Page 51 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

44 Narrating the self
We never cease to reinterpret the narrative identity that constitutes us,
in the light of the narratives proposed to us by our culture. In this sense,
our self-understanding presents the same features of traditionality as
the understanding of a literary work. It is in this way that we learn to
become the narrator and the hero of our own story, without actually
becoming the author of our own life.
(Ricoeur 1991a: 32, original emphasis)

For Ricoeur, this occurs through emplotment, which draws multiple in-
cidents into a single story: ‘the recounted story is always more than the
enumeration in an order that would be merely serial or successive, of the
incidents or events that it organises into an intelligible whole’ (Ricoeur
1991a: 21). Yet Ricoeur also argues that individuals may go through ‘dark
nights of personal identity’ where they experience a sense of ‘nothingness
of permanence identity’ – or one might argue an absence of a narrative self
(Ricoeur 1991b: 199).
It is clear that we are ‘post’ the Enlightenment subject. The conception
of the subject as fixed, unique and rational has been fatally undermined by a
succession of challenging theories, including psychoanalysis, Saussarian lin-
3
guistics, Foucauldian discourse analysis and feminism. However, the ques-
tion remains as to what subject we are left with. Jane Flax cautions against
the restrictions in theorising subjectivity:

Our abilities to imagine such subjectivities are impeded by the positing of
false alternatives. Some postmodernists confine all talk about subjectivity
to critiques of the split Cartesian rationalistic subject or of the unitary,
authentic ‘true self’. On the other hand, critics of postmodernism and
some postmodernists reduce all descriptions of a decentered subject to
a fragmented one that lacks any agency or organisation. None of these
constructs are appealing or plausible. Their juxtaposition and the limits
of the arguments demonstrate how difficult it is to imagine subjectivity
outside Enlightenment ideas of it. The unitary self and the fragmented
one are simply mirror images; neither represents an alternative to the
subjects Enlightenment discourses construct.
(Flax 1993: xii)

We may try to ‘imagine’ subjectivity as multiple, precarious, contradictory,
in process and undergoing constant reconstitution, but it is a complex opera-
tion to speak of it as such and even more difficult and potentially dangerous
to feel it as such: ‘the subject may be the effect of discourses, institutions and
practices, but at any given moment the subject-in-process experiences itself
as the “I”, and both consciously and unconsciously replays and resignifies
positions in which it is located and invested’ (Brah 1996: 125). This chapter
treats the narrative accounts of four individuals as moments of reiteration
of processes of subjection, the narrativisation of the self as a performance