This paper will take up the concern for new ways to research in the postmodern by employing some of the ideas of the German social philosopher Walter Benjamin (18981940). Considered a part of the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxist critical theory, the writing of Benjamin crossed disciplines from literary criticism to Jewish mysticism. His critiques of the project of modernism are often regarded as early sparks of postmodernist thought (Jay, 1994). Specifically, the use of dialectical imagery will be offered as an alternative way to examine research data in the postmodern.
*Department of Education, The National University of Ireland, Galway, University Road, Galway, Ireland. Email: Kevin.Davison@nuigalway.ie ISSN 0951-8398 (print)/ISSN 1366-5898 (online)/06/02013314 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/09518390600575899

134 K. G. Davison While never intended as a methodological strategy, my intention is to employ Benjamins distinct and densely complex use of Marxism and dialectical imagery to fragment research data and illustrate how purposeful manipulation of textual representations can be valuable to researchers in postmodern times. Postmodernism and research Over the last century, researchers have designed and employed various methodological approaches to social inquiry to sort and bind knowledge of the world (Tierney, 1994). Yet, [t]here is an emerging uncertainty for critical education researchers concerning the relationship between new theoretical frameworks and the relationship to methodology (Haywood & Mac an Ghaill, 1998, p. 126). Traditionally, it has been assumed that scholarly research, using particular models, can capture and freeze subjective experiences and can re-present them in text (Denzin, 1997a). Recently however, postmodern, feminist poststructural and postcolonial theories have pointed to the limitations of bounded categories: theoretical, methodological, sexual and geographical (see for example: Jameson, 1988; Trinh, 1989; Lyotard, 1989/1979). These new approaches have contributed to a growing category crisis (Lather, 1991), which has challenged researchers to examine the complexities of social interaction, rather than aiming to provide explanations of closure (Scheurich, 1995).
Philosophically speaking, the essence of the postmodern argument is that the dualisms which continue to dominate Western thought are inadequate for understanding a world of multiple causes and effects interacting in complex and non-linear ways, all of which are rooted in a limitless array of historical and cultural specificities. (Lather, 1991, p. 21)

This theoretical and methodological shift has troubled the act of representation in research that previously has been taken for granted by many as unproblematic. That is, traditional research models have focused on the interpretation of particular social experiences while often ignoring the significance of the resulting textual re/presentation as documented simulations of the real (Denzin, 1997a). Poststructural writers have reevaluated theory and individual subjectivity through a close examination of language (Poster, 1989, p. 3). Lather explains that, in most research, the descriptive adequacy of language as a transparent representation of the world is assumed (1991, p. 107). Qualitative research involves texting peoples subjective experience, through narrative. The researcher translates flesh-and-blood people and their subjective experiences into text for the reader to unpack and put back together in their own way. There is an assumption that experiences can be re-presented and understood unproblematically via text. Yet, Fuss claims that translation always involves transformation (1989, p. 82). This is an act of textual recreation. We are re-producing, replicating and simulating others experiences. Denzin points out that, in the process of research, description becomes inscription (1997a, p. 5). Purposefully replicating and interpreting the experiences of others can only produce a flawed realist tale (Van Maanen, 1988) because of the inevitable transformation that occurs in the texting process. Postmodernism [ on the other hand ] is willing to live with the pain of unrepresentability (Jay, 1994, p. 583).

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The task of the qualitative researcher, whether individually or collaboratively, is often assumed to involve interpreting research participants real experiences through the filter of various theoretical positions. Yet, as Trinh points out The real (is) nothing else than a (social) code of representation (1989, p. 94 emphasis in the original). Such codes are partly how we make meaning of our world. But in the traditional act of scholarly inquiry the researcher uses the dead, decontextualized monads of meaning, the tightly boundaried containers, the numbing objectifications, to construct generalizations which are, in the modernist dream, used to predict, control, and reform (Scheurich, 1997, p. 64). Postmodern researchers, however, uproot taken-for-granted assumptions of the conditions of subjective reality. Jameson explains:
There is something quite nave, in a sense quite profoundly unrealistic, and in the full sense of the word ideological, about the notion that reality is out there simply, quite objective and independent of us, and that knowing it involves the relatively unproblematical process of getting an adequate picture of it into our own heads. (1988, p. 121, emphasis in the original)

