J.P.Roos: Context, authenticity, referentiality, reflexivity: back to basics in autobiography

CONTEXT, AUTHENTICITY, REFERENTIALITY, REFLEXIVITY: BACK TO BASICS IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

J.P.Roos
Department of Social Policy
POB 18, 00014 University of Helsinki
Finland
e-mail: j.p.roos@helsinki.fi

Paper presented at the workshop on "Biographical perspectives on post-socialist societies", 13-17 Nov 1996 St. Petersburg

Introduction

   In an earlier paper (Roos 1994), I have discussed the implications of the poststructuralist/postmodern position to autobiography which - to put it crudely - is that there is no Truth, no Reality, not one "true" way to connect the object world and the spoken or written wor(l)d, but instead lots of interpretations, all equally possible (or, as Peter Bürger says: "It is a central thesis of postmodern thought that in our society signs no longer refer to a designatum, but always only to other signs, and that we thus in our discourse no longer arrive at anything resembling meaning, but merely move around within an infinite chain of signifiers" Bürger 1992, 95)
   As Paul Ricoeur has noted, the history of thinking has developed by the tension between the theories of "sens" and theories of sign, a tension which is presently expressed in the debate between poststructuralist and "classical modern" thought. (see Heller-Feher 1988, Toulmin 1989, Taylor 1990 and also Dosse 1992, Heiskala 1993, Sica 1993, Arditi 1993).
   In the previous paper, I discussed this ambivalence from the point of view of autobiographies, which are, in many ways, expectionally problematic from both perspectives. I used a "biblical/dialectic" perspective which contained three stages (actually, in the first version there was a fourth one, "Genesis", in which I explained the origins of the poststructuralist approach to autobiographies: i.e. the Genesis, not of Paradise but of Paradise lost): Paradise revisited, Paradise lost and Redemption. The argument was, very shortly, as follows:

The Paradise (revisited):

The early sociologists and historians who rediscovered the autobiography as sociological data all approach this wonderful material in this straightforward and euphoric manner: it is the ideal material to get to know what really happens or has really happened in the society, as well as to explain what has really happened (see the well-known texts of Thompson 1978, Bertaux 1976, Bertaux-Kohli 1984, Lalive d'Epinay, etc.)

The Fall:

Upon leaving the Paradise of True Autobiographies, it was seen (revealed) that no text is innocent, independent of certain theoretical, conceptual and textual frames. Nothing we describe or see in the world we just see: it comes to us and through us always mediated by the current way of seeing things. In the most extreme versions of this thought, texts are simply written, the author has no significance and the reader is also just an instance of a more general reader. The "facts" are not facts but just figures of speech or text. As Eakin (1992) has noted, every element in the simple definition, "autobiographies are texts written by the author, about the life of himself", has become suspect, and many more besides: self, reality, life, culture etc etc.
In the most extreme case, then, anything goes (this claim is, of course firmly denied by the defenders of poststructuralist theorizing, but at least in a relative sense it is true, and sometimes even proclaimed). Autobiography becomes simply a text heard by ears of certain size or form which determine what we hear (Derrida's Otobiographie, see Levesque 1992) and nothing is as it is said to be. There is no subject, no author, no reader, no reference. I can write whatever I wish, call it autobiography (or even not call it autobiography, but a novel or a text) and autobiography it is (or if it is not, no matter).

The Repentance:

In a recent issue of Contemporary sociology (1993), the reviewers (Alan Sica, Jorge Arditi) seem to be rather unanimous that the textual, poststructuralist turn has spent its energy and what is most important, has been an interesting critique, but not given much by way of positive impulses.
It is now possible to draw a balance sheet of what has taken place, what are the effects of poststructuralism to the field of biographical research. In the field of autobiography, the discussion has brought about:
a) An awareness of narrativity as a very important factor in the autobiography,
b) And of the often tenuous relationship between the author and the self and the "reality".
c) The problem of the identity of the self (continuity, perspectives, multiple identities, etc)
d) The multiple levels of authors and audiences
e) The primacy of the text, that it is the text, not the life that we are dealing with
f) In the extreme case autobiography may be seen as determining the life, not vice versa or in the other more Derridean extreme case, the autobiography and the life may have a totally contingent relationship.
Or, to put it in a nutshell, we know now that is is impossible to write an autobiography in the ordinary sense: all aspects of the process are problematic: story, self, life etc. But as we (I) know from real life, people go on writing their life stories under the assumption that there is a life outside, that they are describing it, that their selves are contiguous, not contingent and there is a causal narrative connecting the different events etc.

