Introduction
At the outset of my
contribution to this volume, I need to stress that my research interests lie in
identity; more precisely, in the identity constructions of children and
adolescents. In other words, I am analyzing narratives in order to trace how
children in their transformations to young adults bring off claims about
themselves that result in something like a sense of self and therefore,
something that can be claimed to be relevant to one’s ‘identity’. The approach
with which I am working is part of the attempt to explore identity formation
processes from the perspective of ‘the natives’; that is, with as little
preconceptions as possible, particularly preconceptions that come from a
perspective informed by a notion of maturity in terms of what it means to be an
adult at a particular socio-historical time-place coordinate.[1] I
will outline the type of work I do in terms of ‘narrative research’ further
below, but first I would like to fend off the potential misunderstanding that
my work directly lends itself to a ‘better understanding’ of narrative. In
other words, the approach I am embracing in my pursuit of adolescents’
identities and the work I am doing with narratives does not directly contribute
to the field of narratology.
Having presented this
strong disclaimer, I will nevertheless try to take this opportunity to position
my own approach in such a way that it can be read in contrast to a trend in
current narratological theorizing. This trend, which I—admittedly somewhat
polemically—have called the “cognition-űber-alles”
position, is on the verge of becoming the dominant attempt to lend to narratology a seemingly more scientific habitus.
Having entered the field of cognition myself at the heights of the ‘cognitive
revolution’ in the mid-seventies, and having embraced the cognitive approach to
language and narrative enthusiastically for more than a decade, I have become
increasingly dissatisfied with its straight-jacketing controls when it comes to
exploring the lives of ‘real’ people, and the telling of ‘real’ stories in
‘real’ contexts.[2]
Originally, the turn to
cognition, which resulted in the field of cognitive science, had a clear
liberating force: The image of the “cognizing person” was not only no longer at
the mercy of outside stimuli or forces, but also, the “cognizing person” is
viewed as constructing meaningful relationships by taking information in,
working it over, and ‘putting it out’ (in verbal and non-verbal actions). More
importantly, viewing the person and his/her central organizing apparatus, the
mind, simultaneously as the producer and interpreter of meaningful entities,
became an approach that opened up a radically new way of doing inquiry into the
human faculties as ‘competencies’.
However, as I will briefly outline below, this ‘revolution’ came also
with considerable costs. The world of practices (formerly conceived of as
‘behavior’), in particular human discourses, becomes an add-on. Talk as the
everyday business of interaction in this purview becomes one of the many
aspects of what humans can do because they are endowed with competencies and
parameters, and these competencies have become more and more central to what
seemingly needs to be explained – particularly by developmental research. As a
consequence, actual talk-in-interaction as well as narratives-in-interaction become applications and deviations, all the way up to
‘distortions’ of what the ‘actual’ mind is able to accomplish – particularly in
experimental or institutionally augmented settings. In order to study what the
mind is able to do in such situations that are relatively far removed from the
everyday, ‘explanatory approaches’ are called for that show how mind and brain
interact in the production of meanings. Therefore, the empirical domain to
conduct this type of research can no longer be a description of the everyday,
of talk, and of narratives-in-interaction, the way they are negotiated in daily
routines. In contrast, explanations are gleaned (by glimpses of the ‘actual’ mind)
in idealized, experimental conditions, or even better, in controlled
simulations, “revolutionizing” the empirical domain for narrative
investigations.
Before I elaborate further
on the potential costs of our turn to cognition and cognitive science, let me
foreshadow briefly an alternative, one that a number of psychologists and
scholars in communication theory and sociology who became increasingly
disillusioned with the limitations of cognitive science have been working on
for the last two decades. This is the
orientation I will outline more fully in the second and third section of this
chapter. This approach focuses more strongly on the action orientation of
language in ‘communities of practices’. With this orientation, we decidedly
analyze what people do when they talk and what they do when they
tell stories. Starting with practical talk-in-interaction and narratives as
embedded in such talk, presents the attempt to break free from the constraints
of the “cognition-űber-alles” position with its
inherent costs. Thus, the turn to discourse counters the previous turn to
cognition; however, it does not claim that cognition is dead or redundant. Nor does it replace the “cognition-űber-alles” position with a newly formed “discourse-űber-alles” position, but rather, it complements and
sets straight the former with an opening to an empirical realm where cognitions
emerge out of discourse as well as discourses from cognition. In other words,
the approach to narratives as discourse and performance, the way I will
elaborate below, does not explain cognition ‘away’, but knocks it off its
hegemonic ‘űber-alles-position’ and puts it from
its head onto its feet, where cognition can become a product of discursive,
story-telling practices.
I should, however, mention
that there are attempts that seek to connect and complement the two views that
I present here as contrasts and in discordance (narrative as cognition versus
narrative as discourse), particularly in the work represented by Herman (2002,
2003a, 2003b). And clearly, as with my own academic biography from cognition to
discourse in my work with narratives, one could highlight more strands that
point to an underlying coherence. However, in the hope to contribute to more
clarity, I have chosen to structure this chapter in terms of two contrasting
positions. For this reason, I will first sketch a few thoughtd
as to why narratologists at this point in their
long-standing history may be attracted by and turn to cognition. Thereafter, in
section two, I will explicate my own work with narratives as an approach that
attempts to analyze narratives-in-interaction in order to see what people
actually do when they narrate. How it will be possible to integrate this
approach into what is the main concern of narratologists,
that is, moving closer to a definition of ‘narrative’ (or at least closer to a
delineation of what ‘narrative’ can be), may not become clear instantly.
However, I hope that this chapter will stimulate discussions toward that
end.
Why narratologists
might turn to cognition
To start with, literary
studies and narratology are in good neighborhood. The
cognitive revolution has swept across the social sciences to the point that
even social psychology, the former stronghold of social behavioral research, is
in the firm grip of cognition. Nowadays, what is social in psychology is
studied by “getting inside the head” (Taylor & Fiske
1981), so that we can experimentally investigate how social phenomena are
represented in the individual mind, or, as
However, what’s in it for
literary studies and narratology in particular to
jump onto this very powerful band-wagon, unless it is simply attempting to
reach for the mere proximity to what commonly counts as ‘science’ and
‘scientific’? In my opinion, there are at least two compelling reasons: the
first stemming from narratologists’ preoccupations
with and strong privileging of the literate over the oral, and the second, from
the hope finally to link what traditionally has been divided into more or less
two separate centers of concern, the author and the reader. Both are ‘good reasons’,
in the sense that they reflect orientations to expand shortcomings of a
traditionally more textually oriented narratology.
However, as I will try to argue, both are simultaneously coming with great
costs; costs that may blind alternative and potentially more productive ways to
expand traditional narratology and connect it more
closely with the ‘narrative turn’ in the social sciences.
Cognition and the
oral-literate distinction
The oral-literate
distinction has been widely discussed, and it is generally assumed that the
development of writing systems has had some major impact on our self-construal
and the ways we make sense of (social) others in modern times. Writing handles
best the developmental organization of bounded categories in the form of events;
it creates a beginning, a middle, and an end. In
writing, we have become capable of making lists, charting changes, categorizing
everyday experiences, developing a new form of memory, and ensuring the
transmission of memories between generations (Goody 1977; Goody & Watt
1968; Ong 1982). Olson has pointed out that writing
in ontogenesis facilitates the attribution of belief and emotion states to
others, both of which are said to be central in children’s construals
of mind and intentionality, and these in turn are developmental keys en route
to learning how to read and write (Olson 1997a, 1997b).
But why? And how? There seems to be
no clear agreement on how to answer these questions, nor is it clear whether
there is a clear boundary between non-literate and literate epochs within the
European development of literate cultures. Similarly, what kinds of oral
practices tie children optimally into learning to read and to write is another
wide open issue demonstrating the oral-literate continuum (Heath 1983). However,
agreement seems to exist on the categorical distinction that written texts
contrast sharply from oral speech in terms of their openness and contextual
limitations. While oral texts are limited to the immediate situation of the
interlocutors, this ‘narrowness of the dialogical situation’ explodes in
writing (see Josselson’s and Freeman’s discussions of
Ricoeur; Freeman 2004; Josselson
2004). While the oral is fleeting, the referential and ideational fixity of
writing orients more clearly toward intentions ‘behind’ the text that are to
some degree now inscribed or fixated by writing. While meanings are loosely
situated in oral dialogue, they can be negotiated and ultimately surface in
oral encounters, though in a fleeting sort of existence. In writing, however,
they seem to be more overtly and directly accessible. Again, we may wonder:
Why? Why is it that the written text seems to be superior and simply a better
candidate for the investigation of what ‘really’ seems to be at stake in the
construction of meaning and its interpretation?
Only rarely has the
question been raised as to whether the oral origins of narrating
(socio-genetically as well as onto-genetically) have had any consequences on
transferences into other medial representations. Wolf (2002: 36f.) briefly
touches on this question, only to dismiss oral storytelling as a special case
within prototype theoretical considerations to narrative and to use (written)
fairy tales for his demonstration of a ‘narrative prototype’. Fludernik (1996, 2003) more explicitly claims to privilege
“spontaneous conversational storytelling” (1996: 13); that is, oral versions of
non-fictional storytelling, however, only to revert and give privileged status
in her analysis to fictional stories.[3] An
additional question, raised recently by Freeman (2004), is whether written
transcripts of oral narratives have implications in the sense that
predilections stemming from traditional narrativity
leak into the analysis.
Along these lines it should
not come as a surprise that discourse (oral talk) itself is modeled as a text,
and its referentiality is declared to be its central
ingredient. Discourse is the exchange of referentially denoted information, the
way it is represented in the individual mind, encoded by culturally available
semiotic means (usually in terms of a linguistic code), and subsequently
encoded by the reader/interlocutor. Discourse is ‘cognitive discourse’,
exchange between ‘talking heads’. In the worst scenario it is the mere exchange
of information; in a somewhat better world, it is the negotiation (between
interlocutors) of cognitive models. And in an even better world, it is a
negotiation that includes a constant updating of such models (see Herman,
2002). How we, as information processors, text producers, interactants,
ended up with our mental models in the form of (more or less) ready-made
competencies, ready for exchange and updating in performance, is the issue I
will pick up on with my alternative proposal below.
Cognition as ‘distributed’
between the author and the reader
Classical structuralist narrative theory takes the (written) text as
given and investigates the structural features of the text (Nünning
& Nünning, 2002). From here it moves in two
possible directions: one is toward the author and tries to answer the question
of how the text came into being; the other works from the text toward the
reader and attempts to answer the question of how the text is interpreted.
Author-oriented approaches typically are interested in aspects of the author’s
life, his or her biography or spirit as it is breathing in the text.