The act of revealing the truth is confounded within the postmodern. This is a challenge to the modernist assumption that there is a reality out there that the researcher can accurately capture or represent, given the use of improved research methods (Scheurich, 1997, p. 66). By rupturing traditional and modernist approaches to research, postmodern methodologists, such as Scheurich, recommend researchers play with various postrealist modes of representation, like partial accounts or multiple stories or disrupted research texts (1997, p. 162). This paper suggests that the use of dialectical imagery will assist researchers to break away from modernist research methods, which, like railway lines, can only offer travel in a fixed direction dependent on the external methodological framework.

Walter Benjamins image-space In contrast to the Foucauldian tradition of interrogating various discourses and socioinstitutional rules, Walter Benjamin presented and examined images. Unlike pictures and photographs, images can be used as instruments because they are not isomorphic. Images need not correspond to a physical reality. The images by the artist M. C. Escher, for example, often contain stairways and animals that turn in on themselves and transform through optical illusions but do not correspond to a physical reality and cannot be realized. While a photograph or picture replicates and reproduces visual perception, images are optic devices, like a telescope, which are used to investigate the subject, not just re-present it. Benjamin believed that the primary mode and the primary material of thought and ideas are images (Weigel, 1996, p. 4). He isolated and cultivated particular images rooted in ideas and connected them, through language, in order to give rise to new understandings. Benjamin explains: To thinking belongs the movement as well as the

136 K. G. Davison arrest of thoughts. Where thinking comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensionsthe dialectical image appears. It is the caesura in the movement of thought (2002, p. 475, emphasis added). This break in thought can create the contradictions and oppositions needed (in the traditional Marxist understanding of the dialectic) to interrupt and disrupt preconceived understandings in order to move toward new material arrangements. Wolin explains:
The overall effect of this procedure on the reader was intended to be one of shock: by wrenching elements of everyday life from their original contexts and rearranging them in a new constellation, Benjamin hoped to divest them of their familiarity and thereby stir the reader from a state of passivity to an active and critical posture. (1982, p. 124, emphasis in the original)

Thus, the shock of the image was meant to disrupt the overdetermination regulating social processes accessible to the individual subject (Cohen, 1993, p. 54). Benjamin understood the image as a constellation of resemblances (Weigel, 1996, p. 49). This way of thinking about images was similar to the theory of the unconscious as described by Freud (1996). His use of the story of Oedipus, for example, was a dialectical image that brought about a new way to consider subconscious forces at play. Freuds work with dream analysis is comparable to the way Benjamin employed dialectical imagery in his work. The utilization of dream elements in waking is the textbook example of dialectical thinking. For this reason dialectical thinking is the organ of historical awakening. Each epoch not only dreams the next, but also, in dreaming, strives toward the next moment of waking (Benjamin cited in Cohen, 1993, p. 25). Furthermore, Benjamins dialectical imagery is similar to the aims of surrealist poets and painters of the 1920s and 1930s (contemporaries of Benjamin) who were experimenting with images that would draw out subconscious forces to destabilize what we have come to know as real. The French surrealist poet Louis Aragon stated: It should be understood that the real is a relation like any other; the essence of things is by no means linked to their reality, there are other relations besides reality, which the mind is capable of grasping, and which also are primary like chance, illusion, the fantastic, the dream (cited in Breton, 1936, p. 66). In surrealist work, images are triggers to decode the subconscious and in so doing expose reality as transitory and suspect. Thus, like surrealist imagery, an important dimension of the dialectical image is its transgression of traditional representational boundaries (Cohen, 1993, p. 256). Benjamin saw image-space as an understanding, through image, which he believed could affect new knowledge and offer hope for change by assisting the movement and transition from one mode of thought to another. Thinking-in-images can deconstruct ways of thinking and ideas or imaginary concepts handed down through the centuries (Weigel, 1996, p. 53). Thus, the dialectical image seeks unremittingly to expose and unfold the distorted nature of reality such as it is, in order thereby to accentuate the desperate need for its imminent transformation (Wolin, 1982, p. 102). Benjamin imagined the connection between thoughts and writing through imagespace invading the body and setting off an explosive charge that would detonate, in a very revolutionary sense, traditional meaning and provide an embodied

