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Commentary on Schembri and Boyle (2013): From representation towards expression in videographic consumer research
JBR-07928; No of Pages 4 Journal of Business Research xxx (2013) xxx–xxx
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Business Research
Commentary on Schembri and Boyle (2013): From representation towards expression in videographic consumer research Joel Hietanen a,⁎, Joonas Rokka b,1, John W. Schouten a,c,2 a b c
Aalto University School of Business, Department of Marketing, Finland Neoma Business School, Department of Marketing, France Center for Customer Insight, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 10 October 2013 Accepted 16 October 2013 Available online xxxx Keywords: Videography Visual anthropology Cinema Deleuze Representation Performative turn
a b s t r a c t In this commentary on Schembri and Boyle (2013) we offer an alternative perspective on the use of video in consumer research. The dominant modus operandi for visual research, as recently demonstrated by Schembri and Boyle in the pages of this journal, follows a paradigm typical of anthropological tradition. We propose an alternative approach: an expressive imperative in consumer videography emerging from theory on cinematography and experimental filmmaking, which emphasizes the evocative power of moving images. © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Towards the expressive in videographic research As enthusiasts and advocates of the videographic method in theorizing consumer culture, we are always welcoming of new publications that seek to shed light on the academic applications of the medium. While scholarship in this area remains scarce, that which exists points to video as a powerful medium of contratextual presentation. For example, it has been argued that, compared to text, video is especially able to record expressions and bodily presence in contextual space (Belk & Kozinets, 2005); it is more emotional, resonant and commanding of attention (De Valck, Rokka, & Hietanen, 2009); it is in some sense more ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ (Spanjaard & Freeman, 2007); and it is able to “capture the context-rich environment” (Smith, Fisher, & Cole, 2007: 89); it is multi-sensory (Pink, 2009); and the “glimmer of the gem” (Sunderland, 2006: 378). Belk and Kozinets (2004) attribute to video “tremendous possibilities to enlighten, expose, analyze, entertain, stimulate, and critique more effectively than other types of conference presentations” (p. 6). They observe that while “consumer culture is bright and noisy”
⁎ Corresponding author at: Aalto University School of Business, Department of Marketing, Lapuankatu 2, P.O. Box 21230, 00076 AALTO, Helsinki, Finland. Tel.: +358 503120927. E-mail addresses: joel.hietanen@aalto.fi (J. Hietanen), [email protected] (J. Rokka), john.schouten@aalto.fi (J.W. Schouten). 1 Street address: Boulevard André Siegfried, 76825 Mont-Saint-Aignan Cetex, France. 2 Street address: Aalto University School of Business, Department of Marketing, Lapuankatu 2, P.O. Box 21230, 00076 AALTO, Helsinki, Finland.
(Kozinets & Belk, 2006: 335) our textual treatment of it has been predominantly silent. When visual material has accompanied academic work, it has regularly been presented “almost as an afterthought” (De Valck et al., 2009: 79). Clearly there is something special about video-mediated research. Increasingly, since digital video has become a ubiquitous part of our visually engaged consumer culture and is embedded in networks of social relations, it should be understood as a media practice rather than a technical device (Renov & Sunderburg, 1996; Russell, 1999). We suggest that scholars creating academic accounts of consumer phenomena must eventually respond to this cultural shift by revaluating their own predominant modes of representation. We applaud Schembri and Boyle (2013) for furthering the understanding of this nascent approach, but we propose that their perspective can and should be broadened to include a position where the expressive potential of video is given a much greater emphasis. In the following, we detail our proposed alternative (summarized in Table 1) to their approach. Schembri and Boyle (2013) approach visual ethnography in consumer research from a distinctly anthropological standpoint, much in the same way as Pink (2007, 2009) has previously outlined. For them, visual ethnography is a methodological tool that, if used reflexively and rigorously, can produce authentic representations of consumer experience. They conceive of video as “visual text” (Schembri & Boyle, 2013: 1251). This treatment of videography as part of the ethnographer's tool kit reveals a failure to fully grapple with the potential of the medium on an ontological level. Being well aware of the cultural turn in humanistic research, Schembri and Boyle demonstrate a social-
0148-2963/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2013.10.009
Please cite this article as: Hietanen, J., et al., Commentary on Schembri and Boyle (2013): From representation towards expression in videographic consumer research, Journal of Business Research (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2013.10.009
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J. Hietanen et al. / Journal of Business Research xxx (2013) xxx–xxx
constructionist ontology of the “subjectivity of experience and the multiplicity of reality” (p. 1251). To understand the construction of polyvocal realities, they advocate a videography that “effectively captures the consumer/member view” (p. 1252, emphasis added) and that aims for “authentic interpretations in marketing and consumer research” (p. 1251). Their approach stresses criteria such as validity and credibility, achieved by empathic understanding and immersion through extended periods of interaction in the research site — common to traditional ethnographic research. We argue that authentic representation may be impossible and that perhaps the best we can do as researchers on that front is to not create damaging misrepresentations. In striving for authentic representation Schembri and Boyle (2013) emphasize close collaboration with research participants, but they also note that such closeness “may amplify ethical dilemmas, political dynamics, and sensitive issues” (p. 1253). They are especially sensitive to power relations: “Collaborating with participants throughout the research term and across the research site in an effort to ensure authenticity may however unintentionally convey a sense of power” (p. 1253). By this logic the goal of visually replicating the experience of consumers requires the researcher to assume a backseat position and ensure