[ Preface ] [ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ]  [ Notes ]

4: Here’s Another Fine Dress You’ve got me Into

Let me ask you a question, boys and girls.  What is your favourite research technique?  Yes, that’s right, your favourite methodology.  Your all-time, fave-rave, numero-uno, hot-rockin’, in-with-a-bullet, double-platinum, posters-on-the-bedroom-wall, the-kids-are-dancin’-in-the-streets, the-line-is-stretching-for-four-blocks-and-the-scalpers-are-making-a-fortune research technique?

But, Stephen, I hear you say, what do you mean favourite research techniques?  We don’t have favourites!  We modern marketing scientists eschew methodological preferences.  They are just ‘there’, aren’t they?  They comprise an array, a library, a veritable home improvement depot of tools and techniques, the most apt of which are selected as the research occasion demands.  It’s  not a question of favourites, merely a matter of those deemed appropriate to the task in hand, the job to be done, the particular issues, problems or – gasp! – hypotheses that the study seeks to address or test.

Tell me something, mes methodicals, do you really believe that I’m-an-objective-marketing-scientist-and-I-have-no-favourites hogwash?  You do?  More fool you.  Take it from me, just as we have favourite books, albums, movies, restaurants, places, poems and sexual partners (I’ve always been very partial to ripe watermelons and dead metaphors, myself - that’s right, I’m a melonomanicial necrotropophiliac), so too most marketing scholars have soft spots for certain methodological perspectives and procedures. 

Some consumer researchers, for example, are besotted by the big-survey, big-libido, more-power, MMX-hard-drive, show-me-the-memory, my-other-car’s-a-Porsche, no-that’s-not-a-defective-penile-implant-it-just-hangs-that-way style of research. Others prefer to eschew the macho, been-there-done-that, notch-on-the-scholarly-bedpost approach of the my-representative-sample’s-larger-than-yours fraternity, for the in-dwelling, lovey-dovey, soft-spoken, sympathetic-ear, heart-to-heart, all-sisters-together, great-earth-mother, excuse-me-while-I-change-the-tape of the in-depth, qualitative confessional.

Yet others, social maladjustees in the main, avoid human contact completely by foraging in the dusty archives and dank cellars, or doing the Peeping Tom, sad bastard thing popularly known as unobtrusive observation.  And yet others, illiterates to a man, woman and, as often as not, bisexual, disdain the ‘tyranny’ of the written word for photographic, videotronic or cybernetic modes of research and representation (anything basically that involves lots of expensive equipment, ’cos they’ve got this big research grant and have to spend it somehow). 

There is, of course, another type.  Well, there are probably dozens of other types but we don’t want to get ourselves into a typology of consumer researchers situation, now do we?  The other type I have in mind is a particularly loathsome, short-sighted, stone deaf, hairy-palmed, grubby-raincoat-wearing individual, or rather group of individuals, who can perhaps best be described as the onanists of marketing scholarship. 

I refer, needless to say, to the introspectionists and, as a merry member of that member fixated fellowship, I’m speaking here with some authority.  Indeed, when you think about it, as introspectors invariably do, introspection may seem somewhat sad, decidedly selfish or simply sick.  Reflecting on one’s own behaviour, reflecting on one’s reflections on one’s behaviour, reflecting on one’s reflections on one’s reflections on one’s behaviour etc., must come across as a particularly peculiar, some might say pathetic, way to spend one’s waking hours, and not a few sleepless nights.

It’s a dirty job but, hey, someone’s gotta do the ‘it’s a dirty job but someone’s gotta do it’ cliché.  Someone has to be the, er, whipping boy for the rest of the marketing academy.  Somebody has to be the butt of scholarly cracks and jibes, otherwise the hot-shot model-builders wouldn’t be able to feel superior; the love-me-love-my-transcripts sorority might be forced to reflect on their own preferred procedure’s shortcomings; the mephitic mob of is-this-manuscript-in-Hebrew-or-did-I-spill-my-Dr-Pepper? cross-dressers might be required to communicate with the rest of us rather than commune with the dear departed; or indeed the I’m-a-respectable-social-scientist-officer-these-night-vision-binoculars-are-standard-equipment weirdos might be put away for good.  And not before time.

