Alexander Kiossev Narrating life FINAL 222

Narrating life: Approaches to studying life narratives in the humanities and social sciences1 Alexander Kiossev Abstract: This text describes the complex and methodologically discordant context of contemporary autobiography studies, an exceptionally rich field of research. Its unity turns out to be unstable; it consists of different traditions and is marked by a rupture between the humanities and social sciences. The latter leads not only to scattering and non-dialogical methodological and technical research approaches, but also to radically different formulations of the objects of study. ‘Chinese walls’ gradually emerged between scholars in the humanities, who study published autobiographies and memoires, and social scientists, who devote their efforts to oral stories collected through interviews in concrete situations. The text discusses the complex methodological, philosophical, and practical conflicts and dilemmas stemming from this unfavourable separation and forms its own position situated between the dominant scholarly and political attitudes. Alexander Kiossev is a professor of the cultural history of modernity, director of the Sofia University Cultural Centre, and editor-in-chief of the online journal Piron. His research interests lie in the field of surveys of reading, the cultural history of Communist totalitarianism, and autobiographical studies. He has published several books and edited multiple edited volumes in English, German, and Bulgarian. His articles have been translated into English, German, French, Dutch, Ukrainian, Czech, Polish, Romanian, and Macedonian. E-mail: akiossev@gmail.com Autobiography as a Classical Problem within the Humanities Philosophy’s engagement with the modern (published and literary)2 autobiography is longstanding and oscillates between extremes. The lives of notable people as told by themselves have traditionally been considered not only an exciting but also a morally instructive reading (on this cf. Misch 1949, 1989). However, many sceptics doubt that the secret of an individual’s life can be told at all, and accuse autobiographers of committing literary lies, vanity, narcissism, sentimental Rousseauism, and the like.3 First published in Bulgarian in the electronic journal “Piron”, 2018, issue 15, https://piron.culturecentersu.org/alexander-kiossev-narration/. 2 The modern literary autobiography that emerged at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries differs from the spiritual and religious autobiography of Antiquity, whose paragon is St. Augustine’s Confessions. In the religious genre, a person is not a unique individual but the model of a soul, striving to reach God (Schwalm, 2014). 3 It is telling that in 1798 Friedrich Schlegel wrote: ‘Pure autobiographies are written either by neurotics who are fascinated by their own ego, as in Rousseau’s case; or by authors of a robust artistic or adventuresome self-love, such as Benvenuto Cellini; or by born historians who regard themselves only as material for historic art; or by women who coquette with posterity; or by pedantic minds who want to bring even the most minute things in order before they die and cannot let themselves leave the world without commentaries. [They] can also be regarded as mere plaidoyers 1 This equilibrium between reverence and scepticism was disturbed at the end of the nineteenth century when autobiography was granted special philosophical privileges. Setting aside its purely linguistic and literary aspects, Dilthey (2002) declared that autobiographical reflection was a fundamental semantic structure that transforms the temporal flow of consciousness. According to his famous 1906 essay, only this reverse perspective on life is capable of revealing its true meaning – only autobiography sifts out unimportant episodes and rearranges them in a totalising constellation. The new Lebenszusammenhang overcomes chaotic fragmentation; it purifies life of the insignificant and expresses its essential semantic form, extricated from coincidence (Dilthey, 1989: 21–32). This fundamental idea underwent complex continuation and reinterpretation in the works of Misch, Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer; Alasdair MacIntyre, however, standing outside of the hermeneutical tradition, made special contributions. His argument in After Virtue, in which the unity of life is described as a narrative for the first time, is not complicated, but it is convincing – every single act in life is made intelligible only by the agent’s intentions and motives: short-term intentions are only intelligible as part of long-term intentions, and they in turn as elements of one’s life-plan project, which exists only in narrative form (MacIntyre, 2007: 204–226). After MacIntyre, Paul Ricoeur definitively reformulated the whole field of autobiographic studies in a narrative direction in his fundamental three-volume work, Time and Narrative (1983). In Ricoeur’s work, as well, Dilthey’s Lebenszusammenhang is tasked with prefiguring time’s flow through a reverse perspective and with making it human in the form of a narrative. However, for Ricoeur, a narrative is not a closed phenomenal structure of consciousness, but social, shared patterns. The narrative form integrates the life of the Self with the lives of others, it constructs an individual story by combining elements of a collective repertoire of socially valid and intelligible personal stories, and is even capable of provoking and renewing this repertoire – this is why it is a universal mediator. The dialectic of the forward-looking plot and the retrospectively informed of events point of view of narration sublates the tension between life’s incomplete passing and its static totality, between external (objective, cosmic, or social) time and lived, subjective time. The narrative form has additional, important tasks: to build a bridge between personal intentions, aims and projects on the one hand, and external coincidences on the other; between the internal, intimate point of view of the individual and his/her socially valid roles; between experience and reflection; documentary proof and fiction. Human life cannot assume coherence and intelligibility without this universal structure of mediation; this is why, for Ricoeur, life is originally structured as a narrative. Ricoeur acknowledges the argument of ‘weak’ narrativists (that a person produces all kinds of insignificant narratives about him/herself, including ones that are untrue and manipulative, that have little to do with his/her real life, etc.), but holds that there is nevertheless another particular kind of narrative that is constitutive of the Self. Within the latter, a person is in a regime of sincerity and truth – he/she does not deceive him/herself, nor does he/she put on a mask or stage him/herself in front of others, but studies him/herself in her ipseity. Ipse (lat.) for Ricoeur is the fundamental modality of living, because the life-narrative opens with a person’s moral promise to oneself, a [legal pleadings] before the public. Another great group among the autobiographers is formed by the autopseusts [selfdeceivers].’ (Athenaeum fragments 1798, quoted in Falkenfilk, 1993). responsible self-project, to which at one point of his/her life the self-examining person returns in order to ask and take responsibility – was that promise kept? In the interplay of these two perspectives, simultaneously narrative, temporal, and ethical, the narrative constitutes the meaning of life by answering the unavoidable question, ‘Who am I?’, thus sublating the tension between logical sameness and ethical selfhood. For its part, the question ‘Who am I?’ reveals itself as implicitly asking about the good life (‘Am I a good person?’, ‘Did I become the person I am supposed to be?’) (For more on these issues, cf. Ricoeur, 1981; Ricoeur, 1983; Ricoeur, 1991; Dowling, 2011; Teichert, 2004). However, when Ricoeur was writing – in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s – the old distrust of the genre was still alive. For every self-respecting psychotherapist, for example, the autobiographical narrative was not and could not ever be the ‘essential meaning’ of life: the life story told is only a manifest symptom, a rationalisation visible on the surface and a sublimation of deep traumatic experiences. It does not give life meaning, but rather it itself needs to be deciphered in order to reveal real, deep meanings outside of the Self-conscious subject’s control. Simultaneously, philosophical