transparency. Schembri and Boyle are to be commended for raising important ethical issues in conducting visual ethnography, most importantly in terms of their great respect for the integrity and honesty of the videographic researcher–participant collaboration. Yet we feel this approach, confined as it is to field relationships and video recording, is problematic and by no means offers a straightforward way out of the philosophical thicket. Moving from representation into the non-representational and performative paradigm in filmmaking complicates the issue of power even more. Beyond the means we may employ to mitigate our power position as field researchers we must also carry our reflexivity much further, into the way we construct the research report. Crafting the videographic product is as politically charged an endeavor as the researcher's engagement in the field. The videography as a representational device can never be a neutral account of participants' realities and is always a selective expression of the researcher's position. What is captured through the fetishistic camera-eye is not a reality but, rather, a performance constructed for camera and screen. It is not a mistake to feel a ‘sense of power’, because as a researcher it is precisely expressive power
that one wields. As should be clear through contemporary postmodern frameworks, all expressions and utterances are exercises of power (e.g., Stern, 1989, 1993). Writing – or producing videography – is not an innocent practice; every scholar is necessarily culturally embedded in his/her research context (Denzin, 2001; Richardson, 2000). Even though this may not be what Schembri and Boyle (2013) intended to imply, from our perspective the idea of video as analogous to textual representation unnecessarily demotes video to a subset of text, and worse, to something akin to an assumed neutral and balanced voice of the past anthropological tradition (Ruby, 2000; Russell, 1999). While Schembri and Boyle do well to deconstruct the researcher from his/her traditional position of objectivity, their account of the authentic and rigorous videographic product seems to maintain this ideal, similarly to how the sanctity of text persisted for anthropologists (Marcus & Cushman, 1982). Thus, they seem to be implicitly (perhaps accidentally) rewriting the realist anthropological perspective into visual ethnography in consumer research. This is the very notion anthropologists have been struggling to reconsider in the wake of the crisis of representation (MacDougall, 2001; Ruby, 2000; Russell, 1999; Sherry & Schouten, 2002), which reconsidered the possibility of constructing a neural image of reality, through which the all-too-often Western, culturally hegemonic and predominantly male gaze fetishized the exotic Other. In our reading, we cannot help but feel that Schembri and Boyle (2013) are constructing videographic expression as a “verisimilitude-machine,” which has value only if seen to be authentic and rigorous according to marginally loosened realist criteria. We would like to suggest an alternative approach for considering the potential of the medium — a perspective that seeks to be epistemologically emancipatory rather than reductive. As already established by Belk and Kozinets (2005), video as a medium has specific potential for maintaining an open relationship to artistic expression and should not be interpreted as in any way more real than other forms of interpretative work scholars engage in. Our admittedly impressionistic perspective is one where video can, as an expressive and mostly nonlinguistic medium, stand on its own. Following the more politically sensitive post-interpretivist and antifoundationalist notions of performance ethnography in the wake of the performance turn in the Anglo-European discourse (Denzin, 2001, 2003) we see videographic research as a “crystal” (Deleuze, 1989: 274; see also Richardson, 2000), rather than an objectifying and a neutral “window on the world of consumer experience” (Schembri & Boyle, 2013: 1251). This is a very particular crystal indeed, one that does not simply seek to
Table 1 Extending videographic research paradigm in consumer research. Representational videography Relation to reality
Social constructivist (i.e. reality is socially constructed); departure from scientific realism Relation to video as a medium Video is representational; a means to “capture authentic experiences” in producing knowledge and to represent them; video contextualizes discourse, space, and time; analyzed as “visual text”; a “window” to the world Video ethnography as a Not as a data collection tool but a creative process of “representing research method knowledge” (about individuals, society); a tool for “documenting” Strengths of videography as a Achieving “authentic” interpretations; allows “window to the world of research method studied participants”; “captures” visual cultural and symbolic world; enables new ways of understanding Weaknesses of videography as a Is merely descriptive; too open to multiple readings; not generalizable; research method not rigorous enough from a scientistic perspective Potential of videography in “Authentic” interpretations and representations of culture and society advancing research insights Role of the researcher “Reflective”; ensuring videography's “loyal” representation of studied phenomena and multiple subjectivities Role of the researched Collaboration with researcher required to “draw out, reconstruct and represent” relevant and meaningful experiences Role of the viewer “Passive receiver” of knowledge
Expressive videography Non-representational (i.e. reality is a flux of emergent relations); eschewing representation as the focus of inquiry Video is relational; video is a “media practice” embedded in and producing social relations; research expresses the potentiality of change, not representation Video as an expression capable of producing new social relations and meanings Creating powerful encounters that force the viewers to think in new ways; seeks to bring about “revolutionary consciousness” May overemphasize a singular perspective as it expresses an openly political viewpoint on social orders A critique of discourse of cultural representation; a powerful transformative tool in the production and shaping of social relations Expression of arguments about the social, cultural, material world; participation to production of new social relations Involved in constituting new relations through the course of research activities “Active producer” of social relations
Please cite this article as: Hietanen, J., et al., Commentary on Schembri and Boyle (2013): From representation towards expression in videographic consumer research, Journal of Business Research (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2013.10.009