Psychological, in particular psychoanalytic, interpretations have their place
in this orientation. Reader-oriented approaches are relatively young (Iser 1974, 1978). They developed during roughly the same
period in which the cognitive turn took its grip in psychology; that is, during
the sixties and seventies, paralleled by very similar assumptions. While
reception theory was primarily guided by the question of how the reader
interacts with the text (and in this sense what the reader brings to the text
in terms of expectations), cognitive theorizing in psychology was turning to
comprehension issues of a similar but broader range, that is, asking the
question of how the human mind picks up patterns and enriches them with
schematic information (from expectations and memories) into meaningful units. Developments
in artificial intelligence, a sub-domain of cognitive science, promised
exciting developments in the simulation of such comprehension processes and
resulted in advances such as story grammars and machine translation projects.
It is worth noting that these two directions of author-oriented and
reader-oriented text studies rarely were able to connect within the field of literary studies and its sub-discipline, narratology.
This, so it seemed, could
productively change by more fully embracing the cognitive turn and transporting
cognitive theorizing more explicitly into literary studies and narratology. The text in cognitive theorizing is less the
starting point for pattern-seeking, but rather the connective tissue for and
between author and reader – or in broader terms, between speaker and hearer.
Concepts borrowed from frame- and prototype-semantics (Fillmore 1975, 1982; Lakoff 1977, 1987; Rosch 1975,
1978; to mention a few) provided the links between mental configurations of
representations that are able to supplement the cues given in text and
communication with additional, supplementary information. For instance, verbs
such as buying, selling, putting up for sale, purchasing,
or auctioning, all can be said to trigger aspects of a more holistic
scenario (or ‘gestalt’) of the ‘financial transaction scenario’ (Fillmore 1982;
Herman 2002: 164). Language processors of the form of the human mind (or
artificial, though intelligent, systems) automatically fill in the other,
unsaid, aspects of the scenario to a fuller understanding of who is involved,
including contextual aspects of how the transaction took place. The choice of
specific lexical/textual items and devices highlights the particulars of
cognitive scripts or scenarios (such as Schank &
Abelson’s ‘restaurant script’ 1977) that are taken to be culturally shared and
as such contributing substantially to human understanding and sense making.
Against this background of
cognitive theorizing, it becomes intelligible that the study of narratives as
spoken and written texts is always the study of texts as deviations from the
prototypes that are assumed to be shared by speakers/writers and audiences/readerships.
Actual narrative texts are the imperfect copies or performances of idealized,
but ‘psychologically real’, representations of the idealized speaker, writer,
hearer, or reader. In this sense, the narrative as a cognitive category, it is
argued, is as ‘natural’ as the category ‘birds’ or ‘furniture’,
from where we, as contextual, cultural beings, derive—through frequent exposure
and ‘experience’’—the categories that are central (prototypical) to us, such as
‘robins’ and ‘chairs’ for Northern Americans. What used to be
construed as two different orientation points in traditional narrative
theorizing has become the central unit of cognitive narrative research.
Empirical research has developed a number of different means to approximate our
“natural category” (the culturally shared prototype) of storyhood.
These means were sophisticated ways to test for story comprehension and story
recall (prompted and unprompted), appreciation and goodness-judgments of goals,
motives, or emotional tone, as well as comprehension studies of non-literal
statements and non-typical stories. And some of us would like to take this as
the definition of what ‘story’ means, so we can ‘measure’ deviations from it,
and/or see how much of this central category applies to narratives told in
everyday conversations and narratives in other modalities, such as film, music,
as well as across the different arenas of its application, such as court rooms,
medicine, history, psychoanalysis and the like.
Let me stress that there is
nothing wrong with this type of argument and the type of research that follows
up on it. To be clear, research that demonstrates effects that can be
interpreted in terms of some form of ‘psychological reality’ of prototype
categories is a clear progress vis-à-vis traditional checklist inventories,
since it is based on some kind of fuzziness of the assumed category boundaries
and open to some form of cultural, contextual processes of formation. However,
if the argument is maintained that these categories guide not only decision
making processes in experimental conditions, but (all) our activities in
everyday categorizations and interactions, this position is elevated into one
that places ‘cognition über alles’,
that is, it becomes a predilection with consequences. Ochs
and Capps (2001) have listed five practical implications that the hegemony of
cognition has had on the privileging of narrative dimensions in the social
sciences: (i) with regard to the dimension of ‘tellership,’ conventional (cognitive) narrative analysis
has privileged ‘one active teller’ in contrast to ‘multiple active co-tellers;’
(ii) high ‘tellability’ has been over-explored at the
expense of low ‘tellability;’ (iii) detached ‘embeddedness’ from surrounding talk and activity has been
emphasized over a more contextual and situational ‘embeddedness;’
(iv) a more certain and constant ‘moral stance’ has been assumed as the default
case in contrast to a more uncertain and fluid one; and (v) with respect to
linearity and temporality, the closed temporal and causal order has been
privileged over a more open temporal or spatial ordering. These—in my opinion
unfortunate—tendencies, though not in any way caused by the turn to cognition
in narrative theorizing, nevertheless seem to come in the wake of an otherwise
productive inquiry into the cognitive dimensions of narratives.
Narratives-in-interaction
as vehicles to fashion identities
Again, at the outset of
this section, let me reiterate that the purpose of my work and my intellectual
involvement with narratives is not to find out or contribute to a better
understanding of what narratives are. In addition, and this may come
even more as a surprise, my primary interest in narratives is not even in what
the narratives that I am analyzing are about. Form and content are of
secondary relevance. They only become relevant as far as they assist the
analyst in figuring out for what it is they are used. In other words, the
analyses of form and content of narratives in identity research are heuristics
in the effort to analyze how self and identity come to existence.