scepticism formulates much more serious criticisms and counterarguments to autobiography. In Ludwig Wittgenstein’s fragments, they target the assumptions of its phenomenological and hermeneutical privileging – the foundation of solitary consciousness, the Cartesian Cogito and its implications: the certainty of self-knowledge, the isolated ‘mental privacy’ of the self-observing subject, the category ‘inner experience’, etc. In their place, Wittgenstein puts a particular, situational and linguistic-practical Self, multiplied in a family of language-games (Wittgenstein, 1961; Wittgenstein, 1953; Szabados, 1992; Hagberg, 2008). In an analogical but nevertheless very different way, already in 1967 in Speech and Phenomena Jacques Derrida (1973) deconstructed the phenomenological holy-of-holies, the starting point of all autobiographical reflections. His analysis shows that ‘the self-presence of experience produced in the present’ (Derrida, 1973: 59) actually contains within itself its Differance – the sign of absence – the external, the missing, the accidental, death. They penetrate the self-present consciousness from the inside in the form of an endless chain inscribed in it, which challenges its self-presence and self-identity. In various essays, Derrida ironically questioned other significant constituents of the autobiography – ipseity, the key autobiographical question ‘Who am I?’, the audience’s recognition (Derrida, 1985; Derrida, 2002). Some researchers go as far as to claim that this distrust of autobiography is at the heart of his oeuvre. 4 *** For example, Linda Anderson highlights Derrida’s systemic interest in the autobiographical texts by Rousseau, Freud, Nietzsche, and others, at the core of which lies the French philosopher’s conviction that autobiography constantly demonstrates the failure of its own ideal – the Self as an unmediated subjectivity, self-present, self-knowing, and self-narrating. It is the quintessential sign of death and absence: the name, the signature, and the written inevitably outlive their living author (Anderson, 2001: 79–86). 4 Apart from the traditional literary histories of the autobiographical genre and other singular, important but solitary theoretical works,5 literary studies, having long been under the influence of structuralism, had for decades directed its theoretical interest mostly towards the poetics, genre, style, and rhetoric of autobiography – at the centre of its attention lay the general and universal rules, the ‘grammars’, which define genre. They are in no way easy to formulate (cf. the futile efforts of literary critic Jean Starobinski, 1989). Among these attempts, Philip Lejeune’s formalized definition6 deserves special mention – he tried to distinguish autobiography from its neighbouring genres (memoirs, the novel, the autobiographical novel, the memoir, etc.). In a table scheme, Lejeune described in detail several determining characteristics of genres and the scope of their possible structural variations – in the area of linguistic form, autobiography is a prosaic narrative, its subject matter is the narration of the individual life of its author, who is assumed to be identical with the narrator, who in turn is identical with the protagonist, but, unlike the protagonist, has a retrospective point of view. All these characteristics are synthesised in the socalled ‘autobiographical contract’ into which, argued Lejeune, the autobiographer and his/her reader enter. The contract invites the reader to agree to several provisions of the genre: 1. the identity between the author, the narrator, and the protagonist; 2. autobiography’s claim to be a nonfictional narrative; 3. the claim that the narrator is not lying, but is sincere in striving to tell the truth of his/her personal life (Lejeune, 1989). Yet scepticism lives here, too. The deconstructivist branch of literary studies rejected the notion of a valid autobiographical contract. The most famous example, widely discussed in the 1980s, is an essay by Paul de Man, a leading figure in American poststructuralism and a close friend of Derrida’s, namely ‘Autobiography as Defacement’, written in 1979. According to de Man, autobiography bears no relation to reality and truth. The identification of the author, the narrator, and the protagonist does not constitute a valid genre contract, but it is in fact no more than ordinary rhetoric – a trick of language, a conventional trope. This trope – the prosopopoeia (personification) – cannot have referential relation to the autobiographer’s real life in general, as it conditionally gives a living voice to a person who is already dead (i.e., cannot speak anymore): the central trope pushes the autobiographical narrative entirely onto the terrain of fiction. That is why the genre deserves to be called defacement – in the rhetorical dimension of autobiographical writing, the real person and his/her authentic life are sacrificed for the good of a suspicious fictional double, constructed according to rhetorical and literary conventions (de Man, 1984). For a discussion of the subsequent developments in literary studies, heavily influenced by the overall shift in the humanities and by the narrative turn, see below. The Biographical Approach in the Social Sciences After the publication of William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and America in 1918, the scholars of the Chicago School (Thomas, Znaniecki, Allport, Gottschalk, 5 The influential theoretical essays by Wayne Shoemaker, Georges Gusdorf, Roy Pascal from the 1950s stand outside of the scientific revolution in literary studies carried out by formalism, the Prague linguistic circle, and French structuralism (on this cf. Niggle, 1989; Folkenflik, 1993, Eakin, 1992). 6 Despite the fact that – highly uncharacteristic of structuralism – Lejeune included the reader’s expected behaviour in his definition of the genre. Kluckhohn, Angell and others; cf. Dzhambazova, 2008) gradually established a new sociological tradition – the biographical method. Interestingly, it appeared and developed almost independently of the discussions around autobiography in philosophy and literary studies, instead as a reaction against the functionalist paradigm dominant at the time, which studied objective processes and anonymous social mechanisms. Under the influence of interpretive sociology and ethnomethodology, this new approach aspired to shine a light on the inner semantic perspectives of individual social agents rather than describe a system. However, agents are not understood as isolated, self-sufficient, and autonomous universes of meanings, but as mediators between social structures and human agency. The biographical method reconstructs the way they experience coercion and limitations, opportunities for making choices, and freedom – and how, precisely through this, they become relatively free players in the framework of social processes, which in turn makes our understanding of how society functions deeper, non-deterministic, and multi-layered. Following Thomas and Znaniecki, the different versions and branches,7 not Nevertheless, unlike in the humanities, meaning of ‘the subjective perspective’ biographical method spread in the social sciences in its all of which related to the problem of the life story. all of them share a basic epistemological optimism – the and ‘the course of life’ is reachable and knowable.8 The Narrative Turn in Biographical Studies Throughout the 1970s and especially the 1980s, biographical and autobiographical materials began to be analysed not so much as ‘subjective worlds’, ‘mentalities’, and ‘intentional meanings’ or 7 At the end of the twentieth century, biographical studies branched out in a rich and heterogeneous sociological tradition of studies of the course of life under many names – life course research, life course approach, life course paradigm, life course theory, and were associated with researchers such as Glenn Elder, Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson, Robert Crosnoe, Michael Shannon, Karl Mayer, and others. Following the 1961 publication of Erving Goffman’s fundamental book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, some of these biographical approaches were strongly influenced by sociological interactionism, and others by ethnomethodological studies of everyday situations and ordinary conversations (Harvey Sacks, Gail Jefferson, Emanuel Schegloff, Anita Pomerantz and others; in Bulgaria, the latter tradition is followed by Kolyo Koev and Teodora Karamelska). 