…the development of selves (andthereby of persons) in our narratives is one of hte most characteristically human acts, acts that justifiably remain of central importance to both our personal and our communal existence (1).

…it has bcome increasingly evident to numerous influential theorists and practitioners that narratives are a primary embodiment of our understanding of the world, of experience, and ultimately of ourselves (3).

Across many disciplines, the role of narrative in the construction of self has been explored. A concensus is developing to suggest that narratives – the stories that we tell of ourselves and our experience, to ourselves, and to others, play a vital role in framing the way that we view, interpret, and understand the world, and our place in it. Part of the reason for this lies in the fact that narratives offer a device for tying together otherwise fragmented and random events:

…narratives articulate not just isolated acts but whole sequences of events or episodes, thereby placing particular events within a framing context or history (3).

The significance of events is only realised when viewed in the context of other events; each narrative is like a chapter in a broader life-story (3-4). As Kerby notes, “it is in and through various forms of narrative emplotment that our lives … attain meaning” (4).

Kerby discusses the formulation for personhood in some detail; he reads bodies as “sites of narration”, with the self – the person – emerging from this, “the result of ascribing subject status or selfhood to those sites of narration” (4). It is through our bodies that we experience the world – this is something that I will discuss in detail in my chapter on fit & fat blogging – but it’s an interesting topic to think about in the context of the Internet regardless, simply because it does contrast with earlier readings of the body online (or, the lack of body online, as the case may more accurately be).

For the purpose of his reading, Kerby definges self as “the distinctive individual that we usually take ourselves to be” (4). However, he also emphasizes that “Persons only ‘know’ themselves after the fact of expression” (5). I think that this is something that came up in yesterday’s reading — the notion that self awareness is something which only ever occurs after the fact, never during. It is only in retrospect that we can know ourselves, for various reasons, but perhaps mainly because we are too close to the event as it happens to really garner the significance inherent in that event. The pieces of the narrative puzzle – including how that narrative event fits in with all the other narrative events that have combined to paint the picture of who we are – are yet to be placed together, and the lesson evades us until that time. Kerby urges us to think of the self as part-and-parcel of the narrative itself –

The self, as implied subject, appears to be inseparable from the narrative or life story it constructs for itself or otherwise inherits. The important point is that it is from this story that a sense of self is generated (6).

Selves, then, emerge of and from narratives, just as narratives emerge from the experiences of the subject. The two are so closely related that they are as one — there can be no self, in this reading, without narrative, as it is through narrative that we can formulate and understand the self. Even this process, though, is bound in a much broader context; the stories that we tell, and how we tell them, and how we frame the self in those stories, are all influenced by the cultural and social environment in which stories are told. He writes:

The stories we tell of ourselves are determined not only by how ohter people narrate us but also by or language and the genres of storytelling inherited from our traditions (6).

This holistic kind of view of self construction – story as self, self as story, story-self as part of cultural creation – is kind of a nice idea. It demands “coherence and continuity” (6); to remove oneself too far from stories of continuity could suggest a sort of disordered personality (6). The continuity and coherence is important because narratives – and human existence – are temporal. “We indeed find ourselves, collectively and individually, embedded in an ongoing history” (7), writes Kerby. We narrate our pasts because doing so allows us to make sense of our present and speculate about our future:

The storied nature of our experience is, for Crites, what holds the past (memory) and future (anticipation) together in the present, creating the more or less unified sense we have of our ongoing lives, a sense upon which our personal identity so thoroughly depends (8).

This is our coherence: the knowledge that we fit into a temporal narrative, that is not necessarily linear, but which deals with the same, unified subject. Narration is inherent, but it is not always conscious (although sometimes – espcially in the case of blogs – it very much is!). We are a part of many stories at once, and we tell them to ourselves and others at overlapping times.

I’m just thinking about my own experiences as a storyteller here. As a long-time blogger, I have gotten very used to the kind of stories that I can, and need, to tell to my blog audience, rather than my real world. Similarly, there are stories that I tell to selected few in my real world (using that term loosely, of course), that I would never tell on my blog – at least not now. Maybe one day, but not when it’s recently been happening. I constantly tell stories to myself in my mind, and plan out the narratives that I will tell when I am at a computer, or around my friends, or with my family. My narrative self is in overdrive; but, then again, I feel that at the moment especially, I am really engaged in a battle to know who I am and what I want from life, so perhaps that is why I’m more conscious of this narrative exploration of self.

Although we are not self-consciously narrating ourselves all the time, narrational activity of some sort is common to a great deal of our experience–from dreams to memory to future plans from emotional to moral experience… Both self-understanding and self-identity are linked with the coherence of our lives as reflected in our personal narratives (8).