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represent a reality but, rather, expects to produce new realities through the experience of impossible worlds that can bring about new ways of thinking. The emphasis changes from how something can be shown to what showing this something can potentially generate. For us, videographic expression is not a container of information but rather a vehicle through which, as Denzin (2001) puts it, the “moral ethnographer takes sides” (p. 326) as a performer and cultural critic (Denzin, 2003; see also Murray & Ozanne, 1991). Every act of expression (and research) is now understood as a political endeavor because, “The qualitative researcher is not an objective, politically neutral observer who stands outside and above the study of these media processes and the circuits of culture” (Denzin, 2001: 325). In this view research engages in cultural criticism by exposing hegemonies, giving an expressive voice to the subjugated and exposing subjugation through criticism of various aspects of established marketplace culture. It questions dominant social orders and ideologies that seek to make the audience “discover moral truths about themselves, while generating social criticism” (Denzin, 2003: 248). It follows the poetic approach of Sherry and Schouten (2002), who note that social research that is not evocatively moving may not be worth pursuing. The aesthetic of performative academic expression can now be seen not as representations of external phenomena, but rather as “interruptions [that] are meant to unsettle and challenge taken for granted assumptions concerning problematic issues in public life” (Denzin, 2003: 247). This view of research as an evocative activity aims to constitute new questions and to incite societal change through action (Richardson, 2000). What is at stake here is an alternative conceptualization of the very way science understands itself on the continuum of the representational and the expressive. Why does videographic expression constitute such a powerful medium for accomplishing these goals? From our perspective, Schembri and Boyle's (2013) conceptualization of video as akin to a linguistic medium does violence to videography in that the very power of video emanates from its largely nonlinguistic nature (Deleuze, 1986). Surely video employs a multitude of linguistic codes such as narration and interviews, but for a video to be powerful, experiencing it consists of more than a passive surveying of data and intellectual arguments. The editing of video is an active form of storytelling. When videography – and other social science research – is understood as a performative act we can more readily dispense with the art vs. science dichotomy that undermines the legitimacy of the medium (Belk & Kozinets, 2005) and brazenly search for new conceptual resources. For example, in visual anthropology, there have been calls for new modes of anthropological filmmaking drawing from experimental and artistic avant-garde films (Banks & Ruby, 2011; Ramey, 2011; Russell, 1999). This stretches the ethnographic endeavor to a point where any kind of image-making and engagement with visual practices must be considered a performance where the researcher not merely represents but exerts creative agency and thus contributes to emergent visual forms and knowledge (Banks & Ruby, 2011). Yet, the discourse that has been most neglected in videographic research seems to have been the most expressive one — cinematography theory. Any comprehensive account of this broad field is hopelessly beyond the scope of this brief commentary, but let us evaluate some key considerations put forth by the eminent French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who constructed an entire philosophical system of cinematography. Importantly, for him, cinema was never to be understood as a reference of the Real, but rather as an encounter that reveals reality through metaphor and thus creates new realities of thought and action, or as noted by Žižek (2006) in his psychoanalytic documentary of cinema: “Cinema is the art of appearances, it tells us something about reality itself […] There is something real in the illusion, more real than in the reality behind it […] Our fundamental delusion today is not to believe in what is only a fiction, to take fictions too seriously. It's, on the contrary, not to take fictions seriously enough.”
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Following a Deleuzian perspective there is no possibility of authentic representation. Because of the fetishistic and selective gaze of the camera eye, what is shown as the ‘truthful’ image becomes the ultimate illusion, and therefore the image that is most unfathomable becomes the most truthful account, as it does not offer us a reality to believe in, but rather, a possible world that can set our thoughts into new motion (Deleuze, 1989). We do not intend to make a call for overtly abstract and purely artistic “entertaining esoterica” (Arnould & Thompson, 2005: 870), but to argue that impressionistic and evocative videography can, if taken seriously, convey critical viewpoints to the world in powerful ways. Unlike text or photography, the very ontology of the audiovisual moving image is its incessant movement, because before we have interpreted it, it has already moved on, mechanically forcing us to follow its flow (Bogue, 2003; Deleuze, 1986). Text in the form of conventional academic prose with its subject–verb–object syntax depends on the permanence of objects toward which we have agentic power (Metz, 1980). Similarly the ethnographic use of photography “organizes the internal forces of the thing in such a way that they reach an equilibrium at a certain instant” (Deleuze, 1986: 24) thus forcing subject–object relations into a static instant. By comparison the moving image is the embodied modulation of the objects and time itself where movement and emergence take precedence over any frozen state (Bogue, 2003; Deleuze, 1986). That which in text or photos is a stationary object of scrutiny becomes in video a reverberating circuit of evocative relations where movement demands our attention and consideration while constantly eluding them. Video as a digital medium is no longer conceivable as a thing but rather as purely relational flows of information (Cubitt, 1993; Deleuze, 1989), endlessly reconfigurable and reproducible on virtually any computing device. As a media practice it becomes a vehicle of cultural production rather than simply its description. It is an ontology of change rather than of objectified structures (Olkowski, 1999). Video as movement, like much of life experience, reaches us in a