Hello to all participants of our symposium and everybody in audience.
I would first like to thank Judith Purkarthofer and Mi-Cha Flubacher for organizing this amazing symposium that brings together so many of us interested in biographical approaches.
The title of my presentation is: Ceci n‘est pas une autobiographie – Exploring the potential of auto-socio-bio-ethnographic vignettes in linguistic research
As this is a symposium on biographical approaches, let me begin on a personal note:
several of the participants in our symposium are part of the heteroglossia network that started as the research group Spracherleben (lived experience of language) at the University of Vienna in 2005.
Point of departure was a course I held under the title “language biographies, auto biographies and diaries”. The course was inspired by the revival of biographical methods in qualitative social research in the 1980s which –– with some delay – started to appear in multilingualism and language acquisition research.
A short glance on some of the titles hat figured on the reading list give an idea on what was topical at the time: First, Arnetha Ball’s contribution to the famous “Black Linguistics” book edited by Makoni, Smitherman, Ball and Spears.
She documented her courses with teachers in the US and South Africa in which participants wrote narrative essays on their own literacy experiences.
• Then, Rita Franceschini and Johanna Miecznikowski’ s international project “Leben mit mehreren Sprachen. Vivre avec plusieurs langues. Sprachbiographien. Biographies langagières.”
• Bonny Norton’s famous book on her dairy study with immigrant women in Canada learning English. • or, Barbara Treichl’s study based on biographical interviews in Wales
The reading list reflects the methodologically different approaches, developed on different continents - what is common to all these works:
they show that biographical approaches are particularly productive for gaining a deeper understanding of processes of linguistic marginalization in contexts of migration, minoritization and racial discrimination.
But, in fact my very first steps with biographic approaches go back to exploring my own experiences when learning the then disregarded minority language Slovene in Carinthia and to a panafrican MA on language in education in Cape Town.
During the course in 2005 in Vienna, participants did language portraits – about which I will not speak here today as this is my topic in another symposium at this AILA conference.
Today I will rather focus on the second course activity which consisted in writing what we then called “Spracherlebnisse” (scenes of lived language experiences). Participants wrote a short text describing a scene in which language/languages played a central role. The thick descriptions that emerged dealt with topics like: linguistic ostracism, linguistic insecurity, language shaming, suffering from - or overcoming language barriers, finding comfort in a familiar repertoire
language policing and self-censorship, losing or gaining one’s voice, the desire for communicating across boundaries etc.
Inspired by what the sociologist and feminist writer Frigga Haug called Memory Work, the texts were discussed and analyzed in the group from a sociolinguistic point of view exploring the social conditions.
The Spracherlebnisse, one could say, are a kind of (auto)ethnographic vignettes. I will come back to more detailed considerations about the vignette in a moment.
Linguists working in the German philosophical tradition were in the beginning primarily guided by Rosenthal’s sociological biography research that aims at the reconstruction of a full biographical trajectory to produce coherence and continuity across life-historical discontinuities and ruptures.
Our Viennese research group embraced the critical stance taken by the French poststructuralist school of thought that formulated its scepticism vis-à-vis biographical accounts:
In this perspective telling about oneself and one’s being in the world is seen as dialogic and situated as part of what Michel Foucault critically analyzed as “technologies of the self”, which as he says [+ quote] in order to atain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, affection or immortality
In her book “Giving an Account of Oneself”, Judith Butler (2005) draws among others on Foucault’s thoughts on the subject making themselves into an object of possible knowledge,
and she considers autobiographical practices as performative acts that paradoxically enact the biographical ‘I’ while trying to describe it.
This ambiguity vis-à-vis the biographical, characterized by skepticism and by fascination, is not only a topic in Foucault’s and Butler’s works but also in Jacques Derrida’s and Pierre Bourdieu’s.
Derrida developed the move of deconstructing and reverting supposedly pre-given categorizations drawing on his personal life experience.