I am constantly building this picture of who I am, but I still doubt whether I can really see that. Part of the reason for telling stories is surely to have others respond; by telling my story, you can tell me about the kind of person I am. By thinking about my past stories, I can perhaps gauge a sense of the kind of person I have been.

This chapter deals with phenomenology in some detail… but I’m somewhat hestitant to write about it here because it is one of those concepts that I just don’t know if I can adequately put in to words. I should really explore it for that very reason because phenomenology comes up again and again in my research, so I really do need to be able to articulate it and its use for my work. But honestly, presented with passages like the following, I just freak out a little:

…a hermeneutic philosophy can accept the phenomenological starting point of the human subject’s immediacy to phenomena. However, it does not delude itself into thinking that there is a priviliged mode of access to phenomena that would disconnect the categories of our particular historical and linguistic heritage (10).

Okay: let’s work through this.

Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation theory – so, the way that we understand things. A hermeneutic philosophy is therefore a philosophy of understanding; a framework, if you will, for comprehension. Phenomenology is the study of conscious experience. “Human subjects immediacy to phenomena” suggests that there are certain things – certain experiences – which are intrinsic to the experience of being human (the human subject). However, the place we come from – our language, our history – also informs the kind of experiences (phenomena) that we encounter.

Am I reading this right? I think so. This echoes the points from before about each narrative fitting into a meta-narrative of life. It’s foolish to think that because we are all subject to experiences, the experiences that we will have are the same as the next person’s, due to the fact that the other pieces to our life puzzle will differ, based upon the interactions we have had (symbolic interactionism link?).

I think I’m getting there.

references:

Kerby, Anthony Paul (1991). ‘Introduction’, Narrative and the Self. Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 1-14

• Crites, Stephen (1971). ‘The narrative quality of experience’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 39 (3)
  

I guess this is good because it leaves a lot of room for me to explore my topic (although it does have to be noted that personal narratives did feature heavily in early blog scholarship), but it is frustrating for me, sitting here researching today, to keep finding these results (or lack thereof).

I’ll keep plodding on.

In saying that, there were a number of points made in this paper that I found really useful. Blogs, after all, don’t exist in the same space or tradition as other forms of writing. They are more immediate, but also more public and persistant than traditional writing.

Georges discusses the fact that storytelling emerged among the “Greek literati of later antiquity,” as emerged “stories through which men described the workings of their univresity and narrated exploits of members of their species” (313). This is a great quote for supporting the idea that storytelling is something that comes to us almost naturally (if not intrinsically!). Indeed, as time passed, it became evident that the “universality of storytelling was accepted a priori” (313).

Stories have, evidently, been an important element of human cognition for some time.

As I have attested many times in notes here, and in my own draft writing, storytelling is so vitally important because it offers a frame through which to view the world and make sense of experience and circumstance. Georges echoes this, noting,

…that stories can reflect cultural reality or distort it, that they can reinforce the social structure and contribute to social cohesion or weaken the social structure and threaten social cohesion, that they can funciton as conditioning mechanisms and instruments of social control or as escape mechanisms and instruments of social criticism (315).

So, stories are important not just on an individual level, but on a societal level too. Of course, being a part of a social or cultural collective contributes to personal identity, so effectively these broader scale society stories are also stories that help to inform personal growth & development, too.

Georges outlines a number of points that he sees as the framework for understanding & determining storytelling events. Of course, he is talking about verbal storytelling, but many elements, as I mentioned, echo the case of blogging. Another thing to keep in mind is that we are increasingly conducting what would have previously been verbal, face-to-face communication, via the Internet (i.e. making use of the written word). This article was penned in 1969 so it’s only fitting to interpret Georges’ reading of storytelling events to fit the present-day situation.

Georges’ “postulates” for storytelling events:

1. Every storytelling event is a communicative event.

2. Every storytelling event is a social experience.

3. Every storytelling event is unique.

4. Storytelling events exhibit degrees and kinds of similarities (317-319).

Georges obviously goes in to quite a bit of detail, and I’m not going to read it now, but there are some interesting points make about the way that storytellers relate to their audience, which echoes symbolic interactionism & Goffman, to a degree, so it is worth revisiting this article as I write.

Further on, Georges recognises the relationship between stories and literature (whilst still regarding them as separate entities). He writes:

…stories are usually regarded as the unwritten counterparts of written or literary narratives, with which it is felt they share common formal features and narrative devices…but with which it is felt they differ (322).

They differ for a variety of means, but Georges seems to imply that oral narratives are the mechanism of the underprivileged and less educated (322). He goes on to say:

Thought it is possible to draw analogies between written narratives and the messages of storytelling events, the same criteria cannot be utilized to judge both, nor can both be subjected to the same kinds of study and analysis (323).

