Documents of Life Revisited

Narrative and Biographical Methodology for a 21st Century Critical Humanism

Liz Stanley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317148746
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

The cultural and narrative turn has had a considerable impact upon research in the social sciences as well as in the arts and humanities, with Ken Plummer's Documents of Life constituting a central text in the turn towards to narrative, biographical and qualitative methodologies, challenging and changing the nature of research in sociology and further afield. Bringing together the latest research on auto/biographical and narrative methods, Documents of Life Revisited offers a sympathetic yet critical engagement with Plummer's work, exploring a range of different kinds of life documents and delineating a critical humanist methodology for researching and writing about these. A rich examination of the methods and methodologies associated with contemporary research in the social sciences and humanities, this book will be of interest to those concerned with the use and importance of biographical and narrative sources and documents of life investigations. As such, it will appeal to sociologists, social anthropologists and geographers, as well as scholars of cultural studies and cultural history, literary studies and library, archive and cultural management, social policy and medical studies.

PART I
After the Posts:
Reconceiving Methods and Methodologies

The impact of postmodernism, poststructuralism and posthumanism over the last four or five decades is often written about in apocalyptic tones, as though laying waste to all that came before their advent. But after ‘the posts’ the contemporary intellectual world is in fact composed neither by ruins nor by barren scorched earth, although nor is its landscape entirely unmarked either. There is in fact a plethora of new building, among it the ‘turns’ seen as marking contemporary intellectual life, among them the narrative and biographical turn of which Documents of Life Revisited is one small part.

As the Introduction notes, the narrative and biographical approach generally, and documents of life work specifically, encompass not so much specific kinds of data (although they do take note of forms of data often ignored or denigrated by more mainstream approaches), more a different framework in which methods and methodologies are reconceived in ways that respond to ‘the posts’ in a thoughtful, inquiring and – in the best sense of the word – critical way. The chapters in Part I are concerned with exploring various ways in which this reconceptualisation is occurring, including rethinking what documents of life might consist in, repositioning the borders between social sciences and humanities, remaking notions of subjecthood and reconceiving the relationship between past, present and social change.

The result does not provide recipes for critical humanist documents of life research after ‘the posts’, not least because of the foundational insistence of the importance of time, place, persons and context. Rather, the chapters in Part I offer a series of way-markers for researchers who want both to retain a sense of the importance of the ethics and politics of ‘human worth’ and to avoid the traps of essentialism, over-generalisation and unwarranted claims for epistemological privilege.

Chapter 1
Lies and Truths:
Exploring the Lie as a Document of Life

Clair Morrow

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• Critical humanism for me takes as its basis a sustained and morally engaged critique of the universal autonomous subject and aims to re-vision the human and re-invigorate a language of humanism within the social sciences.

• It recognises that humans cannot be understood outside the contexts of the social, historical and cultural moment in which we exist, but are relational beings with the languages used to describe and make sense of our worlds as dynamic, relational and embedded in relations of power.

• It advances an anti-essentialist humanism that is against the rationality invested in the traditional humanist subject, recognises and values humans as feeling, sentient beings, with these modes of experience pertinent to knowledge-making processes.

• And it maintains that all knowledge-claims should be grounded and contextual; researchers are implicated in knowledge-making processes and should have a practical contextual ethics rather than an abstract one.

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Re-thinking Truth, Re-thinking the Lie

What does it mean to tell a lie about a life? As academics, we tread carefully when speaking of truth and true selves, and notions of autobiographical truth have been widely deconstructed (Eakin 1985, Bruner 1991, Smith 1999). In this vein, the lies we tell about the self can be conceived of as particular kinds of storied accounts that are, analytically speaking, as interesting and important as ‘truths’. Yet, defined as an intentional statement of deception (Bok 1999), lying is usually seen as a deviant and disruptive act in social life and disciplined accordingly, with lies and liars treated as morally reprehensible. Within the social sciences too, lying is typically considered as antithetical to truth, and thus as epistemologically and ontologically problematic – and is seen thus even when truth itself is accepted as a social construct. However, this is obstructive to what can be known about social life and social processes, for lying is about power and power is relational and dynamic. In particular, little has been hitherto written about lies as calculated attempts to create new identities and protect existing ones, or concerning the potential of lies to (re)make a life as people endeavour to re-narrate themselves into worlds they were previously, morally or structurally, written out of (Simmel 1908, Goffman 1959, Van Dongen and Fainzang 2005 are some notable exceptions).