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understanding. He explains: [T]his dialectical penetration and actualization of former contexts puts the truth of all present action to the test. Or rather, it serves to ignite the explosive materials that are latent in what has been (2002, p. 392). Weigel notes, however, that these images were not simple metaphors or even mental images, as Benjamins aim was not to identify meaning in images but rather, the insight that memory and action find articulation in images, [and] that ideas are structured as images (1996, p. 9, emphasis added). His thinking goes back to a tradition of an image which precedes that of the function of pictorial representation and which sees the literal sense of the word image as a resolutely non- or even antipictorial notion (Weigel, 1996, p. 49, emphasis in the original). Benjamin explains: The allegorist has given up the attempt to elucidate things through research into their properties and relations. He dislodges things from their context and, from the outset, relies on his profundity to illuminate their meaning (2002, p. 211). This is no modest endeavor, but I am confident that such images mined from research data do hold the possibility to serve as devices or instruments which, in their fragmented form, can provide insight beyond simple description of details or facts. Dialectical imagery as a methodological strategy In the presentation of the data in most qualitative studies, the words of research participants are commonly presented in the form of quotations as a central grounding feature of both analysis and textual presentation. The data analysis procedure usually involves repetitiously reviewing, coding, sorting and interrogating raw data through several methodological, theoretical and, some would argue, ideological filters. The strategy of utilizing dialectical images in data analysis is one that draws images from the data, while at the same time severing the words of the participants from their contexts. That is not to deny that all texts are imprinted with multiple discourses but, rather, to purposefully isolate the reused/recycled words of interview participants to illuminate new insight and understanding from the individual, often contradictory, fragments of thought and image that are produced. In Benjamins writing he asks the reader to patiently reconstruct larger patterns out of the shards that are presented, in the hope that the reader will emerge not only with hard knowledge but with the sense of the cognitive processes that produced such knowledge (Jennings, 1987, p. 10). The quotation, in the work of Benjamin, embodies as it were language as literature, broken out of one discourse in order, as a fragment, to become a part of another, different form of writing (Weigel, 1996, p. 38). This transformation, through imagery, assists in the dialectical process of shifting understanding. Benjamin remarked that: quotations in my works are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve an idler of his convictions (Benjamin, 1968, p. 38). In my doctoral research on modern and postmodern practices of gender and bodies (Davison, 2003), I employed dialectical imagery in my data analysis, along with other analytic techniques, in order to break from some of the discourses that shape various understandings of gender and bodies, including my own. Because all of my research