Now, you might have got the impression that exponents of introspection are not held in particularly high esteem by the marketing and consumer research community, and regrettably this seems to be the case.  Apart from being constantly told to ‘get a grip on ourselves’ – which is part of the problem, not the solution, I assure you – and having our manuscripts rejected on receipt, it is no exaggeration to state that subjective personal introspectors are the Other, the untouchables, the unclean, the auto-eroticists of marketing discourse. 

It was not always thus, however.  Introspection, the act of self-conscious self-examination, was once the procedural primus inter pares of psychology.  Believe me.  As an analytical method, indeed, it goes back to Locke, Hobbes, Descartes, Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine’s De Trinitate.¹  The Ancient Greeks, apparently, didn’t know how to introspect.  Perhaps they just didn’t think about it enough, though they certainly thought that thinking needed thinking about. 

I think.

Be that as it may, introspection was the principal tool of psychological endeavour at the start of the present century.  Espoused by such intellectual luminaries as Franz Bretano and William James, and honed into a rigorous methodological instrument by the indefatigable Wilhelm Wundt, introspection was widely regarded as the royal road to self-knowledge.  The basis upon which a fully-fledged science of psychology could be constructed, no less.  Granted, introspection was not without its attendant difficulties.  For example, the problem of divided attention – that is, the brain’s apparent inability to cope with two tasks at once -- was perceived by some to be a potentially fatal flaw, albeit if you are one of the lucky few who can walk and chew gum at the same time, you’ll probably disagree. 

In fact, none other than Wild Bill James himself countered this damaging critique by contending that attention wasn’t divided when introspecting, since thought processes were self-examined retrospectively (sequential instead of simultaneous attention, in effect).  It is debatable whether James’s stream of sluice-gated consciousness actually resolved the difficulty, since it effectively conflates memory and introspection.  Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the self-absorption of the fin de siècle was (dis)embodied in psychology’s fin de siècle belief that self-knowledge was not only attainable, not only analysable, not only true, but also the key to the very doors of, the very doors of, the very doors of…I’m tempted to say perception but that would be historically inaccurate and unscholarly to boot.  What the hell, ‘perception’. 

Possibly on account of Wundt’s excesses -- his experiments involved displaying 10,000 green blocks to luckless subjects -- introspectionism soon fell rapidly fell from grace, as the citadel of psychology was conquered by Watson, Tolman, Lashley and ensuing behaviourist hordes.  For all I know, Wundt’s catatonic volunteers may have led the charge of the behaviourist zombies.  Certainly, compared to them, Skinner’s electrocuted rodents were reasonably well treated and, in the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the hapless introspectees deserted the sinking psychological ship to make room for the rats.

Classical behaviourism, of course, all but abandoned consideration of mental processes in its pursuit of psychological science (and the subsequent cognitive revolutionaries didn’t have much time for it either).  In a priceless piece of intellectual legerdemain - the ritual breaking of the paradigmatic vessels referred to in the previous chapter - Watson dismissed the entire introspective tradition in these immortal words:

A behaviourist does not deny that mental states exist.  He merely prefers to ignore them.  He “ignores” them in the same sense that chemistry ignores alchemy, astronomy, horoscopy, and psychology ignores telepathy and psychic manifestations.  The behaviourist does not concern himself with them because as the stream of his science broadens and deepens such older concepts are sucked under, never to reappear.²

Later on, after psychology was firmly hooked on the behaviourist narcotic, the paradigm pushers felt confident enough to relax a little and allow some place for introspection.  After all, humans do appear to have this bizarre propensity to ponder their own thoughts and actions.   It develops in children at the age of eight or thereabouts, just in time for them to realise that if they whine long enough or throw a sufficiently embarrassing tantrum, they’ll get the extra pocket money, soft toys or M&Ms they covet.  Either that or a clip around the ear.

Behaviourism’s attempt to accommodate introspection, however, involved little more than the condescending nod that will be familiar to all devotees of post-positivist marketing research.  Known as the context-of-discovery gambit, this involves variations on the old chestnut it’s-not-proper-science-but-might-just-might-provide-us-real-scholars-with-a-source-of-testable-hypotheses.  For example…

Behaviourism has a place for introspection, but it must be a vastly different form of introspection from that which now burdens the literature.  Its avowed aim to must be the discovery of cues to physiological problems and its final appeal for verification to the results of objective methods.  Such introspection may make the preliminary survey, but it must be followed by the chain and transit of objective measurement.³

Ah, you’ve gotta love them, don’t you?

Stigmatised, marginalised and effectively consigned to the ‘production orientation’ slot in the pseudo-history of psychology - as today’s introductory textbooks continue to testify - introspection is still widely regarded as psychology’s youthful indiscretion, an intellectual error of judgement, a cerebral brainstorm, if I can put it like that. 

Thereafter, you’ll be pleased to hear, the introspective torch was passed to the real men of brain science, AI and genetics, as well as that happy band of thinkers, the philosophers of mind.⁴  You’ll be even more pleased to hear that I won’t be pursuing introspection down the synaptic pathways and neural networks of the ‘brain as radar scanner’ trope (Armstrong), ‘brain as computer’ comparison (Putnam), ‘brain as water closet’ simile (Freud) or the ‘brain as gene pool’ allusion (Dennett), though the ‘text as brain’ metaphor that I’m currently articulating does have some interesting possibilities, which I might come back to provided my short-term textual memory isn’t defective.  Quick, tie a piece of string around this sentence!

Suffice it to say that while introspection may have gone absent-without-leave from the front-line regiments of psychological science, or at least its elite corps, it remains something of an intellectual mercenary. Many of the most interesting latter-day developments, indeed, indicate that it is now fighting for the other side.  I refer, of course, to the humanities.  Introspection, remember, has long been and remains a staple of artistic endeavour.  To some extent at least, artists, poets, musicians, novelists and so on examine the inner self, evaluate these investigations and express the outcome of their deliberations in a creative fashion.⁵ 

Paul Auster, for instance, talks about ‘descending into’ the self;⁶ Arthur Rimbaud famously announced that ‘I is another’ (je est un autre)⁷ and, in a particularly interesting instantiation of the introspective impulse, biographers often wrestle with the problems of getting ‘inside the mind’ of their subject, not to mention the associated need to ‘get into’ their own mind in order to get into the mind of the subject (which is in turn affected by the influence of the subject’s mind on the biographer’s mind - and so the creative process continues).⁸

Artists and writers, to be sure, are a disreputable bunch on the whole and their personal hygiene often leaves a lot to be desired (I speak as a one shower per week Irishman, but only if I really need it).  When it comes to diseases, filthy habits, offensive language and outrageous behaviour, whether it be Baudelaire’s encomium to hallucinogens, Hemingway’s hooch-fuelled bullfights, Keith Moon’s fondness for blowing up portable toilets or Alice Cooper’s love of, er, golf, you can rest assured that the artistic avant garde will have got there before the rest of us.  And God knows they’re welcome to it.

Of late, however, this artistic preoccupation with self- (‘expression’, ‘destruction’, ‘justification’, ‘improvement’; delete as necessary) has entered the academic domain. For many marketing scholars, I readily admit, the liberal arts and humanities comprise a wasteland of laid-back, long-haired, left-leaning, lotus eaters -- smokers possibly -- who lounge about in libraries, complaining about overpaid business school professors, while the latter are out selflessly helping companies cope with  today’s cut-and-thrust world of global competition (pausing only to count their selflessly sizeable consultancy fees). 

Worse, the languorous loafers of the liberal arts are so dissolute and degenerate that they don’t even believe in themselves any more, what with their deconstructed, post-structuralised, solipsistic, Goddamn relativist talk.  They are the conscientious objectors of the academy, intellectual draft dodgers, scholarly yellow-bellies, the white feather wearers of cerebration.  They probably inhaled.

It is not my place to defend the sometimes dirty, often delinquent and invariably dipsomaniac denizens of the liberal arts.  Most of the ones in our place make William Burroughs look like a particularly well-scrubbed, clean-living Amish, with Calvinistic inclinations and a Jesuitical streak. What’s more, none of them has said so much as a kind word about marketing, unless you consider ‘capitalist price-gouger’ an epithet of approbation (though compared to some of the things I’ve been called, it is!).  So, why the hell should we do the noble, community-of-scholars, live-and-let-live thing? Turning the other cheek on literary theorists is not recommended, if you see what I mean.  Let’s be honest, the humungoids of the humanities are perfectly capable of looking after themselves.  Most of them have artistic ambitions, remember, and plan to quit academic life once their screenplay-in-progress gets green-lighted. 

Some chance.

Like most stereotypes, marketing’s view of the liberal artisans has some basis in fact.  They are a grisly crew of malingering malcontents in the main, most definitely not the type of people you’d want to bring home to mother.  Anthony Perkins’ excepted.  Their arrogance, furthermore, is so breathtakingly boundless that even economists seem shy, retiring and modest by comparison.  And economists have much to be modest about, I’m sure you agree.

If the stereotype of the humanitarians held by the stereotypical marketing man on the stereotypical Clapham Omnibus is stereotypically correct, insofar as the stereotypical liberal artist’s literary abilities are surpassed only by their estimation of their literary abilities, it is mistaken in another significant sense.  The liberal arts in general and literary criticism in particular are no longer the domain of deconstructionists, Marxists, deconstructed Marxists, Marxist deconstructionists, deconstructed Marxist deconstructionists and the like.⁹  Granted, the coils of the boa-deconstructors remain loosely wrapped around the field and the hegemony of the Marxist lit-crit bourgeoisie is almost everywhere apparent, in an imperceptibly pervasive kind of way. Nevertheless, a modicum of intellectual emancipation-cum-reconstruction has transpired in recent years.

For example, as a clear counter-reaction against the obscurantist, author-excising afflatus of the post-structuralists, contemporary literary theory is suspiciously reader-friendly. Fiendishly complex exegeses of the paradoxes, aphorias and literary non-sequiturs of canonical texts, have been superseded, to some extent at least, by a veritable slew of personal reminiscences, anecdotal remarks, candid soul-barings and endearingly conversational modes of address.  Known as ‘autobiographical criticism’, this essentially comprises acts of academic introspection; that is, scholars reflecting on their individual, lived experiences with specific works of literature and writing revelatory accounts of these highly private, sometimes deeply moving, textual encounters.¹⁰ 

The endeavours of such self-confessed ‘confessional critics’ are not without their critics, however.¹¹  Showing the usual linguistic circumspection for which literary theorists are justly renowned, the opponents of autobiographical criticism have accused its devotees of  dreadful intellectual crimes including narcissism, exhibitionism and self-indulgence (the sorts of things, naturally, that the deconstructors never exhibited).  Indeed, there is some evidence of an impending ‘back to books’ backlash. Nevertheless, this self-unburdening, tell-all, no doubt therapeutic approach to literary analysis has become something of a critical commonplace.  So much so, as Simpson observes, ‘the award of tenure now seems to bring with it a contract for one’s autobiography’.¹²  Veeser, in fact, goes so far as to suggest that ‘auto-critography’ has taken over from deconstruction as the lit-crit orthodoxy.¹³

Like me, you may be wondering why anyone in their right mind would want to read the so-called ‘confessions of the critics’, but there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Theodore, than are dremp’t of in your marketing philosophy.  Like you, I would rather have a ravenous rat attached to my nether regions than peruse any of their revolting revelations, even heavily expurgated versions thereof.  However, in the different strokes, de gustibus, no rules, whatever turns, anything goes, post-postmodern spirit, I think we should allow them to tell their grisly tales, ideally well out of school. 

Luckily, we don’t have to wallow for long in the malarial lit-crit. mire, since it is their introspective inclination that interests leading marketing and consumer researchers such as ourselves.  Unfortunately for us, this self-same, self-obsessed, self-serving propensity is apparent in an another latter-day development in the liberal arts; namely, the much-lauded ironic and/or reflexive turn.¹⁴  Now as you know, irony is a highly self-conscious mode of literary address, that has been around since the Ancient Greeks (unless my sources are having me on), but comes to scholarly prominence from time to time.  Even in America. 

Let me elaborate.

Consider the statement, ‘Stephen Brown clearly states’. For those unfamiliar with the field of marketing and consumer research, such a remark may seem comparatively straightforward or unproblematic, though some may wonder who on earth this Stephen Brown guy is and why they should waste their precious time listening to what he is clearly stating.   Those cognisant of the lineaments of the discipline, however, will know that this statement can only be ironic.  I mean, when has Stephen Brown ever ‘clearly’ stated anything?  What’s more he doesn’t ‘state’, he shouts, screams and throws textual tantrums.  Of course, those who know even better will realise that Stephen Brown is being ironic when he clearly states that ‘Stephen Brown clearly states’ is an ironic statement, although most of you sophisticates have probably gathered that he’s being ironic about being ironic about being ironic about ‘Stephen Brown clearly states’.  And you can’t get much clearer than that.