8 In the aforementioned sphere of epistemological optimism, Pierre Bourdieu stands alone despite his huge influence and numerous followers. According to him, the autobiographical narrative of individual life produces only a misleading ‘biographical illusion’ of life’s totality and coherence; whereas the external objective researcher can see a whole other reality of life. Bourdieu compares it to the Shakespearean chaotic narrative as ‘told by an idiot, full of sound and fury’; in reality it is nothing more than the social agent’s scattered and accidental trajectory, devoid of meaning, unpredictably crossing heterogeneous social fields, each obliging him/her to play different and hardly compatible roles. The impression of a totality of meaning, of a stable life-project and identity is illusory – nothing more than an individual’s retroactive autoideology, sustained by the name, this rigid designator, by society’s habits, and the clichés of narration itself. Furthermore, this illusion is not even individual, intimate, or personal, but a socially constructed normalising effect. It stems from the habitus of the social agent, who finds meaning, organises his/her psychic world and tells his/her life by voluntarily identifying with the role that the hierarchically and unjustly divided social space imposes on him/her. This is why, for Bourdieu, a life story and its meaning are not an important testimony (like the traditional biographical method in sociology), but are rather a symptom of a structural and inevitably conformist cooperation between the individual, his/her ‘psychic world’, and the social system. The autobiographical narrative is in fact a mechanism that makes use of the most intimate – the consciousness of the self, the experience of the self, and the coherent presentation of life – only to deceive the experiencing individual, and in such a way as to make him/her conform to the role that social space destined for him/her. For more on this, cf. Bourdieu (2000) and Deyan Deyanov’s (1998) very important notes on Bourdieu. ‘individual perspectives’, etc., but as narrative structures – stories through which life is experienced and narrated. This general trend almost simultaneously conquered a whole group of social sciences: sociology, psychology, anthropology, and historiography. It had an especially strong presence in their innovative interdisciplinary offshoots: sociolinguistics and social psychology, oral history, microhistory, cognitive psychology, cultural psychology, clinical psychology, human medicine, memory studies, trauma theory, gerontology, theory of education, migration studies, gender studies, critical identity studies, race and class studies, media and communication studies, studies of temporal regimes, etc. One of the conditions of possibility of this narrative explosion was likely the fact that theoretical narratology itself had matured by that time. 9 However, this turn was also conditioned by more general cultural and political processes starting from the 1950s onwards: the death of ideologies, the distrust of grand narratives, dissatisfaction with large-scale modernisation theories, along with the withdrawal of totalising universal grammars and codes characteristic of informatics, structuralism, and semiotics (Lieber, 1985: 126–154; Lyotard, 1984; Brockmeier and Carbaugh, 2001; Brooks, de Corse and Walton, 2008). Gradually, the social sciences began speaking of a wholesale reorientation towards the plurality of microperspectives and contextualisations, towards ‘insignificant’ historical testimonies and oral histories (Brockmeier and Carbaugh, 2001; Schegloff, 2008).10 This process was also influenced by the growing interest in memoirs in the wake of the war. The narrative-biographical approach has its own disciplinary variations. In sociology at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s the model was set by Americans Laboff and Waletzki (1967, 2008), German researchers Fritz Schütze (1983) and Gabriele Rosenthal (2005), the research groups around French scholar Daniel Berteaux (2008) and English thinker Thomas Wengraf (2001). Of great significance for overcoming behaviourist and mentalist attitudes and for the reorientation of psychology towards cultural models and narratives were figures like Jerome Bruner and Kenneth J. Gergen (Bruner, 1994; Bruner, 2001; Bruner, 2004; Gergen 1994). For its part, microhistory was the pioneer in turning its attention to small and local scales (Levi, 2004), the beginning of the programme aimed at ‘amplifying alternative voices’ (Alessandro Portelli, Luisa Passerini and others). The final step towards the orientation to narrative methods was taken by the second generation of oral historians: Joanna Bornat, Daniel Kerr, Michael Frisch, Barbara Harrisson, Alistair Thomson, Paula Hamilton, and others. In recent years, disciplinary distinctions are being overcome and there has been more talk of a unitary field – Life History Research. 11 However, this consolidation trend is incomplete and problematic. Narrative-biographical studies have not yet devised a unitary and generally accepted 9 Especially at the beginning until the late 1980s, at least some of these social scientists read literary theoreticians such as Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, Gérard Genette, Claude Bremond, Algirdas Julius Greimas, and sometimes even the generation of literary narratologists after them: Gerald Prince, Mieke Bal, David Herman, and Robert Scholes. Newly discovered by the West, Mikhail Bakhtin and the Tartu School in the USSR (and especially Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspensky’s work) exerted interdisciplinary influence on philosophers such as MacIntyre and Ricoeur, as well as philosophers of historiography like Hayden White. 10 Finally yet importantly, the narrative turn was made possible by the emergence of affordable and easy-to-use sound recording equipment. 11 That is also the title of the large interdisciplinary volume, edited by Barbara Harrison (2008), which claims to establish a tradition and standards. methodology, nor a sustainable academic and institutional base, but are instead dispersed in countless journals, websites, and archives. Researchers cluster in various networks of academic and non-academic units, research centres and groups, and large and small research projects of both national and international scale. Various groups pursue scientific, sometimes general theoretical problems, but often also purely practical tasks and application in therapeutic practices, ‘truth commissions’ striving towards reconciliation between victims and perpetrators, at institutes for applied biography, for biographical memory, for the recent past etc. (Apitzsch and Siouti, 2007). The intense development of the field prompts some observers to speak of shifting dominant trends in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s (Chаmburlyne, Bornat and Wengraf, 2000), and even already of shifts between a number of paradigms within it (Thomson, 2008). For others, this is an exaggeration: even if large-scale and fragmented, the field continues to undergo changes, searching for a focus, boundaries, and methodological clarity (Kansteiner, 2002). The article does not allow us to go into details describing the historical development of narrative methods in their various disciplinary versions. 12 We will take the risk of generalising and only listing the most important aspects of Life History Research. What follows is an incomplete reconstruction: 1. Life history is a much broader, richer, and more significant field than the specialised literary autobiographies and memoirs of ‘great people’. The turn towards ordinary life stories is a democratic gesture, for in countless situations people (and not necessarily the notable, the great, the talented, nor men or Europeans, but all people) narrate their lives, orally and in all kinds of other ways. Life stories in all of their varieties are a universal phenomenon, much more widespread and fundamental than the specialised, elitist, usually Eurocentric and rhetorically processed literary histories (Ehlich, 1980). 