prereflective moment, producing its initial “shock to thought […] touching the nervous and cerebral system directly” (Deleuze, 1989: 156; see also Bogue, 2003; Evens, 2002). But in addition to its moving force it engages the imagination in its potential to displace time by reorganizing how the notion of time is transcended in the flux of shots in the cinematographic montage, becoming an image of time itself or time-image (Deleuze, 1989). Cinematographic expression – by speeding and slowing the shot, by combining various shots to construct nonlinear time, and by utilizing transitional moments between shots – places the moving image into completely different epistemological relations as compared to its qualities of movement alone. The time-image brings about the destabilization of the commonsensical and causally descriptive images of objects (both human and nonhuman) in the artificially closed system of the frame, set in movement in the shot. Time-images range from simple flashbacks to metaphoric expressions where the realistic spatiotemporal coordinates of the presented world are obscured or broken. In this view, while the realism of videography is purely illusory, it nevertheless invokes a potentially very convincing viewing experience, which Deleuze (1989) conceptualizes as the “powers of the false” (p. 126). In such cases, the impressionistic video becomes more than a readable totality and can be conceptualized as an active encounter. By expressing the malleability of temporal and the commonsensically spatial orders, we come to understand that we are producers of stories, where the problem is no longer of discerning between the ‘true’ and the ‘false’ moving image, but rather constructing an aesthetic and a narrative “labyrinth of time […] the line which forks and keeps on forking, passing through incompossible presents, returning to notnecessarily true pasts” (Deleuze, 1989: 131). After all, how could the truthfulness of a past experience be measured? Žižek (2006) has also noted that, while we all know very well that cinema is fake, we nevertheless let it affect us emotionally in powerful ways. The power comes not from a readable and straightforwardly interpretable text, but from an experience that moves us as it invokes memories that are “undecidable or inextricable” (Deleuze, 1989: 274). Put another way,
Please cite this article as: Hietanen, J., et al., Commentary on Schembri and Boyle (2013): From representation towards expression in videographic consumer research, Journal of Business Research (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2013.10.009
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videography, by utilizing montage in creative ways can show intertwined pasts and presents in ways where the image of the past is no objective account of history. It is rather a past held in parallel relation with the present thus becoming potentially unbearable, a past quality of the present with a powerful ““radioactive” quality” (Marks, 2000: 124). By utilizing the means of expressive storytelling, an impressionistic video becomes an encounter, a shock to thought (Deleuze, 1989) through its “brush with involuntary memory” (Marks, 2000: 81). It is not sanitized and economical expression, but something with potential for being intimate and agentic. It is something about the world that “forces us to think” (Deleuze, 1994: 139). Schembri and Boyle (2013) focus almost entirely on the empirical practice, and while authenticity and validity may be useful ideals for protecting the participants, they say very little about the politics of how videography then becomes constructed on the editing table and, importantly, how it is then experienced by the audience. The engaging experience is where much of the potential impact happens, where evocative resonances are transferred and new thought is related. While ethnography surely needs to be immersive, honest and empathic, no stable criteria are possible for the evaluation of an evocative experience (e.g., Holt, 1991; Sherry & Schouten, 2002). At worst, the search for criteria can hold down novel ways of expression. Denzin (2003) warns that the search for new criteria of orthodoxy that can be distinctly evaluated is potentially dangerous, as it may silence the efforts of producing cultural criticism. Like poetic expression that seeks to “[c]ast a spell that moves your readers” (Sherry & Schouten, 2002: 231), impressionistic videography cannot be judged solely from the perspective of “cults of criteriology” (Lincoln & Guba, 2000: 179) that seek to freeze meaning and the methods by which it is produced and communicated. It should also be judged by how well it conveys impossible worlds that create a “revolutionary consciousness” (Bogue, 2003: 169) in the viewer. In consumer culture research we have already made considerable inroads in moving beyond the scientification of interpretation through set criteria. It is our hope that we do not prevent videography from enjoying the same gains. References Arnould, E. J., & Thompson, C. J. (2005). Consumer culture theory (CCT): Twenty years of research. Journal of Consumer Research, 31, 868–882. Banks, M., & Ruby, J. (2011). Introduction: History, anthropology, and the history of visual anthropology. In M. Banks, & J. Ruby (Eds.), Made to be seen: Historical perspectives on visual anthropology (pp. 1–18). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Belk, R. W., & Kozinets, R. V. (2004). The second annual ACR film festival. In B. E. Kahn, & M. F. Luce (Eds.), Advances in Consumer Research, 31. (pp. 6–17)Valdosta: Association for Consumer Research. Belk, R. W., & Kozinets, R. V. (2005). Videography in marketing and consumer research. Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, 8, 128–141. Bogue, R. (2003). Deleuze on cinema. New York: Routledge. Cubitt, S. (1993). Videography: Video media as art and culture. London: Macmillan Distribution.
