The auto/biographical ‘we’: our search for a voice in academic writing

Nod Miller, University of East London, UK

Linden West, Canterbury Christ Church University College, UK

Paper presented at SCUTREA, 33rd annual conference, University of Wales, Bangor,

1-3 July, 2003

We are two researchers who have collaborated in a number of projects in adult education and lifelong learning over the last ten years. Much of our work has focused on auto/biographical approaches to research on adult learning and on processes of learning from experience, and we have experimented with a variety of methodologies and employed diverse theoretical frameworks in order to explore and analyse our own and other people’s learning stories. In this paper we develop further our auto/biographical model, focusing in particular on our struggle to locate or devise a voice for our collective writing with which we are both comfortable. Part of that struggle has been to connect sociological and psychological discourses, but it has also been concerned with fundamental questions about the meaning and the desirability of ‘authenticity’ in writing. This has at times meant departing from the academic form in order to link the personal and the interpretative.

We have recently found ourselves locked in debate over a number of issues which bear on language and cultural identity, to the extent that our collaborative efforts have reached moments of impasse. We explore these issues in the paper, and the questions we address include the following:

  • How can we write about personal experience in an academic context without getting bogged down in academic jargon?
  • How do we write collectively while at the same time acknowledging our individual identities and disciplinary locations and the differences between us?
  • How do we deal with what is difficult to capture in language, including, for example, the limitations of knowing, as well as our differing stances on such matters as spirituality and the experience of depression?
  • How do we avoid pretentiousness, narcissism or simply being embarrassing?
  • How do we respond to postmodern challenges to ‘truth’ and ‘authenticity’?

Some of these questions may arise out of the changing landscape of adult education, including the shift from the language of adult education to that of lifelong learning, and from metaphors of the field to those of the moorland, in which learning of many different kinds in a wide variety of locations is seen as important. Also relevant is the closure of a number of university departments of adult education and the rise of research assessment and selectivity, which has consolidated restrictive disciplinary boundaries. We have experienced changes in our own professional identities, with the consequent feelings of loss, marginality, and uncertainty about future direction. The theme of this year’s SCUTREA conference provides us with a timely opportunity to reflect further on questions about the relationship between identity, language, situation, power, the struggle for meaning, and the limitations of the academic project.

The ideas set out here are part of a continuing conversation between the two of us, one which has been going on for over a decade. We both write on auto/biography and learning, so inevitably our lives are inextricably tied up in our research (and our research is bound up in our teaching, too, although that is a different story). Often we work through themes in autobiography which appear in our academic writing through lengthy email exchanges about everyday events and feelings. Generally the ideas expressed in our emails get polished and translated into formal academic codes before they surface in the public domain. However, this paper consists for the most part of material from the backstage of our writing, to use a Goffmanesque metaphor. The material might have been slightly less raw if we had not been stretching the deadline for this paper, but perhaps that may make it more interesting to some of our readers.

Nod Miller: I think that’s as far as I want to go in the first person plural. The paragraphs above come from the abstract you and I submitted to the SCUTREA conference organisers in January 2003. It’s now May and a lot seems to have happened since we put together the abstract. But as I dig through my correspondence with you in order to remind myself what we are trying to do, I realise we have been worrying away at the issues alluded to in the abstract for a long time.

As I remember it, the concern with the autobiographical ‘we’ came out of discussions which the two of us have been having for years about a book on auto/biographical writing and lifelong learning. In August last year, just before we each departed for a summer break, we met to review the state of this project. It was not a happy occasion. Neither of us was well prepared, and the strongest shared experience we had was of exhaustion. I remember sitting in your house in the room overlooking the garden and firing questions at you in an ill-tempered fashion. I was trying to strip our project back to the shared bare essentials, but your basics read to me like so many feathery abstractions, studded with references to Giddens and Beck, to reflexive modernity and risk society and shifting gender and occupational expectations … ‘But what exactly do you mean, Linden?’ I asked with increasing weariness.

Linden West: We have wrestled with issues of language and the need for conversations which transcend disciplinary boundaries in our work. We have focused in particular on seeking to develop what might nowadays be termed a ‘psychosocial perspective’ …

NM: That’s a term I have a problem with.