Of course, this shift in
emphasis requires some staking out of the terrain of investigation. Therefore,
this section is devoted to clarify the general approach I am embracing. First,
I will sketch the discursive approach (within the larger framework of
‘discursive psychology’) that is laying the foundation for my interest in what
best is characterized as ‘identity negotiation’ – or even better as ‘identity
confrontations’, events in which conversationalists encounter
interaction-trouble and need to manage and fine-tune their resources in order
to come across in alignment with institutional and interpersonal demands.[4] In
this section, ‘the discursive approach to narrating’, I will argue that
narratives are ‘built on-line’; they are fashioned in order to build and work
one’s way through challenging circumstances. Then, in the next section entitled
‘positioning analysis’, I will lay out an
analytic framework that is able to take care of this type of ongoing relationship
work that narratives are said to accomplish. In a third section, I will
summarize the analysis of a “small story” (
The discursive approach to
narrating
Grounding narratives in
interaction, I follow tenets of a social constructionist approach that applies
ideas from ethnography, discourse analysis, and ethnomethodology
to psychological issues and concepts (Edwards & Potter 1992; Potter 1996;
Potter & Wetherell 1987). This type of
approach typically is concerned with identifying the rhetorical and argumentative
organization of discourse the way it is used to fashion self- and
identity-claims. This, for us as discourse analysts, implies paying close
attention to the way speakers’ accounts are rhetorically and argumentatively
organized, which we only can do (as analysts) by closely following the interactive
subtleties and rhetorical finessing that are part of the daily expression of
attitudes, evaluations, and assessments. As such, analyzing narratives-in-interaction operates in close
proximity to discursive approaches that examine evaluative expressions as parts
of interactive, social, and cultural practices, which implies the close scrutiny
of how such expressions are put to use, as opposed to speculating about the
mental or attitudinal objects that they putatively reflect (Edwards &
Potter 1992; Potter 1996; Potter & Wetherell
1987). Rather than seeing attitudes, values, or self-claims as cognitively
given, either/or, and slow to move, attitudes are seen as talk’s business, as
partial and shifting devices (or ‘topics’) that spring up in a constantly
shifting interaction that occasions and makes use of these devices, and then
moves on (Antaki in press; Edwards & Potter
1992).
As a result, applying this type of discursive approach to narrative
analysis in identity research is fully interested in the inconsistencies,
contradictions, and ambiguities that arise in interactions. And narratives are
taken to be primary territories where co-conversationalists seek and find ways
to mitigate the interactive trouble and fashion a portrayal of themselves in
ways that are interactively useful. Rather than seeing narratives as
intrinsically oriented toward coherence and authenticity, and inconsistencies
and equivocations as an analytic nuisance, the latter are exactly what are most
interesting. They offer a way into examining how storytellers are
bringing off and managing their social identities in contexts (
It is in this sense that participants in interactions constantly adjust
their actions to what is created ‘in the moment’. As Sigman
puts it: “communication is not always or primarily the execution/enactment of
prototypes or scripts; certain problematic situations both emerge and are
resolved through ongoing communication” (Sigman 1995:
9). It also should be clear at this point that this type of work with discourse
neither advocates nor denies the pre-existence of previous knowledge,
experience, or personality traits; it simply circumnavigates the necessity of
having to explain interactive manoeuvres within a cognition-über-alles
approach. Communicative competence of participants in interactions along these
lines becomes the “competence to monitor the progress of an interaction and
fashion … turns to effect remedial steps if it heads in the wrong direction”
(Sanders 1996: 118). And narratives are
no exception.
In contrast to the
‘biographic method’ of the German sociological tradition (e.g.,
Fischer-Rosenthal & Rosenthal 1997; Fuchs-Heinritz
2000; Rosenthal & Rosenthal-Fischer 2000) that is interested in analyzing
elaborate self-accounts in the form of life stories, I am (more) interested in
‘small stories’, the ones that are told in mundane encounters and everyday
circumstances. While biographical life stories are typically elicited by use of
particularized interrogation techniques in institutional settings (research or
therapy), I am starting from the more general assumption that stories in
principle are rhetorical tools for point or claim making, irrespective of
whether they are ‘revealing’ personal and private issues about the speaker and
irrespective of whether they thematize whole lives or
a singular incidental event or happening.
In entering the narrative
realm the point or claim that is under construction becomes contextualized in
the form of exemplary actions by exemplary characters that are appropriated
(from a speaker’s point of view) to “act out” and to make currently relevant
the claim the speaker intends to convey for the here-and-now of the
conversation. This principle holds whether the speaker talks about him-/herself,
his life, or about others. However, inserting the self of the teller into the
story line opens the door to the possibility of an ‘I’ that has been or even
still ‘is’ in flux, is open to interpretation, and can be viewed from different
angles. The conversational point of presenting different ‘I’s’
at different times and places, subjected to different character constellations,
can be highly effective in constructing a particular understanding of ‘me’ as
speaker in particular conversational contexts. In other words, the sequence of I-positions in the story-world are the means to
bring off a claim with regard to ‘this is the way I want you to understand me’,
here and now: The I as a character who has emerged in the story-world is
made relevant to the me as the speaker in the here-and-now. This
differentiation between the self as character in the story and the self as
speaker (animator and/or author) is extremely important, because we all too
often tend to collapse them too quickly in our analyses. However, although
there is no principled difference between drawing up characters in a story
world, in which the self of the speaker figures as character, from drawing up
story worlds in which he/she is not, I would like to concede that the former
usually has more at stake in terms of anticipating and preventively fending off
potential objections by the audience.