Now… this might sound strange, but in the couple of years that I have been researching narrative, this is really the first time that I have pondered the notion that storytelling might be a term reserved for oral communication only. I do wonder though, as I have mentioned, whether the context of communication now is such that this definition is open to interpretation and re-working. The fact is simply that we do not communicate face-to-face anywhere near as much as we used to (or, more correctly, anywhere near as exclusively).

To finish off with, a couple of passages that I think ring true for my research, even if they aren’t dealing with written narrative:

The message of a storytelling event has no existence “outside” the storytelling event itself. It is not some “thing” that is merely used within differing contexts, for the mssage of a storytelling event exists only in terms of and because of the individuals whose selection of the social identities of storyteller and story listener entitles them to enjoy socially prescribed statuses and whose choices among the alternatives presribed by these identity relationships and status relationships result in the genreation and communication of a message that is simply one aspect of an integral whole from which it and every other aspect of the storytelling event are inseparable (323).

And:

Certainly, as an individual performs the duties presribed by the social identity of storyteller, selected from among the multiple social identities of his old persona, he formulates a message that grows out of messages stored in his memory as a result of past experience (324).

I really like this idea that everything that we do, all the stories that we form, tag on to our existing stories and understanding to become this sort of cumulative database of knowledge and awareness. Having a blog certainly helps with this: stories are kept, easily referred back to thanks to archives and tags, and we can build upon our life narratives as we go.

reference: Georges, Robert A. (1969), ‘Toward an understanding of storytelling events’. The Journal of American Folklore 82 (326), pp. 313-328

[annotated copy saved to Zotero]

You see – I’ve been trying to get my head around Paul Ricoeur, and failing pretty miserably. I often find that I’m like that with critical theory kind of stuff (I’m not sure if PR is actually considered critical theory, though, tbh) … I understand the general concept, but I certainly couldn’t explain it. I feel like it’s one of my shortcomings as a PhD student and pseudo-academic, because I’m surrounding by these people who just get it, and that makes me feel, well, unintelligent.

Anyway. This article was good & helpful.

Theorizing a life as narrative, text, or a story to be told or read in multiple ways suggests that our identity (who we are or whom we become) is amenable to change and creative interpretation (687).

I like the idea that, as people, we’re incomplete. (I mentioned this in a post yesterday or the day before, re: Anne Helmond.) Not incomplete in the sense that there is something missing, but rather that the notion of a finished, entire self is always elusive. Perhaps this extends to the concept of the “true self”, too; I used to think that it was possible to know the self entirely, but now I am not so sure. So much of who we are stems from our interaction with others, and others’ reading of us, that it seems all too convenient to think that one could ever truly know oneself. After all, another’s impression and interpretation of who we are can hold particular salience… and what’s to say that that is less important than who we think we are?

What if I’m an arsehole, but I don’t know it? Surely others around me can see that better than I can. Just because I don’t know I’m an arsehole, doesn’t mean I’m not one.

(Now I have gone off on a tangent worrying about whether or not I am an arsehole. Gosh this is unprofessional.)

Ricoeur (1981) argues that textuality provides a “model” for human action, suggesting that the construction of meaning in reading is similar to the interpretive analysis required to understand human action in general… we conceptualize the development of identity as an interpretive task, whereby the self is constructed and reconstructed by the complementary process of distanciation and appropriation (688).

I believe that what Bradbury & Miller are getting at here is that we need to be able to look at the self from the outside in order to have any hope of knowing who we really are. Distanciation implies that we need to look at ourselves from the outside: in some cases, by writing the self into being and reading it back. It’s a physical distance, especially when we write to another, and a temporal distance. I know that I have had the strange experience of reading over old blog posts from three, or six, or eight years ago, and being quite surprised by the voice that I once embodied. On the other hand, appropriation suggests that as we move around in cultural spaces, we take elements of others’ doing: parts of their stories, and their experiences, and we make them our own, forging a sense of self through the words and experiences of others.

One of the recurrent themes throughout this article is this sense that we, as human beings, do not ever exist in a vacuum. We are contextually situated and constructed… as much a part of the landscape and of shared experience as we are of our own selves.

Stories of struggles, dreams, compromises, unexpected opportunities, and ways of overcoming obstacles encourage learners to challenge the limits of their envisaged futures and to think in flexible, diverse ways about the world of work (690).