The Redemption:

   While it must be admitted that this change of perspective has had many useful consequences (in the best case it is simply a question of increased reflexivity (see Giddens (1991)) and that the questioning of the different aspects of the process of production of the autobiography has greatly improved our insights in the different aspects of the autobiographical I, (and precisely in all those astonishing ways in which social and cultural codes or narrative strategies affect the autobiography), I should like to propose a change of perspective once more. Admitting that everything is much more complicated than previously thought, what if the original supposition of I representing his or her life, were still true, or to put it in another way, it is an essential aspect for understanding the autobiography?
   This is exactly what I wish to propose. The autobiographical project or pact is that of an auto(bio)grapher wanting to tell others about life, how it really was, what has happened, what are his/her views of it. Unless we accept this, we may indeed talk about the end of autobiography, not in the sense of the poststructuralist thought, but rather in the sense of having thrown out the baby with the bathwater. But, on the other hand, we cannot revert back to the old perspective: we have lost our innocence, there is no paradise of true autobiography. Things may not be what they look like, they may in fact be drastically different. But still, it is not all interpretation. And most importantly, there is something outside the text, outside the representation, outside the spoken or written wor(l)d. We may have to put our ideas on paper or into words if we want to communicate them, but we are still aware that there is something else, something that we know very well exists but which we cannot (or need not) reach, or express. It eludes us, but it is there. Because I am not a philosopher, I like to call this reality, or real life. It need not be extreme, like a concentration camp experience (but it is true that such "extreme" experiences are more easily perceived as really real if we are sure that they have happened, see Bauman 1991). With practice, with hard work, with creative insights, flashes, we can advance in our project and "get closer to the real truth" about a life (objectivity out of subjectivity as Bertaux 1996 has noted).
Life stories are serious texts. There is no post-modern frivolity or lightness, play with identities or mere identity-relationships a la Gergen, Derrida &co. For the people who write of their lives, these lives are real, in a very concrete sense, not just situation or relation or perspective bound.
   It is much better and more fruitful to go back to the lives themselves, try to use common sense and experience in deducing more general conclusions coming out of them, using general concepts only when they really were useful and necessary, never theorizing unecessarily.
    Of course one should not go too far. There are phenomena which may be or have to be generalized. But individual lives are unique, they are always a combination of accidents and there are never two similar lives. For a theory of autobiography to be fruitful, it must always be a very concrete generalisation.
In a recent article which is quite relevant from my perspective (although it refers to fiction!), Abercrombie, Lash and Longhurst (1992, 120) define realism in the following way:
1. The position of the producer is the referent of reality itself.
2. The position of the audience is the perceptual rather than cognitive apparatus
3. The position of the text is a window, stationed between the observer and the referent;
all of which is an excellent description of the classical position of autobiographical writing (only in the last third point we should say reader instead of observer).
These realism assumptions govern the writing of popular autobiographies and all the work around and about them. And the punch line of Abercrombie et al (1992, 138), "Critics of the twenty-first century, then, will be well advised once again to take realism seriously", fits autobiographic theorizing like a glove!
   One of the arguments against the referential point of view is that texts (or transcriptions of speech) are the only things we can actually have and know about: there is no life outside the text because there is no other way to make statements about life and thus is it nonsense to speak about real life outside the text or spoken word (see Rahkonen 1991, based on Bourdieu 1986). I find this implausible and also a very positivistic: a simple redefinition of evidence, which an autobiography is definitely not. Of course we use mainly texts, but these texts are nothing at all in an autobiographical context if we don't impute an external reality to them, "something" out there which they try to describe, more or less adequately. And which we try to understand, and make understandable to others, communicate.
    The fundamental question is this: what is the essence of the autobiographical from the sociological point of view, what are the basic assumptions of research, in what way can one use life stories? That is, when the dust raised by the poststructuralist theory construction has subsided.
   I thus propose to treat the autobiographies (as different from biographies) as essentially reality- and truth oriented narratives of practices where the truth is seen from a unique, concrete viewing point, that of the author, who is simultaneously the narrator in the story, and sees himself as such. Central to the story are life/events, things that have happened in his life, some of which are seen as turning points or definitely important events, while most are ordinary events. But the important thing is that they have happened in the narrator's presence, (or were told to him by sources known and trustworthy to him). An autobiography which would refer only to - say - news in newspapers would not be interesting or believable.
I propose to anchor autobiographical research to four concepts:   context, authenticity, referentiality and reflexivity. For me, all these concepts are closely interrelated even though they all bring their own contribution to the story.
Still, they cannot be separated in a meaningful way.
In what follows, I shall try to discuss the analysis of autobiographies starting from these four concepts. The most important is obviously context. Context means here: concrete conditions and the significance structure of the autobiography, as referred to, explicitly or implicitly, by the author. A good example of context in autobiography is when the story is only understandable in the framework of a given generation and its experiences of a given socio-historical process. For example when continuous difficulties, deceptions etc. turn finally into a very positive picture of the whole life, this can be only understood in the context of the war, poverty, the building of the welfare state, new security, social mobility, new possibilities of education etc..
If one reads any autobiography, the important (but difficult) thing to determine in a sociological analysis is its context. We must discover and construct the context in order to be able to understand and give meaning to the stories. This is particularly obvious if one is doing cross-cultural comparisons of autobiographies, say comparing Russian and Finnish sexual autobiographies (or discussing father-son relationships like Hoikkala 1996). But this is equally important when the analysis is restricted to autobiographies in one cultural context only. The authors aren't themselves necessarily aware of the context or able to present it explicitly: this is the work of the analyst/reader, who also "creates (constructs)" the context. The context may vary enormously: it may be class, a historical situation, an intergenerational family story etc. The context may be created partly in advance by specifying either the activity (pratique) (sexuality, sport, parenting) or the field (champ) of the autobiography ( work, family, class, childhood). These are both possible themes for writing the autobiography. When writing for instance a sexual autobiography one would in principle write one's whole life, but looking at it from the perspective of sexuality: childhood, relationship to parents, youthful loves, wives, husbands, children, relationships at work etc.) Here the context is transparent, but of course there are more opaque (sub)contexts where a wife may take revenge of her husband by writing a terrible story about him, or where the context may be misery, happiness, justification etc.
In any case, the autobiography must be anchored to social reality through a contextual analysis.
   In Daniel Bertaux' analysis of bakers (see Bertaux 1996) this is very clear: the stories of the different actors, bakers, bakers apprentices, wives, fall into place only after the context is discovered, i.e the ways in which people move from one position to another, all the stories are related. In this sense, context is especially necessary when one works with a set of autobiographies simultaneously. It is like the society game where first only certain glimpses of the whole picture are revealed and through intelligent questioning more and more pieces fall into place and finally/hopefully the total picture is there.
Authenticity is also problematic, but on different level (see also Taylor 1991). It is related to the endeavour of the author to present his life as directly, realistically as possible. This includes also levels of representation or signification, changes of perspective, etc. But in the same spirit as Abercrombie, Lash and Longhurst wish to reintroduce realism starting from the observation that it is still the most pervasive regime of "signification" in popular culture today, (1992, 115). Typically, autobiographies are relatively "simple" from the point of view of narrative techniques, perspective, intendend meanings. In fact, the discussions about the different levels and apparitions of the "I" of ordinary autobiography are more or less meaningless, to tell the truth (no insult intended). The authors don't usually reflect upon the fact that the I telling about childhood micht be different than the one telling of recent events. Or that the present I telling of childhood events must be quite different from the I who experienced them 20-60 years ago.
   The important thing in an autobiography is that the author knows of things (events, relationships) that have happened in his past and wants to tell them. That is the essential difference for the author, as well as for the reader, whatever icing he wants to put on the cake. In fact, I'd be prepared to go further than Eakin (1992) and claim that the problematic circular relationship between "self" and autobiography is actually quite unnecessary: what is needed is simply "experience of life events", i.e. in an autobiography the author tells not the story of "self" but of his personal life experiences, which belong to him and nobody else (in their totality; many of these experiences may be shared with different other persons).
There is no need to resort to a mythical modern, European self to make autobiography possible: all that is needed is referentiality, the fact that I am telling about something that has actually happened to me, that I have experienced. Of course, it helps to have a conception of self, but it is not necessary, at least not historically. And what other way there is to create a self, unless by telling an autobiography?