In sum, narratives,
irrespective of whether they deal with one’s life or an episode or event in the
life of someone else, always reveal the speaker’s identity. The
narrative point-of-view from where the characters are ordered in the story
world gives away—and most often is meant to give away—the point-of-view from
where the speaker represents him-/herself. By offering and telling a narrative,
the speaker lodges a claim for him/herself in terms of who he/she is. In
narratives in which the speaker talks about or even thematizes
him/her-self, this is neither more nor less the case. However, constructing a
self as a character in the story world and entering this construction as a
claim for the self of the speaker, requires ‘additional’ rhetorical work in
order to be heard ‘correctly’. It is this ‘additional rhetorical work’ that
elevates ‘personal narratives’ into the realm of interesting data, and not the
fact that speakers are revealing something that counts as more intimate or
‘personal.’ It is along these lines that I would like to argue that narratives
told in everyday interactions always lodge claims about the speaker’s sense of
self, and in their attempts to convince and make these claims intelligible,
speakers incorporate counter claims vis-à-vis what they think could constitute
possible misunderstandings.
Positioning
Analysis
For the purpose of analytic work with narratives, I had begun to apply
in some of my previous work the concept of ‘positioning’ (Bamberg 1997, 2003;
Talbot, Bibace, Bokhour, & Bamberg 1996). This
concept has gained current relevancy in theorizing identity and subjectivity,
where ‘positions’ are typically seen as grounded in master narratives but
opening up and conserving some territory for individual agency. Elaborating on
Butler’s (1990, 1995) notion of performing identities in acts of
‘self-marking,’ I have tried to advance a view of positioning that is more
concerned with self-reflection, self-criticism, and agency (all ultimately
orientated toward the possibility of self-revisions). In so doing,
I suggest that we clearly distinguish between the ‘being positioned’
orientation, which is attributing a rather deterministic force to master
narratives, and a more agentive notion of the subject as ‘positioning itself,’
in which the discursive resources or repertoires are not a priori
pre-established but rather are interactively accomplished. ‘Being positioned’
and ‘positioning oneself’ are two metaphoric constructs of two very different
agent-world relationships: the former with a world-to-agent direction of fit,
the latter with an agent-to-world direction of fit. One way to overcome this
rift is to argue that both operate concurrently in a kind of dialectic as
subjects engage in narratives-in-interaction and make sense of self and others
in their stories.
In taking this orientation, the ‘who-am-I?’ (identity) question does not presuppose a unitary subject as
the ground for its investigation. Rather, the agentive and interactive subject
is the ‘point of departure’ for its own empirical instantiation (Butler 1995:
446) as a subject that is constantly seeking to legitimate itself, situated in
language practices, and juggling several story lines simultaneously. The
analysis of how speakers actively and agentively
position themselves in talk starts from the assumption that the intelligibility
of their claims is situationally and interactively
accomplished. However, since this intelligibility is the result of what is
being achieved, and therefore inherently oriented to, we begin our actual
narrative analysis by paying close attention to the ways in which the
represented world of characters and event sequences is drawn up. Here we
attempt to spot descriptions and evaluations of the characters and analyze the time and space coordinates in the way that these
relate to social categories and their action potential. From there we move into
a closer analysis of the way these referential and representational aspects of
story construction are assembled in their sequential arrangement among the
participants of the conversation. The assumption that governs this step is that
particular descriptions and evaluations are chosen for the interactive purpose
of fending off and mitigating misinterpretations. The descriptions and
evaluations rhetorically function to convey how speakers signal to their
audience how they want to be understood.
In working from these two levels of positioning (one with respect to the
content of what the story supposedly is about, the other with respect to the
coordination of the interaction between speaker and audience), we are better
situated to make assumptions about the ideological orientation within which the
speakers are positioning a sense of self; that is, as signalling complicity in
order to mark off segments that can be countered. The analysis of the first two
positioning levels is intended to lead progressively to a differentiation of
how speakers work up a position as complicit with and/or countering dominant
discourses (master narratives). It is at this juncture that we come full
circle by showing how subjects position themselves in relation to discourses by
which they are positioned. In other words, analyzing talk in
interaction along these lines enables us to circumvent the aporia
of two opposing subject theories, one in which the subject is determined by
existing narratives, the other in which the subject is the ground from which
all narratives are invented.
Ironically, this way of analyzing talk-in-interaction for the purpose of
gaining an understanding of how interactants
establish a sense of self (in stories-in-interaction) resembles closely
what in developmental theorizing is termed ‘microgenesis’
(see
How to use
narratives-in-interaction to analyze identities
In this section I will
elaborate my aforementioned approach to the ‘narrative analysis of identities’
and give an illustration in the form of a brief example. The story I want to
analyze is a very short account about a male 11th grade student, who
is said to talk a lot about his gayness (near his locker), and who is further
characterized as associating more with girls than other boys. This account,
which altogether does not entail much of a plot development, stems from a
15-year-old boy and is situated in the context of a group discussion with an
adult male moderator and five other male age mates. It will become clear that a
good assessment of what the story is about can only be made if we are able to
take into account why the story was shared, which requires an investigation
into how the story is interactionally grounded, and
how it is jointly accomplished by the participants of the interaction.
