Talk, small stories, and adolescent identities
The two commentaries by
Talk, the interpretation of talk, and working from transcripts
Both commentators hint at the possibility of a different interpretation of the participants’ actions/interactions. They ask whether it is possible to interpret the silence or non-engagement of some of the participants as a counter strategy or even resistance to what I termed ‘slut bashing’ and what I assumed to be the dominant activity of the group. At first, I was surprised by this interpretation, because I had been working with transcripts from the videotaped interactions and could see how the participants were responding with their facial expressions and bodies, and how they were engaged with each other. However, on second thought, I realized that we have a larger issue here, one that poses problems for my original analysis as well as all analyses that are proceeding to present the ‘facts’ in terms of transcripts: Right when I decided to work on the video-clip and began to render it as transcript, a piece of interaction was “culled” and “bracketed out of social life”, as Hall calls it. However, this metaphor gives the impression as if the intention is to remain true to what actually happened, an assumption most of us implicitly adopt.[1] However, it is extremely important to realize that we engage in some form of translation work. The transformation of bodily interactions into written texts is an issue of tremendous theoretical and methodological importance, and it was (conveniently) glossed over in my contribution. Not only is it the ground against which Thorne and Hall (and other readers) can reach a non-complicity interpretation of some of the participants’ non-involvement in the slut-bashing activity, but it also has repercussions that reach into the Schegloff-Wetherell-Engestrom debate that Hall very appropriately alluded to. Let me briefly explicate.
When we engage in transcription, we
yield to a view of discourse as language—the way we encounter it in the form of
literate products and literary interpretations. According to this view we hear
‘words’ and ‘sentences’, simply because writing has become our second nature,
and it is in writing where words and syntactic units are marked off so we can see
them. While oral actions and interactions are limited to the immediate
situation of the interlocutors, this ‘narrowness of the dialogical situation’
(see Freeman, in press) seems to dissolve when we fix it in recordings and
translate it into written text. However, what is in danger to be ‘lost in
translation’ is the non-fixity, the fleetingness and negotiability of the
interactive situation as a whole. And what comes into focus is a world of
individual intentions as ‘behind’ the individual contributions of individuals’
turns (
Along these lines, it would be interesting to start the analysis of the same data over again, but with a slightly different orientation. This time, we[3] would focus on the analysis of visual material, not transcripts. And this time, we would background (as I was ‘blinded’ by the written language of the transcript, and ‘lost in translation’) the activity of slut-bashing and the co-tellers complicity with it. In contrast, in this new pass at a new transcript, backed up with the ‘real’ visual images, we would try to keep a close eye on the strategies employed by all participants (including the moderator) in getting the activity ‘off the ground’, so to speak, but simultaneously, how the participants do something a lot more complex. Rather than the construction of a homogenous group activity of slut-bashing, we could equally foreground more of the ambivalence and ambiguity by which the participants were bringing off and managing their identities. Within this type of analysis then, the interactants would be more closely analyzed in terms of their fine tuning and maneuvering ‘in between complicity and countering’ (see Bamberg, 2004). And although we could show and document the analysis with visual images using web-based data, let me reassure that the interpretation still may ultimately be ‘inconclusive’.
Narratives – biographies and “small stories”
Avril Thorne’s contrast between my “socially situated approach to storied identity” and more traditional life- history and/or biographical approaches opens another interesting venture. Yes, I decidedly wished to complement or supplement the life historian’s interest in grand lives with what I called the analysis of ‘small’ stories—the ones we tell in passing, in our everyday encounters with each other, and which I considered the ‘real’ stories of our lived lives (Bamberg, 2004, in press). The subject notion within this approach is clearly more ‘social’ in a Bakhtinian and Vygotskian sense. However, this is obviously at the expense of a subject who is also ‘social’, but in another sense; namely, a subject who more reflectively puts together the possible stories that can be told as episodes of one’s life, in such a way that they fit into and make up the overarching story of one’s life. Although this type of activity is apparently more of an individualistic and monadic/monologic accomplishment, this ‘life creation’ by way of narrating is only possible against the social matrix of known or imagined possible life narratives. Thorne argues for a way to intertwine these two approaches and two subject positions, and I agree: This is where we ultimately have to be heading. However, this venture is not easy. There are a number of obstacles, and at this point at least, I am not clear whether and how they can be successfully circumnavigated.