138 K. G. Davison data were generated from an online questionnaire, I found more traditional and modernist approaches to data analysis unhelpful when applied to very fragmented postmodern data that included multiple subjective positions. That is, both the data and the methodological approach are impacted by postmodern relations and unstable/discordant subjectivities. I believe that using dialectical imagery as one approach to data analysis will offer a helpful methodological strategy for researchers who are negotiating shifting subjectivities in the postmodern. The dialectical images I mined from my doctoral research data were not images taken directly from the statements of the participants. In order to encourage alternate perspectives from the data and to draw out images I chose to assemble a conglomerate of my own thought fragments alongside the words of my participants in the shape of a poem, or a data novella. Assembling data and reflections in a poem form, as opposed to greater text blocks under thematic categories, presents the data in such a way as to encourage the reader to shift his/her analysis and think differently about the data. Samuel Taylor Coleridge reflected that the very act of poetic composition itself is, and is allowed to imply and to produce, an unusual state of excitement, which of course justifies and demands a correspondent difference of language (Coleridge, 1817, pp. 7475). It is the difference in the metrical presentation of poetic text that produce the continued excitement of surprise, and by the quick reciprocations of curiosity still gratified and still re-excited, which are too slight indeed to be at any one moment objects of distinct consciousness, yet become considerable in their aggregate influence (Coleridge, 1817, p. 68). That is, poetic assemblage may trigger images which, together, offer a different perspective unavailable in prose. To illustrate how images were mined from a poetic structure composed of selections from the data, and my own reactions to the data, I have included a sample, below, of the data novella I assembled for my doctoral research (Davison, 2003). When reading the data novella, keep in mind that the data were taken from research on postmodern understandings of masculinities and bodies conducted entirely online with some participants identifying as female-to-male transsexuals, and others identifying as gay men. Further, the poetic structure and organization of the data does not always make for good stand-alone poetry but it does offer the potential to draw out images from the data that may not have been possible in raw and bulky transcript form. Data novella Parts I & II
I Strength Desire On the inside Penis on/penis off II Gendered bodies Characteristics Voice/voiceless Gender clues

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True gender Natural gender Bodies changing Changing Knowing and being Gendered positions Gender inconsistency Comfort/discomfort Gender performance Surveillance of gender Gender splits Contradictions Confusion, frustration and pain Gender rules Male in my body Being born male/female Exceeding the gendered body Male in the head Rational gender One need not have a penis to be called a man [One need not be gay to be called a fag] Masculinity exists without maleness and vice versa Male privilege vs masculine privilege Rearranging bodies and gender

Seen as Movement Gender codes Phallus Being at home in your body House with comfortable chairs and unfamiliar pictures Size power Symbolic power Present your body Shape Image What male and female should look like Body language The body speaks a language Gendered expectations Bodies as screens of culture Gender as an organizer of experiences To be accepted Body styling Images of men Body presentations Bodies on the margins Desire Marketed bodies Body surveillance Gender is dependent on correlating sexual organs Masculine females Everything between my legs was right Matching bodies to masculinity The wrong body/incomplete Sexed body as indicator of gender Male-man Delivering images At home in your body Rearranging the gender furniture

Data Novella Parts III & IV

III Honesty/honestly Fake gender

IV Reconfigurations of gender Living with gender

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Representation of bodies online Limited range of bodily pleasures Internet outlet to real bodies Recombination Text bodies Myriad of restrictions, prohibitions and pains Need to conform to beauty Behavioral neighborhood-watch scheme The pressure of online dating Policing masculinity Deception Masculinity as unbalanced, partial and sometimes Internet as extension of traditional problematic gendered spaces Altering the relationship between the body and gender I dont fit Playing around Proof of identity Images The body implies notions of true, whole, natural Online world/real world and complete gender Real connectedness in the flesh Being masculine as an active verb Truth Unconnected to sexed bodies Hiding behind the Internet Critically rethinking masculinity Hiding and concealing Making stable gender distinctions unstable A complete man Distance form social and cultural Gender variance beliefs about gender Space to share gender and body Determine the gender of others Identity independent of a body Possibilities lie with the users of the technologies You can be anybody you want to be Offer alternatives to the assumed limits of gender Invisible gender Possibilities lie with the users of the technologies Judged by what is said, not how you look Personas People online accept the gender Gender and bodies done in different ways self-identification of an individual Renegotiating and re-articulating hegemonic gender Defined from elsewhere Happier being the genders that I am Practices Self-defined Present gender in anyway one chooses New discursive frameworks Not to be judged Not being seen and judged Anyone is able to reconfigure identities in new ways Closer to who I really am My body does not match my gender identification To be their own selves You get online and become yourself The person you are from the inside Cloak

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Conveyed through written language Freedom to pick and choose I got to be the man I felt I was inside About not having how people identified me distorted by my physical body Technology of impression

In analyzing the data in poetic meter I focused on the uncomfortable tensions, disruptions, and sense of vertigo produced by the proximity of the decontextualized thoughts and themes that emerged as dialectical images. The discomfort of the text helped to draw attention to where the dominant interpretations were forced to collaborate with the contradictions in the data. Byrne notes that it is advantageous to:
let the aspects of the collaboration created in various mediums stand side by side, let them merely exist simultaneously at the same moment and then it is hoped that the frisson and tension that naturally exists between the content of two mediums would be the fruit of the collaboration. The rubbing up against one another IS the collaboration. (Byrne, 2003, n.p.)