2. Many of these stories are of individuals and groups of people who do not have a truly public voice and have been practically excluded (whether marginalised or stigmatised) from the public sphere and from the grand historical narratives of hegemonic societies. The main political task is 12 To give just one disciplinary example: sociology, because its methodology and methods for studying oral histories are especially influential. Sociologists-narrativists are rarely concerned with the questions with which philosophers or literary scholars are. They usually work on methodological and technical issues, on methods, and sometimes on the ethical and practical aspects of research. The range of problems that they traditionally engage with looks somewhat like this: 1. What is the methodologically correct way to conduct and record oral life story interviews; what are the stages and steps, the permissible questions and interventions on part of the interviewer? 2. On another level: what are the units, the procedures, the exact methods, the techniques to process and interpret recorded life stories? Of utmost importance here is usually the comparison of three modalities: that of objective life with its chronology and causal links (reconstructed by the sociologist), that of one’s life experience (which remembering makes sense of), and finally that of the life told (narrated through specific cultural repertoires). 3. On yet another level, there are inevitable concrete interpretive dilemmas – how is it possible to analyse selectivity and temporal manipulations in the course of narration, how is the balance between activity and passivity of the biographical protagonists represented, what are the omissions, the white spots, the contradictions, how do we discover and interpret repetitions, structural matrixes, the symptoms in the story, even the pauses, the breakdowns, the changes of topic, the tempo, the tone of narration itself? 4. And lastly, there are the typologising questions: how do we outline collective patterns based on the plurality of the life stories we studied so that they have individual explanatory ability in order to inscribe them in different systems of social relevance (habitus, circles of significant others, familial, generational and other contexts). How do we orient these according to the historical context and Great Time? to ‘amplify their voices’ (Portelli) so they can be fairly represented in the public sphere’s conflictual polyphony. 3. The stories people tell about themselves are not something external. They organise their psychic life, including their dreams and memories, define who they are, relate them to others, reveal how others treat them. These stories are an irreplaceable organisational tool – they simultaneous ly organise people’s psyche and its elements, but also their lived life, the Self, and their identity, their interactions with others (Bruner, 1994; Bruner, 2001; Brockmeier and Carbaugh, 2001). The categories ‘life’ and ‘psychological experience’, hitherto not reflected upon, proved to be difficult to separate from the narrative schemas which shape them: in the course of their uses, stories get imprinted on life and begin to determine it, to merge with it over the course of a person’s life (Bruner, 2001; Bruner, 2004). 13 What is more, stories are a shared cultural resource and thus constitute a bridge between the isolated individual and his/her human surroundings, between the individual and the repertoires of his/her culture. On the micro level, one’s significant others validate one’s life story in concrete situations and contexts, and on the macro level each culture has its own accepted cultural codes, a set of forms for narrating life. Through these, one’s life experience appears intelligible and shared, it receives the social collective’s support and recognition. The access and struggles over fair representation in these shared repertoires are a matter of social justice. By renegotiating and shifting between available repertoires, an individual can gain some autonomy and, through his/her own story, validate the unique meaning of his/her own life (Bruner, 2001; Gergen, 1994; Bamberg, 2001). 5. The stories themselves can be studied as an inner structure made up of symbols and narration techniques, as semantics or a grammar (Labov and Waletzky, 1997; Schütze, 1983, Bruner, 2001), but also from a pragmatic point of view – as a symbolic act (performance) which inevitably takes place in a specific context (Schegloff, 2008; Bornat, 2008). There are fierce debates over which of the two approaches is more appropriate, and we will pay them due attention later. Life Stories between the Humanities and the Social Sciences This overview would be superficial if it did not comment on the serious break between humanists and social scientists. For decades, up until the end of the 1960s, the classical humanities had sought to discover the phenomenological, existential, and universal-semiotic structures of autobiographical reflection. In their optimistic hermeneutic version, the universal function of life stories appears as an existential ‘tool’, a temporal, logical, and moral mediator which helps the reflexive person who thinks about him/herself navigate the paradoxes of human time and selfreflection. Through a narrative inscribed in the process of life itself, a person makes his/her experience intelligible for him/her and others, affirms his/her subjectivity and the responsibility of Bruner argues that it is difficult to distinguish between ‘life’ as a social structure and the story constructed in order to think about said life: in the course of life, the life story’s content and structure are inscribed and imprinted back on the experience of life, gradually transforming this mark into a habit, a habitual self-presentation. From here on, this narrative Self-identity becomes a psychic reality and starts defining the categories with which the Self perceives, recalls, thinks about him/herself, plans his/her future, acts etc. (Bruner, 2001, 2004). 13 living, satisfies his/her original will to the meaning of life. The tools of this ‘will to meaning’ were also studied – the narrative mechanisms and universal grammars that service the narrative’s existential and social functions. In other words, scholars of the humanities have long been concerned with how, relying on what features and mechanisms of narration, does the autobiographical narrative answer the question ‘Who am I?’, which inevitably conceals two questions: ‘Who am I to myself?’ and ‘Who am I to others?’ And behind all these stands an ageold Socratic question about the good life and the life in truth, about the totality of meaning and happiness, and about the ethical dimensions of living – about promise, duty, and responsibility. This is why one can argue that an ancient and humanist normative programme has always been inscribed in the humanities’ engagement with autobiography and life stories. Without carrying the burden of this centuries-old Socratic tradition, the social sciences began to develop an interest in the autobiographical problematic much later and in a completely different context. For them, the biographical approach had another methodological task– not to answer what the good life is, but to explain society better. To overcome the schematism of grand narratives and the determinism of modernisation theories, to create a more complicated and non-determinist social picture that allows individuals to have their own perspective, choice, and moral freedom. And, respectively, since the beginning of their interest in the biographical, these sciences relied on categories closely related to the individual. They studied the lives of concrete people and groups; they searched for micro-scales and local contexts rather than for philosophy’s abstract universal individual and the paradoxes of his/her ‘human condition’. Within Life History Research, autobiographical agents are also marked by the social and its irreducible diversity: this new interdisciplinary field simply continued the traditions of Goffman’s interactionism and Burger and Luckman’s constructivism followed by Bruner and Gergen, an invariably social constructivism. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the set of social sciences in question developed in the shadow of nascent analytical philosophy and semiotic pragmatics, which influenced both the social sciences and the humanities. However, unlike the humanists, research teams were composed of story collectors and ethnographers, i.e. scholars whose principal research object is the concrete. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that they did not develop a taste for the ‘universal’, for ‘human life’, or ‘human nature’, but naturally took up an interest in stories produced in concrete contexts, usually recorded through interviews, that pursue concrete research aims. The latter are often tied to social or ethical tasks – care for the elderly, for children separated from their parents, reintegration of traumatised people, etc. In such a context, the main question is necessarily directed not at universal grammars, but at the kind of concrete and empirically embedded cultural practices that stories represent – what kind of tasks do they perform, how are they told and listened to together, what variety of things do they do in the countless situations of social and power interactions? However, there is a growing risk that along with the fair criticism of the normativism, abstraction, and elitism of the humanitarian tradition, one may throw the baby out with the bathwater. In this case, the baby is the humanities’ discovery that life stories are a type of autorelation, simultaneously logical and ethical; that this relation is constitutive of a person’s Self, but, at the same time, contains alienating, destructive, disquieting, and autodeconstructive tendencies. Even though some of the founders of the narrative-biographical approach in the social sciences were heavily influenced by the development of narratology in the humanities (cf. Bruner 1994, Bruner 2001, Gergen, 1994), already at the beginning of the narrative turn that took place in their own disciplinary field they replaced the phenomenological and hermeneutical perspective with a constructivist one – and thus implicitly rejected the classical normative assumptions of hermeneutics, as well. In the course of the field’s unstable normalisation and institutionalisat ion, whatever has been learned from such interdisciplinary exchanges of knowledge and perspectives was usually forgotten: it was no longer prestigious to quote MacIntyre or Ricoeur in the academic everyday life of Life History research groups, and, fairly or not, Derrida and his followers were subsumed under the simplistic pejorative labels of ‘postmodernism’ and poststructuralism (about which we often hear superficial and uninformed allegations of disregarding every reality outside the text).14 A distancing between disciplinary fields commenced, and in a situation like this a common place for social scientists becomes the conviction that the oral stories of ordinary people and the published literary autobiographies of various renowned persons are separated by an insurmountable, principal difference, which does not allow studying these two types of stories through a common research program. Thus, for most social scientists the two types of life stories became separated by a Chinese wall – differences are thought to be so insurmountable that it is impossible to even ask about similarities. 15 The widening break has led to other disturbing consequences which we cannot discuss in detail here, but will at least mention two. We already discussed the first – the social sciences’ interests shifted from the semantic and syntagmatic analysis of ready and completed life stories to the purely pragmatic analysis of narrative acts. That is, to the way the narrator stages him/herself in a concrete situation, what he/she does with his/her story, what image he/she presents to other participants in it, how he/she wishes to change his/her situational image and prestige. What do we observe? After the justified criticisms that the social sciences directed at the extracontextual universalism of the philosophical and literary narratology, the methodological pendulum swung to the other extreme: the narrative turn became a pragmatic turn. Contextualism was radicalised to an extreme, and many claim that the content of life stories, along with the recurring cultural and genre elements of which it is made up, are completely irrelevant for its proper analysis – the only thing that matters is the performative symbolic act, which the story The initial break, which widened as years went by, was transformed into an ever-weaker interest in the others’ work, and at last into mutual ignorance. In the 1990s famous social scientists such as sociolinguists Labov and Waletzky or psychologists Bruner and Gergen were genuinely interested in and heavily influenced by linguistics and semiotics, by Russian formalism and French structuralism, the philosophical studies of the narrative character o f lived time – i.e. at the beginning, the founders of the narrative-biographical method in the social sciences were still truly interdisciplinary thinkers. Gradually, with the growth and autonomisation of Life History Research, the social sciences created their own narrative-autobiographical tradition and became isolated without even realising it. They are uninformed about developments in the humanities; fewer key authors from the humanities are cited in their bibliographies. For example, one of Bruner’s disciples, Michael Bamberg, pointed to his teacher as the founder of the narrative turn – something that Bruner would have most likely disagreed with, as he repeatedly and respectfully quoted Propp, Todorov, Ricoeur, Kenneth Burk, etc. (Bamberg, 2006; Bruner, 1996; Bruner, 2001; Bruner, 2004). Similarly, in the 2000 volume The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science: Comparative Issues and Examples, the editors and authors of the introduction describe the history of the narrative turn in the social sciences without ever mentioning the humanities’ contributions (Chamberlayne, Bornat, Wengraf, 2000). 15 Joanna Bornat, one of the founders of oral history, excludes published literary autobiographies from her object of study, i.e. of oral histories and their microhistorical study. She claims that they lack the interactional and dialogical context of oral interviews (because literary autobiographies were prepared and processed for a long time by their authors, who were by themselves, and autobiographies became works, they were finalised and published in their ultimate textual form as a book – hence, they cannot be compared to the living and shifting history, which is being told by someone in the dynamic context of an interaction (Bornat, 2008)). 14 realises, the narrative performance, a narrative-gesture in a concrete context. An absurdity gradually emerged, an absurdity that only the contextualists remain blind to: the study of the situation of the oral interview becomes more important than the content of the narrated life story, which in turn becomes devoid of any meaning. 16 Things are further complicated by the transformation of a life story with each interview – gradually, the mandatory study of context turns from a technical into a political problem, from a difficulty of method to a principal object of study.17 Finally, and logically, doubts are cast on the basic category of narrative-biographical analysis – the coherent individual story of one’s whole life. To radical contextualists, it seems as According to Emanuel Schegloff, a student of Harvey Sacks’s, recording interviews itself already alters their status as oral histories. It takes them out of the concrete situational context in which they are told and where the narrator ‘does things with them’ – he/she brags, complains, unpicks his/her problems, interacts with those present, wins points and does everything, so that the end of the narration ultimately has the task of improving his/her image in the eyes of interlocutors. This is why the traditional elements of narration analysis, Schegloff argued later, such as theme, genre, or recurring units do more to hinder than to assist it – they push aside the idea of an interactional context that the narrated story cannot be separated from; they hide its defining impact. This is what I call ‘radical contextualism’ – adopting such a stance, however, obscures why people need to tell their life stories at all: after all, in each concrete context there are all kinds of other ways for a person to brag or complain, interact, etc. Life stories, in their content and relative arrangement, thus become interchangeable with all other self-staging gestures, which makes them also irrelevant. Nevertheless, one cannot disregard the fact that narrating one’s life story is different from all other possible situations and performative gestures. It is specific precisely because of its autorelation: the narrator who thinks and tells about him/herself is not only in this situation, bu t also in another dimension – that of his/her own autocommunication and biographical time. Perhaps it matters to people whether their life was dignified or not, moral or not, criminal or not; generally speaking whether the narrators are contented with their life or not. 17 The seemingly technical question of how to successfully record a life