Interrupting the sign: The asethetics of research texts

Blumenfeld-Jones, D. & Barone, T. (1998). In J. Jipson & N. Paley (Eds.), Daredevel research: Recreating analytic practice (pp.83-107).

The authors argue that often displayed in ethnographic research, linear chronology hides negotiation and recursion that occurs throughout conversations by isolating individuals from the context. Moreover, in pointing out the linearity that constitutes the rhetoric of the standard research paper/presentation format, they advocate intervention of readers in relation to the authoritative power of canonical text formats by writing, "A non-standard format prompts a careful search for the warrant of the report, indeed, militates against acceptance of the validity of the report. The authority of the text comes at the expense of the power of the reader to question the ramification of the canonical textual format" (p. 87).

While most texts follow in conventional ways so that readers can focus more on the content than the form of a text, the authors assert that a text is intrinsically free from the author's intentions and can be subverted and such non-conventional reading can be demanded through non-conventional forms. Thus, form and content, signified and signifier in deconstruction are conflated into a whole entity in their argument: "The activity of sense-making afforded by the lack of familiar anchors may even become a kind of aesthetic experience, an experience in which form and content, signifier and signified become a powerful, synthetic, informative whole" (pp. 90-91).

Lastly, in their discussion about soliloquy as a form of data display, they address that although individuals go through their daily life in integrity without a feeling of 'disjunctures' of characters, transcript display only fragments individual speech and even hide the sense of personal coherence.