Yelena Ostrovskaya  in Russia wrote about BNIM (or maybe biographical research in general) in terms of promoting “coherent narratives”.

Elena's remark, in her very interesting paper and for which many thanks,   prompted in me a stream of troubled consciousness. 

I was bothering about about non-coherent narratives and the importance of the unsaid (and of incoherence). I will now try to reconstruct something of this stream of consciousness.  

I've decided – because of a lack of time – just to send off these notes (slightly edited for comprehensibility) in case they ring any bells with people.

HERE ARE THE NOTES:

In BNIM, it seems to me, we implicitly ask for (coherent) narratives, but we may learn more from allowing the responses to  reveal  incoherence and unevenness.

Caroline Nicholson’s work with people trying to tell stories towards the end of their life with the onset of some dementia shows the value of working with people who try to produce a coherent narrative.  She and I would exclude from BNIM interviewing only those people who cannot formulate such an intention, who do not at least try.

 Her work shows what value can come precisely from struggling to understand the incoherence that BNIM enables to emerge.

Another methodology -- which forces (I’m not sure how) the emergence of 100% coherent narratives (perhaps by a disciplined set of listed narratives and sharp callings-to-narrative-order by the  disciplinarian interviewer) -- a forced coherence methodology -- to my mind would actually be much less interesting than the BNIM approach in which the degree and the location of significant incoherence  is enabled to happen, and thus provide clues as to the nature of thinking behind the discourse.

A perfectly coherent narrative would be a polished press release or other ‘less suggestive’ example of discourse: a polished and prepared epic. 

In an improvised  open-narrative such as BNIM facilitates – by insisting on not providing the SQUIN in advance, discouraging preparatory work by the interviewee, not allowing the interviewee authority to revise and edit the transcript of the improvised interview narrative, et cetera - there are always incoherences,  there are always movements in the flow of the text which produce an unbalanced narrative and incoherent narrative, changing  proportions of argumentation description and narration whose very pattern of unevenness and strangeness gives clues to the flow and structure of the subjectivity which has generated such deviations from a notional 100% balanced and coherent and exhaustive narrative (Habermas the perfect communication situation might be relevant here).

It is the unevenness, the incoherence, sometimes the excess and sometimes the deficit, the explicit and the implicit,  which makes the BNIM ‘performed interview’ so rexpressive of subjectivity, revealing of subjectivity because of the would-be smooth narration's  actual achieved uneven and incoherent character.

What else was I thinking about?

I remember that I thought of a non-contents analysis in which the study is not so much on the content of what is said but on detecting the “unsaid” and in Daniel Bar-On formulations the detectable but unsayable. I like the idea of a non-contents analysis of the interview content!

The other image that I had was of the book by whoever ‘drawing with the right side of the brain’, in which she says that to draw the outline of a leaf, you start by drawing the jacket sky that the deed outline insists upon. Can’t remember her name: Betty Edwards? Doesn’t matter. [Later, I found the reference]. 

Track one of BNIM (as amplified as documentary research and other-people research can make it) is precisely concerned with indicating all that might be talked about and therefore detecting the significance of what is not talked about or what is only talked about in one Particular Way.

We call this the BDC, but in  oral history the Italian researcher and friend of Anna’s [Passerini] on the aged communists who imagined Togliatti at having been at a meeting where he wasn’t, and having talked to him there when they hadn’t, the BDC can also be a place where the ‘imperatives of collective subjective culture’ can be explored in order to make yet more sense of the way the said is said, of the way in which the unsaid is not said, and the way in which some facts are ignored and others are invented, some facts are overstressed and others under stressed.

Indeed a completely even presentation of all the facts would be the unnatural achievement of a completely mechanical fact-aggregation machine. If one of these were to exist it would be very helpful, but only in exploring the deviations from coherence and fullness and never-taking-sides that any human being inevitably goes in for in their BNIM interview. The perfect inclusive fatualist-positivist history would provide the bacxkground in which the shape of any particular subjective-storying would beco me more apparent.

Going back to my very ragged free association.

Daniel Bar-On and the elephant in the room, the elephant in the room of the mind of the storyteller in the BNIM interview, should never be underestimated. And, of course, there may be several contradictory elephants, so that each time you avoid one of the elephants you find yourself somehow admitting the shape of the location of the other! [See also John Le Carre and the whole ‘Honourable schoolboy’ exposition,  taking 'back -readings' from what somebody most wanted not to be detectable. In this case Karla].

In diplomacy, there is the whole practice of plausible denial, of never putting down on paper anything except the opposite of what you’re actually trying to communicate, the over-zealous insistence, all the subtle and often one-time only indicators not so much of the psychopathology of everyday life but the meta-communication that literal minded sufferers from Asperger’s syndrome can never hope to grasp.

I’m not managing to reconstruct my frame of mind, flow of consciousness. I’ve a feeling as if Virginia Woolf and stream of consciousness novels of the early 20^th century would be the ones that would be most useful. I know that in the BNIM interpretation volumes, I’ve tried to suggest something of this especially in the SSS area.

I’m now thinking of Collingwood’s description in his Autobiography – relevant bits cited in the BNIM Short Guide and Detailed Manual -- of all the ps from the past ( and maybe projected as possibilities into the future?) that are exhibited in the current p₄. There are also what structuralist analysis would stress as being the anti-p elements and dynamics inherent in the various assertions of p. See my discussion at the end of QRI on the semiotic triangle (Bronwyn Martin).

We have the said and behind that the consciously-unsaid, and behind that the unthought known, and behind that the globally unknowable. Since the BNIM researcher is always in a different local-temporal position from that of the interviewee, and even of himself/herself at the previous time of the interview as interviewer, the interpreting researcher is in a position to explore these various and deeper levels of obscurity behind the explicitly said.

Does the Briggs-Wengraf diagram and discussion  in my QRI (2001: 43-50)  usefully characterise some or all of that receding obscurities? Could it be improved for insertion into the SGDM?

Daniel Bar-On. 1999. The indescribable and the undiscussable. Budapest: Central European University Press

Daniel Bar-On and E. Rottgardt. 1998.  ‘Reconstructing silenced biographical issues through feeling-facts’, in  Psychiatry 61: 61-83.

Robin Collingwood. 1939. An Autobiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Caroline Nicholson. 2009. Holding it together: a psycho-social exploration of living with frailty in old age. City University: PhD thesis