Poetic witness

Poetry reveals the researcher

Once a taboo form of writing that undermined claims to validity (Cahnmann-Taylor, 2008), poetry is now acknowledged as a means to embrace the experiences and active presence of researchers within research procedures. If as Tedlock (2000: 455) argues, knowledge formation is inseparable from personal experience, then research is always ‘located between the interiority of autobiography and the exteriority of cultural analysis’. Poetry serves to elucidate this relationship between the knower and the known by introducing and accounting for researchers’ personal biases and feelings within the representations of knowledge that they construct (Prendergast, 2009).

In light of criticisms of ‘realist’ forms of representation in qualitative research (Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Van Maanen, 1995), this is an important goal towards which marketing research has made progress through poetry (Sherry and Schouten, 2002). Poetry has helped to reveal researchers’ intense cultural experiences, their embodied and emotional biases, and layers of memory and meaning, all of which colour interpretations of research sites and analyses of data (Dholakia, 2005; Schouten, 2009; Sherry, 2008). This being the case, far from undermining claims to validity, poetry can improve qualitative inquiry by acknowledging and illuminating the presences and experiences of researchers in the production of knowledge.

In short, poetry reveals researchers as ‘masked and unmasked, costumed and bared, liars and truth tellers, actors and audience, offstage and onstage in the process of research’ (Prendergast, 2006: 371). Some readers will question whether this outcome cannot be achieved through prose writing. To be sure, researcher reflexivity is an important aspect of all qualitative inquiry (Bettany and Woodruffe-Burton, 2009). Nevertheless, poetry enables researchers to illuminate different effects from those uncovered by prose writing. To explain how this is so, let us consider the potential of poetry to unfix marketing knowledge from dominant discourses within our field.

Poetry creates territory for new knowledge

The potential of poetry in marketing research is not limited to peeling back layers of researcher reflexivity. Rather, poetry is a useful tool to expand territories of knowledge creation in manners that push marketing theory forwards. My justification for this statement largely stems from the power of poetry to ‘unfix’ language from the expectations and conventions of canonical research methods, written texts and theoretical interpretations (Stern, 1998). Such conventions act to silence utterances that contradict these canonical discourses (Lyotard, 1988). The possibility to transcend linguistic barriers is an important goal if we are to continue to explore the realms of social action and the constitution of market phenomena in manners that extend approaches that are already familiar within our field (Schouten, 1998).

It is worth stating here that limitations in epistemology, interpretation and the practice of research are not created by language itself, but the ways in which our research puts language to use. Consumer culture theory (CCT) research, for instance, is dominated by theoretical discourses of identity, community, ideology and social–cultural patterning of consumption (Arnould and Thompson, 2005). On the one hand, these discourses organize research into streams through which incremental contributions are built; on the other hand, they can territorialize and police the possibilities of method, theory, representation and conversation within our field (Foucault, 1994). As such, research discourses act both as guides and as barriers to understanding.

It follows that by admitting alternative forms of language such as poetry into the research process, we may rework entrenched methods and metaphors, and enjoy a bloom of alternative discourses that afford new ways of knowing about marketplace cultures. Prendergast (2006: 369), for instance, regards poetry as a means to present data in manners that ‘reflect on, play against, and perform’ the topic of inquiry. In terms of ‘reflecting on’ inquiry, poetry can extend the boundaries of prose and offer more holistic expressions of reflexivity (Wijland, 2011). In terms of ‘playing against’ inquiry, poetry can enhance space for sensuous, experiential effects that are sometimes glossed over in more prosaic accounts (Dewsbury, 2003; Prendergast, 2006; Stern, 1998). Finally, in terms of performing inquiry, poetry can engage us with presentations of data that are not only reflected upon or remembered, but viscerally felt as ‘sensuous scholarship’ (Sherry and Schouten, 2002: 223).

It could be argued, for instance, that intense experiences of pleasure, pain, desire, joy or fear require spaces for expression and inquiry beyond regular modes of representation. Depth interview transcripts in particular, tend to elicit highly reflexive and self-conscious accounts of consumers’ identity and meaning-making procedures (Dewsbury, 2003; Wijland, 2011). Poetry, on the other hand, offers a means to present emotional experiences in a more emotive manner (Sherry and Schouten, 2002). This is an important feature of poetry, and one that can help us to better acknowledge the emotionally charged nature of consumption experiences that involve, for instance, addiction, loss, bereavement or loved objects.