Likewise, reflexivity is the characteristic postmodern conceit where texts are self-conscious and, in effect, bend back in on themselves (saucy!).  Essentially, this involves writers writing about their writing, commenting on their comments, cogitating on their cogitations, ruminating on their ruminations, reflecting on their reflections, complaining about the complaint that no-one understands their complaints and, above all, writing about writers writing about their writing, commentating on commentators commenting on their comments, cogitating on cogitators cogitating on their cogitations, ruminating on ruminants ruminating on their ruminations, reflecting on reflexives reflecting on their reflections and, not least, complaining about complainers complaining about the complaint that no-one understands their complaints.  Understand?

Fortunately, such egregious acts of textual self-sodomy and ‘ironic’ self-abuse are almost unknown in marketing and consumer research.  Even in America.  Hence, we don’t need to concern ourselves unduly with such smug, self-satisfied textual affectations. It is sensible to take precautions, however, since this affected affliction is heading in our direction, having been spotted in sociology, psychology, philosophy, political science, anthropology and, heaven help us, organisation studies.  (Lord only knows what’ll happen when it penetrates economics and ops management.  I can hardly wait for the models of the modelling process, can you?  Mind you the economics journals have been ironic for years.  No change there, then.)¹⁵

Vaccination, as you may be aware, involves injecting a minute dose of the disease in order to increase resistance to the full-blown version.  It follows that if we are to protect ourselves from the intellectual ebola virus of introspection – ironic, reflexive or otherwise -- it may be necessary to introduce a diluted version of the stuff.  To this end a few devoted, not to say self-abnegating, members of the consumer research community have been busy on the introspective front, writing first-person, first-hand, first-class, first past the postmodern marketing accounts of their own consumption experiences.  Although ‘autoethnographies’, as they are sometimes called, remain comparatively rare, the range of consuming passions essayed thus far include skydiving, weight lifting, long-distance running, sexual sustenance, near death experiences and obsessive collecting behaviour.  Basically, the sorts of things that most ordinary shoppers do on a Saturday morning.¹⁶

Sadly, the selfless actions of the consumer introspectionists have not been universally acclaimed, their self-effacing endeavours remain unappreciated, their willing self-sacrifices go unrewarded.  Indeed, it pains me deeply to report the almost incomprehensible fact that not only are these consumer compositions uncompensated, but their authors’ academic altruism, intellectual philanthropy and all-round marketing munificence has been roundly condemned.  Although a number of voices have been raised in opposition, the principal critics of introspection are Wallendorf and Brucks.¹⁷  In a wide-ranging assessment, they distinguish between several different types of introspection and contend that ‘researcher introspection’ suffers from very severe shortcomings.  These methodological inadequacies are so profound that the technique has little to recommend it, except as a means of accomplishing other, non-scholarly, essentially narcissistic, lamentably exhibitionist ends.  Such studies, they conclude, ‘make for fun reading but may mislead readers if not based on sound, carefully thought-out and articulated methods’.¹⁸

I’m sure you agree, this is hardly the way to treat those who give of themselves so that the rest of us can sleep easy in our beds, safe in the knowledge that the mad dogs of the liberal arts are being kept firmly at bay.  In fact, the introspector in chief, Steve Gould, paid the ultimate academic price - denial of tenure.  As with so many other seers, visionaries and innovators, it seems that the autoethnographers are little more than a laughing stock who, to put it at its most charitable, add a dash of local colour and provide a modicum of light relief from the real research work being done by the mining engineers, the bridge builders, the dam busters, the rocket scientists, the moon walkers, the build-a-better-mousetraps of the marketing academy.  Even those who are otherwise open-minded and supportive towards intellectual unorthodoxy have distanced themselves from introspection, a communicable disease that is doubtless debilitating, certainly contagious and probably terminal.

John Sherry, for example, someone who once championed ‘ragamuffin, barefoot insouciance’¹⁹ and has written several compelling autobiographical accounts of his own consumption behaviours, now concedes that introspection is within ‘perilous proximity to self-indulgence’.²⁰  Kahle sneers that introspective essays are mildly diverting in a pulp fiction, B-movie, romantic novel, cheap music, common-herd, down ’n’ dirty kind of way.²¹  Such textual fish ’n’ chips, such scholarly Big Macs, such intellectual bread and circuses, may fill the bellies of the academic proletariat (circuses can be hard to digest, I confess) but they are much too unsophisticated for the educated marketing palate.  And, in a breath-taking move of mind-boggling hypocrisy, none other than Melanie makes-for-fun-reading Wallendorf has recently urged her marketing brethren to ‘break out of the box’ and become more methodologically creative, albeit always within reason. (Translation: you can get a little bit pregnant, sisters, but not too pregnant.)²²

Peace loving, self effacing, shy and retiring humanitarians that they are, the shopping introspectionists are understandably reluctant to indulge in epistemological fisticuffs. After all, it’s hardly a fair fight since the weight difference is such that it makes David and Goliath look like Goliath’s Dad versus David’s kid brother.  Nevertheless, the bashful counter-punchers of introspection have developed a marketing equivalent of the old one-two. 

