Readings- Autoethnography and Connected

I really enjoyed “Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexity.” Firstly, it gave me a much better sense of what exactly autoethnography is. And I really appreciated how the form reflected the content, how the article was written as an autoethnography about autoethnography, a personal narrative about personal narrative and so on. Not only did this enable the authors to put their money where the mouths are, so to speak, but it gave me a much better sense of how autoeth. works and why is is effective. When Art reads his part of the handbook, he discusses how he arrived at this kind of sociological writing, tracing the various academics that he read who caused him to question the Social Science methodologies currently being used. I was especially drawn to the part when Ellis discusses how “personal narrative is a response to the human problem of authorship, the desire to make sense and preserve coherence over the course of our lives.” This reminded me of something that I once read when studying Canadian Fiction in undergrad. I was reading Alice Munro, an author who has the amazing ability to create life for her characters and often focuses on the incongruities between memory and reality and how memory has a constructive function rather than a mimetic one. She said this in an interview:

“Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories–and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories. We can hardly manage our lives without a powerful ongoing narrative. And underneath all these edited, inspired, self-serving or entertaining stories there is, we suppose, some big bulging awful mysterious entity called THE TRUTH, which our fictional stories are supposed to be poking at and grabbing pieces of. What could be more interesting as a life’s occupation? One of the ways we do this, I think, is by trying to look at what memory does (different tricks at different stages of our lives) and at the way people’s different memories deal with the same (shared) experience. The more disconcerting the differences are, the more the writer in me feels an odd exhilaration”.

Later in the article one of the audience members critiques this type of writing as a kind of voyeurism, playing into the same fears and desires that reality TV does. I found this comparison very interesting. Although Art does a fine job of addressing this critique, I think the comparison is an interesting way of looking at a cultural moment. In the preface to Connected, Shaviro explains the “structural affinities” between contemporary cultural theory and science fiction, comparing it to the way that 19th century realism is the genre of choice for Marxism (literary) criticism. Going back to my reality TV tangent, perhaps autoethnography and reality TV, blogging, personal disclosure do bear structural affinities. This is not a value judgment. I am not comparing them as a way to devalue autoethnography as the audience member did in the audience. But perhaps in narrative terms, we are fluctuating between realism and personal narrative. And perhaps this reflects a shared cultural desire to share our stories with one another, voyeuristic or not…

I really like the idea of weaving the personal and cultural experiences when doing ethnographic writing. It is a way of probing how personal experience and culture co-exist, react and relate to one another but ultimately it does not attempt to generalize. It is an exploration of the particular and hence is very much a posthumanist way of writing, and embodied writing and knowledge.

In Connected, Shaviro uses a similar approach to Hayles in his use of the science fiction genre to explore the current networked age. I suppose I will return to my reality TV tangent now. Shaviro states and re-states the premise that in our contemporary media landscape, “to be is to be perceived.” He uses celebrity, Warhol, philosophy and examples from the Internet to illustrate his point. When we think about the proliferation of webcams we usually think of them as a type of voyeurism or surveillance, but the truth is, as Shaviro says, that their are more webcams than there are eyes to watch them. Our virtual presence is enough to redeem our real existence. Here, we go back to the idea of the desire to narrate our lives except with the very important fact of virtuality added to the picture. If narration is a way to make sense of our lives and virtual presence is a confirmation of identity, the two must necessarily go hand in hand. The narratives we construct online are both for ourselves and for others. For ourselves as a way of organizing our lives and bringing continuity to them and for others as a way of “being perceived.” Shaviro cites McLuhan and follows his logic that the medium is the message: “what the JenniCam shows us is unimportant, compared to the sheer fact that it is always on, so that Jenni’s life is presented to the world in its sheer ordinariness” (78). So narrative is content and virtual is form.