Admittedly, however, data cannot speak for themselves; they are always mediated by the researcher. As the four parts of the data novella illustrate, the data and researchers reflections (in italics) are fragmented and amalgamated so that striking contradictions are exposed and the linearity of narrative flow is disrupted. In Benjamins writing, it is the collision of static images (Jennings, 1987, p. 208) that produces a dialectical shift in thinking. Benjamin referred to this moment of shifting, which occurs in the blink of an eye (augenblick), as dialectics at a standstill (Wolin, 1982; Jennings, 1987). By isolating these fragments of data and the subjective reflections of the researcher it may be possible to draw from the data images that create a dialectical conflict to illuminate insightful moments that need not conform to a modernist or essentialist reality. The images that could possibly be drawn from the data novella are multiple and reveal possibilities of interpretation as opposed to fixed truths. For example, while some of the female-to-male transsexual participants in my study had written about their understanding of true gender and natural gender they also understood gender as inconsistent, uncomfortable and not reliant on biological sex. Participants who identified as gay men valued honesty and being truthful about gender, especially with regards to online encounters with other men in a dating or cyber-cruising environment. However, they also recognized the fluidity of gender both online and offline, which was often valued by the F to M participants who discussed masculinity. The parameters of this article do not allow for a greater presentation and analysis of the data (see Davison, 2003) but the examples above and in the data novella should begin to illustrate some of the many tensions in the data and between the data and the researcher. One of the advantages of using dialectical images mined from a data novella is that it resists a dominant reading and offers many equally valued interpretations. While this may be unsettling for some researchers, I would argue that the attempt to force

142 K. G. Davison postmodern, fragmented, multi-subjective data into a modernist framework is a much less forgiving approach that literally leaves much to be desired. There are many images that might be drawn from my data novella. For the purpose of illustrating the use of dialectical imagery I will offer two examples that arose for me and which I believe produced the dialectical shock effect which assisted me in my analysis of the data. The first is that of mirrors. Much of the data from the research about masculinities and bodies in the postmodern condition included a great degree of dissonance between bodies, gender and the gaze. Participants recounted experiences that included unease with not only their own gender and bodies but also how both were publicly reflected back to them. The image of a mirror here is dialectical because it both breaks down and draws attention to the spaces in between the physical body and how it is represented and interpreted by others. These contradictions that the image of the mirror reflects both to the participants in their daily/nightly lives, and to the researcher in sifting various ways the participants were positioned to the interpretive gaze of others, offered me a greater understanding of the complexities of the role representation and multiple levels of reflection play in the performances of masculinities and bodies that I may not have been able to access by simply engaging with multiple readings, and sorting the data into themes. The image of the mirror also helps to convey to the reader of the research how the complexities of identity are encompassed in most peoples daily reflections. The second image I offer is that of rearranging gender furniture. By assembling my data in poetic meter it became more and more apparent that masculinity is a condition; it is contextual and contingent. That is not to imply that gender is an illness although, like an illness, there is a relationship between gender and the body with which we live all our lives. This relationship involves a mutual arrangement of bodies and gender. Like furniture in a home, some things seem to fit in particular locations and some things do not. But, more importantly, this changes over time. Gender is situated. Masculinity positions the body in particular ways and vice versa. What makes a man complete/incomplete? The condition of masculinity does not involve only one configuration of bodies and gender, for as one participant stated, one need not have a penis to be called a man. Imagine that. What, then, are the conditions of masculinity and where do they reside? Many participants spoke of wanting to feel at home in their body. Whats the address? Where do you call home? Some of the available modernist maps are not sufficient, not detailed enough, leave out important landmarks and contain too many one-way streets. Living with masculinity can sometimes be difficult, powerful, awkward, pleasurable, dangerous and too comfortable. Masculinity, as described by the participants, is not always stable, even when you want it to be. It is a conditional contingent condition, and, like the placement of furniture in a home, gender is inevitably open to change, for authentic (gender or body) in Lacanian terms is produced (secreted) by its own effects (Zizek, 2001, p. 124). The contingency of the condition is reliant on the subjective ability to perform or parody the simulacra of what we have come to believe as true masculinity. There is no original rule that necessitates that a couch be placed in the living room. For some people, a couch in the kitchen, a bedroom or on

