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Situating
Auto/biography: Biography and Narrative in the Times and Places of Everyday
Life
SAGE Publications, Inc.200510.1191/0967550705ab025oa
IanBurkitt
University of Bradford, UK, I.Burkitt@bradford.ac.uk
Address
for correspondence: Ian Burkitt, Reader in Social Science, Department of Social
Sciences and Humanities, University of Bradford, Bradford BD7 1DP, UK; Email:
I.Burkitt@bradford.ac.uk
My aim in this piece is
to situate biography and narrative in the historical times and places of
`flexible capitalism' and `liquid modernity', which has created significant
changes to everyday life. The end of economic conditions that provided `jobs
for life' has meant the collapse of long-term time frames, and created a
necessity for people to move from place to place to seek out work or progress
in a career. This has affected individual biographies and narratives, by
breaking up the structures of time, place and social relations in which biographies
were traditionally located. I assess the effects of these social changes
through the analysis of a biographical narrative. From this and other supporting
data I suggest that profound change is occurring in individual biographies,
which is highly variable depending on social class position. However, it
is still possible to develop life strategies and reconstruct narratives in
ways that resist some of the more corrosive aspects of flexible capitalism
eating away at the fabric of everyday life.
Like
all sciences, sociology – which is the disciplinary base for many narrative
approaches – has its own narratives to make sense of the con- temporary
world. In recent years, many of these narratives have shifted to make sense
of the radically altered socio-economic state we now find our- selves in and,
to do so, they employ metaphors of `flexibility' and `fluidity'. For example,
to Harvey (1990) we are now living under `flexible accumu- lation', a new
form of global capitalism where all national barriers to the flow of capital
have been removed, empowering multinational corporations over nation states
and individual citizens. Gone are the days of state- managed capitalism, and,
with it, gone also are the days of jobs for life, of living out one's days
in relatively stable communities of fellow workers,
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long-time
neighbours and extended families. Now our lives are flexible lives, to be
uprooted at a moment's notice. Bauman (2000) characterizes this as a transformation
from `heavy' to `light' capitalism, which is indica- tive of a new `liquid
modernity': that is, the current phase in history where all social forms and
relations solidified in specific places are uprooted and made transient in
time. For Sennett (1998), this creates the conditions for a `corrosion of
character' – character meaning the long-term aspect of personal traits
valued by self and others – for in a world where people are always
starting over again, in new jobs, work teams, or neighbourhoods, many have
lost the witnesses to their days. My aim here is to begin to understand the
effect of these social changes on the auto/biographies of individuals and
to question whether the socio- logical narratives that seek to explain them
are reflected in, or contra- dicted by, biographical narrative. If we regard
biography as that which `render[s] intelligible historical action in context'
(Chamberlayne et al., 2000: 8), then the condition of flexible accumulation
or liquid modernity should have profound effects on the ways in which individuals
attempt to construct a biography with others. Indeed, these social conditions
would seem to splinter the times, places and social relations – the
very fabric of everyday life – in which biographies have traditionally
been nested and that provided the context for people to render intelligible
their historical actions. If people can never settle in jobs, towns or cities
with groups of long-term or medium-term companions with whom to share their
lives, how has this affected the coherence of the narratives they construct
to make sense and meaning of themselves and their historical actions? According
to Bauman (1995), in a society where time fragments into a series of episodes,
there can be no consistent or cohesive life strategy or narrative to deal
with the world or make sense of it. However, the sociological story lines
of flexible accumulation and liquid modernity are, like all narratives, extremely
complex once one gets below the surface. As Gergen (1994) has pointed out,
there is never a single narrative providing a linear theme that runs throughout
the biogra- phy of an individual, nor, by extension of this idea, can there
be a single narrative that unifies the themes of an author telling a story
of society. For example, as a Marxist, Harvey (2000) wants to tell other stories
about resistance to flexible capitalism, and, as a geographer, about the spaces
of hope that exist in everyday life which provide the basis for this resistance.
Likewise, Sennett is interested in the coherent narratives people create in
the face of flexible capitalism, how they maintain a sense of personal responsibility
and meaning in their lives through narratives about `career'. And Bauman realizes
that while modern society attempts to evaporate all solid forms into liquids
and make them fluid, this often results in contra- dictions. For example,
in order to be recognized by others there must be
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something
about one's identity that is relatively substantial and which does not change
from moment to moment. There is, then, a contradiction `of self-made identities
which must be solid enough to be acknowledged as such and yet flexible enough
not to bar freedom of future movements in the constantly changing, volatile
circumstances [of liquid modernity]' (Bauman, 2000: 49–50). So the
search for identity must at certain points make solid what is fluid and make
form out of the formless. How we achieve this in our biographies and narratives
is another central concern of this piece. Overall, then, quoting C. Wright
Mills, one could say that here I am attempting to `work out and revise [my]
views of the problems of history, the problems of biography, and the problems
of social structure in which biography and history intersect' (1959: 225).
However, this intersection of history and biography can be fraught with theoretical
and methodological difficulties. Rustin (2000: 45) has claimed that, in biographical
work, societies and cultures must be studied from the ground `upwards', the
ontological assumption being that individuals have agency, which leads to
the conclusion that biographies make society and are not merely made by it.
While I have some sympathy with this, I think the ontological assump- tion
is skewed: where history and biography meet there must surely be reciprocal
interchange, with individuals able to shape their biographies in various ways,
but always within social contexts not entirely of their own making. As I hope
to show here, the places and social contexts within which individuals create
meaning and devise strategies for their lives are a co-production, sometimes
of many individuals stretching across enor- mous vistas of time and space.
