Week 3: Saussure: 2, Foucault: 1

Turns out that the postmodern turn can occur with the click of one button! Much like my fellow blogger Quill, I played around with the quiz a few times. Saussure: 2, Foucault: 1. Saussure for the win? All it took to achieve this critical change in discourse was to change my response to one question: “Good research results in…” I was somewhat unsure about my response because I felt just as strongly about responding with “relative objective truth” and “identifying structures and systems”. I thought about my response and my first instinct was to think about the option that I would have liked to have seen. I would have blended the two previous options into something like this: Good research results in the identification of a relative objective truth within a specific spatio-temporal context and the structures and systems that produce and reproduce these situated discourses. That was long and unwieldy.

My previous research explored identity and landscape transformation in Montréal during the 1960s Quiet Revolution. I was interested in analyzing how social identities are influenced through the reshaping of the urban landscape and vice-versa. In particular, I wanted to know more about how the social and physical construction of CBD spaces in city during this tumultuous period marginalized working-class, inner-city manufacturing districts across all ethnolinguistic identities. I answered my research questions through a theoretical lens that is best described as poststructural because that is simply where my empirical work led me. I ended up with a case study that illustrated how multiple discourses essentially competed within an existing structure to (re)produce the landscape, and that because of the changing relationship of ethnolinguistic identity relative to capital ownership throughout time, not all groups were able to equitably appropriate land in order to assert their respective identity. All this to say that my research showed me over and over again how relative truths need to be considered in relation to extant structures and that we need to know how those structures came to be. So why does this quiz set up an artificial divide in associated good research with either ‘relative objective truth’ or ‘identifying structures and systems’? I’m not even sure that Foucault would like to see his theories perceived as standing in opposition to the “identifying structures and systems” option… Post-structuralists would say it’s about both, it’s about teasing out the dialectical relationships between discursive power effects and structures that interpellate each other over time and at specific sites.