While Derrida admitted that everything he writes is “terribly autobiographical”, at the same time he reflected on the impossibility to write an autobiographical text.
In his essay “Monolingualism of the Other” where he reflects on moments of lived experience of language in his childhood and youth in Algeria he explains: [+ quote]
Whereas the traditional biographical genre of the bildungsroman – narratives of coming of age, of conversion, of survival –, pursues the aim to show how the protagonist facing all kinds of challenges ultimately became the hero of their life story,
Derrida is interested precisely in the moments of rupture and discontinuity imposed by the social and political power relations that make it impossible to perceive oneself as a coherent biographical subject.
In a similar way Pierre Bourdieu (1979) addresses the biographical dilemma and expresses his deep distrust vis-à-vis the “biographic illusion” as a totalizing and unifying enterprise and vis-à-vis the biography as an artifact that creates the fiction of coherence and continuity.
It tends, as he says, to make the autobiographers the ideologues of their own lives who select certain significant events in function of an overriding intention and establish relations of connectivity and causality between them.
However, Bourdieu together with his co-authors collected and published in “The Weight of the World” dozens of “accounts that men and women have confided to us about their lives and the difficulties they have in living those lives”.
And, he goes a step further in “Sketch for a Self-Analysis” (2008) based on his farewell lecture at the College de France.
In what he calls, in delimitation to an autobiography, a “self-socioanalysis” he insists that “to understand is first to understand the field with which and against which one has been formed” (2008: 4).
Bourdieu gives an account of how the development of his praxeological approach and the concepts of distinction, symbolic capital and habitus necessitated two successive conversions of gaze:
First from the naive to the objectivating gaze of the ethnologist when he studied marriage patterns among the Kabyle in Algeria,
then – after his return to his region of origin, the rural Béarn in southwestern France – to a reflexivity that takes into account the indigenous and the academic gaze.
About the sketch for a self-analysis, he says that it was his intention to write it ‘in reverse’ to the famous work by the ethnographer Lévi-Strauss “Tristes Tropiques”, a claim that reminds us of Marie-Luise Pratt’s idea of autoethnography as a form of writing back.
As Bourdieu somehow hesitated to publish the “Sketch for a Self-Analysis” in France, it appeared first in a German version and only later in French – alluding to Magritte’s famous painting of a pipe, with the epitaph “Ceci n’est pas une autobiographie”.
And you will guess that I borrowed the title of my contribution from Bourdieu.
The second part of my title is borrowed from the French literary writer Annie Ernaux who published a series of books that are – as she says – “less autobiographical than auto-socio-biographical”.
Together with her younger colleagues the sociologist writers Didier Eribon and Édouard Louis, she is part of a group that has a particular affinity to Bourdieu’s work.
They see their principal aim in addressing mechanisms of symbolic power and social injustice and understand their texts less as accounts of their individual lives than about the collective conditions of the society they live in.
One could say that these authors established a sort of post-biographical genre. Their success as well as that of authors like Ocean Vuong in the US or Cho Nam-Joo in Korea
shows that this genre apparently corresponds to a broader need, namely to understand the social fabric through exploring peoples’ lived experience and to understand accounts of lived experience as a reflection of and response to social power relations and social changes.
In “The years” (2018), one of Ernaux’s best known novels, she sets out “to capture the reflection that collective history projects upon the screen of individual memory”.
To do so she reviews photographs showing her at different periods of her life and reflects in an account that avoids the ‘I’ on how she and those around her were formed in their appearances, attitudes, tastes, emotions and opinions by successive socio-political time space articulations.
These photographs serve as an anchor for the analysis of the socio-political, historical constellations or the scenery in which the particular lived and retrieved scene was located.
