Simon Gottschalk

A COLLAGE OF SUBJECTIVITIES: Review of Investigating Subjectivity

Carolyn Ellis and Michael G. Flaherty (eds.) Newbury Park: Sage
Symbolic Interaction 16 (2): 191-195.

Traditional sociological studies of subjectivity have been handicapped by a number of important problems which have limited our understanding of this complex topic. Investigating Subjectivity is an effort to rescue the study of subjectivity along four interrelated axes: (1) highlighting the often-dismissed emotional dimension; (2) connecting the emotional to the cognitive and the physical; (3) linking subjectivity to socio-cultural and historical forces; (4) bridging the gap between subjects and their lived experiences. Although the authors of the eleven articles assembled by Ellis and Flaherty vary widely in their style, method, focus, and theoretical sophistication, they all share a commitment to these goals. The book is divided into four sections which I review in their order of appearance.

In the first section, the authors use various texts to discuss the problems of (re)presenting subjectivity, to highlight its political, cultural, and historical dimensions, and to suggest new discursive strategies for its conceptualization. Inspired by Bergman's Persona, Denzin stresses that subjectivity is an "open-ended, reflexive, non-linear, gendered and interactional production" constructed from bits and pieces of the meanings culture and history make available to --or force upon-- us. Suggesting that "our standards theories are no longer working," and that if we want to change how things are we must change how they are approached and conveyed, Denzin demands that, with Bergman's Elizabeth, we "drop the mask of social realism" and develop new approaches to subjectivity. Those would hopefully be more "interpretive, subjective, feminist, biographical, and narratively inspired."

Graham introduces the novel approach of incorporating diaries in her intertextual analysis of the popular representations of a year in the life of Lillian Moller Gilbreth (a pioneer in scientific management). Because popular representations create stories/mythologies about Gilbreth's lived experiences which inevitably reproduce sexist ideologies, the use of diaries encourages the reader's active and interpretive involvement, thereby facilitating a subversive-feminist deconstruction of these texts.

Theory and biography intersect in Davies' insightful discussion of women and men's subjectivity. Grounding her work in poststructuralism, she argues that subjectivity results from --and reproduces-- discursive, interactive, and structural positionings which trap interactants in a web of hierarchized dualisms and destructive story lines. While exploring her own early commitment to, and rejection of, the traditional romantic story line, Davies also examines the possibilities, the complexities and the necessities of escaping their confines by creating subversive feminist discursive practices. Her feminist fairy tale illustrates that such practices should construct different subject-statuses for women by writing/reading "against the grain." Such a strategy will help women expose and de-center dominant story lines and dismantle our taken-for-granted conceptual/sexual dualisms by highlighting the necessity of both sides for the continuous (re-)constitution of one's subjectivity.

But how does it feel? Using various self-reflexive and introspective techniques, the authors of the second section communicate the various dimensions of their own subjective processes, and artfully bridge the gap between themselves and the reader by evoking her/his emotional and physical reactions. In their "postmodern ethnography," Ellis and Bochner produce a daring multivoiced text/performance which describes the various subjective dimensions and phases of their experience with abortion, effectively encouraging the reader to feel and experience this ordeal with them.

As Richardson aptly remarks, besides being "skimmable...or dreary," traditional sociological texts are articulated within a certain discursive culture, one that eschews the importance of the subjective experience of the researcher/writer. Additionally, these texts are produced from a privileged position which allows their authors to speak for the subjects and to create meanings for them --a situation which is ethically, politically and philosophically problematic (see Lather, 1991). Facing these dilemmas, she transforms a 36-page interview of Louisa May (an unwed mother) into a poem, reflects on the various reactions she faced following the submission of this most unorthodox text, and explores how Louisa May and her poetic representation have transformed her own sense of self, perspectives, and professional practices. As the moral of her article proclaims, "In writing the Other, we can (re)write the Self"; and this conclusion is important for sociologists interested in writing sociology as an honest self-reflexive "effective and affecting discourse, a nonalienating practice."

Ronai does not so much communicate about her emotional experiences as she completely and viscerally abolishes the distance between her and the reader. Writing in a style she describes as "emotional strip-tease," she discards the habitual and cumbersome layers of discursive inhibitions, and discloses her thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations while working as a dancer/researcher. Seduced by such a strategy, the reader follows her to the bar where she works and experiences its decor of loud sounds, foul smells, sleazy come-on's, abusive gestures, and lewd gazes. Being "in the bar" with her, the reader cannot help but vicariously feel her rage towards the clientele, and her confusion about her own position as an ethnographer. As she remarks, the conflicts generated by playing the roles of both participant and observer cannot be limited to "becoming the phenomenon," but involve the difficult act of balancing a multiplicity of voices which speak different languages as we participate in different settings.

We often overlook that time, space and activity represent important parameters which energize and transform our subjective sense of self, and this is the focus of the texts in the third section. Interpreting several biographical accounts of the familiar but elusive experiences of protracted duration and temporal compression, Flaherty proposes an interesting theoretical formulation suggesting that our subjective experiences of the passage of time must be understood in terms of the interplay of self and situation. More specifically, the nature of one's involvement in a particular situation, the degree of novel stimuli one must attend to, and the remembering of events all play a role in these experiences.