The above quote is particularly pertinent in the context of blogging, I think. Blogging – being a blogger, writing a blog, speaking to an (invisible/assumed/silent/whatever) audience – puts one in the strange position of always having an audience. Of course, what people choose to share varies significantly, but there is a good chance that many (most?) personal bloggers in particular will talk about their dreams, and their setbacks. When you lead such a public life, via publicly articulated narrative identity, you invite others to share in your triumphs and struggles, insofar as you are willing to keep this audience informed, of course. Bradbury & Miller talk about this in the context of education and work, but I think that it applies to personal growth more generally, too. The stories of others, they are saying, can be used to make sense of one’s own life, especially in shared context, but not necessarily so. I guess thinking about my own experiences in reading blogs: I have read about topics that I never would have thought about, or have not been so affected by, in my own life (death, birth, physical & personal triumph, heartache, infertility). So many of these are negative, but in many ways, we learn so much more from the bad than from the good. A bit further along, the following kind of echoes this:

…the world of individual thought is always mediated or penetrated by the other, who is always a sociocultural other (691).

We are, always, interlinked and intertwined in the lives of others, as they are in ours, and this fusion creates identity. We understand, through others, what we are, and what we are not. This is quite Goffmanesque I think! Understanding the other leads to the understanding of the self, and vice versa. We regulate behaviour in light of this understanding (690).

Language (or discourse) simultaneously regulates us and creates the possibility for novelty, resistance, and interpretation… (692).

We do so much through language. It’s really the root of my entire thesis: How do we choose the words to form the narratives that tell the stories of our lives? How do we choose what to tell and what to withhold? McAdams is a name that keeps coming up again and again; this time, he notes:

“Language is indeterminate. Every word is ambiguous in and of itself, and its particular meaning in a particular moment is dependent on its relation to other equally ambiguous words with which it is spoken and written” (McAdams, 2001, p.115) (692).

I love this idea – it really appeals to the linguistics nerd within. Words are, essentially, arbitrary; some of them carry some weight, of course (I’m thinking particularly of swear words here, which carry the stigma of offensive language, and of cancer, which is so sharp a word it should almost be written Cancer, and never said in anything other than the most serious tone), but it’s not until they are put together, formed and shaped into sentences and statements, that they become more meaningful. And this is what Ricoeur is saying:

“…the literary work is the result of a labour which organises language” (Ricoeur, 1981, p.136).

There is something so beautiful and romantic about that statement, that I had to write it out and stick it on the wall of my office:

To me, there is something so organic about this statement: the notion that literature is something that emerges from arbitrariness if you just work hard enough at it (if you labour at it, coax it in to being, and mould it yourself).

One thing that I don’t agree with from this article, in the context of my own research, is the following statement:

The distance of text makes dialogue impossible; the author is absent or not directly accessible through face-to-face social interaction. The distance between the author’s world of experience and the text is furhter compounded by the distance between the possible world revealed by the text and the world of the reader’s experience (693).

Now, of course, the Internet has massively changed the way that we look at & read text. The author of a blog is still (usually) not available through face-to-face social interaction, but the distance between author & reader is, I would argue, lessened in the online context. The author is more reactive and available than a traditional print author, just as the audience (readers) of a blog are more vocal & involved than that of traditional print. The relationship between author & reader changes significantly in this context. Bradbury & Miller go on to suggest (I think!) that texts are more useful as they are read, than as they are written,

…with text providing a kind of impetus or immanent prospect for the reader to generate new understandings of the self (693).

They continue;

The self or identity, far from being an individual or bounded interior entity, is that which we construct by the “long detour of the signs of humanity deposited in cultural works”. The “real” self is an imagined or projected possibility rather than something hidden, whole, to be discovered or unearthed behind the text, or even behind behaviour or consciousness (693).

Quoting Ricoeur (1981, p.143 — check) here, Bradbury & Miller are discussing the self as it is constructed from within other selves. Or, perhaps not within, but alongside? That suggests though that we are somewhat independent, and I’m not sure from this reading that we are. But if we’re not independent… ?

I’m not sure. One thing that I am definitely getting from this article is this sense that, because of the impossibility of the ‘real’ self, we have to be constructed, at least partially, from others’ interpretations of us. I think that Bradbury & Miller are urging us – as individuals, as collectives – to think about what our everydayness means in the context of the bigger picture of life –

…we can treat our lives, ourselves, the human life-world of action as a kind of text: read them, interpret them, appropriate their meanings across a distance (694).

Again, this returned to that idea of nothing existing in a vacuum; we are in and of a greater world order, and all of our actions, words, thoughts, interpretations, are influenced by others, but also influence others, too. As human beings, we are constantly engaged in a process of meaning-making; we take time to think about things, to talk through them with others, to think about why what we are doing or experiencing is important. Dan McAdams (2001) talks about this too; Bradbury & Miller summarise it as such:

McAdams (2001) … suggests that in the same way that a narrative structure connects events or episodes across time and place, identity construction entails a “synchronic” synthesis of selves across roles and relationships and a “diachronic” synthesis of selves across time (695).