Leaving the literary realm and returning to linguistic ethnography: It is less ‘full’ life stories in the sense of Rosenthal’s biographical case reconstruction that interest us than accounts of what
• William Labov calls “critical incidents, short-range-stories of landmark or key events” (Labov 2013) or • Alexandra Georgakopoulou’s “locally performed and on the spot constructed ‘small stories’.
• Li Wei (2011) adapted a methodology initially developed by the MIT Community Innovation Lab, the so called Moment Analysis:
Participants are encouraged to retrieve the knowledge they acquire through experience by identifying and reflecting on important events that represented critical shifts or changes in orientations.
As different as these approaches and their epistemological foundations are, they have in common their attention to spacio-temporal points of intersection in which processes that remain usually below the level of awareness culminate and manifest themselves.
When speaking about the Spracherlebnis (scene of lived experience of language) I am not speaking about the moment in which something was experienced,
but rather the retrospective projection by which lived experience – through remembering and narrating – is transformed into a gestalt that interweaves different time layers remaining to a certain degree polyvalent and polysemic (Busch 2020).
This – as we will see – implies a creative process of condensation.
Condensed scenes can take the form of vignettes as is common practice in ethnographic studies. Vignettes, brief evocative descriptions, accounts, or episodes, are inserted text chunks that can differ considerably in style from the rest of the text.
They are as Ben Rampton et al. (2014: 4) develop “designed to provide the reader with some apprehension of the fullness and irreducibility of the ‘lived stuff’ from which the analyst has abstracted structure”.
According to Angela Creese et al. they often take the form of personal experience stories used in the research process to address researchers’ emotional involvement and positionality.
To explore the function and affordances of ethnographic vignettes, I find it very inspiring to return to Roland Barthes' reflections on vignettes, which he discusses referring to the full page plates that illustrate the famous 18th century encyclopedia by Diderot and d'Alembert.
These plates, as you can see on the slide, are usually divided into two parts: the lower part shows single objects like tools,
the upper part, or vignette, shows the same objects but as part of a lively scene taking place in a workroom, a shop, a farm.
The vignette displays a scene – as Barthes says - that is “‘enacted’ in a tableau vivant”. With reference to structural linguistics, he states, that the lower part, which has the role of ‘declining’ the object, corresponds to the paradigmatic axis,
whereas the upper part, where objects are linked to other objects by contiguity, corresponds to the syntagmatic axis.
Let’s take a closer look at one of these plates: in our case “agriculture, labourage”. In the lower paradigmatic part we can see the agricultural implements.
The upper part, the vignette, stages in the foreground the activity of ploughing. In the middle plane we see other activities that contextualize the ploughing (harrowing, sowing, rolling).
These activities are embedded in a scenery that is actually not essential for understanding the technical side of the activity but paints the particular atmosphere of an autumn day in the ploughing season:
the wind ridden tree, the clouds, the bypassers signaling the ordinariness of the scene, the castle ruins, the windmill that makes an allusion to the future use of the cereals.
Through the processes of mis-en-scène and condensation, all these disparate elements form the gestalt of a bucolic, romantic scene that triggers in the eyes of a (probably urban) beholder an emotional response.
The vignette is saturated with 18th century ideologies of the ‘mastery of nature’ on one hand and the romanticising of country life on the other.
The vignette is, as Barthes says, charged with a disseminated meaning, it presents itself like a rebus, a pictorial riddle.
“The vignette has the riddle’s actual density: all the information must turn up in the experienced scene”.
The vignette is a “condensate of meaning”, its function is less in giving new information than, by invoking a recognizable scene or experience, to demonstrate that “meaning is completed only when it is somehow naturalized in a complete action of man [sic!]”
The vignette in the Encyclopedia – and similarly one could say the ethnographic vignette – certainly has a demonstrative intent but it vibrates well beyond this intent
and as Barthes says: “this singular vibration is above all an astonishment”, the vignette “is poetic because of its overflows of meaning”.
Going back to vignettes in academic writing designed to provide the reader with the “fullness and irreducibility of the ‘lived stuff’”.
