Volume 4, Issue 1, Fall 2000

Critical Claims, Critical Functions: Autoethnography and Postscholarship
Jill Taft-Kaufman
Central Michigan University
1197@sensible-net.com

Value judgments underpin social thought. Consequently, those who hide behind unquestioned objectivity create an illusion of the world rather than address the way ideas and events work in it. On the other hand, those who limit themselves to subjective discourse assert that no idea is better than another and relinquish the critical thought necessary to evaluate competing claims of knowledge. What these academics advocate dismisses any evidence that can demonstrate that certain narratives, ideas, values, goals, and consequences are better than others. Indeed, they seek to undermine the confidence to make judgments. Disturbingly, the assumptions and practice of the latter group of academics has gained ascendancy in much current criticism and teaching, emphasizing subjectivity as the dominant form of academic production while devaluing and displacing essential modes and priorities of critical thought.

Investigating values and debating questions of worth have been at the heart of the academic enterprise and human life in general. Critical inquiry in the university has been based on foundations of knowledge, subject to relentless innovations, that have accumulated throughout the millennia. Broad frameworks of knowledge help to create meaning, shape inquiry, and function as part of a public forum for conflicting interpretations and debate. Therefore, major goals of liberal education have been to introduce students to broadening spheres of inquiry, across multiple disciplines, in order to help them consider various ideas, individual goals and social arrangements, and to solve problems. In the realm of aesthetic literature, for example, students can imaginatively contemplate issues of human psychology, sociology, and science, and are invited to consider the kind of people they want to be and the kind of worlds they want to inhabit. The study of history provides them with what Fredric Jameson calls "the retrospective dimension indispensable to any vital reorientation of our collective future." (1991, p. 18) Such collectively grounded investigations have enabled critics and students to make choices that variously embrace, reject, synthesize, or transform others’ ideas and values.

Those in power and those on the margins have dynamically created, in a dialectical process, foundational knowledge, which has provided reference points for dialogue, debate, and change within academia. This growing intellectual heritage is not limited to that found in any specific canon or set of Great Books. It has been, despite the claims of narrow objectivists and narrow subjectivists, growing and deepening, fed by an ever-increasing multiplicity of sources. Academics have helped spawn technological innovations, scientific breakthroughs, social upheavals, and political revolutions.

This dynamic intellectual process is undermined by an increasingly prevalent academic genre of choice that turns to radical subjectivity for its sources and postmodernist assertions for its underpinnings. Much of this new form of scholarship, called "autoethnography," avowedly exists to discredit and displace more widely practiced and tested forms of scholarship. Central to the postmodern project is an often-repeated and totalizing narrative, which asserts that we have entered a new (a)historical epoch, in which, contradictorily, large narratives, including foundational knowledge, are no longer credible or useful. This triumphalist proclamation dismisses, by decree, the dominance of a continuously mutating capitalist social order that engenders, within postmodernist practice itself, manifestations of "realism, even, fully as much as modernism." (Jameson, p. xii) In this milieu, " the personal narrative, expresses what appears to be a grounded truth based in experience . . . The little narratives sell the truth." (Corey, 1998, p. 252) The academic is invited to present a self-referential anecdote or "story," with little regard to such considerations as craft, rigor, verifiability, or other widely accepted criteria. Freed from these constraints, a variety of personal stories may be presented, but no story may claim greater value or credence than any other. This practice sidesteps the assessment of competing claims of knowledge, moral authority, and legitimacy, thorny issues that form the very substance of the academic endeavor and human existence. Consequently, the new scholar not only reduces her or his scope of inquiry but also, in support of not "privileging" any particular reading, can scarcely refute an assertion such as "Mein Kemp provides as valid a call to arms as The Declaration of Independence, The Communist Manifesto, or a shopping list."

Despite claims that autoethnography is a mode open to all, certain narratives are discouraged (discourse that echoes those dead white males, for example), and other stories are favored (especially from voices considered marginalized). Autoethnography is touted as a practice that does not participate in the perpetration of ideology (advocacy and responsibility are two of those thorny issues). However, many of the autoethnographies that appear in journals and at academic gatherings explicitly structure and relate the points in their stories to the doctrines that underlie the practice, imparting an almost formulaic sameness to these supposedly subjective expressions. These narratives are performed theory, ostensibly celebrating individual expression (implicit in the sharing of any personal narrative), permeated with notions that stress the fragmentation and instability of the human subject. They create and use jargon that refers to yet more jargon, to posit the idea that all knowledge (except their own radical subjectivism) contains ideology that is oppressive. This position leads the writer/performer to declare some kind of cultural marginality and Balkanized identity. The disavowal of shared knowledge and values is usually underscored by presenting oneself as either a victim or someone who operates sensationally outside of systemic constraints, sometimes both. Thus, she or he focuses much of the narrative on an ostensible reinvention of identity as a form of remediation.