Now this… this is king of Goffman, no? This idea that we have many selves or roles that we play, but they’re all essentially part of the same being. Diachronic means pertaining to changes in linguistics over time… I’m not sure how this fits in.

However, implications of coherence and structure, and the idea that identity may be a crisis to be “solved” once and for all during a particular developmental phase of life, is negated by postmodern characterizations of life as non-linear and fragmentary, more loosely discursive than narrative (695).

Postmodernism, it would seem, challenges the idea that life narratives can even be. There are parts that fit together, but the fact that there is no final product – no whole, no completeness – does this challenge the idea of a narrative? I think a problem with this reading is that it assumes that life narratives are linear. Blogs aren’t linear. The way that we think and tell stories – they’re not linear. Perhaps what we do when we tell stories of the self is that we mentally hyperlink events, associatively linking together events and experiences across space and time. No one tells their story as it happens; no one even understands their story as it happens. Citing Ricoeur (1984), Bradbury & Miller note:

… understanding is impossible in the onslaught of the present and that it is only in retrospect that we can “know” the past (the moment just flash or the century way back; that of ourselves or of others) retrospectively. Immediate experience is unknowable… (695)

We are aware of things as they happen, obviously, but what they are about – their significance – only makes itself known to us retrospectively, as we gather experience and perspective and hindsight, and make sense of what has happened. Because of this, everything that we do in life involves some kind of “narrative work” (696) in order to understand life.

Postmodernism would suggest that this is impossible, though. I’m not sure that I will even go in to this in my thesis, because there is a lot of pomo stuff that I don’t necessarily agree with (they were all high, right?), but I thought the following was interesting:

Postmodernity simultaneously erases directionality (and coherence) and dissolves the subject, suggesting perhaps that all that remains are authorless intertextual worlds rather than narrating subjects (re)creating identities (697).

This idea is kind of grim, I think! It completely does away with the idea of the individual as important or even existant, favouring instead colliding, intertwined circumstances, in which it is the events – the placement of everything in this worlds, the interactions – rather than the experiential individuals, that actually matter. So if there no subjects, no authors, no narrators, and no narratives, then there are no identities, and this project is completely pointless.

Unless it is the blogs – as authorless, intertextual worlds – rather than the narrator-bloggers themselves, that is important. Perhaps the words on the page, how they bring together this intersection of physical and virtual space and experience, rather than the person using or telling the stories, that is important. In thinking about life and what it means and creating stories of experiences, we render them inauthentic. Vice (2003) agrees with this, as Bradbury & Miller discuss:

She concludes that the storied or narrative view of life is a delusion because it imposes order that isn’t there, because there is another kind of reality that is authentic or really, really human that lies outside of all this reflexivity/thinking/interpretation (697).

Life is a delusion? Is Vice suggesting that we do away with thought – or at least stop placing such weight on the conclusions that we draw – because they don’t matter anyway? But if they don’t matter, then why do we spend so much damn time thinking about things and making sense of them and putting them into narratives so that we may share with others? WHY? I guess that’s one of my problems with much of this: if it’s something we do so intrinsically, is there any point in denying it, other than to be controversial? Surely Vice is as human as I am: surely she thinks about things and plays them over in her mind and shares with others. To not share, to avoid telling the stories of our lives in order to make sense of them, seems almost sociopathic. I wonder what her friends and lovers think, if she never shares anything because there is no point.

Or maybe, having accepted it as delusion, she shares it anyway, being content in the knowledge that it does not matter.

reference: Bradbury, Jill & Miller, Ronald (2010), ‘Narrative possibilities: Theorizing Identity in a Context of Practice‘. Theory & Psychology 20(5), pp. 687-702

[This is a research piece about blog research - it doesn't really include much useful information for my thesis, but it has some interesting titles in the bibliography so I have decided to keep this very short notation here.

reference: Larsson, A. O. & Hrastinski, S. (2011).’Blogs and blogging: Current trends and future directions‘. First Monday 16(3). Retrieved 10 November 2011.

…turning points in a life are provoked not by actualities, but by revisions in the story one has been using to tell about life and self, the most drastic of these being genre changes prompted from within. This leads me to propose, then, that in some important sense, “lives” are texts: texts that are subject to revision, exegesis, reinterpretation, and so on. that is to say, accounted lives are taken by those who account them as texts amenable to alternative interpretation (129).

This idea that lives are texts is one that I really like, and that I think fits in with the overall theme of my thesis quite well. We are increasingly narrating the stories of our lives as written texts, through blogs (and, really, in visual terms: Flickr, Instagram, YouTube, and so many others).