The lies people tell are informative about more than the morally dubious nature of those concerned. To tell a lie is to create a fiction, but that fiction is a self-story like any other, and similarly imbued with social and cultural meaning, invoked or constrained by the contexts of its expression; and it needs to be addressed as such. Dissimulating stories, sub-stories in the shadows of the bigger stories people tell about themselves in everyday life, may be designed to alter or fabricate but they are, nevertheless, enmeshed in the ‘true’ stories, even sometimes engendered by them.

The idea of a true story in a naive referential sense has of course been widely deconstructed (Eakin 1985, Bruner 1993, Smith 1999), but cannot entirely be dismissed either. As Plummer notes, whilst ‘we can never get at a simple, real truth about a life through a life story’, nevertheless ‘stories are told from different points of view which have their own truth at the time of telling’ (Plummer 2001: 238–9). The idea and actuality of truths define our lives, for they tell us and others who we are, what we do and where we belong, as much as they tell us who we are not, what we cannot do, where we do not belong. Sometimes people find those truths too heavy to bear, too restrictive or unfair; they can evoke strong affective responses such as anger, shame, guilt, jealously or fear. People can also experience feelings of dissonance from received truths – ‘these are not my truths’, ‘that’s not really who I am’. And in these contexts, when people feel they cannot live with truth, some, many, tell lies. We lie to fit in, to assuage guilt, bury shame and overcome fears; and as these feelings are relational (Probyn 2004, Sayer 2005), so too are lies. Lies, like all stories, can be richly autobiographical in that they are stories about me, but they are also about us, about you, and about we.

I shall now explore these ideas around two empirical examples: one is a short auto/biographical reflection on a dissimulation – or is it a lie? – of my own, and the other concerns an interview with Lisa (a pseudonym). As I reflect upon the storied nature of lies, I am analytically interested in ‘just why and how people come to tell their stories (or don’t), why and how they assume the forms that they do, what happens to them once told and how they connect to the life being told’ (Plummer 2001: 42). In asking these questions of myself, as well as of what Lisa said, I see lying as a mode of identity construction and expression of agency.

A Reflection on Dissimulation

Well, I suppose a lie is anything that’s not the truth really. (Lisa)

I already knew Lisa when she contacted me about my research on lying and although I did not know her well, I admired her. In her early 30s at the time of our interview, Lisa ran a successful business, was a homeowner and living with her long-term partner. She was always immaculately dressed, fashionable and articulate. I was impressed, even a little intimidated, by her confidence whenever we met. When Lisa arrived on the day of our interview I was nervous. As a doctoral student just beginning my research, perhaps my nerves were unsurprising, but while my nerves were a response to my worries about getting a ‘good’ interview, they were much more about my imaginings of Lisa as middle class. Quite simply, I felt intimidated.

We met and greeted each other with hellos and smiles and began to make small talk; but my words felt strange and tense as I spoke. To my dismay, I realised I was speaking in a voice that did not sound like my own – it was, put simply, posher. But having started, could I revert to my ‘real’ voice and risk revealing my pretentiousness, remembering how I used to cringe whenever I heard my mother put on what she called her phone voice when talking to anyone ‘official’? I felt profoundly uncomfortable and too embarrassed to switch back and expose myself as the fraud I felt myself to be. So I continued and tried to bury my burgeoning discomfort behind my smile. Without knowing it at the time, this experience in fact profoundly shaped my analysis of the interview about to take place, because it impacted on the dynamics of the interview talk. As I would come to hear, Lisa and I shared something, as I explain later, that neither of us could acknowledge explicitly, regarding our similar but distinct ambivalences and struggle about being working class.

There are several motivations behind my admission of deceit here. In part this is a confession, atonement for my lack of transparency during the interview. But there are also complex and interesting ethical aspects, for this act of deceit was not a lie in the conventional sense, but an attempt to pass as something or someone I felt myself not to be, and doing it flew in the face of my allegiance to an ethics of care (Brown and Gilligan 1992, Mauthner et al. 2002). In my fake performance, had I unfairly and unethically shaped the encounter with Lisa in such a way that it prevented a relationship with her? And what does this tell me about the documents of life and their structuring more generally?