   Authenticity is also related to evaluation of the autobiographies. In all the competition juries where I have participated, this question has been one of the central and most important criteria in evaluation the stories. In principle we are interested in more or less authentic stories, i.e. stories perceived (read) as such. The less authentic the story seems to be, the less useful it is from the point of view of analysis. But authenticity is also a dual construct: authenticity by the author and authenticity by the reader. It may be that a superficial, hapless story becomes authentic for the reader from a specific point of view. But this is an exception: normally then the first thing one should do is to find the most authentic stories or the most authentic sections of the stories. There is only a small problem: we cannot be sure whether the story is really authentic: i.e. not only constructed as authentic but actually is a true reflection of what the author has experienced and lived.
      Authenticity has also to do with reflexivity and referentiality. An authentic story is authentic because it refers to something: it is construed in relation to actions, events, social reality. But this is not enough. Authenticity presupposes also reflexivity: a story where the narrator is taking stock of himself or herself, moving on different levels or using different perspectives. This has of course also to do with contextuality: the more reflexive the story the more context is also present.
    What I mean here with reflexivity is more or less connected with a multilayered story: if I had known what I now know, in hindsight this was not so good thing after all etc. I.e. the author himeslf/herself is evaluating the story. But it has also to do with motivation, the author tries to explain why he must tell the story in the way he or she tells it (this is important for me).
   But, in the last analysis, authenticity is all about whether we can believe the story or not. There are obviously techniques to make a story believable (to quote the Finnish painter Kimmo Kaivanto: "As to my own relationship to realism, I can say that I haven't yet made one single realist painting. All I've done is to change the visual reality in order to make it more authentic"), but in the case of ordinary authors, they don't usually resort to any tricks, but create authenticity though their own straightforwardness: this is the story and all there is to it. Sometimes the events told in the story are such that one starts to disbelieve the story: a teacher who tells about all kinds of evil things happening to him in a village loses authenticity becauser he himself beleives in impossible events. Or when a russian autobiographer tells of incest in his life; he meets incest everywhere, all his new women have their own incest stories. These coincidences are rather unbelievable, inauthentic. But of course it is still possible that the story is really true. I.e. that there is a context (a milieu) in which such things happen. Only in the case of Soviet society in the 70's this seems quite improbable: how could the local community not notice, the circumstances would make it impossible ...
Another example of the problem of referentiality / reality is related to the current (Finnish/American) discussion about incest at childhood, especially the question of recovered memory. There are therapists who think that it is possbile for a person to forget an extremely traumatic and difficult event (for example, the murder of a friend byt the subject's father) and then recover the memory much later, often with the help of therapy. Others on the other hand, believe that such events are so important and momentous that they cannot be forgotten. Another thing is if they happen to children who are so small that they scarcely even know what is happening: even in these cases people have produced memories which have been accepted as true. Here, then the question of truth and referentiality is really acute: if we think that the memories are completely irrelevant as to their referent, then these memories could just be interpreted as symbolic, lacking any kind of truth value. If, on the other hand, we believe in their referentiality, that they reflect the truth in some hazy way, then they are of course extremely explosive and terrible memories. The interesting paradox is that it is often the idealistic-psychoanalytic thinking which produces both discussion about the essentially reality-unrelatedneess of our subconscious and the methods with which to draw reality inferences from such memories.

