Writing of the Heart: Auto-ethnographic Writing as Subversive Story Telling
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Presentation for the Academic Identities Conference 2014, Durham University UK
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Writing of the Heart: Auto-ethnographic Writing as Subversive Story Telling
- 1. Writing of the Heart: Auto-ethnographic Writing as Subversive Story Telling Simon Warren, NUI Galway, Ireland Academic Identities Conference 2014
- 3. Isn’t this going a bit far for the REF? But we must achieve research excellence. Now, as for your writing plan…
- 4. dérive
Hinweis der Redaktion
- 13th February 2012 …as with every day last week, and all through the conference and study school, I get up, I wash and dress. I have breakfast –– something resembling breakfast. I put on the mask and perform the competent academic and adult. Inside, though, I am dissolving. Each moment it is harder to maintain this fiction of calmness, of ‘togetherness’…I am caught between anxiety and normality. Normality is increasingly unreal. Anxiety is increasingly normal. The idea of facing all my colleagues tomorrow at the staff meeting…God, I don’t know…I MUST. I MUST…just get through this week…GET THROUGH THIS WEEK. “A 2012 survey on occupational stress carried out by the University and College Union found that staff in British universities are more stressed now than in 2008, and experience considerably higher average levels of stress relating to the demands made on them at work than the British working population as a whole.” Guardian website July 9 2013 I have moved here from a ‘me’ story to an ‘us’ story; from a personal biographical account to a scholastic account. The first is an extract from my personal diary the night before I finally succumbed to clinical depression. The second is a report of a survey in the British Guardian newspaper. They both speak of the same phenomena, but in different ways. The energy produced by placing these two different texts next to each other – the first pathic, the second gnostic - is the kind of energy that is produced by a ‘layered account’ as found in much autoethnographic work. And this approach to speaking of academic life and practice is the content of this presentation. The writing is about my experience of a particular context – of the impossibly competing demands between teaching, research and administration. Increasing student numbers with fewer resources whilst also increasing research productivity and ‘grant capture’ in a culture of measurement and surveillance. This is a context where the very institutions we work in and for create what what Barabara Jago has called ‘academic depression’, and what Art Bochner refers to as ‘…institutional depression, a pattern of anxiety, hopelessness, demoralization, isolation, and disharmony that circulates through university life.” (431), the way we succumb to performative institutional culture, especially the ways we are conditioned to split our academic and personal lives, to privilege the former and suppress the latter. Academic depression, as discussed here, is then both a disenchantment with the romance of a scholarly life and psychological trauma. BUT - How do we write of ‘academic depression’ without emptying the experience of its visceral reality? In this presentation I draw on a number of personal, intellectual, and cultural resources to tell a story about how I am trying to write of academic depression, of writing a: MY/YOU/US STORY of life in the modern university. In particular I speak to the capacity of autoethnographic writing to be transformative, to remoralise us in a context of demoralisation; and of the pause [……..] the pause that such writing and reading can create, within which different ways of being an academic can emerge. But there is a craft to this and I speak also to this craft-work. I speak to a kind of playful writing, of autoethnographic writing as a sampling and remixing of introspection, memory, anecdote and scholarly work to create an evocative text.
- This presentation rehearses the ideas that I hope will become a paper published in an academic journal. This represents something I want to term ‘authentic’. That is, my experience of academic depression, I feel, says something not just about me personally but about a wider experience of academic life in neo-liberal times. In reading the many texts of academic capitalism or new public management sometimes I feel as if I cannot see the human experience, the panic attacks, the joy at being published, the dark night of the day, etc. While eloquent in their analysis I cannot FEEL myself in them. [Community]: I am involved in a project of redefining my academic purpose. And in writing I want to enter into dialogue with others. And because of the mode of engagement – autoethnography – I am signaling which kinds of folk I want to talk with, what kinds of conversation I want to have. There is an ethical dimension to this. Autoethnography is an ethical choosing, a political position. BUT – at the same time, my efforts, my existential choosing, is caught up in what Guy Debord referred to as the SPECTACLE. That is, the substance of my authentic and choiceful activity is also taken up in the knowledge factory of the modern university, emptied of meaningful content, transformed into a commodity, and utilized in the pursuit of institutional ambition. Imagine the modern world of global higher education as being like a fashion show. What is important is the glamour, the style, the posturing. What we are not invited to see is the ecological damage of a culture that persuades us that we MUST keep going out to buy more and newer clothes so that we end up with wardrobes bursting with unused items while the majority of the world’s population struggle to secure the basics. We are not invited to think about the child labour that will underpin the cheapness of the latest fashions we purchase. In other words, image and illusion come to dominate. We don’t experience the world directly, Debord argued, instead we increasingly meet the world through images of the world.