LW: … that is, one that recognises how culture and society penetrate to the heart of the most intimate of experience, and selves, but that inner life has a dynamic and reality of its own, and cannot be reduced to an epiphenomenal status. The current interest in auto/biographical approaches among university-based adult educators in the UK (apparent in successive collections of SCUTREA papers since 1993) can be seen as a response to the state of flux in the field of adult continuing education, with many departments changing their titles, foci and locations (or having these changes thrust upon them), as some of the concerns of adult education move from the margins to the mainstream in educational policy. Given the unstable working conditions of many scholars in the field, perhaps it is not too surprising that many of us are seeking to understand our own histories, identities and locations at present.

How can we write about personal experience in an academic context without getting bogged down in academic jargon?

LW: Some of the response reflects my mixed and muddled feelings, at present, including being upset at not progressing our book project, and trying to understand why. I’ve been anxious to understand the block and its nature. It has to do with far more than our work and friendship. I have been writing, somewhat manically, on various subjects recently: about men and their learning for an ESREA book; a chapter on supervision in primary care; the editorial for a Polish journal; an article on Sure Start, or rather an ‘Unsure Start’, and a number of other bits and pieces. It all feels a bit mad, in the sense of doing too much; but I suspect there is a more basic struggle going on about writing and me; maybe life and me. Transitions and learning come to mind, which includes learning to write better, differently and more authentically; more simply, using less jargon and academic game-playing.

How do we write collectively while at the same time acknowledging our individual identities and disciplinary locations and the differences between us?

NM: It seems that no matter how much I write, I always struggle at the beginning of a new piece of writing to find a location (a place to stand and from which to conduct the analysis) and a voice for myself. If it’s a struggle to get the voice right in an individually written paper, then it’s more so in collective writing. There are always compromises. It’s not so much of an issue when the material is somewhat distant (theories of social inclusion or whatever), and in such cases I can accept others’ constructions and wording without having to contest every word. But when it’s an explicitly auto/biographical piece, as here, then it feels really important to be sure that I can own what’s being said.

LW: Voice has been a lifelong issue for me, maybe for both of us. We are, I think, challenging some conventional locational boundaries, for example the ‘field’ of academe and its marginalisation of the personal and subjective. We are perhaps celebrating as well as interrogating many ways of knowing (don’t like those words, but can’t think of a way round them), including in each other. Perhaps too we are acknowledging the lack of certainty surrounding where we are located, which touches on the postmodern point, I guess.

You remember how we talked about needing to keep things simple, more direct and not hide behind academic jargon, especially when we can’t define it clearly? Maybe this struggle is just too close for comfort right now. You (in effect), along with Wilma Fraser and Steve Wakelham (another close friend who is a writer) have encouraged me to break free from academic jargon, loosen up a bit, get creative. That’s what I have been trying to do, with mixed success, and your comment touched a raw nerve.

How do we deal with what is difficult to capture in language, including, for example, the limitations of knowing, as well as our differing stances on such matters as spirituality and the experience of depression?

LW: I think we are both struggling to break free into a different territory; one that is more grounded, a location from which to conduct the analysis and find a convincing voice for the ‘I’ and ‘we’. Maybe part of the difficulty is that I sometimes draw on forms of knowing such as psychoanalysis and spirituality which are difficult and contested, not least between us. I take spirituality to be concerned with values and morality as well as the fundamental but also, at times, unsayable search for meaning in life. It raises questions about knowing and unknowing, certainty and uncertainty, and the power and limitation of words in auto/biography. God, so to speak, knows how we tackle that.

NM: It’s not that I don’t have moral values I try to live by, but I don’t feel I have an adequate language to articulate them. You mention God in your text, and I wonder if your religion helps you in this respect. Spirituality is another of those words which makes me shuffle my feet uncomfortably and avert my gaze. But perhaps something useful might come out of our having more discussion about this aspect of difference between us.

LW: We must look at this, as well as my own diffidence about introducing spiritual dimensions into the conversation, and about writing on adult learning more widely. Part of the problem is that I have no confident language in doing so, because these issues are deeply personal, deeply, and experiential. They’re about a sense of dialogue with a transcendent other who is on my side in the hardest of struggles, in being in and learning from experience. Writing about this challenges my reticence and fear.

NM: In the last few weeks I’ve been in and out of depression and anxiety again. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to confess to this here, but since I woke up full of foreboding and wept copiously for no good reason over the breakfast table I thought you should know. Writing these notes has calmed me down somewhat, but I don’t know what you will read in this text, and the context in which I produced it may be relevant. I don’t know what is causing this depression … If I can avoid getting paralysed by it, it may even be useful in this project.