De Valck, K., Rokka, J., & Hietanen, J. (2009). Videography in consumer research: Visions for a method on the rise. Finanza Marketing e Produzione, 27, 81–100. Deleuze, G. (1986). Cinema 1: The movement image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema 2: The time image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (1994). What is philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press. Denzin, N. K. (2001). The seventh movement: Qualitative inquiry and practices of a more radical consumer research. Journal of Consumer Research, 28, 324–330. Denzin, N. K. (2003). Reading and writing performance. Qualitative Research, 3, 243–268. Evens, A. (2002). Sound ideas. In B. Massumi (Ed.), A shock to thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari (pp. 171–187). New York: Routledge. Holt, D. B. (1991). Rashomon visits consumer behavior: An interpretive critique of naturalistic inquiry. In R. H. Holman, & M. R. Solomon (Eds.), Advances in Consumer Research, 18. (pp. 57–62)Provo: Association for Consumer Research. Kozinets, R. V., & Belk, R. W. (2006). Camcorder society: Quality videography in consumer and marketing research. In R. W. Belk (Ed.), Handbook of qualitative research methods in marketing (pp. 335–344). United Kingdom: Edward Elgar. Lincoln, Y., & Guba, E. (2000). Paradigmatic controversies, contradictions, and emerging confluences. In N. Denzin, & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 163–188). Thousand Oaks: Sage. MacDougall, D. (2001). Renewing ethnographic film: Is digital video changing the genre? Anthropology Today, 17, 15–21. Marcus, G. E., & Cushman, D. (1982). Ethnographies as texts. Annual Review of Antropology, 11, 25–69. Marks, L. U. (2000). The skin of the film: Intercultural cinema, embodiment, and the senses. Durham: Duke University Press. Metz, C. (1980). Aural objects. Yale French Studies, 60, 24–32. Murray, J. B., & Ozanne, J. L. (1991). The critical imagination: Emancipatory interests in consumer research. Journal of Consumer Research, 18, 129–144. Olkowski, D. (1999). Gilles Deleuze and the ruin of representation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pink, S. (2007). Doing visual ethnography. London: Sage. Pink, S. (2009). Doing sensory ethnography. London: Sage. Ramey, K. (2011). Productive dissonance and sensuous image-making. In M. Banks, & J. Ruby (Eds.), Made to be seen: Historical perspectives on visual anthropology (pp. 256–287). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Renov, M., & Sunderburg, E. (1996). Resolving video. In M. Renov, & E. Sunderburg (Eds.), Resolutions: Contemporary video practices (pp. xi–xxiii). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Richardson, L. (2000). Evaluating ethnography. Qualitative Inquiry, 6, 253–255. Ruby, J. (2000). Picturing culture: Explorations of film and anthropology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Russell, C. (1999). Experimental ethnography: The work of film in the age of the video. Durham: Duke University Press. Schembri, & Boyle (2013). Visual ethnography: Achieving rigorous and authentic interpretations. Journal of Business Research, 66, 1251–1254. Sherry, J. F., & Schouten, J. W. (2002). A role for poetry in consumer research. Journal of Consumer Research, 29, 218–234. Smith, S., Fisher, D., & Cole, S. J. (2007). The lived meanings of fanaticism: Understanding the complex role of labels and categories in defining the self in consumer culture. Consumption, Markets & Culture, 10, 77–94. Spanjaard, D., & Freeman, L. (2007). Tread softly: Using videography to capture shopping behaviour. In M. Craig-Lees, T. Davis, & G. Gregory (Eds.), Asia-Pacific Advances in Consumer Research, 7. (pp. 26–29)Sydney: Association for Consumer Research. Stern, B. B. (1989). Literary criticism and consumer research: Overview and illustrative analysis. Journal of Consumer Research, 16, 322–334. Stern, B. B. (1993). Feminist literary criticism and the deconstruction of ads: A postmodern view of advertising and consumer responses. Journal of Consumer Research, 19, 556–566. Sunderland, P. L. (2006). Entering entertainment: Creating consumer documentaries for corporate clients. In R. W. Belk (Ed.), Handbook of qualitative research methods in marketing (pp. 371–383). United Kingdom: Edward Elgar. Žižek, S. (2006). The pervert’s guide to cinema: Parts 1, 2, 3. : A Lone Star, Mischief Films, Amoeba Film Production.
Please cite this article as: Hietanen, J., et al., Commentary on Schembri and Boyle (2013): From representation towards expression in videographic consumer research, Journal of Business Research (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2013.10.009
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Business Research
Commentary on Schembri and Boyle (2013): From representation towards expression in videographic consumer research Joel Hietanen a,⁎, Joonas Rokka b,1, John W. Schouten a,c,2 a b c
Aalto University School of Business, Department of Marketing, Finland Neoma Business School, Department of Marketing, France Center for Customer Insight, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 10 October 2013 Accepted 16 October 2013 Available online xxxx Keywords: Videography Visual anthropology Cinema Deleuze Representation Performative turn
a b s t r a c t In this commentary on Schembri and Boyle (2013) we offer an alternative perspective on the use of video in consumer research. The dominant modus operandi for visual research, as recently demonstrated by Schembri and Boyle in the pages of this journal, follows a paradigm typical of anthropological tradition. We propose an alternative approach: an expressive imperative in consumer videography emerging from theory on cinematography and experimental filmmaking, which emphasizes the evocative power of moving images. © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Towards the expressive in videographic research As enthusiasts and advocates of the videographic method in theorizing consumer culture, we are always welcoming of new publications that seek to shed light on the academic applications of the medium. While scholarship in this area remains scarce, that which exists points to video as a powerful medium of contratextual presentation. For example, it has been argued that, compared to text, video is especially able to record expressions and bodily presence in contextual space (Belk & Kozinets, 2005); it is more emotional, resonant and commanding of attention (De Valck, Rokka, & Hietanen, 2009); it is in some sense more ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ (Spanjaard & Freeman, 2007); and it is able to “capture the context-rich environment” (Smith, Fisher, & Cole, 2007: 89); it is multi-sensory (Pink, 2009); and the “glimmer of the gem” (Sunderland, 2006: 378). Belk and Kozinets (2004) attribute to video “tremendous possibilities to enlighten, expose, analyze, entertain, stimulate, and critique more effectively than other types of conference presentations” (p. 6). They observe that while “consumer culture is bright and noisy”
⁎ Corresponding author at: Aalto University School of Business, Department of Marketing, Lapuankatu 2, P.O. Box 21230, 00076 AALTO, Helsinki, Finland. Tel.: +358 503120927. E-mail addresses: joel.hietanen@aalto.fi (J. Hietanen), [email protected] (J. Rokka), john.schouten@aalto.fi (J.W. Schouten). 1 Street address: Boulevard André Siegfried, 76825 Mont-Saint-Aignan Cetex, France. 2 Street address: Aalto University School of Business, Department of Marketing, Lapuankatu 2, P.O. Box 21230, 00076 AALTO, Helsinki, Finland.