The discussion topic at the
start of this excerpt is whether there are any gay boys at their school. James, who in turn 4 had already established
to be better informed than Ed about the current status of gay boys at their
school, in turn 6 claims to actually know a few gay boys at their school.
However, midstream he self-repairs his claim to this kind of knowledgeable
authority by downgrading it to ‘just’ “having seen” them. One possible
explanation for downplaying the quality of his relationship with gay
schoolmates may be to fend off being heard as “too close” to them; that is, as
someone who has ‘gay friends’ and possibly even is gay himself. However, he is
challenged by Ed and Alex in their subsequent turns (7 and 8), though not for
‘having gay friends’ (or being gay). But instead, Ed and Alex ‘notice’ that
James does not have clear criteria for recognizing others as gay – as if James
did not know what he was talking about. James, in turn 9, responds by seeking
clarification (“how do I know they’re gay?”). He displays ‘not understanding’
Ed’s and Alex’s challenges, and treats them as if they were groundless.
From here the conversation
could go into a number of different directions. For instance, a potential
dispute could evolve about typical gay characteristics. However, when Ed
upholds his challenge (turn 10), James responds with a turn-initial “well” (a
general shifter of frames that also signals the intention of holding the floor
for an extended turn) and shifts focus from ‘plural gays’ to an unspecified
‘singular he’, supposedly a member of the ‘gay category’. This ‘he’ is further
specified as an 11th-grader, and his name
is explicitly not mentioned. The rhetorical device of explicitly not mentioning
his name is a clever way of displaying sensitivity and discreteness, and
thereby indexing the interactive business at hand as not gossiping or any form
of ‘bashing’ a particular person. However, at the same time, these very same
devices foreshadow and gear up the audience’s expectations toward something
that is highly tellable and gossipy. Ed’s and Josh’s
demands (in turns 12 and 14, respectively) to hear names bespeak exactly this.
However, instead of giving names, James (in turn 13) moves further into
descriptive background details; namely that he has class with mostly 11th-graders,
and thus – in contrast to the other five boys in the ongoing conversation, who
all are 9th-graders – may be more knowledgeable of the boy he has introduced in
turn 11 and left unspecified thus far.
So, the interactional
setting in which the storied account is grounded is the following: James, who
seemed to have successfully laid claim to knowing better and more about the gay
population at their school toward the beginning of this excerpt, is challenged
for not being able to distinguish gays from non-gays. This seems to force James
to respond by setting the scene for what orients toward a more elaborate
account in the form of a story. He introduces a specific character, presumably
a gay 11th-grader, opening up audience expectations for what is to
come next as a sequence of descriptions and evaluations (most likely of the
character in question) that clarifies why and how he (James) actually is able
to make accurate judgments on gay issues. In other words, with his subsequent
story James is expected to reclaim the authority on gay issues that had been
questioned.
|
1 |
Ed |
there are some gay boys at Cassidy. |
|
2 |
Moder |
do
they do they suffer in eh at your schools do they are they talked about in a
way// |
|
3 |
Ed |
//I
don’t think there are any I don’t think there are any openly gay kids at
school |
|
4 |
James |
ah
yeah there are |
|
5 |
Ed |
wait
there’s one there’s one I know of |
|
6
|
James |
actually
I know a few of them I don’t know them
but I’ve seen them |
|
7 |
Ed |
how
can you tell they’re gay |
|
8 |
Alex |
yeah
you can’t really tell |
|
9 |
James |
no
like how do I know they’re gay |
|
10 |
Ed |
yeah |
|
11 |
James |
well
he’s an 11th grade student the kid I
know I’m not gonna
mention names |
|
12 |
Ed |
alright
who are they (raising both hands up) |
|
13 |
James |
okay
um and I’m in a class with mostly 11th
graders |
|
14 |
Josh |
and
his name is (rising intonation) |
|
15 |
James |
ah
and and ah
and um a girl who is umm very honest and nice she has she
has a locker right next to him and she said he talked about how he is gay a
lot when she’s there not with her like um
so that’s how I know and
he um associates with um a lot of girls not many boys a lot of the a few
of the gay kids at Cassidy |
The actual story unfolding
in turn 15 is not a typical event or plot story, but rather consists of two
pieces of further descriptive information. First, a description of the 11th-grader:
He is said to talk a lot about his being gay and to hang out at school more
with girls than with boys. These pieces of information arguably provide
evidence for the alleged person’s membership of the category ‘gay’, and in this
sense can be said to relate the point the audience may be waiting for. The
second piece of information is more subtle and also more interesting, although
it does not seem to be directly relevant to why James actually relates this story, this is, to show that he actually can differentiate
gays from non-gays. However, this piece of information makes the story more tellable: James presents the information about the gay boy
as ‘second-hand knowledge. He uses ‘reported speech’ (here in the form of
‘indirect speech’, i.e., as a summary quote) to recreate the action in question
(= having seen gays in their school) through the talk of someone else who is
held socially accountable. He skillfully introduces an overhearing (though
nameless) witness, who is characterized as female, honest, and nice, and as
having her locker right next to the boy whose reputation is at stake in this
account. It is this girl who is presented as overhearing the speech actions of
the boy that give rise in the unfolding story to the characterization ‘gay’.
And supposedly this girl has reported this information back to James.