Through reflection on my struggle to speak ‘truth’ here, I recognise elements of my own story in Lisa’s own. Lisa and I, like our acts of deceit, are distinct; I certainly do not claim or imply that my perceived point of connection with her enables me to somehow speak for her. But they did help me attune to the embodied elements of Lisa’s narrative. As my own struggle to speak traversed feelings of embarrassment, shame and guilt, Lisa’s did too; as I heard Lisa speak, I experienced a sense of recognition. Reflecting critically on these points of recognition helped me appreciate what I had asked of Lisa and what was at stake for her when she chose to tell her own ‘little lie’. I began to build a scene around the lie that not only resisted the moral presumption against lying, but actively demanded a degree of ethical reconsideration of the practice. I call this the ‘landscape of the lie’. As I began to appreciate this landscape, I began to see the locations of the lie, the structural dynamics of those locations, the bodies-in-relation located therein, and the embedded narratives people tell within and by reference to this landscape. Also I began to understand that lies can become ensnared in the truths of lives and are almost interdependent with these. With all this in mind, I now turn to the story of Lisa and the little lie I have referred to here.

Lisa and the ‘Little Lie’

Lisa’s lie may, initially, seem inconsequential: she has lied for most of her life about where her father is from. Rather than stating that he is from Tossa del Mar, a holiday resort in north-east Spain, Lisa infers he is from Barcelona. Despite growing up in England and speaking only English, her father’s nationality means that Lisa also regards herself as half-Spanish. Referring to her lie as ‘stretching of the truth’, this ‘stretching’ takes various forms. The effect is that ‘When bodies cannot or will not fit the place … seemingly, there is no place to hide’ (Probyn 2004: 329). Sometimes Lisa will tell an outright lie, at other times she omits her father’s place from his (and her own) biography. In the quote below Lisa tells me about how she felt when she decided to tell her boyfriend about this part of her heritage, her story:

(L) So, with, when I was sort of true to him about it I sort of, there was … that rush inside of you, that you just, that panic, the vulnerability of telling somebody that you care about … [the] potential that you could laugh, or again with the snobbery thing just look down upon me, I suppose but, I just, I just sort of blurted it and he, I was aware that he didn’t have a clue about what I was talking about or anything.

She tells me here that she felt ‘that rush’, ‘that panic’ at the potential of being laughed at or looked down upon. I heard that in speaking her truth, Lisa felt she was taking a risk, a risk that filled her with fear. She told me that she lies because Tossa sounds similar to the word ‘tosser’, British slang for male masturbation, and whenever she says the word to someone ‘they instantly start laughing’ and she feels a sense of shame. No longer protected by her lie, Lisa was once again vulnerable to the experience of shame:

(L) His Dad was talking about travelling around Spain when he was young and he said “yes, I went to Lloret and Tossa” and Harry just instantly – completely innocently was like “Oh, that’s where your Dad’s from!” and the shame, the shame just hit me! … And eh, I think I just fluffed my words and just went bright red … I just felt all flustered and I just felt the rush of shame rising up and feeling the redness just coming, starting from chest and going all up my face …

It is not uncommon for sexual language to be used to embarrass someone or shame them. However, as I came to hear more about Lisa’s life in particular places, and her family relations across those places, I began to understand that in telling her little lie Lisa was attempting to do more than defend herself against the feelings of shame invoked by a sexually suggestive word.

Shame, a feeling that is both ‘intensely individual and social’ (Probyn 2004: 329), is often experienced when ‘the self is seen to be in some way diminished or inadequate’ in the eyes of a (real or imagined) judgemental other (Lawler 1999: 18). But it has also been associated with place or rather, as Probyn writes, with ‘the body’s feeling of being out-of-place in the everyday. It is a shame born of the body’s desire to fit in, just as it knows it cannot’ (Probyn 2004: 328, my emphasis). Lisa’s feelings of shame do reflect her embarrassment regarding the sexual connotations of the word Tossa, but they are also strongly implicated in Lisa’s own complex feelings of (not) belonging, which I attribute in large part to Lisa’s feelings about what it means to be working class.