That lives are ‘texts that are subject to revision’ is poignant; it kind of fits in with Anne Helmond‘s notion that online, our identities are in pertpetual beta. Blogs are, really, the perfect space in which to manage these identities: the use of tagging & categories (forms of folksonomy) means that it’s easy to retrace ones steps, so long as one is familiar with the keywords assigned to a particular story (and has used them consistently). Also, one can link (trackback via permalink) to pasts selves… I might be writing today, and remember something I wrote two or three years ago that kind of tells the same story, and I can link to that past story, forming this kind of cohesive, richer (but still not complete) version of the self in doing so.

Accounted lives means also expecting that we will interpret events differently in different situations & under different circumstances. I guess I am thinking here about the kind of stories that we tell to others when something is bothering us… the propensity to overindulge or overemphasise a situation, exaggeration, the withholding of certain information. I will parts of a story out when telling it to particular friends or family members. I will embellish others. The act of telling these stories is important, but the way that we tell them is just as significant, I think. Over time, too, it’s easy to look back on a past account of an event or time that was particularly trying, and view it through much more… balanced? eyes. Balanced? Maybe just through less involved eyes. Less invested.

…I wish to equate “text” in this sense with a conceptually formulated narrative account of what a life has been about (130)

That is to say, that according to Bruner & Weisser, a text can exist in the memory – it does not have to be written down, so long as this narrative account of life is present in some form.

Paul John Eakin published a text in 1985 called Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention that might be worth a look if the library has it. In it, according to Burner & Weisser, he quotes William Maxwell, from his 1980 text (So Long, See You Tomorrow): “In talking about the past, we lie wih every breath we draw” (p.27 in that text; p.131 in this).

I find that idea so sad: that everything we say is a ‘lie’ in some way (though I suppose that depends upon how we interpret the concept of a lie, really. Yes, everything we say is mediated… but if (as discussed by Havelock and Narasimhan in both of their chapters in this text) we need language to make sense… and verbally articulated self is more ‘real’ (they don’t say real – that’s my interpretation) than other, temporal forms, then does that mean that there is never a true self at all? Or at least, that every self, by nature of its being constructed and performed, is a lie?

reference: Bruner, Jerome & Weisser, Susan (1987), ‘The invention of self: autobiography and its forms’. In David R. Olson & Nancy Torrance [eds.] (1991), Literacy and Orality. Cambridge; New York; Melbourne: Cambridge Unversity Press pp. 129-148

The two, orality and literacy, are sharpened and focused against each other, yet can be seen as still interwoven in our own society. It is, of course, a mistake to polarize these as mutually exclusive. Their relationship is one of mutual, creative tension, one that has both a historical dimenson – as literate societies have emerged out of oralist ones – and a contemporary one – as we seek a deeper understanding of what literacy may mean to us as it is superimposed on an orality into which we were born and which governs so much of the normal give and take of daily life (11).

It seems, in many of the texts that I am reading, as though there is this tension between orality and literacy. There is no doubt that we are a literate society now, but is literacy better? Have our  minds become mushy and flawed since the move towards written word, or does literacy simply make up for the fallibility of the human memory?

One thing is certain: writing is a learned activity. As I mentioned in this post re: Narasimhan (from the same volume at this), writing is a technology: developed, adopted, learned, but never natural.

The natural human being is not a writer or a reader but a speaker and a listener. Literacy at any stage of its development is in terms of evolutionary time a mere upstart, an artificial exercise, a work of culture, not nature, imposed upon the natural man (20).

The fact that writing is an artificiality means that it will always be set one step outside of human nature. Yes, we learn to write at a young age, and we have (mostly) become quite proficient at it. We use the written word to communicate and to comprehend, to alert others, to remember. But it has not always been that way; before there was written word, there were oral tales, accounts of events passed from person to person.

At some point, though, we needed written language.

Havelock cites the Ancient Greeks in this chapter, around 500AD, as having created the first truly useful, efficient written language. He notes:

A limited set of shapes small enough to be outlined quickly by the hand was devised that could be manipulated to form groups of shapes, combinations of two, three, or four, running to the thousands of such groupings that could correspond to the thousands of linguistic noises produced by the specialised organs of the throat and mouth. A given language restricted itself to a given number. The row of letters on the page became the automatic propmpters of corresponding speech that the brain recites to itself (24).

I am quite fascinated by linguistics. It’s a fascination that I’m not sure will ever lead to me studying linguistics, but it’s given me enough of an interest to be quite taken by the way that letters are combined into words, and those words arranged on the page, and the way that the removal of certain words (or even of something so seemingly minor as punctuation – the example of Let’s eat, kids! vs Let’s eat kids! springs to mind!) can entirely change the meaning of a sentence.