In sum, James’s attempt to
regain his credibility and authority (on ‘gay issues’) rests on his
presentation of an overhearing eyewitness and relaying the crucial information
as hearsay. And by placing his reputation as knowledgeable in the hands of this
witness and her reputation, he is able to successfully ‘hide’ behind this
eyewitness. Thus, the question arises, how does he manage to come across as
believable in spite of the fact that he himself does not have any first-hand knowledge
– at least not in this particular case?
James seems to be
accomplishing several activities at the same time: First, when openly
challenged not to be able to differentiate gays from non-gays, he successfully
(re)establishes his authority. He lists a witness’ account and rhetorically
designs this witness as reliable. This witness is ‘honest’ (in contrast to ‘a
liar’) and ‘nice’ (in contrast to ‘malicious’ or ‘notoriously gossiping’). In
addition, giving details such as ‘her locker next to his’
contribute further to the believability of James’s account. Furthermore,
the characterization of the boy as talking ‘a lot’ about his gayness, makes it
difficult to (mis)-interpret the girl’s (and James’s)
accounts as potential misreadings.
Second, introducing his
witness as a girl (note that James could have left the gender of this person
unspecified), and in addition as one who did not talk directly to the gay boy,
further underscores how James wants to be understood: In line with his
corrective statement in turn 6 (‘just having seen gay boys, not really knowing
them’), to have a close confederate who is also close to the gay boy (and
speaking with him ‘a lot’) could make this confederate hearable (again) as in
close relationship with a ‘gay community’. Thus, designing this confederate as
a girl, who is not even being addressed by the gay boy when he talks about his
sexual orientation, makes it absolutely clear that there is no proximity nor
any other possible parallel between this boy’s’ orientation and James’s. A girl
is a perfect buffer that serves the role to demarcate the difference in the
sexual orientations of James and the gay classmate.
Third, James’ staging of
the ‘fact’ that this boy ‘associates with a lot of girls and not boys’ (except
with a few other gay kids at school) at the very end of his story, is very
telling. Had James mentioned this at the beginning—that is, as his abstract and
orientation for why he is sharing his account—he could have easily been heard
as too quickly buying into the typical (stereo-typical) view of gays. And this
could have resulted in further challenges from Ed and Alex as just talking
‘from the top of his head’ and not really knowing. However, placing this
generalized statement at the end of his very detailed account, and giving it
the slot of the coda, he uses this typicalization to
finish the storied account and orient the conversation toward why it is that
gays hang more often out with girls, and this is what actually happens in the
talk that follows. It may be fair to say that the more general group-level
ascriptions of the boy as hanging out with girls and gays is more likely to be
heard as stereotypical if followed by his carefully scripted account of how he
actually knows about particular gay boys at their school. In other words, this
way of strategically sequencing his “evidence” allows James to epitomize the
group of gays by having captured the individual in relation to the aggregate;
and in turn helps James to move himself back into the group of ‘his peers’ by
drawing a boundary between ‘them’ and ‘us’.
In sum, James’s story is
doing multiple things: When openly challenged that he doesn’t know how to
differentiate gays from non-gays, his story enables him to re-establish his
identity as knowledgeable and reliable; furthermore, it helps him to fend off
coming across as gossiping and being heard as prejudiced,
that is as antigay or homophobic. However, most important, his story
allows him to carefully fashion himself as
heterosexual and straight. It is in this sense that his story reflects
masculine norms and a sense of heteronormativity.
However, as I would like to argue, this sense of a heteronormative
self—just like his sense of self as a cool authority in ‘gay issues’, a
non-gossiper, and as someone who is not homophobic and prejudiced—are all
active accomplishments of the participants who in concert put these norms to
use. They are achieved by the way this story is situated and performed within
this very local setting. Thus, it is the situation that determines the logic or
meaning of the norms being circulated, and not the boys’ cognitions or
previously established concepts that they seem to have acquired elsewhere and
now ‘simply’ bring to their interactive encounters. And it is in this sense
that the boys (as members of the social category ‘boys’) are both producing and
being produced (or ‘acquired’ – see Hall, 2004) by the routines that surround
and bring off these kinds of narratives-in-interaction. And although our
particular ‘small story’ in a strict sense is the response to the challenges by
Ed and Alex in turns 7 and 8, it answers a number of other identity challenges
that are hearable in the way the story is made to fit into the ongoing
negotiation. It should be stressed that this particular local ‘small story’ as
an exercise in maneuvering through the challenges of gossiping, homophobia, and
heteronormativity is simultaneously a practice of
negotiating competing ideological positions. It is in situations like this that
children and adolescents, but also adults in the form of a life-long process,
draw on multiple subject positions; positions that can be used to be complicit
or to counter existing master narratives (
Concluding remarks
My contribution to this
volume has been intended as a question-asking chapter rather than one that lays
out clear-cut orientation guidelines for narratologists.
It emerged from my puzzlement with why narratologists
have become embraced and increasingly seem to be
embracing cognition, while there are other (better) alternatives available.
As I have stated
repeatedly, for social scientists whose interest lies in people’s identities,
the question of what narrative really is (that is, the definition of
‘narrative’ as a literary or oral category), is not relevant. I am working with
what people tell us, but equally important, with how they tell their stories.