(Kozinets & Belk, 2006: 335) our textual treatment of it has been predominantly silent. When visual material has accompanied academic work, it has regularly been presented “almost as an afterthought” (De Valck et al., 2009: 79). Clearly there is something special about video-mediated research. Increasingly, since digital video has become a ubiquitous part of our visually engaged consumer culture and is embedded in networks of social relations, it should be understood as a media practice rather than a technical device (Renov & Sunderburg, 1996; Russell, 1999). We suggest that scholars creating academic accounts of consumer phenomena must eventually respond to this cultural shift by revaluating their own predominant modes of representation. We applaud Schembri and Boyle (2013) for furthering the understanding of this nascent approach, but we propose that their perspective can and should be broadened to include a position where the expressive potential of video is given a much greater emphasis. In the following, we detail our proposed alternative (summarized in Table 1) to their approach. Schembri and Boyle (2013) approach visual ethnography in consumer research from a distinctly anthropological standpoint, much in the same way as Pink (2007, 2009) has previously outlined. For them, visual ethnography is a methodological tool that, if used reflexively and rigorously, can produce authentic representations of consumer experience. They conceive of video as “visual text” (Schembri & Boyle, 2013: 1251). This treatment of videography as part of the ethnographer's tool kit reveals a failure to fully grapple with the potential of the medium on an ontological level. Being well aware of the cultural turn in humanistic research, Schembri and Boyle demonstrate a social-
0148-2963/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2013.10.009
Please cite this article as: Hietanen, J., et al., Commentary on Schembri and Boyle (2013): From representation towards expression in videographic consumer research, Journal of Business Research (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2013.10.009
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constructionist ontology of the “subjectivity of experience and the multiplicity of reality” (p. 1251). To understand the construction of polyvocal realities, they advocate a videography that “effectively captures the consumer/member view” (p. 1252, emphasis added) and that aims for “authentic interpretations in marketing and consumer research” (p. 1251). Their approach stresses criteria such as validity and credibility, achieved by empathic understanding and immersion through extended periods of interaction in the research site — common to traditional ethnographic research. We argue that authentic representation may be impossible and that perhaps the best we can do as researchers on that front is to not create damaging misrepresentations. In striving for authentic representation Schembri and Boyle (2013) emphasize close collaboration with research participants, but they also note that such closeness “may amplify ethical dilemmas, political dynamics, and sensitive issues” (p. 1253). They are especially sensitive to power relations: “Collaborating with participants throughout the research term and across the research site in an effort to ensure authenticity may however unintentionally convey a sense of power” (p. 1253). By this logic the goal of visually replicating the experience of consumers requires the researcher to assume a backseat position and ensure transparency. Schembri and Boyle are to be commended for raising important ethical issues in conducting visual ethnography, most importantly in terms of their great respect for the integrity and honesty of the videographic researcher–participant collaboration. Yet we feel this approach, confined as it is to field relationships and video recording, is problematic and by no means offers a straightforward way out of the philosophical thicket. Moving from representation into the non-representational and performative paradigm in filmmaking complicates the issue of power even more. Beyond the means we may employ to mitigate our power position as field researchers we must also carry our reflexivity much further, into the way we construct the research report. Crafting the videographic product is as politically charged an endeavor as the researcher's engagement in the field. The videography as a representational device can never be a neutral account of participants' realities and is always a selective expression of the researcher's position. What is captured through the fetishistic camera-eye is not a reality but, rather, a performance constructed for camera and screen. It is not a mistake to feel a ‘sense of power’, because as a researcher it is precisely expressive power
that one wields. As should be clear through contemporary postmodern frameworks, all expressions and utterances are exercises of power (e.g., Stern, 1989, 1993). Writing – or producing videography – is not an innocent practice; every scholar is necessarily culturally embedded in his/her research context (Denzin, 2001; Richardson, 2000). Even though this may not be what Schembri and Boyle (2013) intended to imply, from our perspective the idea of video as analogous to textual representation unnecessarily demotes video to a subset of text, and worse, to something akin to an assumed neutral and balanced voice of the past anthropological tradition (Ruby, 2000; Russell, 1999). While Schembri and Boyle do well to deconstruct the researcher from his/her traditional position of objectivity, their account of the authentic and rigorous videographic product seems to maintain this ideal, similarly to how the sanctity of text persisted for anthropologists (Marcus & Cushman, 1982). Thus, they seem to be implicitly (perhaps accidentally) rewriting the realist anthropological perspective into visual ethnography in consumer research. This is the very notion anthropologists have been struggling to reconsider in the wake of the crisis of representation (MacDougall, 2001; Ruby, 2000; Russell, 1999; Sherry & Schouten, 2002), which reconsidered the possibility of constructing a neural image of reality, through which the all-too-often Western, culturally hegemonic and predominantly male gaze fetishized the exotic Other. In our reading, we cannot help but feel that Schembri and Boyle (2013) are constructing videographic expression as a “verisimilitude-machine,” which has value only if seen to be authentic and rigorous according to marginally loosened realist criteria. We would like to suggest an alternative approach for considering the potential of the medium — a perspective that seeks to be epistemologically emancipatory rather than reductive. As already established by Belk and Kozinets (2005), video as a medium has specific potential for maintaining an open relationship to artistic expression and should not be interpreted as in any way more real than other forms of interpretative work scholars engage in. Our admittedly impressionistic perspective is one where video can, as an expressive and mostly nonlinguistic medium, stand on its own. Following the more politically sensitive post-interpretivist and antifoundationalist notions of performance ethnography in the wake of the performance turn in the Anglo-European discourse (Denzin, 2001, 2003) we see videographic research as a “crystal” (Deleuze, 1989: 274; see also Richardson, 2000), rather than an objectifying and a neutral “window on the world of consumer experience” (Schembri & Boyle, 2013: 1251). This is a very particular crystal indeed, one that does not simply seek to