Literature

(see Heller-Feher 1988, Toulmin 1989, Taylor 1990 and also Dosse 1992, Heiskala 1993, Sica 1993, Arditi 1993).

Nicholas Abercrombie, Scott Lash and Brian Longhurst: Popular Representation: Recasting realism, in Scott Lash-Jonathan Friedman: Modernity & Identity, Blackwell, Oxford 1992, 115-140
Jorge Arditi: Out of the Maze? Twists and Riddles of Postmodern thinking. Contemporary Sociology, 1.1993, 19-23
Zygmunt Bauman: Modernity and the Holocaust. Routledge, London 1991
Daniel Bertaux: Histoires de vie - ou récits de pratiques?. Methodologie de l'approche biographique en socio-
logie. Mars 1976 (mimeo, Paris)
Daniel Bertaux 1996
Daniel Bertaux and Martin Kohli: The Life Story Approach: a
continental view. Annual Review of Sociology 1984: 10, 215-
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Peter Bürger: The disappearance of meaning, in Lash-Friedman: Modernity and identity 1992, 94-112
Jacques Derrida: Sceptres de Marx. Galilée, Paris 1993
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Paul John Eakin: Touching the world. Reference in autobiography. Princeton University Press, Princeton 1992
Anthony Giddens: Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Polity Press, Cambridge 1991
Agnes Heller and Ferenc Feher: The Postmodern political condition. Columbia University Press, New York 1988
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Tommi Hoikkala 1996
Lalive d'Epinay
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J.P.Roos: The true life revisited: autobiography and referentiality after the 'posts', in Lives & works. Auto/biographical occasions Special issue of Auto/Biography 3 (1-2) 1994
Alan Sica: Does PoMo Matter. Contemporary Sociology 1.1993, 16-19
Liz Stanley: The Auto/Biographical I: The theory and practice of feminist auto/biography. Manchester University Press, Manchester 1992
Charles Taylor: The Sources of the Self. The making of modern identity, Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1989
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Stephen Toulmin: Cosmopolis. Free Press, New York 1990

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