The inclusion of poetry in marketing research therefore balances approaches that concentrate on consumers’ self-reflexive identity and meaning-making narratives by creating space for presentations of consumers’ moment-by-moment experiences (Wijland, 2011). This quality of research can help us to build theory that further includes and incorporates hard to measure experiences (Hewer and Hamilton, 2010), such as ‘in the moment’ feelings of communitas, flow, pleasure or desire. In order to approach this goal, I now present a poetic tool to acknowledge and consider sensory and emotional phenomena in consumption experiences.

Poetic transcription

One way to communicate emotional phenomena in emotional manners is poetic transcription. Poetic transcription involves ‘the creation of poem-like compositions from the words of interviewees’ (Glesne, 1997: 202). Procedures of transcription are familiar within ethnographic explorations of marketplace cultures. Arnould and Wallendorf (1994: 497) explain this process of constructing ethnographic representations and interpretations from multiple data sources:

[T]he voices of native participants come through clearly as they enact and recount their consumption experiences. After developing an interpretation, the ethnographer selects stellar exemplars of identified layers of meaning and presents them using such devices as videos of customer stories, transcriptions from observations and unstructured interviews, or excerpts (often on video) from focus groups.

An acknowledged strength of this transcriptive mode lies in the poly-vocal nature of the texts generated (Canniford, 2005). Such vocal collages go a little way towards overcoming criticisms of patriarchal representations of ethnography in which the researcher occupies a singular and privileged authorial position (Clifford, 1986, 1990). Instead, through transcription, a more complex and contested version of cultural reality is developed in which the role of the researcher is to become familiar with data and to then compile and juxtapose texts according to interpretations and research questions (Arnould and Wallendorf, 1994). Once this is done, initial findings can be reported back to participants via member checking procedures in order to test the validity of findings and credibility of representations (Lincoln and Guba, 1985).

The difference between this canonical mode of transcription and poetic transcription is the manner in which data are treated once collected. Similar to regular forms of transcription, data destined for poetic transcription are first coded and sorted. Rather than reporting meaningful quotes and exemplar language verbatim, however, words and phrases are appropriated and imaginatively reconstructed in the light of research questions (Glesne, 1997; Prendergast, 2006). Figure 1 illustrates this process of transforming an interview transcript into a poetic transcription.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Assembling a poetic transcription (after Glesne, 1997)

It is clear that the researcher continues to play a strong role in selecting the essences and textures that interview transcripts yield. Nevertheless, Glesne (1997) emphasizes how multiple transcriptions can emerge from an interview, hence poetic transcriptions, just like their regular counterparts, should be reflected and reworked among interviewees through member checking procedures. In this way poetic transcriptions can remain faithful to interviewees’ ways of saying things, and resonate with their emotional experiences (Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor, 2010).

Poetic transcription thus extends the benefits and potentials gained in researcher–reflexive uses of poetry outwards by recognizing the emotionally textured worlds of research participants. This can enhance insight. From the transcriptive exercise illustrated in Figure 1 for instance we can freshly interpret Zak’s sense of wonder, amazement and a desire for difference achieved through what he calls a loving and spiritual interaction with the ocean. The poetic rendering of the interview transcript contains the key phrases with respect to these themes, yet binds them in an emotive, compelling and powerful bundle. Such ‘optimally reduced presentations’ (Wijland, 2011: 133) help us to re-approach an interview (Glesne, 1997), in this case helping us to know about Zak in a way that foregrounds his sense of magical merging with a numinous nature that he feels is made possible by surfing.

Poetry challenges theoretical paradigms

In addition to the potential to imbue research with spaces for emotionally charged data, poetry also creates territory for the development of new theoretical paradigms. Imaginative means of knowledge creation are seen to challenge dominant theoretical outlooks by blurring or breaking boundaries of art, humanities and science (Brown and Patterson, 2000; Glesne, 1997). More specifically, transcending these boundaries affords insight into the diverse ‘meaning sets’ (Gould, 2008: 414) from which consumers’ lives and cultures are constructed, as well as enabling opportunities to tie together polar modes of thought and representation in manners that permit access to novel accounts of consumer culture.