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the front porch may be a very comfortable or necessary placement. This image is not intended to downplay the seriousness of gender in how it impacts on lives lived. Rather, it is meant to break down the taken-for-granted-ness of gender that became more problematic and apparent when research data were fragmented and repositioned poetically. By presenting an image of gender as furniture I was able to disengage with modernist assumptions of gender grounded in particular bodies, in particular places at particular times. The image of the conditional locatedness of masculinities and bodies seemed to direct me toward a different analysis that not only embraced the contradictions of the data but resisted the temptation to resolve the contradictions or argue for one particular interpretation over another. This did not prevent me from offering multiple levels of insight from my research; it merely avoided the pitfall of a singular, rigid and deterministic analysis. An image for research in the postmodern condition Benjamins image of thinking as a constellation of tensions (2002, p. 475) is a particularly apt way of projecting an understanding of how the postmodern condition works, both as a theory and as a methodology. Constellations are relatively, but not universally or permanently, fixed in the heavens. (That is, for the most part, their state of fixedness has been predicted to outlive us generationally.) For many centuries the semi-fixed nature of the stars has guided us through various scientific and geographic discoveries. Not all have had positive effects on cultures and knowledge, but a great many have radically altered our understanding of the world around us. Therefore, I would like to push Benjamins image of the constellation of thought further and open the lens wider in order to illustrate how dialectical imagery can be applied to research methodologies in the postmodern condition. I am proposing the image of gravity to argue for the possibilities of postmodern data analysis. In order to approach constellations saturated by tensions (Benjamin, 2002, p. 475), I propose a ride in a helium balloon.1 A balloon filled with helium or an alternative gas that is lighter than air is, literally, grounded in modern scientific advancements. But this grounding is dependent on the sandbags and ropes that anchor particular ways of thinking to the inescapable condition of gravity on Earth that most take for granted. However, by cutting the ropes and releasing the ballast that keeps us grounded we are able to rise up to unknown heights of new knowledge. In temporarily overcoming the gravitational pull, and with space travel exceeding gravity, we un-root that which is central to our understanding of the world around us. So far, this may seem like simply a clever metaphor, but I would argue that it is more than that. The image of exceeding gravity addresses some of the concerns and critiques of postmodernism. The grand worry is that postmodernism, with multi-fractured and equi-valued subjectivities, leaves no anchor whatsoever to ground or build theory or research. And that may indeed be true but this does not mean it is problematic to the extent that it paralyses thought or action. On the contrary, we can always come back (down) to what we know with new perspectives that may transform knowledge,

144 K. G. Davison thought and data in ways unimaginable from the ground alone. The dialectical image may enable this leap to starry heights. That is not to say that such images will be panaceas for research or for postmodern thought and theory. There will inevitably be turbulence as the tensions are explored and this, I argue, is not only to be expected but welcomed in research. To do otherwise would return us to the tendency to rely on modernist grand narratives (Lyotard, 1989) to solve or answer our research inquiries. Instead, the image in research may provide us with flickering possibilities that can propel us further not to progress, as Benjamins angel of history dreads in its backward flight, but toward a greater understanding of the composition and archeology of the rubble we have piled up behind us in our effort to grasp that which the wind of curiosity has blown toward us.