Fine focuses on the often-neglected Umwelt, the essential backdrop against which actors create meanings and experience reality. As his participant observation and interviews with mushroomers clearly convey, even though the culture-nature distinction "is, at its heart, a fraud," it carries decisive consequences for the people who embrace it. Thus, if most Americans usually overlook mushrooms, absentmindedly chew on them, or inadvertently step on them, mushroomers "literally make others' ground their figure." They anthropormorphize mushrooms, evoke their names with psalmic passion, and interpret their encounters with rare species as epic victories. Armed with these meanings, mushroomers acknowledge intense emotional, physical, and cognitive transformations as they hunt for and discover these natural trophies. Using her/his imagination, the reader can certainly reflect on other hobbies and passions which produce similar experiences.

Using reflections conveyed by tourists visiting the Grand Canyon, Newmann explores and clarifies the subjective processes activated by travelling. He also provides insightful examples illustrating the effects of physical activities such as rock-climbing, camping, and hiking on the emotional/cognitive experiences of the self. As he convincingly shows, such activities can restructure the self by displacing its familiar voices, and by energizing silenced and potential ones. At the same time, through encounters with (oneself through) others, travelling can also re-affirm the self we thought we had left behind. Travelling is thus an "experience centered on ambiguity and uncertainty," providing "few stable answers to the riddle of the self."

The authors of the fourth section discuss transformations in the subjective sense of self from different perspectives. Interested in the interplay between the physical and psychical dimensions of the self, Olesen relies on interviews and on her own recollections to understand how individuals experience transformations in their sense of self while confronting events that are either extraordinary and external (such as the 1989 San Francisco earthquake) or those that are mundane and internal (such as ailments). She reports that both types of events trigger strong emotions in respondents. They call for a re-evaluation of the perceived relationships between self and body, and precipitate the emergence and re-cognition of a physical self, which is then reintegrated into a new "physical biography of vulnerability and potentiality." As her work attests, symbolic interaction theory contains both interesting potentials and limitations for explaining these transformations.

Positing that the self is "the sum of an individual's changing internal conversations," Gagnon provides a provocative discussion of the cultural and material transformations which imperceptibly encouraged the emergence of a "new species of mental life" in the 19th and 20th century. Appearing first among members of the Romantic movement, and circulating later throughout the rest of society, the idea of a private protoself truer than, and alienated from, social roles and society shifted the locus of the self from the public to the private realm. Additionally, the introduction and increasing availability of a series of innovations (especially the novel) created possibilities for the experiencing with new forms of subjectivity. Among these, Gagnon notes the increased opportunities for privately experimenting with a multiplicity of voices, for social detachment, for "the reconstruction of mental life on a vast scale," and for qualitatively new phenomenological experiences of time, space, desire, presence, absence, fantasy, and role-taking. But if these historical changes encouraged an increase in the voices available for internal and external speech, they also multiplied conflicts between them. Accelerating this trend, the contemporary self "comes to address more and more audiences, but in increasingly limited ways," a situation he suggests will soon be conventionalized in the postmodern world.

At the end of their introduction, Ellis and Flaherty invite the reader to assess the worth of this volume by reflecting on: whether the authors have made subjectivity more intelligible, whether they have sensitized the reader to the socio-cultural and historical dimensions of subjectivity, whether they have succeeded in evoking her/his recognition and identification in the texts, and whether the texts have "moved" her/him? As a reader, I believe that these various texts accomplish these tasks. This volume is cleverly organized and engaging; many of the texts do strike a chord and some of them will certainly move the reader. Besides connecting between the emotional, the physical and the cognitive dimensions of subjectivity, quite a few authors also explore its socio-cultural and historical parameters. Additionally, they provide useful critiques and point at a multiplicity of directions for further exploration. Some also experiment with stimulating new forms and approaches, and most locate fertile grounds where symbolic interactionist answers meet postmodern questions.

Finally, the project of linking the emotional aspects of subjectivity to cognitive, physical, and historical ones raises a concluding comment. Quite a few theorists associated with postmodernism have argued that the present moment may encourage qualitatively different forms of subjectivity (see Gagnon, above). For example, historical forces are assumed to encourage "a liberation" from feelings, a subjective experience characterized by "a complete lack of affect punctured by moments of extreme intensity," (Jameson, in Stephenson, 1988:4-5) "anhedonia" and "ressentiment," (Denzin, 1991:viii) or "free-floating, autonomous affective moments." (Grossberg, 1988:180). It would thus be interesting to probe and interpret both those situations where individuals experience high/low intensities and affectlessness, and those where individuals experience a lack of correspondence between the affective, the cognitive, and the physical dimensions of subjectivity. Several of these articles hint at such dynamics.

REFERENCES

Denzin, Norman K. 1991. Images of Postmodern Society. London: Sage.

Grossberg, Lawrence. 1988. "Putting the Pop back into Postmodernism." Pp. 167-190 in Universal Abandon?: The Politics of Postmodernism, edited by Andrew Ross. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Jameson, Frederic. 1984. "The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodernism Debate." New German Critique No. 33 (Fall):53-66.

Lather, Patti. 1991. Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy with/in the Postmodern. New York: Routledge.

Stephenson, Anders. 1989. "Regarding Postmodernism -- A Conversation with Frederic Jameson." Pp. 3-30 in Universal Abandon?: The Politics of Postmodernism, edited by Andrew Ross. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,