- And so, my article will be denuded of meaning, it will be taken up by the production of writing plans, it will be linked to performance indicators and professional development meetings, it will become a commodity that is accumulated by the university, and will eventually be reflected back to me as an item on my CV, as part of an institutional submission to a research assessment exercise – as something emptied of its choicefulness, of its ethical claim, of its authenticity. And this is perhaps why so many of us feel demoralised. And so this is why it is important to write in ways that remoralise, that can open up the possibility of imagining what an authentic academic might be – to give moral purpose to what we do.
- The ‘managed’ academic CV is one that increasingly must be cohesive, must be linear. BUT –but - Cohesiveness and linearity is a product of retrospection – an afterthought. Yet we are asked to write plans AS IF intellectual thought was linear, tidy, bullet points. This is a world that cannot entertain the idea of “dérive”, of wandering of meandering through intellectual landscapes. [“dérive” is like the idea of the artist Paul Klee who invited us to ‘follow the line’ – that is, to not think of trying to represent something on paper with the pen, but of seeing where the line takes us, see what it reveals. So we might be asked to draw the space around a person rather than to ‘draw the person’. [Danny Wildermeersch]] Imagine drawing a straight line on a map and attempting to follow that path regardless of what obstacles might be in the way; of having to negotiate those obstacles as best we can; of having to encounter people; and to encounter the space without GPS or smartphone. Or psychogeography where you might be given a set of simple instructions (2nd left, 1st right, 2nd left, repeat) and use this to navigate an urban space and to observe what you see and experience – experience it directly without the concepts provided by a map. Or, choosing a familiar space (work building, journey to work, etc.) you are asked to travel in silence. The silence immediately forces a pause, a reflection, where we might start to notice certain aspects of the ‘familiar’ environment in different ways, where we might find ourselves drawn to certain objects, feelings, anticipations. - [Wood Quay Project.] As well as this mode of academic practice being contrary to the managed CV it is also how I am imagining the writing I am talking about. It is much more akin to psychogeography – a methodology that enables me to walk through my experience of academic depression in a structured way but which makes possible new observations.
- A dérive is a methodology that poses this question – what if there is no point B? It is a methodology that invites the researcher (me) to begin in a particular place – now - looking back at my experience of academic depression – and to traverse this recovered experience with no specific destination in mind. The dérive Is Disruptive – like the walk following an arbitrary straight line it is a methodology that is disruptive of traditional social scientific practice. It disregards the arbitrary distinction between public and private – so my person and personal feelings are viewed as important, and it plays with creative and scientific writing, It is An embodied methodology: it places emphasis on capturing the emotive experience without rushing to abstraction….it tries to speak of the bodily response and not to give undue weight to the cognitive. It places the pathic as equal to the gnostic… [It Encourages/discourages] – part of the aim of an aimless walk is to identify the way everyday life, the mundane, is ordered or structured. But this requires something like the phenomenological reduction, the bracketing of our normal understandings, and the cultivation of a open attitude. Similarly, the wandering through cycles of introspection and analysis can, it is hoped, produce the kind of disorientation. And disoriented we identify what we find ourselves attracted to (what incidents, emotions, ideas induce us towards them) and what discourages us (what feels uncomfortable, distasteful). IN OTHER WORDS WHAT IS IT THAT PRESENTS ITSELF TO OUR CONSCIOUSNESS AND WHAT SENSE CAN WE MAKE OF IT? [How do I for instance find myself constituted as ‘other’ in everyday academic settings? What spaces or practices induce pleasure or pain? What is my experience of email, form filling, reading student feedback, hearing passing conversations? What are the situations where I felt/feel ‘at home’ or where I feel threatened?]
- And so the dérive is also an ethical intervention to encourage a deep reflection on the nature of academic life as we live it. A political intervention.
- One way of doing this in the craft of writing is the use of the Layered account used to produce disruptive and evocative texts. This can involve the varied use of memoir or diary, as well as academic analysis in order to reconnect the private and academic self – as in my opening quotes. It is Ruth Bihar’s combination of ‘a novelistic and scholarly voice’ ; or Carolyn Ellis’ (Ellis, 2007) invitation to write in a way that moves back and forth between personal introspection and academic reflection, methods that are simultaneously social and psychological. This is similar to the Situationist method of détournement.
- Detournement is ‘culture jamming’ or ‘culture hacking’. This is where everyday objects, normally those associated with power and capitalism and patriarchy are subverted, are hacked and reproduced – where items from personal life are conjoined with scholarly writing to disrupt our consciousness and reveal not only the child labour behind the glamorous clothes, but what this means to us, what this feels like.
- It is a process of sampling and remixing everyday objects, of using familiar items and putting them together in ways that disrupt perceptions, that create new, possibly subversive stories. The hope is to invoke such disruptions for me but also for the reader. To subvert the tidiness of academic writing that can abstract us from lived experience That asserts academic life and academic practice as embodied and embedded in social-political space That produces a pause or intensified awareness of the object of study – modern academia – so questioning my sense of being and opening up space to reimagine academic life And in reimagining academic life seek to live it differently