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 telling ‘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 person was not only no longer at the mercy
of outside stimuli or forces, but also, the image constructed 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 dully 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
practices.
I should, however, mention
that there are attempts that seek to connect and complement the two views
(narrative as cognition versus narrative as discourse) that I present here as
contrasts and in discordance, 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 reasons
as to why narratologists at this point in the 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 Greenwood (2004: 239) calls it, to explore “cognition directed
toward other persons and social groups.” The study of emotions, personhood,
and even ‘the world’ has been successfully subjected to a cognitive orientation
that views the human mind as the central and universal organizer of information
– or, in less agentive terms, the place where information about self and the
world is centrally organized (Hogan 2003, 2004; Taylor & MacLaury 1995; Wierzbicka 1999).
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 my 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
literate-oral 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 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 in press; Josselson in press). While
the oral is fleeting, the referentially and ideationally 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 (in press), 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.[Jz1] 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 1977: 72ff.; 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.
[Jz2]Let me stress that there is nothing wrong with this
type of argument and the type of research that follows up on it. 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 ueber 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 are only important 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
narrative published elsewhere (Bamberg, 2004) to orient the intended reader
toward the application of this type of approach to narratives-in-interaction.
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 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 mentally held,
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 narratives
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 (Bamberg in press
a). 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 do appear as complex, reportable, and authentic, and not
too obvious, challengeable, or immature (see Korobov & Bamberg in press).
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-first 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 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 narrator’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 Bamberg in press). This approach
focalizes the momentary history of human sense-making in the form of emergent
processes. It assumes that developmental changes (such as learning or better
understanding) emerge as individuals create and accomplish interactive
tasks in everyday conversations. The interactive space between the
participants, whether situated in interviews or other social locations, is
the arena in which identities are micro-genetically performed and consolidated
and where they can be micro-analytically accessed. Here I am borrowing
from developmental (Bamberg 2000; Catan 1986; Riegel 1975; Werner 1957; Werner & Kaplan 1984; Wertsch & Stone 1978), conversation-analytic (Schegloff 1982; Sacks 1995; Sacks, Schegloff,
& Jefferson 1974), and ‘communities of practice’ approaches (Eckert 1989,
2002; Hanks 1996; Wenger 1998) to analyze the sequential and relational
structure of narratives-in-interaction, for the purpose of inquiring not only
into the developing sense of self and others, but also into what is shared as
the cultural background of sense-making. This does not imply that such
‘senses’ of self, other and generalized other (culture) do not exist previously
to or outside the discourse situation. However, for the analysis of
narratives-in-interaction, I am suggesting the bracketing out of these
categories so that we can be open to the analysis of what the participants make
currently relevant in the interactive setting. In entering this
orientation from a socio-linguistic and ethnomethodological
vantage point, I am proposing considering and analyzing narratives as brought
off and carefully managed in the social realm of interaction rather than as
stories.
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 as hanging out at school 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 doesn’t have clear criteria for recognizing others as gay – as if James
didn’t 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 explicitly not mentioned with his
name. 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 the story-point. However, it makes
the account more tellable: James presents the
information about the gay boy as ‘second-hand knowledge’, that is, not due to
his own witnessing but to hearsay. 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 short, James’s attempt to regain his credibility and
authority (on ‘gay issues’) rests on his presentation of an overhearing
eyewitness. And by placing his reputation as knowledgeable in the hands of this
witness and her reputation, he is able to ‘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, he successfully
(re)establishes his authority on ‘gay issues’. 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, details such as ‘her locker next to his’ contribute
further to the believability of James’s account, and 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, establishing his
witness as a girl, and in addition as one who did not talk directly to the gay
boy, also serves purposes in terms of 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 isn’t even being addressed by the gay boy when he talks about
his sexual orientation, makes it absolutely clear that there is no proximity
nor possible other parallel between this boy’s’ orientation and James’s. A girl
is a perfect buffer that serves the role to de4marcate the difference in their
sexual orientations.
Third, his 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 orients the conversation toward why it is that
gays hang more often out with girls – which actually happens in the subsequent
turns.
In sum, James’s story is
doing multiple things, but most important, he carefully fashions 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 self is an active
accomplishment of the participants who put these norms to use. It is 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 these kinds of narratives-in-interaction.
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 (i.e., 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 last 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 turns, 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 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 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 [Jz3]reflect that James “is” normal, nor did it come about
“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.
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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’, they way the surface in everyday interactions – in contrast to full-blown life stories (elicited in research interviews or therapeutic sessions) or written biographies.
[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.