Beyond Performative Talk: Critical Observations on The Radical Critique of Reading Interview Data

We centrally consider the question of what interview data can be used to ‘say’ through a dialogue with advocates of the ‘radical critique’ of interview studies. We propose that the critique has considerable utility in drawing attention to ‘the social life of interviews’ and the pervasiveness of notions of the ‘romantic subject’ to how researchers often approach interviews and their analyses, highlighting some of the implications of that position. However, we suggest that the radical critique simultaneously goes too far in respect of its reduction of interviews to narrative performance, and not far enough in terms of its own critical departure from core characteristics of the romantic subject. Here we consider how certain aspects of the conceptual imagery employed by proponents of the radical critique lead towards a dichotomisation between the experienced and the expressed, a concomitant retreat into discourse, and a tendency to conflate what interviews can be used to say with what can be said at interview. We explore how the radical critique might productively be built upon via more ‘synthetic’ forms of research engagement, outlining alternative modes of apprehending interview data through a further critical departure from the romantic subject. We suggest that such an approach helps researchers move beyond a sole engagement with questions of how data are constructed and produced and towards how such data might otherwise be used to speak about the social world beyond the social nexus that constitutes an interview encounter.