The value of telling this kind of narrow story of the self is ostensibly put forth as political resistance, criticism, celebration, and therapy. Yet, the consequences appear to be theoretical indoctrination and irresponsible abdication of the critical process. Audiences that are constructed for such discourse within the university are asked to accept unquestioningly the claims of the speaker. Rather than being invited to function in an active, critical manner, listeners/readers are asked to take on the implied audience roles of non-directive therapist, voyeur, or disciple. All lead to passive acceptance of the assumptions, values, and relevance of the discourse.

Autobiography is situated within and emerges from a broad social fabric. Personal narratives have been a mainstay in journalism. They have been crucial sources to be crosschecked in the creation of histories. They have provided the inspiration and substance for literature and other artistic pursuits. Such narratives serve as points of departure, rather than as ends in themselves, and help to complement and supplement larger discourses about the way the world works, contributing to foundations of knowledge.

Two recent and noteworthy examples demonstrate the power of personal narratives to illuminate larger contexts. In James McBride’s book, The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother, the author tells the story of both himself and his remarkable mother who raised twelve successful children amidst the obstacles of racism and poverty. In Barbara Sonneborn’s documentary film, "Regret to Inform," the filmmaker takes us on a journey that starts with her pain and anger as a result of having lost her husband in the Vietnam War. It builds outward as she uses her personal tragedy as a way to recognize that the war made widows on both sides of the conflict and to understand through interviewing others how they attempt to reconcile their personal feelings with the courses of action taken by their countries. Both stories focus the reader or viewer outward on society as much as they turn inward to the individual.

Ours is a time when the university is under attack. Conservative ideologues, such as those in Accuracy in Academia, assail critical functions of the university and threaten academic freedom. Others try to impose on the academic mission and governance of the university market values that are antithetical to education. If we devalue and abandon the foundations and practices that have been our strength, then we leave ourselves easy prey for critics who seek either our collapse or mutation into yet another force for conformity, commodification, and apathy. Substitution of insular forms of subjectivity for rigorous scholarship, criticism, and debate draws the academy into atomized monologues and soliloquies, rather than the principled discourse necessary to underscore and defend the academy’s distinctive contribution to the social life around us. If we de-intellectualize what constitutes scholarship by narrowly reframing the practices within academia, then we undermine the university’s function. Those of us in communication have a key role to play in that function. As David Zarefsky (1993) has observed, communication scholars can nurture a kind of public forum in which communication serves as the "social glue," helping us work towards collective goals.

The quality of discourse in public these days has been decried for its emphasis on celebrity, gossip, self-disclosure, and self-promotion. In the larger society, despite these shortcomings narrative thrives. It is common for people to share their personal anecdotes at the bar, at home, on the subway, in the market, in letters, emails, in therapy. This democratic practice does not require specialized skills, broad knowledge, or critical acuity. It should not be governed by any one critical perspective, particularly one that insists on the disengagement of the narrator from larger interpretive sources and modes, confining the individual within a narrow subjective frame as a prerequisite for legitimate individual expression. Our society is already hyper-individualistic as it is. Nor should public discourse necessitate the permission of any experts, in or out of academia. However, within academia, when scholars withdraw into the isolation of each telling their individual stories in the postmodern mode, they substitute what should be ambitious, albeit contentiously argued, practices of education with excursions that end where they begin. We then lose a vital answer to a question increasingly asked rhetorically by our detractors: Who needs the university?

References

Corey, F.C. (1998). The personal: against the master narrative. In S.J. Dailey (Ed.), The Future of Performance Studies: Visions and Revisions (pp.249-253). Annandale, VA: National Communication Association.

Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism or, The cultural logic of late capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Zarefsky, D. (1994). The postmodern public (1993 presidential address). Spectra, March. Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association, 9-13.

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