Dear Alec and all

In joining the debate I will share my thoughts about the constructed self and phenomenology.  I have never felt comfortable with Husserlian ‘transcendental’ ideas regarding stable “essences” of phenomena, independent of the observer. The reality of ‘individuals’ is based upon their perceived experience, influenced in turn by culture, education, etc.  This is the story of the ‘self’, which is continuously being shaped, critiqued and rewritten. Interpretive phenomenology, with its acceptance of the person being situated historically and culturally, and experiencing being and becoming, seems more compatible with a dialogic and relational research approach. 

Nevertheless, as you point out Alec, the researcher still adopts the role of seeking and imposing meaning on the data generated. The themes thus developed can assume undue significance and reification.  Gadamerian phenomenology, with its emphasis on the ‘fusion of horizons’ between researcher and participant, attempts to close the gap between individuals, but the very process of research invests power in the researcher and can subtly maintain separation.

Returning to my earlier points … if the self is a constructed story we tell ourselves, then the very activity of research is a ‘wild goose chase’ … hunting a phantom.  There is no ‘other’ … just experience (thoughts, feelings, sensations) arising in awareness.  The mirage of the individual is a convincing dream, from which few wake up.  It’s possible to see through the illusory subject-object divide, and to realise that ‘we’ are the sole Subject, enjoying (or not) the dream of separation.  The activity called research may appear as part of the story, but nobody is doing it. We can write all we like about ‘persons’ (via dialogic, relational or post-structuralist perspectives), but shouldn’t forget that the self is “a convenient fiction and an ego-sustaining illusion”. 

We are not who we think we are.

Graham

Dear Jo, and all,

Further to our dialogue about this, I’ve been thinking more about the ‘self’ strand with my academic head on, in relation to its ontological and epistemological status. What is ‘the self’ and how do we know it? So far, we’ve talked about this issue in performative terms, and as a convenient fiction and an ego-sustaining illusion. I want to talk more about another dimension which is concerning me in relation to my current research: the self as dialogic, as relational. It’s difficult for me to accept the humanistic, or Enlightenment/Romantic  line of the self as ontologically prior to and independent of its inscription within culture, if culture is accepted in Geertz’s terms as the ‘webs of significance’ (webs of meaning) produced by human relationships. For me the lone self just doesn’t work. We are born into dialogue, a point championed by Bakhtin, and by Gergen and Frank who draw on Bakhtin in dialogic narrative inquiry and social constructionism respectively. This means that my words are never just ‘my words’. To paraphrase Bakhtin, a person never coincides with her or himself. We carry around loads of voices, which we more or less accept or reject  (and Mead made complementary points).

Now, if this argument is accepted it has implications for research, and for relational ethics and aesthetics in research and more generally. We never find out about the researched self, as lone self, independent from her or his inscription within relationships, ‘cause there aint no such beastie. This makes research (and relational practices more generally, including therapeutics and everyday life) which is predicated on some inner, essential self a bit problematic (and I wonder what you think about this Graham, in relation  to your interest in phenomenology? And do you see any tensions between the Buddhist view of ‘self’ and the Husserlian essentialist line?).

Postructuralism, emerging from the representation crisis in the human sciences, captures the project of the dialogic self. From a poststructuralist perspective, dialogue doesn’t mirror human experience. It creates it, while constantly deferring and transforming that which is being described. So, meaning, and identity, are slippery; never quite there, but never quite not there, and always contextual and tied into power and politics.

This has implications for representational practices in narrative research. As autoethnographer, the best I can ever do is offer highly reflexive, politically charged and contestable representations of my ‘reality fragments’. These need to be judged on their own terms rather than with reference to some assumed external and fixed reality reference point. In this regard, there are obvious issues for representational and audience ethics, as well as problematising the kind of qualitative research evaluative criteria which is based on external standards (and I wonder where your research stands, Lydia, in relation to Lather’s use of (drawing onDeleuze and Guattari’s work) rhizomatic legitemation?).

As narrative researcher (will be doing research on the back of Our Encounters with Madness, based on the text, individual chapters, and interviews with individuals about the experience of writing their chapters), I need to represent people’s texts and interviews in a dialogic way, and in a way that respects narrative selves as open, relational and ‘unfinalisable’ (Bakhtin again). This contrasts with much social science and qualitative research that exhausts identity and simultaneously fractures it by reducing participants to de-contextualised meaning units to back up researcher themes.

And I should try to manage my relationships with others outside of research similarly, but that’s another story and I think that’s probably enough for now.

Alec

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