Re: [xmca] Narration as BIG story in contrast to little story

[Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>]

Hi David

That was a fascinating huffingtonpost article.  I want to reflect on the
statement you wrote,

Here his idea is that the real key to reconciling all these contradictions
of identity is that we are all far, far more than we seem. But only the
actor, on the stage, can realize all of the potential identities that a
single self can contain. In practice, it is race, class, caste, and above
all the country in which the child finds himself or herself unwillingly born
that selects and realizes the potential that later becomes a cheap
substitute for his or her real identity. If the child wants anything more
than this cheap substitute, then we are simply going to have to do something
about race, class, caste, and above all national boundaries.


If we are all far far more than we seem [and our beliefs and fantasies keep
us imprisoned or contained or SUBJECTED] how do we go about freeing
ourselves from our illusions.  I have recently been reflecting on narrative
practices as "positioning" practices and how we are "given"position
[subjected] and the possibility that we can "take" positions
[subjectivity].  This narrative practice perspective is an aspect of the
discursive framework which is exploring positioning theory. [R. Harre]  The
neo-Meadian emphasis on position EXCHANGE theory is an extension of
positioning theory as a framework.  Position exchange theory uses a metaphor
of "weaving" the integration of multiple perspectives into a wider horizon
of understanding. This weaving activity as a concept has similarities to the
metaphor of  the world as a stage with interactants playing their parts.
Positioning exchange theory suggests that through taking multiple
perspectives [within actual social acts] intersubjectivity develops.  In
other words the development of the capacity to take many positions [as an
actor] requires developing an intersubjective  "imagination"  [that emerges
within particular  social acts.]  David, the notion of an "actor" playing
"roles" is a similar notion to interactants weaving together [integrating]
multiple perspectives.  Both metaphors imply or make reference to the notion
of agentic capacity as arising out of social interaction., but it does not
collapse the individual's agency into the social [as a reduction]. Alex
Gillespie writes,

"although actors gain agency through social interaction, they subsequently
posses agency to the extent that they manage to extricate themselves from
those same interactions.  The mechanism for this liberation is
intersubjectivity and the basis of intersubjectivity, I have argued is
POSITION EXCHANGE. "   cited in "Gillespie, A., Position Exchange: The
Social Development of agency, New Ideas in Psychology, (2010),
doi:10.1016/j.newideapsych.2010.03.004"

Michael Bamberg, who wrote the current article I referenced on narrative
practice as small stories has edited a book [with Anna Fina & Deborah
Schiffrin] titled "Discourse & Identity" (2006)  The book is a synthesis of
the multiple theories that go under the umbrella term "discourse theory" and
is an attempt to bridge two approaches at opposite extremes of discourse
theories.  The one approach is sustained within the frame of Conversational
Analysis and the other is sustained by scholars working in Critical
Discourse Analysis.  The book emphasizes that this division is not exclusive
to the study of identity.  Rather, it derives from different conceptions,of
the relationship between language and social life.  One approach brackets
and focuses on the emergence of identities in interaction in local contexts
to explain the emergence of subjectivity.  The other approach brackets and
focuses on the context in which identities are produced or imposed [given or
subjected] and frame the way identities are perceived.  David, the article
you posted is an excellent example of this approach.  In the book edited by
Bamberg et al  the various authors explore aspects of positioning [not
position exchange] theory to bridge the tension between conversational and
critical discourse traditions.  In the introduction on page 7 the authors
write

"On the one hand, historical, sociocultural forces in the form of dominant
discourses or master narratives" [big stories] "position speakers in their
situated practices and construct who they are without their agentive
involvment.  On the other hand, speakers position themselves as constructive
and interactive agents and choose the MEANS by which they construct their
identities vis-a-vis others as well as vis-a-vis dominant discourses and
master narratives".

David, I'm curious about the concept of positions "given" [subjected],
positions "taken", [subjectivity] and positions "exchanged"
[intersubjectivity] as ways we construct, imagine, and fantasize possible
worlds and how we are situated within them.

The other basic primary metaphor that weaves through my speculations on this
topic is the metaphor of "container" and containment.  The tension of being
contained [as subjected AND subjectivity AND intersubjectivity].  What are
the "right" relationships for "containing" development [identity & security
needs] and also developing the capacity to agentively "take" positions
beyond security needs.  In other words, to develop the capacity to imagine
and act to create possible new worlds of containment beyond the "given"

Larry





On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 7:13 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:

> Thanks, Larry. Somewhere in the headwaters of the current thread on
> Vygotsky's claims, Andy says that Vygotsky's purposes in psychological
> inquiry are better set out in "The Socialist Alternation of Man", and Mike
> counters that his goal in "Thinking and Speech", anyway, is the more modest
> one of merely accounting for the whole of human consciousness. Well, I want
> to argue, sort of on the basis of what you've sent and also on the basis of
> something I have been reading, that these two purposes have more in common
> than you might think.
>
> I don't have the article at hand. But you quote Bamberg to the effect that
> any "claim" of identy actually involves:
>
> 1) sameness of a sense of self across time in the face of constant change;
> 2) uniqueness of the person vis-a-vis others in the face of being the same
> as everybody else; and
> 3) the construction of agency as constituted by self
> (with a self-to-world direction of fit) and world (with a world -to- self
> direction of fit).
>
> You can see why "identity" is a very tenuous claim. You would have to be a
> very eccentric person, one of Dickens' grotesques, to have the same sense of
> self accross time in the face of constant change (think of Micawber and his
> wife, "I have never abandoned Mr. Micawber and I shall never abandon Mr.
> Micawber!").
>
> Even if you could somehow manage the trick, it would rather tend to
> emphasize the things that make you the same as everybody else (we might call
> this your "embodiments" as opposed to your potentials). Most of all, the
> idea that the self is somehow a source of agency, a tragic or comic hero, a
> central figure in the face of all the vicissitudes of the social world in
> which it discovers itself, with all the trappings of class and race and so
> on, is somewhat laughable and pathetic; if all the world is a stage, then
> all the men and women upon it are not actors but only extras.
>
> But take a look at this.
>
>
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wallace-shawn/why-i-call-myself-a-socia_b_818061.html
>
> It's only an article in the Huffington Post (which, as we all know, does
> not actually pay for what it prints, and therefore gets scoffed at by "real"
> writers, but we academics, who are NEVER paid for what we publish are
> therefore not real writers either, may take it as seriously as I think it is
> meant). The author is mostly a voice actor, who you may have seen as a goofy
> high school teacher in "Clueless"; he was also one of the leading sources of
> ideas for a "poor theatre" that we see in Louis Malle' s great movie "My
> Dinner With Andre".
>
> Here his idea is that the real key to reconciling all these contradictions
> of identity is that we are all far, far more than we seem. But only the
> actor, on the stage, can realize all of the potential identities that a
> single self can contain. In practice, it is race, class, caste, and above
> all the country in which the child finds himself or herself unwillingly born
> that selects and realizes the potential that later becomes a cheap
> substitute for his or her real identity. If the child wants anything more
> than this cheap substitute, then we are simply going to have to do something
> about race, class, caste, and above all national boundaries.
>
> In Volume Five of the Collected Works, Vygosky is writing (at considerable
> length) about how we might test the James-Lange theory of emotion (that is,
> the idea that physiological changes in the viscera or the vasomotor system
> somehow occur as an unmediated response to perceptions and emotion is merely
> the conscious mind that notices these).
>
> He discusses a "direct theorem" and also a "reciprocal one". The direct one
> is the surgical realization of James' "gedankenexperiment": through
> vivisection we prevent all changes in the viscera, the vasomotor system, and
> even the sympathetic nervous system, and we discover that animals still have
> emotional responses. The "reciprocal one", though, is the opposite: we
> produce, through drugs, pathology, or Stanislavskian "method" acting, the
> changes in the viscera, vasomotor system, and sympathetic nervous system,
> and we see if there is an emotional response.
>
> Now the problem is that these two theorems contradict each other. The
> direct theorem suggests that physiological changes and emotional experiences
> really CAN be decoupled. But the Stanslavskian method really indicates the
> OPPOSITE--we find that when we produce the physiological changes through
> method acting, we really DO get an emotional response with it.
>
> But the contradiction is really only apparent. First of all, the emotional
> responses that we get from dogs who have had their vagus nerve cut or their
> spinal cord severed are really very different from emotional response in the
> wild. They are not adaptive, they are altered by being decoupled from
> practical activity. For example, if you poke a paralyzed dog with a stick
> through the bars of a cage, it will get angry, but there is no possiblity of
> either fight or flight, so the anger is, as Vygotsky says, "anger without
> the sting".
>
> Secondly, the emotional responses we get from actors who have taken on
> another role are not so much responses to physiological changes as responses
> to ideas. And these ideas are not just any ideas. They are ideas that must
> in some way represent POTENTIAL SELVES to the actor. They are a kind of
> living realization of a potential emotional response rather than a real one.
>
> I guess I think that narration is always a little story; it's always a
> potential and not a real emotional response. That is why the Stanislavskyan
> technique seems a technique for testing the James-Lange hypothesis rather
> than a realistic method for the exploration of real, and not simply
> potential, human feeling.
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Educaiton
>
>
> --- On Wed, 2/16/11, Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> From: Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>
> Subject: [xmca] Narration as BIG story in contrast to little story
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Wednesday, February 16, 2011, 7:12 AM
>
>
> David Ke
>
> I thought I would bring to your attention an article in the current journal
> of Theory & Psychology by Michael Bamberg titled "Who am I? Narration and
> its Contributions to Self and Identity".  He is contrasting the
> biographical
> approach [lives as texts] as a metaphor of BIG stories with the Narrative
> Practice approach as a metaphor of small stories.
>
> To prime the upcoming discussion on identity formation that this months
> article will explore I want to bring Bamberg's perspective on
> distinguishing
> self from identity. On page 6 of the article he writes,
>
> "in broad strokes, identity is a label attributed to the attempt to
> differentiate and integrate a sense of self along different social and
> personal dimensions" [which the article explains not not distinct or
> separate dimensions] "Consequently, identities can be differentiated and
> claimed according to varying socio-cultural categories e.g., gender, age,
> race, occupation, gangs, socio-economic status, ethnicity, class, nation
> states, or regional territory. Any claim of identity faces three dilemmas:
> 1) sameness of a sense of self across time in the face of constant change;
> 2) uniqueness of the person vis-a-vis others in the face of being the same
> as everybody else; and 3) the construction of agency as constituted by self
> (with a self-to-world direction of fit) and world (with a world -to- self
> direction of fit). It is argued that IDENTITY takes off from the
> continuity/change dilemma, and from here ventures into issues of uniqueness
> (self-other differentiation) and agency.  In contrast, notions of SELF and
> SENSE OF SELF start from the self/other and agency differentiation and from
> here can filter into the diachronicity of continuity and change".
>
> David,  Bamberg is elaborating a notion of a small story approach which is
> in the discourse tradition of the Narrative Practice framework. {Hutto is
> also working in this realm}  Not sure how these ideas will possibly link up
> with notions of identity in the coming article to be posted but I
> appreciated how Bamberg opens his article with 3 dilemmas to be answered by
> concepts of identity and a sense of self.
>
> Larry
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