Table 1 Extending videographic research paradigm in consumer research. Representational videography Relation to reality
Social constructivist (i.e. reality is socially constructed); departure from scientific realism Relation to video as a medium Video is representational; a means to “capture authentic experiences” in producing knowledge and to represent them; video contextualizes discourse, space, and time; analyzed as “visual text”; a “window” to the world Video ethnography as a Not as a data collection tool but a creative process of “representing research method knowledge” (about individuals, society); a tool for “documenting” Strengths of videography as a Achieving “authentic” interpretations; allows “window to the world of research method studied participants”; “captures” visual cultural and symbolic world; enables new ways of understanding Weaknesses of videography as a Is merely descriptive; too open to multiple readings; not generalizable; research method not rigorous enough from a scientistic perspective Potential of videography in “Authentic” interpretations and representations of culture and society advancing research insights Role of the researcher “Reflective”; ensuring videography's “loyal” representation of studied phenomena and multiple subjectivities Role of the researched Collaboration with researcher required to “draw out, reconstruct and represent” relevant and meaningful experiences Role of the viewer “Passive receiver” of knowledge
Expressive videography Non-representational (i.e. reality is a flux of emergent relations); eschewing representation as the focus of inquiry Video is relational; video is a “media practice” embedded in and producing social relations; research expresses the potentiality of change, not representation Video as an expression capable of producing new social relations and meanings Creating powerful encounters that force the viewers to think in new ways; seeks to bring about “revolutionary consciousness” May overemphasize a singular perspective as it expresses an openly political viewpoint on social orders A critique of discourse of cultural representation; a powerful transformative tool in the production and shaping of social relations Expression of arguments about the social, cultural, material world; participation to production of new social relations Involved in constituting new relations through the course of research activities “Active producer” of social relations
Please cite this article as: Hietanen, J., et al., Commentary on Schembri and Boyle (2013): From representation towards expression in videographic consumer research, Journal of Business Research (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2013.10.009
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represent a reality but, rather, expects to produce new realities through the experience of impossible worlds that can bring about new ways of thinking. The emphasis changes from how something can be shown to what showing this something can potentially generate. For us, videographic expression is not a container of information but rather a vehicle through which, as Denzin (2001) puts it, the “moral ethnographer takes sides” (p. 326) as a performer and cultural critic (Denzin, 2003; see also Murray & Ozanne, 1991). Every act of expression (and research) is now understood as a political endeavor because, “The qualitative researcher is not an objective, politically neutral observer who stands outside and above the study of these media processes and the circuits of culture” (Denzin, 2001: 325). In this view research engages in cultural criticism by exposing hegemonies, giving an expressive voice to the subjugated and exposing subjugation through criticism of various aspects of established marketplace culture. It questions dominant social orders and ideologies that seek to make the audience “discover moral truths about themselves, while generating social criticism” (Denzin, 2003: 248). It follows the poetic approach of Sherry and Schouten (2002), who note that social research that is not evocatively moving may not be worth pursuing. The aesthetic of performative academic expression can now be seen not as representations of external phenomena, but rather as “interruptions [that] are meant to unsettle and challenge taken for granted assumptions concerning problematic issues in public life” (Denzin, 2003: 247). This view of research as an evocative activity aims to constitute new questions and to incite societal change through action (Richardson, 2000). What is at stake here is an alternative conceptualization of the very way science understands itself on the continuum of the representational and the expressive. Why does videographic expression constitute such a powerful medium for accomplishing these goals? From our perspective, Schembri and Boyle's (2013) conceptualization of video as akin to a linguistic medium does violence to videography in that the very power of video emanates from its largely nonlinguistic nature (Deleuze, 1986). Surely video employs a multitude of linguistic codes such as narration and interviews, but for a video to be powerful, experiencing it consists of more than a passive surveying of data and intellectual arguments. The editing of video is an active form of storytelling. When videography – and other social science research – is understood as a performative act we can more readily dispense with the art vs. science dichotomy that undermines the legitimacy of the medium (Belk & Kozinets, 2005) and brazenly search for new conceptual resources. For example, in visual anthropology, there have been calls for new modes of anthropological filmmaking drawing from experimental and artistic avant-garde films (Banks & Ruby, 2011; Ramey, 2011; Russell, 1999). This stretches the ethnographic endeavor to a point where any kind of image-making and engagement with visual practices must be considered a performance where the researcher not merely represents but exerts creative agency and thus contributes to emergent visual forms and knowledge (Banks & Ruby, 2011). Yet, the discourse that has been most neglected in videographic research seems to have been the most expressive one — cinematography theory. Any comprehensive account of this broad field is hopelessly beyond the scope of this brief commentary, but let us evaluate some key considerations put forth by the eminent French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who constructed an entire philosophical system of cinematography. Importantly, for him, cinema was never to be understood as a reference of the Real, but rather as an encounter that reveals reality through metaphor and thus creates new realities of thought and action, or as noted by Žižek (2006) in his psychoanalytic documentary of cinema: “Cinema is the art of appearances, it tells us something about reality itself […] There is something real in the illusion, more real than in the reality behind it […] Our fundamental delusion today is not to believe in what is only a fiction, to take fictions too seriously. It's, on the contrary, not to take fictions seriously enough.”
