Norm Denzin's Empiricist Bent, Theory of the Self, and Focus on Paradoxical Agency

Abstract

While distinguishing himself as a vanguard of postmodern symbolic interaction, Norm Denzin remained loyal to his roots as an empiricist and theorist of the self. He displayed such loyalty to the examination of social relationships, involving the complex process of self-lodging, and significantly, the examination and analysis of alcoholics. This focus on lodging and the alcoholic introduced a paradoxical agency in which one's choices to act create obdurate constraints that limit choices. His particular focus on the recovering alcoholic not only involved comprehensive observations of recovery in situ (e.g., in Alcoholics Anonymous Meetings) but also in cinematic representations. Denzin also merged his ethnographic observations and cinematic readings while merging the perspectives associated with pragmatism, interactionism, and dramaturgy. In effect, by engaging in the worlds of alcoholics, alcoholics in recovery, and their images and portrayals in films, Denzin emphasized the importance of talking about the self (via internal conversations and relationships with external others). In doing so, he provided a theory of the self while straddling the symbolic line between a postmodernist imagination and a modernist commitment to realism.

Citation

Katovich, M.A. (2022), "Norm Denzin's Empiricist Bent, Theory of the Self, and Focus on Paradoxical Agency", Chen, S.-L.S. (Ed.) Festschrift in Honor of Norman K. Denzin (Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 55), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 39-45. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0163-239620220000055004