Interpretation and Method Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn

WE CALL IT A GRAIN OF SAND 379

meeting, Chicago, IL, September 2–5, 2004. I thank the presenters at that session—Mark Bevir, Martha
Feldman, Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, and Dvora Yanow—for stimulating papers that provided the ingredients
for this essay. I especially thank Dvora Yanow, session chair, for inviting me to comment at the panel and for
her guidance and encouragement throughout the writing of the essay. And my deepest gratitude goes to Julie
Jay, without whom this would not have been possible.

1. “View with a Grain of Sand” from View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems, transl. Stanislaw
   Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995). Copyright  1993 by Wis³awa Szymborska.
   English translation copyright  1995 by Harcourt, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.


2. By poststructuralist I mean the broad philosophical orientation that is at once a critique and an
   extension of the structuralism typified by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, and Roland Barthes. This
   broad orientation is characterized primarily by the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois
   Lyotard, and, to some extent, Richard Rorty. As a critique of structuralism, poststructuralism seeks to desta-
   bilize structuralism’s reliance on precisely defined binaries and to highlight the deeply contingent nature of
   all systems of thought. As an extension of structuralism, poststructuralism often retains structuralism’s dis-
   missal of the conscious subject as the primary frame of reference, seeking instead to explicate how elements
   of formal systems shape and create even the very conditions and possibilities for consciousness. For a
   helpful synopsis of the ways in which poststructuralism both critiques and extends structuralism, see Gut-
   ting (1998).


3. In what follows, I discuss Michel Foucault as an exemplar of the poststructuralist approach because
   his work is often the most immediately relevant to the concerns of social scientists.


4. “KKV” refers to King, Keohave, and Verba (1994). The work has taken on such a central role in
   methods argumentation (they advocate grounding qualitative research on positivist methodological proce-
   dures) that rendering the book a verb is sensical [eds].