You should leave the past at home.

The Art of Storytelling

Over the last couple weeks, I have been considering the relationship between identity, narrative, and discourse. For this course, I plan to deeply analyze video data of what I consider narrative play. Yet, this is tricky data to fully conceptualize as the individuals are playfully constructing identities for imagined selves in imagined worlds. What I find intriguing is that these local stories likely have connections to broader cultural ways of characterization, performance, and play.  Here, narrative is not explicitly 'personal' or a life story -- it is not a reflection of "lived-experience" (one can assume) and an individual's role within the narrative is often non-normative to that individual's role in society.  With this in mind, and thanks to one Jessica Lester's recommendation, I have dipped my toe into the ocean of work by Elizabeth Stokoe, particularly for background on narrative identities and membership categorization analysis. (At first glance, these seem to be in competition with each other, but I hope to unravel this more later.)  While I am no expert on her work (yet), I already feel that her connections between narrative theory and discourse analysis has progressed my thinking.

So, this week I approached the readings through the lens of identity and discourse. I would say that this was a rather beneficial approach to these specific readings. However, I honestly think I lost track of all the ways identity surfaced. While somewhat dense, I do think I was able to, on some level, interpret the Jørgensen & Phillips' conceptualization of identity (albeit situated in the theory of Laclau and Mouffe), which is based on the concept of interpellation. In all, identity is not fixed; it is a dynamic response to the relevance of discourses and their corresponding actions. Yet, if we believe that only discourse structures the social world, we lose some agency in shaping and shifting identities. In many ways, this is not unlike some contemporary Western understandings of identity signifiers as in accordance with some natural law or simply not a choice. However, Laclau and Mouffe would, of course, disagree with this sentiment as "identities are accepted, refused and negotiated in discursive processes" (p. 43). So, if identity is dynamic, fragmented, represented in discourse, "is" only in relation to what it "is not", and unpredictable, where do we allocate individual agency in the identity we discursively perform? And we come full circle, because I think the answer is in what the discourse is doing.

Membership

 It seems logical that identity and group formation follow the same principles -- individual and collective discursive structures function similarly. Laclau and Mouffe's theoretical approach to group formation and representation was insightful. However, I found it a bit at odds with my quick read of membership categorization analysis. This did not shock me, considering the perspectives of conversation analysis, but I wonder if there are common grounds. My initial considerations are on the shared histories of individuals. While perhaps not stated explicitly, I am under the assumption the Laclau and Mouffe position members of a group as having a shared history. How else could groups be reduced based on a process of possible identifications. So, if conversation analysis cares broadly about sequence and membership categorization analysis cares broadly about, well, categories, is there a place for individual and collective history? I see this as two-fold. First, if shared history is present in the talk and used with discursive purpose, we can make inferences (but what are the odds of that?). Second, if categories are rich with social and cultural history, we can make inferences about how they predict, explain, or orient talk. This might be a bit more of a stretch for CA/MCA.

Disidentification

Graham (2015) uses post-structuralist theories of language to refocus the self-identification of "troubled children". She considers both the clinical discourse of self-characterization and students' discursive strategies for identity (re)construction. However, another interpretation could be disidentification. I make this case, in part, due to Graham's reference of Judith Butler work on identity. If we follow the line of thinking in much of Butler's work (particularly Butler, 1993), we can continue to use a post-structuralist lens to interpret the students discourse as simultaneously recognizing and failing to recognize normative identifications. This discourse is not simply "saying the right thing" on one hand or missing the dominant discourses on the other. Rather it is rhetorical; a means of resistance by (re)constructing minority, and perhaps deviant, identifications. While I am not well read enough to fully commit to this idea, I feel disidentification can be connected with interpellation, as the students are responding to dichotomous social positionings. One step further, we could posit that the students are disidentifying with each other.