During Lisa’s childhood years, Tossa del Mar was a popular destination with British holiday-makers of a type that was stigmatized as déclassé both at home and abroad. Since the 1980s the UK has had several television programmes that have documented these ‘Brits Abroad’, early examples of ‘white trash’ TV (Skeggs 2005), and Lisa told me that it was programmes like this that first led her to lie:

(L) I started telling the lie – well, stretching the truth – from when I was quite young, because there would be quite a stigma attached to the whole Lloret de Mar thing, [it] was quite apparent on the television and everywhere …

(C) So you knew from quite a young age then [about the stigma]?

(L) Oh yeah, yeah, yeah! Well, just from like watching, like, I don’t know if you remember shows like Duty Free … when they would be talking about holiday destinations when it was, like, that frizzy perm and those sorts of people. And growing up on a council estate, you know those sorts of people – not that I think I’m better than anyone else at all but … my grandparents would … always correct my speech and try to make me finish my sentences, and, not, but with, the “t” and all that …

The class prejudice inherent in these programmes is hard to refute. Generally the tourists were depicted as uneducated, uncultured, disrespectful drunks; viewers were invited to laugh, ridicule and feel smug that ‘they’ were not ‘us’. Through television, Lisa learned that if she was honest about her connections to family and place, she was in danger of being stigmatized and subject to the social barriers invoked by stigma. Even in childhood Lisa was aware of the moral values and hierarchies inherent in classed identities. She states that ‘not that I think I’m better than anyone else’, but remarks upon how her grandparents corrected her speech, and asserts her own moral distance from those she grew up alongside. As a form of moral boundary drawing, in my own experience too being taught how to speak ‘properly’ was a way of presenting yourself as not working class, although materially this shift was much harder to make. Moral boundary drawing has been defined by Andrew Sayer as:

the way in which social groups often distinguish themselves from others in terms of moral differences, claiming for themselves certain virtues which others are held to lack … It is particularly strong in groups that are anxious about their position in terms of both how they are regarded from above and the risk of falling into the groups they despise and fear below them. (Sayer 2005: 952)

Lisa’s attempts to create such boundaries work not just along the vertical hierarchical lines of class, for her fears and shame also move across places too, with her struggles to fit in relating to her national identities as well as her classed ones. Lisa worries that Spanish people when faced with Brits Abroad are thinking ‘fucking stupid English people’ and she tells me that she gets upset with ‘people from England acting in a certain way in a country [abroad]’ because she is supposed to be ‘half and half’. The denigration of the working class embedded in the ‘Brits Abroad’ narratives often interferes with Lisa’s own feelings regarding herself as Spanish:

(L) When you go over there and you see those proper Brits abroad … and they’re like (puts on belittling voice) “what’s this, what’s this funny meat?” Y’know, you’re really like do feel that sense of embarrassment because it’s like please don’t judge me or tar me with that brush.

Lisa’s moral boundary drawing and how it is enacted, in part through lying, also involves her relationships – real or imagined – with her Spanish place and the person who connects her to that place, namely her father.

Throughout the interview, it is clear that Lisa’s feelings towards Tossa are ambiguous and this is not just as a result of its negative portrayal as a Brits Abroad resort, but also because of her complex feelings about place, family and moral worth. In lying about her place, Lisa is trying to negotiate this complexity. At one point Lisa tells me that people laugh at Tossa because ‘it’s not proper Spain with Spanish dancers and mystery and passion and fire and fury. It’s a holiday resort full of English northerners in vest tops’. Yet later she said that ‘the place itself is so beautiful … when I’m there I feel so happy’. These more positive descriptions of Tossa are imbued with a strong sense of family:

(L) … where my dad’s from … There’s a whole big medieval castle. People used to live in the castle – my dad’s mum used to live...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• INTRODUCTION
• Introduction: Documents of Life and Critical Humanism in a Narrative and Biographical Frame
• PART I AFTER THE POSTS: RECONCEIVING METHODS AND METHODOLOGIES
• PART II ON TELLINGS AND RETELLINGS: ANALYSING STORIES, AUDIENCES AND CONSTRUCTED LIVES
• PART III THE ORDINARY, VIRTUAL, UNTIMELY, SACRED: CRITICAL HUMANIST KNOWLEDGE-MAKING
• STORIES AND STORIED LIVES: A MANIFESTO
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects