Notes on Autoethnography Part 2: How to go About this Business

'

There is no solution. One can only decide, cut, sever, and everything is bad. There is no exit nor entrance. We are in the burning bush. We where born in the burning bush.' (Cixous 1998, xv1)

We begin where we began yesterday but going deeper, 'taking the red staircase, down to the bottom of ourselves.' (Cixous 1993, 3)

The purpose of this blog post, now we have defined some of our terms, is to examine how they will be applied and what will be studied.

Finding what will be examined and what will not.

In her discussion on 'How to find Research Topics' Heewon Chang discusses the work of Kim Foster who examined her experiences of her Mother's mental illness. She shares a list of questions that Foster used to promote introspection and some of these are relevant to my own ethnographic study, particularly the following: 'How Does your life experience shape the theory that will frame your method? What 'cultural baggage' do you bring to the research encounter?... How will your identity place limitations on your research?' (Foster, McAllister, & O'Brien, 2)

In the margins of this I have written: 'Here I can ask about my relationship to a tradition - be that the Jazz cannon, the avant guard or the directly political - activism'

'1. My own position as a white person engaging in a practice born from the work of black people.'

'2. As an improviser from outside a Musical or Free Improvising tradition, as an activist who is seeking to use improvisation as praxis.'

This led to me (I am modelling a story of my own researches here, what Chang calls 'descriptive-realistic writing') (Chang 2008, 136)(1) to ask what I wanted to study, what would form the basis of my autoethnographic endeavours. The dominant themes that emerged where that I need to think of my own relationship to the tensions between the Jazz cannon and the practice of Free Improvisation (Bailey 1992) but, even more importantly, I have to recognise that my work is overtly political. If I do not engage with the political in my work and instead focus on the sense impressions and associations that come to mind during my playing then I betray the purpose of my improvisations, I leave my praxis half formed.

The main focus of my self reflection, my 'data gathering' will be how self is constructed through the interactions of oppressive systems operating within society. I will focus on the hierarchal nature of performance, on the problem of labour and my position (regardless of my wish to be otherwise) as the 'mill owner' to borrow my supervisor's phrase.

My Autoethnography will be critical. Not in there sense that it will critically examine the stories I tell (and I am reminded of Jeanette Monaco warning us regarding the constructed nature of memory) (Monaco, 2010) but that I will be 'telling stories about theory and theorising through the autoethnographic stories we [I] tell.' (MacKinlay 2019, 194) My study will be critical in nature and will be performed through a critical lens.

Self and Subjectivity: the Burning Bush and the Red Staircase.

The key to developing the form my autoethnography will take for these improvisations came from reading Cixous' discussion of her childhood realisation of the impossibility of providing a resolution to the issues autoethnography gives rise to, the 'inexorability' of any tidy and clean solution (to borrow her own word.) Her statement that 'one can only decide, cut, sever, and everything is bad' (Cixous 1998, xv1) provides a way to begin to move away from positivist positions that can threaten to overwhelm our autoethnography, away from data gathering and objectivity. To recognise this is to recognise that we are present within the process of forming our ethnographic stories and 'the ways in which locations of identity and emotional registers inform research choices and processes.' (Monaco 2010, 102) This is not to deny the value of Objectivity but to recognise, as Cixous reminds us, that 'subjectivity is the wealth we have in common.' (Cixous 1994, 18)

Equally important to the formulation of my approach was Cixous' essay 'Bathsheba or the Interior Bible.' (Cixous 1993) In this essay Cixous discusses 'Bathsheba Bathing' and 'The Slaughtered Ox' by Rembrandt and constructs the metaphor of a journey into self/ flesh. She compares Van Gogh's argument that 'we must get inside the country' with Rembrandt's painting of Bathsheba's interior life, 'the interior Bible' as she phrases it: 'And to get inside the interior Bible? One must take the stairs, and plunge into the flesh. Down to the farthest Country...Taking the red staircase, down to the bottom of ourselves, under the earth's crust.' (Cixous 1993, 6-7)

This profound sense of flesh as country, flesh as metaphor is echoed in another piece by Cixous where she discusses the ways in which that which is personal and local is a part of and inseparable from the global by speaking of 'private drama' as war within the self and states that 'I and the world are never separate.' (Cixous 1994, 16)

Within the process of autoethnography is the person, the body, the 'embodied auto ethnographer' (MacKinley 2019, 60) and that which effects the self both as a constructed embodiment of societal/ oppressive forces and the body in which that self negotiates the act of being are subject to and vital to autoethnography.

References.

Bailey, D. (1992)Improvisation: it's Nature and Practice in Music. UK: De Capo Press.

Chang, H. (2008) Autoethnography as Method. London and New York: Routedge

Cixous, H. (1993)Bathsheba or the Interior Bible, in Cixous, H. (1994)Stigmata Translated from the French by Catherine A.F. MacGillivray. London and New York: Routledge Classics

Cixous, H. (1994)Preface, in S. Sellers (ed) The Hélène Cixous Reader. New York: Routledge

Cixous, H. (1994)Preface: On Stigmatexts by Hélène Cixous, in Cixous, H. (1994)Stigmata Translated from the French by Eric Prenowitz. London and New York: Routledge Classics

MacKinley, E. (2019) Critical Writing For Embodied Approaches: Autoethnography, Feminism and Decoloniality. Cham: Palgrave MacMillan.

Monaco, J. (2010)'Memory Work, Autoethnography and the construction of a fan-ethnography.' Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 7(1) pp. 102-146

Notes on Autoethnography part 1: Definitions and Problems

This is another section from my thesis which concerns the ways that free improvisors engage in the creation of a group identity and how they exclude audiences.

(a short note: this post first appeared on my blog a few months ago and uses a dictionary definition within it, this is a very lazy thing to do and i offer my apologies however i wanted to preserve the post as it was.)

‘We are in the burning bush. We are born in the burning bush.’ (Cixous 1998, XVI)

In preparation for Thursday’s improvisation I must consider how I will engage in an analysis of my own responses to the event, I must consider how I will engage in autoethnography. ethnography and autoethnography are broad methodological categories and need to be defined to some extent before we move forward.

Words and Meanings.

On Princeton University's anthropology page ethnography is defined in the following way:

Ethnography is a research method central to knowing the world from the standpoint of its social relations. It is a qualitative research method predicated on the diversity of culture at home (wherever that may be) and abroad. Ethnography involves hands-on, on-the-scene learning — and it is relevant wherever people are relevant. (Department of Anthropology, 2022)

This, however, hardly serves as a definition, is a little too vague. Turning to the Cambridge Dictionary we are offered the following 'a scientific description of the culture of a society by someone who has lived in it, or a book containing this.' (Cambridge Dictionary 2022) The objectivity of ethnography is questionable and positivist in nature. Perhaps it is best to say that ethnography is the systematised study of cultures in which the individual studying them is situated for a time, a study of the other.

Autoethnography is the inclusion of the self within ethnographic study, the systematised study of the self as situated within culture (be that your own culture or the culture being studied within an anthropological study.) In her book 'Autoethnography as Method' Heewon Chang details an exchange with her sister-in-law over a meal where she is asked to define autoethnography. She describes it as 'a research method the utilizes the researcher's autobiographical data to analyze and interpret their cultural assumptions.' (Chang 2008, 9) This is a very high level definition and one that Chang herself admits is far from perfect (Chang 2008, 9) In 'Critical Writing for Embodied Approaches: Autoethnography, Feminism and Decoloniality' Elizabeth MacKinlay argues that Autoethnography arises from the mess and detritus of life, from 'Diaries and rooms, ordinary affects, dreams I tell you and the troubling secret lives of them' (MacKinlay 2019, 6) before situating it within Woolf's moments of being: 'imagine, Virginia and me wording and writing and wording critical autoethnography. This is the stuff that a girl sitting in a room of her own might give herself permission to dream.' (MacKinlay 2019, 6)

Autoethnography is the personal used as a tool for the universal, the acceptance of self as a construct worthy of analytical study.

The Problems With/ Within Autoethnography.

Given the claims to scientific rigour employed by ethnography (call to mind the definition from the Cambridge dictionary or the 'qualitative' of the definition offered by Princeton University) then how can that which is subjective - literally grounded in the self - nature of autoethnography also embrace the positivism of the dictionary or the quantitive nature of Princeton's definition of ethnography. Is autoethnography the poorer, less worthy companion to the more rigorous methodology of ethnography?

This is an issue Sue Butler addresses in her review of Chang's 'Autoethnography as Method.' If the objective/ subjective split is an issue in the writing of and on autoethnography then how can one achieve what Chang attempts which is a general text book on autoethnographic models, is it (to quote Bulter) 'possible to follow rigorous methodological processes...while embracing opposing philosophical, theoretical and epistemological stances?' (Butler 2009, 297) The method Chang uses is to move therein both positions without positioning herself within any camp. (Butler 2009)

I feel there is, however, an unstated and deeper issue left unaddressed by simply operating with this approach and that is to ask if the dichotomy is itself a valid one.

Within the first stage of deconstructionism Derrida critiqued the idea of dualities and dichotomies, pointing to their hierarchal nature 'with one side of the opposition being more valuable than the other.' (Lawlor, 2021) If we ask what hierarchies a objective/ subjective dichotomy embodies and what other dichotomies it shares a formal nature with (male - female, mind - body, presence - absence and so on) then we can begin to see that by engaging with the objective/ subjective dichotomy we are embodying a discourse that already ensnares us within the objective. By recognising this and choosing not to embody this hierarchy then we allow our methodological approaches to provide an equal grounding for both rigorous methodology and the insights to be gained through an immersion in self.

What next then?

This is the first part of this blog on methodology. Tomorrow I will discuss how I intend to go about the process of collecting data during the improvisations, what work has already been undertaken to create a set of themes to guide my research and what will be done with the data I collect. I will also discuss alternative texts for autoethnography including a discussion of Héléne Cixous and my use of her work to construct an awareness of the imperfect nature of solutions to the problems inherent in autoethnography, the construction of a metaphorical journey into self and the presence of the body within autoethnography.

References.

Butler, S.(2009) 'Possibilities in Autoethnography: A Critique of Heewon Chang's Autoethnography as Method.' The Weekly Qualitative Report, 2(51), pp. 295-299

Cambridge Dictionary (2022) Ethnography. Available at: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/ethnography (Accessed: 29th March, 2022)

Chang, H. (2008) Autoethnography as Method. London and New York: Routedge

Cixous, H. (1994)Preface: On Stigmatexts by Hélène Cixous, in Cixous, H. (1994)Stigmata Translated from the French by Eric Prenowitz. London and New York: Routledge Classics

Department of Anthropology (2022)What is Ethnography? Available at: https://anthropology.princeton.edu/undergraduate/what-ethnography (Accessed on 29th March, 2022)

Lawlor, L. (2021) Jacques Derrida. The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Zalta, E. N. (ed.) Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/derrida/ (Accessed 29th November 2021)

MacKinley, E. (2019) Critical Writing For Embodied Approaches: Autoethnography, Feminism and Decoloniality. Cham: Palgrave MacMillan.