No matter whether these vignettes are autoethnographic texts in which researchers reflect upon their emotional involvement and positionality or the reproduction of text chunks written by other research participants
that distinguish themselves by their poetic quality reaching beyond the descriptive – in their condensedness, they have a similar function and unfold a similar effect as described for the vignettes in the encyclopedia.
But, let’s have a closer look at what reading such a condensed scene involves: The German psychiatrist Alfred Lorenzer dealt from a psychoanalytical point of view with scenic understanding.
According to him – and in this he follows Freud – significant reoccurring lived moments of interaction that form a kind of interactional pattern can merge and condense into a single scene that remains polysemic and polyvalent.
Such a scene can translate into dreams, poetic language, artistic creation etc.
Lorenzer (2006) distinguishes between ‘scenic understanding’ and ‘logical understanding’. Scenic understanding requires taking into account phenomena of experiential resonance on the side of the reader and of scrutinizing the artistic-poetic means by which they are triggered.
Lorenzer pleads for an interactional engagement with such texts, approaching them with evenly-suspended attention, a not-directed form of listening removed from theoretical presuppositions. Specific attention is paid to the emotional power of the text and (by counter-transference) one’s own response to it.
In the process of understanding, the scene is reconstructed by the reader by building on their own lived practical experiences.
Vignettes and in particular autoethnographic vignettes in academic texts are more than simple illustrations or ornaments. They can develop a life of their own and help to a deeper understanding precisely by resisting a merely logical analysis.
If they trigger corresponding emotional experiences in us, then they can make us co-particants of the scene, so to speak.
As vignettes are often used to shed light on researchers’ positionality and emotional involvement, it might be worth considering the multiple ‘I’s that are in one way or another present in an autoethnographic text:
• First there is the ‘I’ of the autoethnographer at the time of the research process who ‘selects’ from their own life experience critical moments or scenes that seem worth telling because they can be read as emblematic within the specific research context.
• Then, there is the earlier, experiencing ‘I’ which the autoethnographer invokes in the process of retrieving memories by transporting themselves to what Pitard, drawing on Husserl’s understanding of epoche, calls the “pre-reflexive moment of happening”.
Like the flavor of the madeleine cookie dipped into Marcel Proust’s cup of tea, it is often smells, tastes or other sensory perceptions or certain artifacts (as photographs, pictures or objects of daily use) that help to initiate the retrieval of emotions and sensations linked to a scene of lived experience.
What emerges then is of course not what was lived in the past – as lived experience is never directly accessible – but a re-construction, re-enactment, or re-embodiment.
• Another ‘I’ is the one of the narrator who exposes the narrated ‘I’, who following Humphreys, rhetorically arranges the experience as a personal story or vignette to stimulate an emotional response and provoke (scenic) understanding from their readers.
• A further ‘I’ is the one that is the object of the analysis. Analysis as a process in which biographical events are understood as placements and displacements within the social space and its successive transformations (Bourdieu 1994).
• And finally there is the ‘I’ of the autoethnographer who is positioned within the academic field and positions themselves with regard to current discourses.
These different ‘I’s pointing to different chronotopes, time-spaces, intersect in the text, and in the text only – not in the fiction of a coherent subject. For the multiple ‘I’s applies what Bakhtin says for the chronotopes:
They are, as he writes “mutually inclusive, they co-exist, they may be interwoven with, replace or oppose one another, contradict one another or find themselves in ever more complex interrelationships’
I would like to thank you for your attention to this talk in which my intention was to show that biographic approaches do not necessarily contribute to constructing the fiction of a coherent biographical subject,
and to show that autoethnographic vignettes, biographic elements in academic texts, can enrich academic texts by bringing in positionalities and bodily/emotional dimensions and should therefore not be underestimated.
On the last two slides you can find the references - and thank you once again. I am looking forward to all the interesting presentations in pour symposium.