Schouten’s (1998) poetry demonstrates this notion. Composed from letters in brand names, themes and codes emerge from interior conversations between brands and the researcher. Such a technique permits access to the ‘rhizomatic and situated character’ of consumption (Sherry and Schouten, 2002: 221); the ways in which dense clusters of material culture, discourses, cognitive, creative and embodied experiences combine to assemble marketplace cultures. Thrift (2007) in particular calls for research methods that explore these diverse associations of consumer experience, material objects, social discourses and physical forces. This call is important, because it enables us to consider new directions in marketing theory.

It is with respect to this possibility that poetry can be developed to yield theoretical perspectives in which the voices of consumers are placed beside those of the objects, images, technologies and texts that enable consumer’s experiences of power, action and thought. The manners in which poetry makes space for sensory perspectives, emotive dialogue and rhizomatic phenomena offers to expand the factors considered salient in the construction of culture and experience. To illustrate this possibility, I will now explain the concept of poetic translation.

Poetic translation

Despite the benefits of poetic transcription, this method tends to perpetuate a focus upon the consumer. Some marketing scholars consider this focus problematic in light of the manner in which objects ‘frequently take control of human lives’ (Firat and Dholakia, 2006: 137). Solutions to this problem suggest that we blur neat subject–object categorizations and consider carefully the matrixes of influences that construct culture and experience (Campbell et al., 2010). These matrixes are likely to be diverse associations of categories that include myths, bodies, political forms, scientific techniques, religions, rituals, objects and physical forces (Latour, 1993).

One such model for a mode of research that can access diverse associations of interconnected categories exists in Alice Oswald’s (2002) poem Dart. Dart is prefaced with the methodological procedures by which Oswald probes a wide variety of voices that can aid understanding of her chosen life world, the river Dart in South Devon. Her procedures will not be unfamiliar to ethnographers:

This poem is made from the language of people who live and work on the Dart. Over the past two years, I’ve been recording conversations with people who know the river. I’ve used these records as life-models from which to sketch out a series of characters – linking their voices into a sound-map of the river, a songline from the source to the sea. (Oswald, 2002: preface)

Once she has collected her data, Oswald uses her interview transcripts as ‘life-models’ from which she begins to sketch out and then link together the culture that springs from the river Dart. Like poetic transcription, Dart is bounded by what can be constructed from the materials available. Dart, however, is an exploratory collection of multiple and unlimited voices. Moving beyond the researcher–reflexive mode that dominates previous uses of poetry in marketing research, and the voices of interview participants represented by poetic transcription, Oswald extends dialogue to animals, plants, the water itself, as well as the myths and folk-tales that flow there.

Such a move meets Thrift’s (2007) demands head-on by threading together an ontologically diverse range of influences. Oswald’s poetry accesses characteristics of culture in a mode that recognizes and presents influences that would not normally be afforded voice. It follows that poetry of this kind is a means to imaginatively translate the properties and potential action and interaction of multiple non-human objects and forces. Tentative precedents for making ‘things’ speak in this way exist in social science. It is a revelatory moment in Latour’s Aramis (1996), for example, when the voice of French public transport emerges within what is otherwise routine ethnographic prose writing. The power of such a move is to decentre the human, and to recognize the roles of ‘inanimate things’ in culture not as inert categories that are acted upon, but as active enablers among human experiences (Kwinter, 2001).

Figure 2 illustrates a poetic translation process. In this case, the focal ‘inanimate’ object/force is a pressure system that generates wind and then waves. The meteorological representation on the left is itself a visual translation of a global pressure system assembled by computer from local barometric and temperature observations represented as isobars (silver lines) and isotherms (coloured/greyscale areas). Air flows between areas of high pressure (1025 millibars) and areas of low pressure (970 millibars). The poetic translation on the right cycles language off the visual translation of an atmospheric phenomenon in manners that seek to present a concentrated, rhizomatic portrayal of interconnected psychic and material influences.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Assembling a poetic translation

The outcome of this procedure reflects the shape, feelings and consequences of the resulting winds in such a way that further insight and meaning can be pondered, and then juxtaposed with other kinds of influences. To achieve this goal, let us now turn to procedures for finding and presenting a multiple register of voices for transcription and translation.