The story that I briefly analyzed (as an example in the previous section of
this chapter) may not even count as a ‘narrative’ to some of my readers. But
that is beside the point. Narratives-in-interaction are not particularly
privileged speech genres. They happen. And the analysis of these ‘happenings’
does not provide a deeper or better window into people’s lives. It is one of
many. However, narratives are ‘interesting’ and ‘telling’ devices, since they
usually enable speakers to arrange their claims in a ‘more organized’ fashion:
Speakers, with their narratives, react to previous pieces of the interaction,
and orient, with their temporal and spatial layout of the narrative, to the
future course of talk-in-interaction. How speakers are entering the floor and
are managing to hold the floor by successfully blocking off interruptions or
objections, and how they constantly monitor how they will be heard, gives us
better insights into how several simultaneous positions by a singular speaker
are brought off and managed in synchrony. This is what I attempted to demonstrate
with James’s “How do I know they’re gay?” narrative. And as I hope I was able
to show, this narrative is only to some degree about “how I know” – and to an
equal, if not larger, degree about James’ self-claims as a non-gossiper, as not
prejudiced vis-à-vis homosexuals, and as a ‘normal heterosexual’. The focus of
telling the story is on the creation of ‘normalcy’ and to claim this normalcy
for the moment of this narrative-in-interaction. The narrative is rhetorically
designed to do this job for him. Neither does it reflect that James “is”
normal, nor was the narrative brought off “because” James “is normal”. I think
of this mundane insight as a beginning for continued work with narratives; it
is definitely toward the end of more and better analyses of identities-in-the-making.
But also, I hope, it has some potential to energize discussions around issues
of what narratives are and how it is possible that we can do such interesting
things with them.
Let me conclude with some
final thoughts on ways in which the concept of positioning may help illuminate
and re-conceptualize such notions as ‘focalization’ and ‘evaluation’. As should
have become clear from the aforementioned, working with oral
‘narratives-in-interaction’ as presented in this chapter sympathizes with Fludernik’s suggestion to “scrap the concept of
focalization in its traditional configurations” (1996: 346) and to develop
alternatives that start from and can be applied to ordinary, every-day stories,
the way they occur in the form of ‘small stories’. In contrast to Fludernik, however, I would like to suggest that the
project of ‘recontextualizing narrative’ should not
rest on the notion of consciousness nor cognition, but on ‘action’—or better,
on what is being accomplished between co-conversationalists in terms of their
strategic management of positioning selves vis-à-vis others and vis-à-vis
dominant subject positions in the form of master narratives.
The concept of
‘evaluation’, as developed by Labov (1972) and
expanded by Polanyi (1989), can equally be better
accounted for in terms of ‘positioning strategies’. Rather than assuming that
there are some internal mechanisms (operating at the time of the actual
experience or at the time of telling the experience) that cue the speaker into
his/her evaluation (and cue the listener into the point for the telling),
positioning emphasizes the interactional
accomplishment of ‘doing evaluating’. Furthermore, the linguistic (and supra-segmentational) devices that actually result in what can be
read as ‘evaluative stance’ are not only all over the delivery of the text, but
more relevant, they point to previous and subsequent speech as well as to
larger aspects of the context; they function as ‘contextualization cues’ (Gumperz, 1982).
‘Positioning’ should incorporate
what ‘focalization’ and ‘evaluations’ are supposed to accomplish. Sorting out
the linguistic and supra-segmentational performative means that index what’s going on in the
represented world of the story (the way characters are positioned vis-à-vis one
another), and adding them to the layer of discursive means that index the
relational work that is being accomplished between the co-tellers/audience
(where tellers and co-conversationalist gain their interactional
identities), we are better equipped to understand how tellers become positioned
vis-à-vis themselves with claims they hold to be true and relevant above and
beyond the local conversational situation and in relation to dominant
ideological subject positions. This should not be misunderstood as wanting to
do away with ‘evaluative perspective’ and ‘focalization strategies’. However,
both can become incorporated in the more general strategic orientation of
speakers to convey one’s sense of self in the face of challenges to one’s
identity positions—may they be concrete and actual in the form of challenges by
interlocutors in the communicative situation, or may the be more abstract,
imagined and anticipated in the form of demands by competing discourses that
always seem to position us.
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[1] This type of ethnographic/ethnomethodological analysis is explicitly anti-deductive. If we already knew the central concerns of the life-world of ‘the natives’, we would go in with clear hypotheses, test them, and not waste our (and the natives’) time with expensive (in the sense of time-consuming) qualitative research. However, it should also be clear that there is no totally ‘presupposition-free inquiry’. Ethnographic research, particularly if ethnomethodologically informed, has to be open and become increasingly reflexive of the ideological positions that are exposed in this type of inquiry.
[2] This
appeal to ‘something real’ is not supposed to contrast with something that is
‘not real’, but rather to view people (in my case young adolescents) involved
in everyday interactions, sharing accounts on topics that are relevant to them.
It will become clear further below that this orientation is concerned more with
‘small stories’ (
[3] Fludernik (2003) argues that the model she has developed in (1996) “takes its inspiration from natural narrative, arguing that natural narrative is the prototype of all narrative” (p. 248), but it should be clear that her goal is very different from my own. While my interest in narratives is concerned with how people use them, hers is to work up a definition of narrative that can be applied to “all types of narrative texts, including “the two least researched areas of narrative texts – pre-eighteenth-century narrative (medieval and early modern) and postmodernist narrative” (p. 248).
[4] It is assumed that ‘interactional trouble’ is more the norm than the exception; in particular, this is so when it comes to claims about self and identity. The kind of relational maneuvering of claiming a positive social value for oneself that Goffman called ‘facework’ (Goffman, 1967), even if participants cooperate in sustaining its enactment, always requires us to place ourselves ‘on the line’. Face can either be lost or saved.