story in an interactional context turns out to be littered with political and ethical traps. The figures of both the researcher and the authority of science and academic institutions dominate the situation of conducting an interview, while the respondent, usually a person who stands lower on the social ladder, does not possess such symbolic and cultural capital – hence, hegemony is reproduced in the context of the interview itself. How does one avoid this? How does one reverse the relations of power, so that the voice of the respondent is ‘empowered’ instead? Such considerations entail not only new requirements and directions as to how one should conduct an interview, but also cast doubts on the obtained results. The researcher is now required to not only conduct an interview methodically, but also to commit to a particular self-renunciation – to try and give up his/her own privileges and carefully account for the situation’s power dynamic. Why does the person sitting across from him/her tell this story this way, what does he/she want to achieve with his/her story, how does he/she address it, how does he/she want to present him/herself, how does he/she want to be liked? How does the researcher influence the respondents by way of his/her position and authority? Moreover, does the authoritative scholar have to be a silent listener, who only asks a question at the beginning and lets his/her respondents, unaccustomed to narration and interviews, tell their whole life? Or, on the contrary, does he/she need to help them by taking part in a more natural, dialogical and equal communication? Each natural, everyday conversation entails interruptions, clarifying questions, comments, and other interventions on the part of the interlocutor (Bornat, 2008). How does the respondent’s vocabulary, their cultural repertoire, relate to the powerful metalanguage of the science that analyses them? Does the researcher have the right – morally and politically– to finally analyse the respondent’s life story by translating it into the terms of his/her categorical apparatus? Alternatively, if he/she wants to empower the Others’ voice, does he/she need to leave them their right and privilege to not only tell their stories, but interpret them, too? Would it not be preferable if the figure of the researcher was reduced to a collaborator whose humble task is merely to prompt and facilitate their stories? On the other hand, if he/she wishes to remain a researcher, then should he/she completely trust the respondents’ own language and interpretation, their own insinuations and assessments – can he/she leave their partial and selective life testimony without a distanced, external, and relatively objective commentary? If the researcher acts more like a facilit ator, is the final subjective story of the respondent of any scholarly value at all? Moreover, is it ethical to extract from the life story things that the narrator wants to remain silent about: embarrassing situations, latent and repressed meanings, traumas, biographical breakdowns? Should the narrators be forced to take moral stances on one or another issue? Instead of a researcher, the interviewer becomes more of a political activist and a social worker. Both the life story and its analysis become questionable if not impossible. 16 if, from a performative point of view, such long, reflexive stories are actually not ordinary enough, suspiciously transcontextual and provoked from outside, in short: artificial and false. In fact, the acts of narration in a concrete situation are just a play of poses and masking of the Self that addresses concrete interlocutors. Is it thus not more productive, some radical contextualists ask, to dethrone life stories from their privileged categorical-analytical position and replace them with another basic unit of analysis – small stories, shorter, accidental, fragmentary, but more natural, embedded in everyday life, born not out of reflections about life as a whole (which is nothing more, it turns out, than a performance, a contextual play), but out of practical occasions embedded in concrete situations?18 The existential stakes of life stories – the meaning of life, about which a person thinks and narrates – disappear. And no one asks what should Life History Research be called now. *** The second divisive issue is the no-less-radical leftist politicisation simultaneously taking place within the humanities and social sciences. 19 The political programme, which aims to ‘amplify marginalised voices’, doubtlessly constitutes a just cause, but nevertheless risks replacing the careful and conscientious work of cognition with activist fever and unproblematised, necessarily ‘progressive’ political positioning. Nevertheless, there is something else, something even more important – the replacement of the moral problematic with a political one. The humanitarian tradition after MacIntyre and Ricoeur held that life story is a constitutive autorelation, a bridge between the logical and moral identity of the subject. However, is this ethical problematic still valid, is it not politically discredited? Following the radical political critique of ‘the isolated consciousness’ of ‘the Cartesian subject’ after ‘the death of Man’ (Foucault), anti-humanism and transhumanism, etc., is there any meaning left at all in questions like ‘Who am I?’ Are not questions about the subject’s duty, promise, and responsibility, about self-reflection and selfresponsibility taken off the agenda? To some, they begin to appear suspiciously Eurocentric, 18 This is the position of Michael Bamberg, Alexandra Georgakopoulou, and Luke Moissinac, who wished to revise the privileged status of big life stories, which they claim are artificial exemptions to everyday communication, and that is why it is important to privilege accidental small stories. Such appeals demonstrate the way that strange, illconsidered, and reductionist notions of ‘the everyday’, ‘cultural practice’, ‘context’, ‘naturalness’, and ‘normalcy’ are established, thus excluding all other, long-term temporalities, and along with them the values, reflection, confrontation of a person with his/her finality, even der Wille zum Sinn, the ‘will to meaning’ that concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl wrote about. 19 Following Foucault and the deconstruction of logocentrism and the symbolic order’s power binaries, critical theory, cultural studies (on this, cf. Kiossev, 2013: 174 – 278), neo-Marxism, feminism, gender studies, and postcolonial studies radically politicised the process of cognition itself. Every theory is now a theory only insofar it is a critical theory and a weapon aimed against hegemony. Research openly becomes part of political struggles for just representation of the working class, of Black people and people of other races, of women, homosexuals, the ill, genocide victims, etc. However, these are no longer the traditional political struggles of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century revolving around elections, institutions, legislation, and the public sphere. They are now cultural struggles localised in a plurality of concrete and everyday topoi, i.e. wherever there is unfair symbolic production and consumption – in classrooms, on the pages of great texts, in auditoria, in married couples’ bedrooms, in the everyday, in radio talks, in TV images. Thus, struggles everywhere play out in a politicised everyday life where one fights for just politics of representation and practices of signification and where doing politics becomes identical to subversive interventions in the symbolic order; unjust semantic oppositions (or binaries) that privilege the male and the European are deconstructed, grand narratives are pulverised into small stories, traditional cultural canons are revised – so that alternative voices and subaltern histories, democratised canons and heritage penetrate educational institutions and cultural policies. patriarchal, uninteresting and old-fashioned – and it seems like they are cancelled by the imperatives of political correctness and affirmative action, by social justice struggles and the political programme for inclusion and the memorialisation of alternative voices. A person no longer studies him/herself, does not tell his/her own life with his/her own voice, does not assess nor make sense of it – through his/her story he/she carries out, whether openly or secretly, a political act, fights for just representation. And he/she does that not as a unique or self-evidently interesting individual, but