Poetic sampling

In order to begin gathering the constellation of diverse influences from which consumer cultures are assembled, where should the researcher go? Who and what should researchers interview? Beginning to assess the interdependent forces, material resources, social discourses and emotions from which cultures are constructed is an intimidating task. As a solution, Latour (1996) suggests that researchers ‘follow the actors’, allowing participants to determine field sites, and what data to collect. Thus, instead of relying on an a priori geographic or demographic boundaries to the research field or sampling procedures, the researcher first becomes a hub of investigation – sensitive and responsive to the matrix of cultural influences (s)he encounters.

Sampling procedures such as these are nothing new in multi-sited, qualitative inquiry (Canniford, 2005). I would suggest, however, that poetic transcription or translation techniques can aid and direct this kind of sampling once fieldwork has begun. Latham (2003) emphasizes how ideas grow through immersion in the field, thus once data collection is underway, procedures of poetic transcription and translation can be applied to a variety of forms of data (eg. auto-ethnographic and participant diaries, telephone conversations, letters and emails, photographs, screenshots, field notes, and notes on field notes). In so doing, researchers at any stage in the data collection process are provided with a means to creatively consider a range of possible ‘voices’ of cultural influences in a particular field.

In short, the products of poetic transcriptions and translations of data serve to clarify and collect the range of interdependent influences from which culture is constructed. By reflecting on elements of data that represent diverse cultural influences, the researcher can illuminate the interdependent nature of these cultural influences (Sherry and Schouten, 2002). Subsequently, each voice collected can help to gain access to further voices that may not have been previously considered, rather like a non-linear, more-than-human snowballing procedure.

Assembling poetic witness

Once a range of voices has been collected and treated with procedures of poetic transcription and/or translation, the process of building a wider poetic witness can begin. The illustrative presentation that follows is assembled from data gathered between 2002 and 2008 as a process of following the actors (Latour, 1996). These data have been reconstructed and presented through procedures of poetic transcription and poetic translation. The collected researcher reflections, transcriptions and translations are assembled to reflect the basic principles of the surfing experience as part of a ritual, in terms of preparation, communitas and liminality (Turner, 1995).

This organizing principle emerged during member checking procedures, as a structure that reflects on the process, purposes and potentials of the surfing experience, while also highlighting the constellations of heterogeneous material objects, mythic narratives, powerful discourses and physical forces from which surfing experiences unfold. This process of reworking among participants is vital in order to fully develop and improve the validity of the poetic witness. Footnotes are offered to familiarize the reader with influences that come together during surfing and to detail the poetic procedures applied.

Evaluating poetry in marketing research

‘You never know what you might find lurking in the interstices between your own brain and the bubbling cultural stew’ says Schouten (1998: 455). For many of us, however, these stews do not offer appetizing food for thought. Wielded carelessly, poetry can produce melodramatic bathos that undermines the benefits of the medium. Perhaps the witness assembled above exemplifies this risk: it is hard enough to develop an ethnographic voice, but harder still to become a ‘poet’. ⁷ Nonetheless, such a perspective might miss the point, for as Glesne (1997: 213) suggests, ‘poetic transcription moves in the direction of poetry but is not necessarily poetry’.

Accordingly, it could be argued that poetic witness for the purposes of marketing research need not be judged according to the same aesthetic measures as poetry. To be sure, obeying poetic principles in terms of probing sensory, embodied and emotional communication, poetic witness should be grounded in a desire to present the field site in an engaging and insightful manner, over and above wishes to craft an aesthetically pleasing poem. Equally however, with proper training, practice and experience, poetic witness can tread skilfully the borders of art and ethnography, thereby yielding even more powerful idiomatic insights and improved representation.

Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor (2010) consider practised poetic technique to be key in conveying meaning effectively. Where canonical forms of qualitative representation can gloss over the indirection, ambiguity and lacunae that characterize culture, poetry can approach and present these features (Maynard, 2008; Wijland, 2011). Oswald’s (2002) poem fulfils these potentials. Her use of language not only reflects the features that come together in the river Dart, it expresses the flow of the river. At some points the poem flows full force, at others it gently meanders, or circulates back on itself within eddy-like structures. For Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor (2010: 13) crafted poetic work like this opens territory for effects and relationships that defy normal description: ‘Active engagement in reading and writing poetry enables ethnographic poets to bring discernment and sensual attention to their observations, it helps them to make surprising analytic leaps.’