Conclusion Patti Lather (1986, 1991) has argued that in postmodern times and in feminist poststructural research researchers must be up-front about their investment and subjective relationship to the research process. Once we admit that within the context of a critical social science, methodology is viewed as inherently political, as inescapably tied to issues of power and legitimacy (Lather, 1991, p. 110), we can then unapologetically produce openly ideological research (Lather, 1986). This politicization and ideological positioning is not, however, innocent. Any ideology is problematic in that it is prescriptive and most often valued above other perspectives. This is hardly postmodern in its outlook. Yet, with this caution in mind, what Lather is suggesting is that researchers must be up-front about the inevitable subjective manipulation of text, words and experiences that take place in the research process. Working within the postmodern, researchers should be encouraged to shamelessly manipulate text with the hope that their efforts will produce new, hybridized knowledge. If, as Lyotard argued, the decisive level of social analysis in the postmodern age is language (cited in Poster, 1990, p. 142), then use of poetic fragmentation of research data and dialectical imagery may offer a methodological intervention strategy that can mediate between thoughts (thinking and theory) and language (textual representations of experience). Dialectical images offer the possibility to transform data and present insights that are not completely dependent on discursive relations, precisely because the image has the ability to parody and mock what are assumed to be original truths, and, in turn, can create alternate ways of understanding social relations in the postmodern. This methodological approach to data analysis may interrupt the everyday ways we make sense and meaning from the data. As Byrne reflects:
the most desired thing for an artist or writer is to remove doubt, for art is that activity that is never provable. Unlike science, in which a hypothesis or theorem can eventually be proven to be right or wrong, in the arts, one is never quite sure. With an artist or writer there is always the nagging doubt that its all a heap of crap. Often theyre right. (2003, n.p.)

The doubt we might aim to remove from research is not the fear of truth-less-ness, it is the doubt inherent in the credibility of the methodological approach in contrast to

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the analysis. Being systematically tentative about methodological direction need not be a strike against trustworthy research; it should be an asset. Furthermore, utilizing poetic meter and dialectic imagery as a data-analysis strategy can, like a painting by M. C. Escher, offer new perspectives, by manipulating textual and imagistic representations to spoil the taken-for-granted illusion of the fantasy of discovering a singular, true interpretation. Rethinking qualitative research methodology in the postmodern condition may cause discomfort for those who have an investment in more traditional approaches to research and analysis. Lyotard has often referred to the mourning and melancholy for the lost illusions of modernism (cited in Jay, 1994, p. 586). However, what is critically important in reevaluating research in the postmodern is that it interrupts the modernist belief in getting it right or telling it like it is. Neutrality, objectivity, observable facts, transparent description, clean separation of the interpreter and the interpretedall of these concepts basic to positivist ways of knowing are called into question (Lather, 1991, p. 105). The reality that is advanced in postmodern theory is one of complexity, and may not always involve solutions or an ultimate truth. The collapse of, or challenge to, modernism may seem to involve an uncomfortable breakdown of what we know so well. Yet, as Haraway has pointed out: Breakdown provokes a space of possibility precisely because things dont work smoothly anymore (1999, p. 115). Employing alternative methodological strategies, such as dialectical imagery, is one way (among many) to embrace the tensions postmodernism imposes on qualitative research, and to produce texts that undermine modernist methodological traps. Acknowledgements The author would like to thank the anonymous external reviewers for their very close read of his work and their insightful recommendations that have led to an improved text. Additionally, he would like to acknowledge Bruce Barber, from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, for his careful reading of early drafts of this work. Notes on contributor Kevin G. Davison is a Lecturer in Education, and Research Development Coordinator, with the Department of Education, at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He teaches sociology of education for the Higher Diploma in Education programme, as well as qualitative research methodologies for the Postgraduate programme. He currently researches and publishes in the area of masculinities, bodies, boys and literacies, as well as research methodologies in the postmodern condition. Notes
1. A more contemporary form of transportation such as the space shuttle may be substituted here instead of the gas-filled balloon, but I believe the balloon provides a more historically situated example of a shift from modernity to postmodernity.

146 K. G. Davison References

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