The left, thrown by Morris ‘hitman’ Holbrook and his erstwhile sparring partner Stephen J. no-I’m-not-the-Harvard-biologist-but-I-wish-I-had-his-royalties Gould, comprises an attempt to justify the technique in broadly ‘scientific’ terms.²³  Drawing upon an impressive body of supporting literature, ranging from rhetoric and romanticism to neo-pragmatist philosophy, our dynamic duo posit that introspection is nothing less than the ultimate form of participant observation.  In a familiar defensive feint, moreover, they contend that ruling the procedure out of court is both premature and unnecessarily restrictive (yes friends, the classic ‘advancement of science, who knows what the future will hold’ side-step, one routinely employed by the heavyweight champions of the hard sciences).

The right, lately swung by Sidney ‘haymaker’ Levy, is yet another old knock-em-dead favourite.  Indeed, it is the veritable horseshoe-in-the-glove, the below-the-belt-eye-waterer, the look-out-your-shoelace-is-undone, the sorry-ref-was-that-his-ear?-I-thought-it-was-a-cauliflower of academic discourse.  That’s right, the timeless tu quoque, you-do-it-too uppercut.  Introspection, according to El-Sid, is an integral part of the research process, everyone does it, it cannot be avoided and to deny the utility of introspection is to deny the utility of research itself.²⁴  The gossip round the gym, I’m told, is that a certain lightweight Irishman has accused those celebrated sluggers, Wallendorf and Brucks, of employing introspection in their much-vaunted critique of introspection.  Disgraceful, I know, but they obviously don’t fight by the Marquis of Queensbury rules over there.  Barbarians, the lot of them.²⁵

Trusty as the old one-two undoubtedly is, and many an opponent though the left jab, right cross combination has efficiently felled, boxing remains a very dangerous cerebral sport.  Goodness, there must be hundreds of brain-damaged, punch-drunk has-beens knocking around the marketing academy.  You know the type, shuffling along, mumbling to themselves about truth, realism, model building, general theories, marketing’s scientific status and the like.  Whatever you do, however, don’t waste your sympathy on them.  They had everything and threw it all away.  They’ve no-one to blame but themselves.  They coulda been contenders and ended up in Palukaville.  No-body up here likes them.

In this respect, it is arguable that our Rocky Balboas of autobiography, unconcerned though they appear to be by the strength, stamina and power of their opponents, are completely mismatched.  Nuttin’s ’ova ’til it’s ’ova, I realise, but the fact remains that the shots thrown by both the introspection-is-perfectly-valid heavy-hitters and the everyone-does-it-research-is-a-dirty-business rabbit-punchers are not only ineffective but misdirected.  What self-regarding social scientist is likely to drop their guard and fall for the feeble sample-of-one slap ’n’ tickle?  Similarly, the tu quoque sucker-punch is rendered indecisive thanks to the padded headgear, gum shield and protective cup afforded by the  context of discovery (yes, introspection has its place but there’s a vast difference between using the procedure to develop hypotheses, which are subsequently subject to rigorous testing, and employing it as the primary research method).

An alternative tactic, articulated by Stephen I’m-a-writer-not-a-fighter Brown, is to argue that the boxing analogy is singularly inappropriate. (You know, it’s amazing what the ‘fragmented authorial self’ allows you to get away with.)  However his basic point, as I understand it, is that the introspectors are playing a completely different sport, a non-contact sport, a non-sport sport.  In other words, that introspective essays are not, never were and should not be considered ‘scientific’, as such.  They are works of art, which resonate, reverberate, dazzle and evoke an epiphanic ‘A-ha, that rings true, that’s the way it is’ reaction in the reader.²⁶ 

Well written ones do, anyhow. 