The written word is so natural to me today, sitting here typing out my thoughts into a blog post,  that the notion that it took some time to realise the true potential of the written word as a device for codifying new information.

At first the alphabet was used to record oral language as previously composed for memorization in Greek epics, lyrics, and drama. The conceptual revolution began when it was realized tha the full register of linguistic sound could be placed in a new kind of storage no longer dependent on the rhythms used in oral memory recall. It could become a document, a permanent set of visible shapes, no longer a fleeting vibration in the air but shapes that could be laid aside until rescanned for some purpose and indeed forgotten (25).

This concept – “no longer a fleeting vibration in the air” – will fit in quite well in the introductory paragraphs of Chapter Three of my thesis. I enjoy this contrast between the fleeting ephemerality of spoken word, and the permanence of written word – although, of course, nothing is truly permanent. Records may be destroyed, documents forged… No system is perfect.

One thing that I am unsure of is over what kind of a time the adoption of writing happened, and why people chose to stick to this one system. It would be quite interesting to read about some time when I have the opportunity.

reference: Havelock, Eric (1987), ‘The oral-literate equation: a formula for the modern mind’. In David R. Olson & Nancy Torrance (1991), Literacy and Orality. Cambridge; New York; Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, pp. 11-27

So after a couple of months away from writing, I find myself thrown in to a chapter about storying selves – the process of developing narrative identities and using narrative storytelling as a means for really exploring the notion of who we (as a society, and as individuals) are. There are a stack of books on my desk that look at orality and literacy in its various forms, from Ong to Bruns, each, I suppose, thinking in different ways about this self that we construct with words to play out our preferences.

This chapter by Narasimhan (in Olson & Torrance, see reference below) is kind of dense, and not entirely relevant (it deals with the development & use of language in India and Greece, amongst other topics such as the representation of spatiality vs temporality) but it has a few passages that I think will prove quite useful for this chapter as well as the introduction to this thesis.

Writing is also claimed to have been an essential force in the emergence of an autonomous psyche making up the inner world of individual human beings: The hallucinations of Homeric heroes gave place to the reflective introspections of the post-Homeric Greek tradition. Writing and subsequently, to an even greater extent, printing made it possible to draw a clear distinction between “utterance” and “text” (177).

This notion that writing marked a clear shift towards an articulated, reflective, expressive individuality that facilitated the move to understanding the self is quite interesting, and an idea that I think would be useful in the introduction to the thesis. Writing and speaking are markedly different activities, of course — texts are bound by a sort of physicality, a permanence, that spoken word (even when recorded) never possesses.

I find there to be something quite romantic about the idea that we are because we have the words to say we are. That language underpins so much of our idendity kind of fills me with a bit of a warm and fuzzy feeling, because I’m such a language nerd, and because I spend quite a lot of time trying to articulate what’s going on in my life and in my mind (although I am articulating something just by thinking about it, really, because I very much think in words rather than images etc).Narasimhan notes,

…a characterising feature of language behavior is that it enables one to articulate aspects of the world and the self” (181).

I also like this concept that, as we write, we write to another space and time:

Writing, ohwever, is intrinsically a distanced activity. One writes for an individual that is separated from oneself in space and time (181).

You don’t write to the person next to you (although I suppose this is changing, in many ways, with the rapid uptake of online social networking – many times I’ve chatted in text form to my housemates, who are in the next room, so tha’ts an example of using the written word to converse proximally). In terms of time, we are certainly using the written word to converse with those with whom we share temporality more than ever… that’s a way that it’s changed. It would be worth thinking about this.

Finally, one of the things that I have discussed in chapter… two? I think? is this idea that writing is a technology – it’s aided by tools, it’s a learned (rather than natural) skill, and even the development of the written language itself: the decision to write characters in certain ways and have them produce particular sounds and words in combination. I believe that Walter Ong talked about this, and I feel that the following fits together nicely with this:

In the language of representations and their uses, the orality-literacy contrast reveals itself as the contrast between craft techniques based on apprenticeship and tradition and engineering techniques based on theorized science (182).

reference: Narasimhan, R. (1991). ‘Literacy: Its characterization and implications’. In David R. Olson & Nancy Torrance [eds.]. Literacy and Orality. Cambridge; New York; Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, pp. 177-197

I forgot that I had this blog. It’s been hidden on my WordPress dashboard for the past year so I kind of assumed that it no longer existed, but I’m glad I found it today.

Maybe I will write some more, maybe I won’t. I’d really like to harness my early enthusiasm for the project and go from there, truthfully. I used to have such high hopes for this thesis. Now I just have hopes – like, I hope it will be finished soon and I hope it won’t be shit.