Let me start by briefly elaborating the subject notion. Selecting episodes from lived lives and stringing them together in a way so they appear as more than mere listings requires familiarity with this type of social practice. Selecting episodes for the purpose of commenting and reflecting back on aspects of a lived life also requires the ability to cull these stories and bracket them out of the original social settings in which they have been socially shared. This kind of practice is based on socio-cultural traditions and institutionalized practices[4], and the subject that is created in these socio-cultural practices is a reflective subject; one that is able to step back, choose from all those that are tellable episodes, and organize them into some form of an overarching theme that gives (more or less) coherence. No wonder that this approach to narratives privileges a notion of the person as fuller and rounder. And equivocations and inconsistencies, though possible in life accounts, are signs of disarrays. Children and young adolescence simply do not seem to have had enough practice to work their way up to this kind of challenge, placing them into the developmental slot of ‘not-yet-adult’.
In
contrast, if we take everyday, small narratives to be the primary territory where
co-conversationalists seek and find ways to mitigate the interactive trouble
and fashion a portrayal of themselves in ways that are interactively useful, we
draw on a different kind of subject and identity. Rather than seeing narratives
as intrinsically oriented toward coherence and authenticity, and
inconsistencies and equivocations as an analytic nuisance, we turn the latter
into what are most interesting. They offer ways into examining how
storytellers are bringing off and managing a sense of themselves in contexts
that require interactive accounting. Seen this way, such instances no
longer appear as contradictions or inconsistencies, but rather as openings into
which the analyst can delve and see how such multiple attending and rhetorical
finessing is used to work up identity claims that are complex, reportable, and
multifaceted (see Korobov & Bamberg, in press). Sure, aspects of the person
that come to the foreground as privileged are those that orient more to the
fragmented and fleeting underpinnings than to the full and round.
These two different notions of narrative, one as oriented toward organizing lives, the other as situated in small-talk, chit-chat, but nevertheless being highly instrumental in local identity work, thus far have not been sufficiently differentiated, let alone integrated, as appropriately pointed out by Thorne. Hall’s suggestion to collect more of these ‘real-life’ small stories-in-interaction with the same participants, but at different times and in different settings, is an extremely valuable suggestion for future research in identity development. And indeed, we are trying to do exactly that. However, my main interest, at least at this point, is less to document parallels between positions held in different contexts and build toward generalizations, but rather to point up interesting differences. The reason for this general orientation is twofold: First, it opens up more opportunities to investigate how revisions in identity positions may actually be grounded in everyday interactive practices and their performances, rather than as brought off by engaging in reflection and abstraction. Second, and more importantly, research and theories in identity development in the past have more often foreclosed investigations into the plurality of identities by focusing too much and too quickly on what is same and what is constant, often relying on a single “take” in the form of a single interview (see Mishler, 2004, for an excellent proposal of how to expand this perspective). In contrast, investigations that conduct several “takes”, from different angles and in different situations, can lay out revisions in our sense-making and restorying capabilities in much more detail and with greater effectiveness. This is something I feel could be highly relevant for researchers and scholars in human development.
References
Elias, N., Schroter, M., & Jephcott, E. (1987). Involvement
and detachment.
Freeman, M. (in press). The matter of the text. Narrative Inquiry, 14(1),
Goody, J. (1977). The
domestication of the savage mind.
Goody, J., & Watt,
Korobov, N., &
Mishler, E. (2004). Historians of the self: Restorying
lives, revising identities. Research in Human Development, 1(1&2),
101-121.
Ong, W. (1982).
Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word.
[1] And this assumption is particularly relevant for the business of generalizing from a piece of interaction to other interactions, and to the assumption of ‘repertoires at work’.
[2] Of course ‘being silent’ is very different from ‘pausing’ or ‘not immediately following with one’s turn,’ because it requires some form of an intentional stance. It represents an act of the form: ‘I could have said something here, but I decided to keep it to myself’. When we, as interpreters, make this kind of inference, we are in the midst of placing participants in between level 2/level 3-types of positioning activities.
[3] I am using the ‘we’ because these thoughts were inspired by the comments of Thorne and Hall.
[4] How much these practices have developed as parts of literacy practices is an interesting question (see, for instance, Elias, Schroter & Jephcott, 1987; Goody, 1977; Goody & Watt, 1968; Ong, 1982)