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Narrative identity
In Narrative and Time (1988) Ricouer posits the idea of “narrative identity” as not only a crucial form of knowing but also the critical mechanism of subject formation. At risk of oversimplification it can be expressed as: we are the stories that we tell ourselves. Or as Ricouer himself says in a later treatment of the idea: characters “are themselves plots” (1992:143).
The notion of narrative identity is not however about self-absorption in the detail of our own stories, it is about a dynamic relationship between our own stories and the story of others.
The self of self-knowledge is the fruit of an examined life, to recall Socrates’ phrase in the Apology. And an examined life is, in part, one purged, one clarified by the cathartic effects of the narratives, be they historical or fictional, conveyed by our culture. So self-constancy refers to a self-instructed by the works of a culture that it has applied to itself. (Ricoeur 1988:247)
The concept of narrative identity is not a static model of sameness, it highlights the fluid cultural understanding of contemporary identities but it never-the-less maintains a sense of “self-constancy”. It is a “practical” term rooted in the question of agency: it answers the question ‘Who did this?’ rather than ‘Who is this?’ (Ricoeur 1988: 246) It applies equally to individuals and communities: “Individual and community are constituted in their identity by taking up narratives that become for them their actual history.” (1988:247)
Ricoeur postulates that both fiction and non-fiction narratives are a “vast laboratory for thought experiments in which the resources of variation encompassed by narrative identity are put to the test of narration.” (1992:148) As David Rasmussen puts it:
One of Ricoeur’s most brilliant insights is to reconceived [the] dialectic of concordance and discordance [of the sense of personal identity across time] on a higher level as the dialectic between sameness and selfhood thematized as a set of “imaginative variations” entertained by the narrative. This is the very point of narrative. Narrative does not seek to conceal this dialectic but rather it seeks out the contradictions. (Rasmussen 2002:63)
Self as teacher versus self in teaching,
Conceived of in this sense, our story of self as teacher need not produce a teacher centred narrative of education. If our narrative identity comes from a sense of “who did this?” rather than a sense of “who is this?” our actions are always inevitably linked to others and our project of self-narration becomes both a personal and a communal story. We discover our self as teacher when we discover ourselves in teaching.
Following Iris Murdoch William Barbieri describes our freedom as based in “our ability to represent our moral experience in an ongoing, integrated, and responsible manner” (1998:372). This process of moral evaluation is not one of creating distance or objectification it is one of going more deeply into the multi-layered experiences of our polyvalent narrative experience.
As human beings we are part of many different stories: national, regional, occupational, familial, erotic, gendered, racial and ethnic to name only the most obvious frameworks. Barbieri suggests that there is in a broad sense “a rough hierarchy between more basic and less basic stories in which we participate” (1998:379). It is through a phenomenological process of balancing these stories against one another that we develop our moral viewpoint and express our agency as narrative beings.
How basic a story is to us is, in my view, a function of how constitutive it is of our knowledge--and hence, of our agency. Because our more basic stories are deeply and subtly employed in those acts through which we know the world, they inform how we participate in less basic stories in a way which we for the most part simply take for granted. On this view, we criticize stories by--and only by--invoking what are to us deeper stories. These provide us with a context in which a critical moral assessment becomes intelligible. (Barbieri 1998:379)
The saturated self and the nomadic subject
The question of the narrative self becomes increasingly important in a world where the “discursive ecology” (Gergen 1996:131) is undergoing a period of radical change. Social psychologist Kenneth Gergen (1991; 1996) has written persuasively about the “saturated self” that is exposed to an exponential expansion of possible significant relations in our complex multimedia world.
This dispersal of self-concept across a range of competing narratives runs the risk, Gergen argues, of producing a profound emptying or dissolution of self. However, for better or worse it also allows for a series of new identifications or “multiple ontologies” (Gergen 1996:132). Gergen uses the example of mental health:
Prior to this century, one could not meaningfully experience a nervous breakdown, an inferiority complex, an identity crisis, an authoritarian personality tendency, chronic depression, occupational burnout or seasonal affective disorder. Now these and a virtual multitude of additional candidates are offered as candidates for ontological status (Gergen 1996:132).
Perhaps more significantly this new discursive ecology opens individuals to a range of possibilities opened up by exposure to different other/selves: different ethnicities and cultures, different sexualities, different classes and genders. The coming out narrative, for example, is critical in both the individual adoption of gay identity and in the cultural opening up of acceptance of sexual difference.
Although Gergen argues against postmodern categories for a new “relational sublime” (Gergen 1996:137) his analysis is consistent with other postmodern theorists who have argued the arrival of the “nomadic subject” (Grossberg 1988; Braidotti 1994; Brown 1996). For Rosi Braidotti the nomadic subject is a utopian figuration that is not about displacement but about a discursive freedom from dominant narratives.
[The nomadic subject is] a figuration for the kind of subject who has relinquished all idea, desire, or nostalgia for fixity. This figuration expresses the desire for an identity made of transitions, successive shifts, and coordinated changes, without and against an essential unity. (Braidotti 1994:22)
