Narrative identity construction (& Ricoeur!).

Posted: November 12, 2011 | Author: erin | Filed under: reading and regurgitating | Tags: associative thinking, construction of self, Goffman, hindsight, hypertext, identity, McAdams, memory, narrative, narrative self, Paul Ricoeur, reflection, retrospect, Vice | Leave a comment »

I found this article by Bradbury & Miller really helpful.

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

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