Just as apples and bananas, shoes and hats, boxing and chess, and Elvis and Meatloaf are completely different categories of object and difficult directly to compare, except in their own good-banana/bad-banana intra-category terms (Meatloaf and Elvis are the same person, now that you mention it, or else Meat was El’s Las Vegas love child, although I naturally hesitate to speculate on the specific alien species he impregnated), so too the introspective essay should not be expected to conform to the ‘standard’ scientific criteria of reliability, validity, objectivity, trustworthiness and suchlike.  They may not be scientific, in any conventional sense, but that does not mean that works of introspective literature are uninsightful or that marketing and consumer research can’t obtain something meaningful from them. 

Introspective essays, as Khale archly observes, may be a bit like reading a novel.²⁷  Correct!  Call me a fool, as many do. Call me a trouble-maker, as almost everyone does. Call me a cab before Attila the Hunt steps into the ring.  But, tell me something, is this supposed to be a criticism?  Maybe I’m mistaken, as I often am, yet it seems to me that writers, poets and creative artists - introspectors one and all - can provide real, genuine, significant, otherwise unobtainable insights into the character of consumer behaviour and the nature of marketing.  As I mentioned in Chapter Two and the sainted Russell Belk made clear more than a decade ago, ‘one can learn more about the complexity of motives and mutual perception from a reasonably good novel than from a “solid” piece of social science research’.²⁸

You buyin’ it, amigos?  No?  Okay then, may I momentarily remind you of my epigraph from the good book?  Still not convinced?  Then, let me quote Stanislav Andreski, someone who says extremely nasty things about the social sciences generally:

There is no reason to deny the existence of phenomena known to us only through introspection; and a number of philosophers have pointed out the impossibility of carrying out Carnap’s programme (accepted as a dogma by the behaviourists) of translating all statements about mental states into what he calls the physicalist language.  I would go even further and argue that physics itself cannot be expressed in the physicalist language alone because it is an empirical science only insofar as it includes an assertion that its theories are corroborated by the evidence of the senses; and we can assign no meaning to the latter term without entailing a concept of the self.  If you ask a physicist to tell you how he tested a hypothesis he will say: ‘I did this, I did that; I saw this and that…’.  If you disbelieve him and he invites you to take part in experimenting you will say: ‘Ah, now I see…this moves here and this moves there…now I see such a colour or line or what have you’.  Thus you cannot give an account of the evidential foundations of physics without hearing and uttering ‘I’.  And what kind of meaning can you attach to this word without using the knowledge obtained through introspection; and without postulating the existence of other minds within which processes are taking place which are similar to those which you alone can observe?²⁹

How’s about the comments of Colin Campbell, another noted critic?

Introspection is a legitimate method of inquiry open for use by any researcher or scholarly investigator, no matter what their discipline.  To reject it out of hand on the pretext that it is “unscientific” strikes me a particularly churlish if only because it should be obvious that the study of a wide range of phenomena is necessarily dependent on such an activity.  Those who wish to investigate topics as various as backache, daydreaming, nostalgia, creativity and mystic enlightenment are all in the first instance dependent on reports that derive from introspection.  To accept that such data are indispensable when originating from “subjects” but to deny it any value when it originates from “researcher as subject” has always seemed to me to be a peculiarly inconsistent standpoint.³⁰

Oh, all right then, George I’m-so-much-better-read-than-you Steiner it is:

More than ordinary men and women, the significant painter, sculptor, musician or poet relates the raw material, the anarchic prodigalities of consciousness and sub-consciousness to the latencies, often unperceived, untapped before him, of articulation.  This translation out of the inarticulate and the private into the general matter of human recognition requires the utmost crystallisation and investment of introspection and control.³¹

Jesus, I’m beginning to sound like Morris quote-everybody-especially-myself-and-maybe-something-will-stick Holbrook.  Any more nonsense from you lot and I’ll start quoting Holbrook, or Holbrook quoting Holbrook, or Holbrook quoting Holbrook quoting Holbrook. 

But don’t quote me.

Anyway, back down now, boys and girls, or else it’ll get really ugly when I’m forced to call forth today’s “confessional” climate – Oprah Winfrey, Jerry Springer and the storm-troopers of psychotherapy.  I’m warning you!  I can regurgitate the Romantics if I have to and the Decadents are just dying to get their teeth into something juicy.³² You wouldn’t believe what Mad Max Nordau, Batty Henri Bergson and call me Madame Blavatsky can do when they’re riled.

I take it you’re coming round.  Let’s move on before Oscar and the Wilde Boys get here.

[ Preface ] [ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ]  [ Notes ]