Analytic leaps

Perhaps this potential to make surprising analytic leaps is the most important implication of this paper. In addition to the expressive power of poetic language, poetic transcription and translation move the use of poetry in marketing research towards a mode that can represent the complex cultural fabrics that consumers are threaded into. This is to say that poetry is a research tool that explores the shapes of culture through a multiplicity of viewpoints (Glesne, 1997; Wijland, 2011).

What happens when multiple and strange voices are given equal credence? One effect you may have noticed in the poetic witness above is that ‘inanimate’ objects (rocks, water, wind, sand and moving air) are acknowledged not merely as stages on which the action occurs, but as vital and active players in the action. Like Dart, the cluster of poetry offered above forms a sound-map from open ocean to beach, weaving in voices of intermediaries and involved parties along the way. I am not suggesting that rocks talk. Rather, that by imagining voice we are able to think through ‘how our bodies are linked to wider consumption spaces and the ways that they are inflected by these sociospatial relations’ (Valentine, 1999: 329).

Moreover, this exercise encourages us to mix categories that are often placed in separate ontological and epistemological ‘bins’ (Campbell et al., 2010; Giesler and Venkatesh, 2005). Through poetic witness, researchers can present accounts of the field, that co-locate categories as diverse as myth, dreams, embodied dispositions, material culture, physical forces and geographical features (Thrift, 2007). For Latour (1996), these co-present voices must be recognized as effects of one another. Features of any cultural environment are interdependent in conjuring one another’s meanings and potential uses through constant performances. The upshot of this approach to understanding culture is the possibility to understand consumers and consumer life worlds as ongoing events constantly called into being that occur through the mixing of material culture, flesh, emotion and discourse (Kwinter, 2001; Latour, 1993; Thrift, 2007).

Poetic witness offers a lens to reveal the surprising issues and effects that transpire from such a model of culture and identity. As with Latour’s (1996) explorations of technological voices, the above poetic witness represents power and action as emergent effects of a matrix of things in which subject and object categories are blurred. In such a scheme, bodies, place and technology become hybridized in surprising ways (Campbell et al., 2010; Sherry, 2000). It may be noted that throughout the witness, there appear opportunities to think in between consumers and the objects and forces that are currently considered in theorizations of consumption experiences. Latour (1993) stresses that a plethora of things mediate the links between taken for granted categories, and all too often, these disappear from view. How then can we consider these things, and what are the benefits if we do?

Writing the small things

As Schouten (1998) points out, poetry tends to violate expectations. This is true not only in relation to what the presentation of qualitative data should look like, but also in respect of the manners in which poetic research can play a role in conceiving of a broader and deeper range of phenomena from which culture is constructed. Such an exploratory approach can help researchers to respond to calls for experimental collaboration and multiplication of perspectives, in order to bridge topical boundaries in marketing research (Brown and Patterson, 2000; Wilk, 2001). More specifically, from the juxtapositional borderlands that poetic transcription and translation highlight, researchers are empowered to design research that measures events and forces that have ‘little tangible presence in that they are not immediately shared and have to be represenced to be communicated’ (Dewsbury, 2003: 1907).

This possibility to ‘represence’ categories from outside the borders of current theory is a serious matter. In deciding to accept or reject methods that can access and present manners in which diverse categories mix together to create consumer experience, we are deciding what phenomena are deemed sensible subjects that can be recovered for investigation (Dewsbury, 2003; Thrift, 2007). The power of poetic transcription and translation to take seriously transient and hybrid phenomena that so easily evade our gazes (Latour, 1993) may help to loosen the grasp of theories that currently dominate marketing research, and generate research questions that probe anew the interdependent networks of consumer culture.

Indeed, from the poetic witness above, categories of inquiry cry out for further investigation. One might note, for instance, the points of transaction, tension and disconnection between consumers and consumption resources; the sexualized and alchemical views of nature (the tone of transcriptions and translations borders on the erotic during the commitment period of the representation); the co-presence of nature, emotion, myth and technology as a source of personal transformation and personal therapy (especially during the communitas stage); perhaps even issues of physical and subjective temperature variation might be useful points of analysis for future studies. In short, food for marketing thought occurs not only between our brains and cultural stews (Schouten, 1998), but also in the interstices of the cultural stews themselves.