How jaded I’ve become.

Reed aims to look at the blog as anthropological text, by focusing on “the ways in which people hold that texts can act as substitutes or extensions of them” [224]. Thinking of text as person, Reed’s argument could fit in well with the idea of blogged self as substitute/simulation – more real than real, it stands in the place of a self that cannot always be truly present (and, given the mediated nature of the self online, this blogged self will only ever be a portion of the ‘true self’ — not that this makes it any less authentic than the offline, physical self, as this self too only ever shows a particular face…). Reed asks a number of questions that are pertinent to my own research, including “Who does it substitute for? How is agency extended? … How is the ‘person’ composed and how does that composition alter over time?” [224].

Reed conducted an ethnographic study of bloggers, using both online and face-to-face interviews in order to gather his data. Speaking of one of his subject’s blogs, Reed notes:

These entries, and the ones I read later, in the following weeks and months, enforced the impression that here was the world as Leo saw it. The weblog appeared to provide a day-by-day account of passing moods and experiences, of his life as it happens. [226].

What Reed is saying here is simply but poignant; a blog has traditionally been a space wherein the author can present their view of the world, as interpreted through their own experiences and ideologies. In my ever-present fear of the corruption of blog culture (through advertising and freebies and what not), I fear that this personalised view of the world might be under threat. Reed voices perfectly the sentiment that I hope all blogs should entail.

Reed goes on to discuss the fact that “the ‘I’ narrative” [226-227] is central to blogging, with the “entity depicted in the digital text” responsible for narrating and perpetuating a coherent (but not necessarily streamlined) whole. The blog and the blogged self are both dynamic, contrastingly starkly with the more “static” representations of personhood found in print and on earlier webpages (227); this dynamism is largely credited to the frequent updating of blogs:

At the heart of journal blogging is an ethos of immediacy. Weblogs entries are meant to be ‘of the moment’, a record of how the individual felt or thought at that particular point in time. The claim that the text and subject can be temporally contiguous relies on the assumption of virtuality, but also on the ease of online publishing that allows posts to be put down on the digital page straight away… the weblog is valued for capturing a person’s impressions almost as they occur. [227]

Reed proceeds to contemplate the status of blog-as-therapy [228], “a means of clearing the mind in order to move a subject’s though processes along”. This concept is analogous to early beliefs such as the Ancient Greek hupomnemata, where it was perceived that a person only had so much room in the mind, and must write down thoughts in order to make room for new learnings, and not forget them in the future. These notes to the self were then used as memory-joggers in the future, a permanent record of previous lessons that could be referred to as needed. A blog operates in much the same way.

There are always aspects of the subject that remain outside or beyond the text, impressions that they cannot or do not want to post. What is censored and why seems to obey no coherent rule…; the most important thing for bloggers is that the claim stands, acting as an implicit defence of their fullness of being… In fact, the digital text is taken to provide a partial version of the subject. [230]

The above quote will tie in nicely with a discussion of symbolic interactionism and performance in chapter four. For Reed, the above provides a tidy opening into the role of audience in blogging. Reed argues that “As well as drawing out the ways in which the digital text substitutes for the ‘I’ of the blogger, individuals are concerned to explore how it mediates between persons after publication” [230]. The blog, as public document, is received in different ways online, and has the potential to be remediated easily – as re-postings on other people’s blogs, or even in the way that it is interpreted and regarded. The blogger must be aware that the self they present online via their blog is the only version of that self that many of their readers will ever encounter. This provides a double-edged sword situation: on the one hand, bloggers may try not to offend or shock their readership, in order to avoid controversy (as an example). On the other hand, doesn’t this censored version of self imply deceit of the audience? Reed later mentions, however, that “the most important visitor to the text is the blogger… this document is produced so a subject can view himself or herself in a mediated form, exteriorised as text” [231]. There is something inherently exhibitionist about the blogger, though:

She compared weblogs to the graffiti that one finds across the city, texts left for strangers to read… the blogger was like someone who leaves scrawled notes on park benches and inside telephone boxes, or who tacks postcards to the front doors of public buildings. [232]

Reed also considers the reasoning behind blogging (i.e. using a public document to record one’s history) and a more private diary [233]. Undoubtedly, the public nature of a blog leads to more editing than one would perhaps employ in a traditional diary, and yet the potential for feedback and the knowledge that someone is hearing your voice are unparalleled.

NB: Discussion of celebrity bloggers (236-238) might be relevant to part 5 of chapter 2?

Texts to consult:

Gell 1986. Writing Culture.

Reference:

Reed, A. (2005). “‘My blog is me’: Texts and persons in UK online journal culture (and anthropology).” Ethnos v.70 n.2