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The Question of Interpretive Validity (Apr 2002)

In order to examine the validity of constructivist interpretations, we may turn to the work of Lather (1993) and what she calls sociology's "fertile obsession" with validity. Lather rethinks validity in light of anti-foundational discourse theory, and seeks "to rupture validity as a regime of truth… [and to] position validity as an 'incitement to discourse'… [a] reconceptualized validity that is grounded in theorising our practice" (1993:674). Her approach is not about validity as "epistemological guarantees" but as "multiple, partial, endlessly deferred [validities]… [which] construct a site of development for a validity of transgression that runs counter to the standard validity of correspondence: a non-referential validity interested in how discourse does its work, where transgression is defined as the game of limits… at the border of disciplines, and across the line of taboo" (Lather 1993:675).

But which methods can address these kinds of validity? Lather suggests "a nomadic and dispersed validity, [where she employs] a strategy of excess and categorical scandal in the hope of both imploding ideas of policing social science and working against the inscription of another 'regime of truth'… [and] rather than prescriptions for establishing validity in postpositivist empirical work… [she offers] a forthrightly personal and deliberately ephemeral antithesis to more conventional and prescriptive discourse-practices of validity" (Lather 1993:677).

Lather continues to suggest a "rhizomatic validity," where rhizomes are understood to supplement and exceed what order has tried to make stable and permanent. As such, rhizomes produce paradoxical objects, following growth and not surveying a smooth unfolding. Rhizomatic validity would address what it means "to let contradictions remain in tension, to unsettle from within, to dissolve interpretations by marking them as temporary, partial, invested…" (Lather 1993:681). On a related note, she describes a "voluptuous validity" in which "the residue… exceeds the categories, [instigating] a disruptive excess…" (Lather 1993:681). The politics of excess, of leakage, of "going too far" bring "ethics and epistemology together in self-conscious partiality, an embodied positionality and a tentativeness which leaves space for others to enter, for the joining of partial voices" (Lather 1993:683). This will create a "constantly moving speaking position that fixes neither subject nor object" (Lather 1993:684).

And, finally, Lather (1993:686) presents the following criteria for both types of validity:

Rhizomatic validity:

" unsettles from within, taps underground;
" generates new locally determined norms of understanding;
" proliferates open-ended and context-sensitive criteria;
" works against reinscription of some new regime, some new systematicity supplements and exceeds the stable and the permanent, Derridean play;
" works against constraints of authority via replay, multiple openings, networks, complexities of problematics;
" puts conventional discursive procedures under erasure, reaches congealed discourses, critical as well as dominant

Voluptuous validity:

" goes too far toward disruptive excess, leaky, runaway, risky practice;
" embodies a situated, partial, positioned, explicit tentativeness;
" constructs authority via practices of engagement and self-reflexivity;
" creates a questioning text that is bounded and unbounded, closed and open;
" brings ethics and epistemology together.

Bibliography

Lather, P. 1993. Fertile Obsession: Validity after Poststructuralism. Sociological Quarterly 34(4):673-693.