solely as the representative, the voice of the dominated group to which the person belongs; as if this person does not narrate with his/her own voice, which is unlike any other, but only ‘amplifies’ group voices, public and historical.20 This replacement of the logicalmoral problematic of thinking of oneself with a political struggle for justice is especially visible in the critique of autobiography from feminist and postcolonial positions,21 which exerts strong influence over contemporary literary theories of autobiography. From such perspectives, Rousseau’s Confessions or de Musset’s Confession of a Child of the Century are no longer great, complicated, and exciting books, but Eurocentric manipulations of privileged patriarchalists. The old genre of the autobiographical stocktaking is not simply reactionary, but also losing its power: it turns out to be a small, old-fashioned island amidst an avalanche of life stories of women, traumatised people, the ill, transsexual, people of different races and classes, and histories that do not observe the old conventions of the genre (Schwalm 2014). In the context of such explosive expansion of the genre and of narration strategies, life stories are pulverised in a dynamic plurality of roles, fragmentary performances, atomic poses and narrative strategies of self-staging. However, no one knows what glues all these together. A narrator who tries to makes sense of them cannot deal with their plurality – they do not have a ‘core’ to give them meaning, to make them whole; there is no centre, no Cartesian subject (Hilmes 1994). From the aforementioned progressive political perspective, Dilthey’s Lebenszusammenhang, the reflexive ideal for ascribing a total meaning to life begins to appear not only as boastful and narcissistic self-fashioning, but also as autorepression. The will to meaning reveals its dark side – it transpires that it has always been part of the microphysics of power; it is nothing more than the genre form of the self-control and self-governance of the transgressive forces of Desire, which needs to be emancipated; a literary technology for disciplining and normalising the elusive, plural, incomplete Self (Schwalm 2014). If life stories are only autorepressive texts, it remains unclear why autobiographers agonise and continue to torture themselves trying to tell and write them. *** 20 An additional paradox hidden in this position is that if the oppressed are being oppressed on a micro-level, whether through the names they are given, metaphors, catachreses, or the histories of the unjust, Eurocentric, patriarchal symbolic order, then it turns out they do not have a voice and a story of their own: ‘the subaltern cannot speak’, claims Gayatri Spivak (1996). 21 Here is an overview of these critiques: the autobiographical Self is only a power genre role – it has always been a better fit for male, white individuals high on the social ladder, with various privileges and their respective habitus. For centuries they were the ones who had the luxury of living in such autobiographical illusion related to the appearance of autonomy, isolation and self-knowing, self-control, power of the self, and self-narration. This genre role was hardly obtainable for other non-subjects – women, black people, homosexuals, etc. could not narrate their own unjust and traumatised life through its conventions. Critical arguments usually go on to say that a person’s life is never selfcontained or autonomous, it is always shared – this is the autobiographical narrative, which inevitably includes stories about the lives of others in shared life stories of mothers and daughters, of sisters, in tales about the oppressed. (For more on the feminist critique of autobiography cf. Baier, 1985; MacKinnon, 1987, Benhabib, 1987, Code, 1995; cf. the discussion of this problematic in Gertler, 2002, Cosslet, Lury and Summerfield, 2000). Objecting to this radical politicisation, we will attempt to argue ex contrario. Let us assume that it is true that the isolated, self-knowing and ipseic, identical Self, the one who wields him/herself, studies his/her experience and attempts to make sense of his/her life and take moral stock of it, is nothing more than a Eurocentric, patriarchal and Cartesian privilege-illusion. Let us assume that the Self is also a privileged role, historically only available to men, to white people, to Europeans, to elites. It remains unclear whether poststructuralist, postcolonial, and feminist critiques posit that this role should be discarded entirely. What exactly is supposed to replace it? If it is a ‘privilege’, is it not thus a good? According to the customary notion of justice, access to goods must be equal – therefore, the individuals who are deprived of this biographical good, in a hypothetical just situation, must have the opportunity to achieve it and develop their own reflexive life narratives and identities (instead of remaining ‘mute’, hybrid-fragmentary, ‘displaced’, ‘uncanny’, ‘inbetween the grand narratives’, actually deprived of their own life, as postcolonial theoreticians claim (Bhabha, 1990))? Therefore, this biographical Self does not disappear, but rather its role undergoes transformation. It is transformed from a real and limited privilege to a common normative good, political goal and utopian horizon of emancipatory struggles – in its ideal limit qua good, it should be achievable for everyone. Even if we assume that the disintegrated, contemporary multifaceted Selves (unstable subjects of the elusive interplay between Desire and memory, creatures deprived of a real voice, whose identity can only be ‘identity-in-difference’ (Spivak 1996)) are the only factual givens and the only realities of the contemporary cultural situation, we cannot be satisfied with these realities. They must not only be conscientiously described, analysed, and criticised politically, but must also confronted with the possible autonomous Self seen as a political good, i.e. confronted with the norm and telos of emancipatory struggles. However, has this norm not irrevocably lost its normative energy? Perhaps the deconstruction of the biographical illusion entails that the emancipated Self no longer serves as a moral compass distinct from political justice for all these multifaceted, elusive constellations. This also entails assuming that asking questions such as ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What should I strive for?’ or ‘Did I live a good life?’ have actually lost their validity and apparent normativity. It is easy to see that this is not the case. These questions have sustained and continue to sustain their validity in all cultural and power situations, collective as well as individual; they apply to even the most radical revolutionary, feminist, postcolonial and queer activists. Each and every one of them wonders about his/her duty, about ‘What should I strive to be?’, and studies whether his/her life corresponds to this emancipatory ideal, whatever it is. And the genuine examination of the Self is always true to the truth: it not only examines life, but probes into the ideal to which it has strived; it is a biographical reflection with unpredictable outcomes, and that is why it brings about a programme for achieving justice, as well as the moral excitement, tension and unpredictability surrounding the indestructible question, ‘Am I a good person?’ This evidence ex contrario demonstrates that the radical versions of the critiques of the Cogito merit criticism themselves – they cannot be sustained. Struggles for emancipation and autonomy teach that a part of their agenda – as their notions suggest – is the autonomous, self-governed person. This person belongs to the normative assumptions and presuppositions of the life stories, not to illusions or power autorepressions: it plays the role of a horizon of values for the plural and dispersed-in-differences Self (and barely keeps it from totally dissolving and disintegrating into these dispersed differences). Despite its variety, the norm is valid transcontextually, across different individual situations, groups, contexts, and causes. The subjects that make themselves cannot construct their own freedom and personality without asking ‘Who am I?’, ‘What kind of life did I live?’ Moreover, it is a matter of a particular, philosophical good related not to autoapologies, but to reflection, scepticism, and, sometimes, devastating critique. Hence, the just distribution of the good, of which we spoke here, concerns its ambivalence: it should be simultaneously available to everyone in both its optimistic-hermeneutic and sceptical versions. Not solely as hope and a universal mediator that welds the totality of life together, not only as a narrative tool that guarantees its meaning and commensurability with other lives, but also as a continuous anxiety, immanent to the narrative, that the totality of life and meaning are slipping away; that narration itself is in danger of scattering in empty rhetorical games, that honesty and stocktaking will face insurmountable aporias any time now. 22 Only by accounting for this double character of biographical narration does the narrative itself and the act of its just inheritance by all deprived and vulnerable individuals and groups make sense; the common good of narrating life should be reflexive, doubting, critical, and complex. Autoreference, self-examination, ‘self-judgment’, the questions ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Did I live well?’ would be sustained as a universal right and universal good – of all persons in the process of subjectification, despite and beyond their differences. This, for its part, will sustain the possibility of telling long stories and narratives, which make sense of one’s life course, having absorbed one’s own sceptical anxiety. The biographical narrative is not simply an interactional and political act – it will continue to carry the emancipatory task of a constitutive moral autorelation.23 22 Even in the most disintegrated autobiographical narration, the reconstructing reader of whom Hilmes spoke is faced with the need to deal with fragmentarily chaotic gestural narration and to construct an ultimately negative image of a unitary character of the Self, which remains only a hypothesis in the zone of public silence. 23 The author of this paper believes that it is high time to discuss this key question shared by social scientists and humanists. Such discussion would allow for a synthesis – i.e., for a reconsideration of the status of life stories – so that they are understood beyond the contextual interaction and instead as an autodialogue that structures identity. Here we speak of a constitutive autorelation, which does not flow situationally but has another, long and biographical duration. Historically, this autodialogue was a complex phenomenon and appeared in thousands of historical and cultural varieties. To name a few paradigmatic texts: the Confessions of St. Augustinе, Rousseau’s modern confession, Soliloquy (Shaftesbury); we can keep listing autobiographies and ways of taking stock of one’s life from the age of individualism, or therapeutic analysis and self-analysis from the age of therapy and psychoanalysis. All of these, regardless of their historical and cultural differences, can be metonymised through the laconic title of Marcus Aurelius, ‘To One’s Self’. The things inscribed in a life story ‘to one’s self’ are solitarily autonomous without ceasing to be interactional. We ought to have learned from Bakhtin that Shaftesbury’s soliloquy, the conversation with oneself, is never simply a soliloquy – it is always a polyphonic chain of interiorised replicas by oneself and others, endless reverberations and reactions to other voices, newer and newer responses to others’ responses, etc. Indeed, the lives and histories of others are inscribed in the soliloquy without it ceasing to be addressed ‘to one’s self’. Such debate would require the appearance of cracks in the boundaries between the artificial notions of ‘situation’ and ‘context’, allowing for the inclusion of imaginary situations within these boundaries. They must assume that life stories are structured not only by the immediate situation of narration, not only by memory, but also by the individual and social imagination inscribed in them, with its unlimited horizons. Currently, the social sciences assume that the Self is constructed in the process of an interrupted interactive communication, but do not allow it to be a phantasmal communication with oneself, with absent others, with imagined dead interlocutors, or different kinds of past. Because the past is a ‘foreign country’, it is a question of travels, of many foreign countries. An autoreflexive narrative structured as a monologue-polylogue can traverse situations without letting its flexible adjustments change it beyond recognition; despite the contextualisations, renegotiations, and *** In contrast to the multiple versions of the narrative-biographical method described above, a the focus of the reflection on life under Socialism (supported by a careful empirical study of the way different people narrate it) inevitably lays elsewhere. This reflection would not look for life stories’ universal grammars, as did structuralism, nor would it limit itself to the pragmatic power situations of conducting an oral interview, as the Life History Research scholars currently do. Rather, it would point to the fate of the collective cultural and linguistic repertoires used to narrate life in postsocialism. This reflection cannot but take into account that prior to 1989 totalitarian ideology was the collective public language, the framing of collective memory that made every individual life story possible. Back then, ideology, as the universal official language and repertoire consisting of socially valid, ideologically sanctioned forms of the official life story, was the inevitable condition of possibility for narrating experience – it applied to both ‘high’ and elitist memoirs, as well as to ordinary, commonplace narration, to both written and oral versions. A key question is what happens after this ideology loses its validity. What takes place after its collapse as a total language and narrative repertoire during the so-called post-socialist ‘Transition’? This fundamental commotion changes both lives and research programmes – and the analytical spotlight should be directed at it. Analysis should shine a light on the transformations and catastrophes of shared repertoires of collective stories, trace the drama that befell the life matrixes, which up until recently possessed a total validity they have now lost. They previously offered individuals security and models of a good life, they oriented them as to what a successful life was, what an understandable, acceptable, acknowledged and valued life was. But what kind of processes set about when the aforementioned old ideological forms of narrating life all of a sudden implode? And what comes after them, when the social situation in countries like Bulgaria lapses into total chaos and ‘post-truth’? This question is novel not only in terms of content, but also from a methodological point of view: how should one study these post-histories, whether oral or written, what kind of change does the said ‘annihilation’ require of the research perspective itself, how does one approach hybrid postnarratives from the Transition period? And how should individual histories be compared, especially within the double-pole coordinate system – simultaneously to the previous but also to the new collective stories, borne out of the new political, cultural and media situation? Many of these questions are yet to be posed. At the end, we will make a few remarks of a preliminary nature. The position defended here is that the new situation requires interdisciplinarity and overcoming of the ‘Chinese wall’ between the oral autobiographical narratives of ordinary people on the one hand, and published autobiographies and memoires on the other, i.e. also between social sciences and the humanities. It searches for links between life stories obtained through interviews and official literary ‘summing ups’ of the lives of notable people, thought out over long periods, and published in their final textual version after multiple revisions. If what is adjustments, it will keep its relatively stable transcontextual and autoreflexive structure and will always take place not only in relation ‘to others’, but to oneself, reproducing Ricoeur’s ipseity. relevant here are not the important differences, but the shared crisis of the available narrative and linguistic repertoires, then this interdisciplinary problem must stand at the centre of academic efforts. It requires cooperation. It necessitates the formulation of a common interdisciplinary research programme that unites humanists and social scientists and is directed at the shared drama of collective languages and narrated life patterns common to notable and regular people. 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