LW: Thank you for sharing this with me, and the fact that you felt able to. I’ve sensed this, for a while, and believe psychoanalysis could help, as it has me, but don’t want to press the idea. But I could explore the possibilities, as a committed friend who will help in whatever way I can.

How do we avoid pretentiousness, narcissism or simply being embarrassing?

NM: There is a part of me, closely allied with the truculent working-class grammar school girl, which regards all academic theorising as pretentious. This presents a problem for the part of me which is an academic theorist, of course. I also carry around lots of contradictions in my stance towards auto/biography. I am committed to using an auto/biographical approach (although sometimes I forget why), and I seem to be stuck with this way of writing anyway, but I’m haunted by the spectres of self-indulgence and showing off.

LW: I’ve been so pretentious at times. And I’m not sure about my academic identity, partly because I’m questioning some of the academic project anyway. This has something to do with the relationship between literature and social science as a source of insight and meaning. Euripides’s tragedy Medea tells us more, I think, about how a woman can murder her children than any number of social science texts. But I was also at my daughter Charlotte’s graduation yesterday. Lovely, and healing, for all kinds of complex reasons. The downside was the clear incorporation of the academy into a business agenda and a kind of soulless commercial rhetoric that seemed empty, pretentious as well as reductive of what higher education ought to be in a fragile, conflict ridden and confused world. The Vice-Chancellor talked about marketing the institution, as did a main speaker, with relatively little reference to the students other than as salespeople for an institution. The talk was of league tables and business, rather than whole people receiving their degrees, and the complexity of their struggles to learn, auto/biographically. It’s demeaning.

How do we respond to postmodern challenges to ‘truth’ and ‘authenticity’?

LW: I may have some postmodernist tendencies, and think some of the questioning liberating, but have doubts about the whole business, which I think you share. You provide clues in the paper, in pointing to the relationship between representation and inner emotional life, and postmodernism steers clear of the emotions, despite its challenge to privileging rationality in the West. I’ve believed for a while that your struggle is similar to mine: about the place of feelings, authenticity, and the need to know what’s real, and yes, true. I understand what you mean when you say that all representation is ultimately ‘artful’, a kind of fiction, a play on words, shaped by context and audience, rather than being the reality itself. But I believe now, more than ever, that there is more to the struggle, or at least mine, than ‘what works on the page’. It is what makes good rather than poor fiction or art, which brings me back to honesty, authenticity, sensibility and truth-seeking as well as intellect.

NM: Authenticity is a hard one. I accept that I probably overdid the emphasis on ‘what works on the page’ in the shaping of my narratives, although when I wrote that bit I was trying to be truthful (‘truthful’?) about my own practices. When I first became involved in the world of group relations training, I was intrigued and then irritated by the frequent invocation of ‘authenticity’ in discussions of interaction in groups. It seemed to me that calling someone’s behaviour ‘inauthentic’ was a way of assuming the moral high ground and saying ‘I disapprove’ in a blanket way. My perception was that the term was part of a personal growth discourse to which I was opposed.

LW: I think the struggle to be real, when viewed in the light of my own analytical work, is hard, but important. There are two sides to me, for instance; one is always waiting to mock and disable the other Then there is the narcissistic performer caught in the glare of his own deepest vulnerability and need for approval; and then there is the performer with real focused passion, who can, just occasionally, stay on the subject, and what is really important.

I realize how much I’ve spent my life writing texts as a kind of performance for others; if often unconsciously. It goes, back to earliest experience, as I’ve told you many times, this need to perform: for parents. Life became a kind of act, a need to shine, early on and it continued: at grammar school, university, in politics and as an academic educator. (It is for all of us, I know, and that’s quite normal; we’re talking degrees here). Part of the present struggle is about wanting and needing to bring my whole self (selves too, in the sense that you mean it), body and soul into the process of writing, in a freer, less inhibited way. Writing more instinctively, as well as engaging with the harder headed dimensions of the psychosocial imagination.

NM: I found what you said about performance helpful, and it connected with an aspect of my perception and experience of you which I mostly enjoy and admire but sometimes feel uneasy with at the same time. As I’ve said before (probably many times), I assumed when we first met that you were a toff. Then when I got to know you better and learned more about your origins and where the voice and presentation came from, I found the slightly actorly style endearing.