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Following a Deleuzian perspective there is no possibility of authentic representation. Because of the fetishistic and selective gaze of the camera eye, what is shown as the ‘truthful’ image becomes the ultimate illusion, and therefore the image that is most unfathomable becomes the most truthful account, as it does not offer us a reality to believe in, but rather, a possible world that can set our thoughts into new motion (Deleuze, 1989). We do not intend to make a call for overtly abstract and purely artistic “entertaining esoterica” (Arnould & Thompson, 2005: 870), but to argue that impressionistic and evocative videography can, if taken seriously, convey critical viewpoints to the world in powerful ways. Unlike text or photography, the very ontology of the audiovisual moving image is its incessant movement, because before we have interpreted it, it has already moved on, mechanically forcing us to follow its flow (Bogue, 2003; Deleuze, 1986). Text in the form of conventional academic prose with its subject–verb–object syntax depends on the permanence of objects toward which we have agentic power (Metz, 1980). Similarly the ethnographic use of photography “organizes the internal forces of the thing in such a way that they reach an equilibrium at a certain instant” (Deleuze, 1986: 24) thus forcing subject–object relations into a static instant. By comparison the moving image is the embodied modulation of the objects and time itself where movement and emergence take precedence over any frozen state (Bogue, 2003; Deleuze, 1986). That which in text or photos is a stationary object of scrutiny becomes in video a reverberating circuit of evocative relations where movement demands our attention and consideration while constantly eluding them. Video as a digital medium is no longer conceivable as a thing but rather as purely relational flows of information (Cubitt, 1993; Deleuze, 1989), endlessly reconfigurable and reproducible on virtually any computing device. As a media practice it becomes a vehicle of cultural production rather than simply its description. It is an ontology of change rather than of objectified structures (Olkowski, 1999). Video as movement, like much of life experience, reaches us in a prereflective moment, producing its initial “shock to thought […] touching the nervous and cerebral system directly” (Deleuze, 1989: 156; see also Bogue, 2003; Evens, 2002). But in addition to its moving force it engages the imagination in its potential to displace time by reorganizing how the notion of time is transcended in the flux of shots in the cinematographic montage, becoming an image of time itself or time-image (Deleuze, 1989). Cinematographic expression – by speeding and slowing the shot, by combining various shots to construct nonlinear time, and by utilizing transitional moments between shots – places the moving image into completely different epistemological relations as compared to its qualities of movement alone. The time-image brings about the destabilization of the commonsensical and causally descriptive images of objects (both human and nonhuman) in the artificially closed system of the frame, set in movement in the shot. Time-images range from simple flashbacks to metaphoric expressions where the realistic spatiotemporal coordinates of the presented world are obscured or broken. In this view, while the realism of videography is purely illusory, it nevertheless invokes a potentially very convincing viewing experience, which Deleuze (1989) conceptualizes as the “powers of the false” (p. 126). In such cases, the impressionistic video becomes more than a readable totality and can be conceptualized as an active encounter. By expressing the malleability of temporal and the commonsensically spatial orders, we come to understand that we are producers of stories, where the problem is no longer of discerning between the ‘true’ and the ‘false’ moving image, but rather constructing an aesthetic and a narrative “labyrinth of time […] the line which forks and keeps on forking, passing through incompossible presents, returning to notnecessarily true pasts” (Deleuze, 1989: 131). After all, how could the truthfulness of a past experience be measured? Žižek (2006) has also noted that, while we all know very well that cinema is fake, we nevertheless let it affect us emotionally in powerful ways. The power comes not from a readable and straightforwardly interpretable text, but from an experience that moves us as it invokes memories that are “undecidable or inextricable” (Deleuze, 1989: 274). Put another way,
Please cite this article as: Hietanen, J., et al., Commentary on Schembri and Boyle (2013): From representation towards expression in videographic consumer research, Journal of Business Research (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2013.10.009
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videography, by utilizing montage in creative ways can show intertwined pasts and presents in ways where the image of the past is no objective account of history. It is rather a past held in parallel relation with the present thus becoming potentially unbearable, a past quality of the present with a powerful ““radioactive” quality” (Marks, 2000: 124). By utilizing the means of expressive storytelling, an impressionistic video becomes an encounter, a shock to thought (Deleuze, 1989) through its “brush with involuntary memory” (Marks, 2000: 81). It is not sanitized and economical expression, but something with potential for being intimate and agentic. It is something about the world that “forces us to think” (Deleuze, 1994: 139). Schembri and Boyle (2013) focus almost entirely on the empirical practice, and while authenticity and validity may be useful ideals for protecting the participants, they say very little about the politics of how videography then becomes constructed on the editing table and, importantly, how it is then experienced by the audience. The engaging experience is where much of the potential impact happens, where evocative resonances are transferred and new thought is related. While ethnography surely needs to be immersive, honest and empathic, no stable criteria are possible for the evaluation of an evocative experience (e.g., Holt, 1991; Sherry & Schouten, 2002). At worst, the search for criteria can hold down novel ways of expression. Denzin (2003) warns that the search for new criteria of orthodoxy that can be distinctly evaluated is potentially dangerous, as it may silence the efforts of producing cultural criticism. Like poetic expression that seeks to “[c]ast a spell that moves your readers” (Sherry & Schouten, 2002: 231), impressionistic videography cannot be judged solely from the perspective of “cults of criteriology” (Lincoln & Guba, 2000: 179) that seek to freeze meaning and the methods by which it is produced and communicated. It should also be judged by how well it conveys impossible worlds that create a “revolutionary consciousness” (Bogue, 2003: 169) in the viewer. In consumer culture research we have already made considerable inroads in moving beyond the scientification of interpretation through set criteria. It is our hope that we do not prevent videography from enjoying the same gains. References Arnould, E. J., & Thompson, C. J. (2005). Consumer culture theory (CCT): Twenty years of research. Journal of Consumer Research, 31, 868–882. Banks, M., & Ruby, J. (2011). Introduction: History, anthropology, and the history of visual anthropology. In M. Banks, & J. Ruby (Eds.), Made to be seen: Historical perspectives on visual anthropology (pp. 1–18). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Belk, R. W., & Kozinets, R. V. (2004). The second annual ACR film festival. In B. E. Kahn, & M. F. Luce (Eds.), Advances in Consumer Research, 31. (pp. 6–17)Valdosta: Association for Consumer Research. Belk, R. W., & Kozinets, R. V. (2005). Videography in marketing and consumer research. Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, 8, 128–141. Bogue, R. (2003). Deleuze on cinema. New York: Routledge. Cubitt, S. (1993). Videography: Video media as art and culture. London: Macmillan Distribution.
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Please cite this article as: Hietanen, J., et al., Commentary on Schembri and Boyle (2013): From representation towards expression in videographic consumer research, Journal of Business Research (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2013.10.009