Biographies cannot simply be the products of individual agency and, in many
cases, people have to be hugely cre- ative in order to salvage agency and
personal narratives in a global world that often moves with a momentum beyond
their individual control. It is, of course, important to avoid social reductionism,
by showing how individuals have a subjective or psychological position within
their objec- tive sociological location in the world. It is in this sense
that I hope to show here how individuals can resist social forces, solidifying
part of their experience and looking for sense and meaning in fragmented
social contexts. Individuals are not overdetermined by the social, although
onto- logically history sets the parameters in which we act and can make our
biographies. So how do history and biography intersect in flexible capitalism,
and what are the strategies people can adopt for salvaging a sense of narrative
continuity in the world? I will address this question by examining how biographies
are composed of time, place, and others, and how narratives help to weave
all this together into meaningful coherence. Threaded through the larger sociological
narratives about change in contemporary
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society
is the biography of Paul, with whom I did a biographical interview.2 Paul
is a 40-year old man who has always lived in the West Yorkshire area of England
and has first-hand experience of many of the social changes about which sociologists
are concerned. Although one biography cannot prove or disprove larger sociological
theories, nor can it be taken to rep- resent biographies in general, it is
nevertheless interesting to see how this one personal story both reflects
social change and demonstrates resistance to it. It also illustrates my central
theme: how wider social changes have affected the everyday lives and biographies
of individuals and, with it, their narratives. BIOGRAPHIES IN EVERYDAY LIFE:
TIME, PLACE, OTHERS, AND NARRATIVE Back in the 1970s, the French Marxist
Lucien Seve (1978) wrote about the biographies of individuals living in capitalist
society. From Seve's Marxist position, a person's biography is made up of
the activity they engage in, through which they assimilate their social and
cultural heritage, and, thus, a biography can be divided up according to the
time an individual has to engage in various activities. Most peoples' lives
are divided between the time they have to spend on activities that hold a
personal interest for them – usually in their `free time' – and the time they must spend on activities done for others. In the latter
category, most of this time belongs to an employer, who uses the worker's
activity to extract surplus value. From the worker's point of view, this is
`abstract activity' with little personal sense or gain, while activity done
in their own free time is `concrete activity' and can be spent on their own
self-development or enjoyment. In addition to this, Seve also split the time
in a person's biography between that spent on learning new activities – which would be the most rewarding, with the acquisition of new skills and
capacities – and that spent on repeating activities already learned.
For Seve, the limiting and exploitative nature of capitalism was expressed
in the fact that for most people, certainly the working classes, most of their
time is spent on boring repetitive tasks, the sole purpose of which is to
make money for capitalists. While some aspects of Seve's ideas about biographies
are still interesting, especially in the way he understands them as shaped
by the time people have for different activities, the overall tenor of his
writings speak of another capitalist age. Although Seve never says this explicitly,
his writ- ings conjure up a world in which work is regular and routine, with
the carving out of biographical time monotonously predictable. One can picture
Seve's workers with their shoulder to the grindstone, seven to five daily,
coming home for their hours of leisure and dreaming of their pen- sions. I
can see this world in the life of my own father, who worked in the
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same
Yorkshire textile mill, seven to five each day, from age 14 to 65. It was
only after retirement that his life seemed to begin, with more time to spend
watching rugby and cricket and going to the horse races. Equally, while my
mother did not do paid work, her working life was centred around the home,
fixing her biography in a way that was typical for many working-class women
of her generation. But so much of this world has now changed. Work is no longer
routine in terms of regular hours, with more flexible work practices being
introduced, such as shift work and working across the seven-day week. Also,
who can rely on a job for life, working in the same occupation, let alone
for the same company, for the span of one's working life? In addition, most
women now have to juggle paid work outside the home with unpaid domestic work
for partners and/or children. This has had two effects on biographical time.
More flexible working patterns within the day, with shifts often varying week
to week, have meant that biographical time is more disrupted, people finding
they have less ability to plan the time they will be able to spend with family
and friends. Some financially poor workers find this flexibility allows them
to do more than one job (Sennett, 1998), and, in general, people in the UK
are working for longer hours (Hertz, 2001). A Marxist like Seve would see
in these working conditions the existence of greater exploitation, with a
large number of workers working more of their time for capitalist corpo- rations
and having less free time for themselves. The greater encroach- ment of routine
work into biographical time leads to people spending more time on abstract
activities, the result of which is a stunting of personal growth. The second
effect on biographical time is more long term: indeed, as Sennett has noted,
one of the effects of flexible capitalism is that there is `no long term'.
In his extended essay, The corrosion of character, Sennett (1998) recounts
meeting by chance with Rico, the son of a worker he had interviewed 25 years
earlier for another study. While Rico's father had worked in the same occupation
all his life and lived in roughly the same locality, his son had already had
a number of different jobs and moved around the USA. What this meant was constant
relocation for himself and his family in various places, never staying long
enough to feel that they belonged. Worse still, this involved losing friends
made in particular places, breaking precious relationships that were either
lost or kept alive through the Internet. The new neighbourhoods into which
the family moved were not empty of sociability, but the people there were
used to others moving in and out – to the making and breaking of temporary
relationships – and the social bonds formed there lacked a feeling
a permanence. Sennett's book is full of such stories: broken narratives of
relocation and of constantly starting all over again.
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But
the biggest dislocation reported in all these stories is the dislocation in
time, and the feeling for many that they lack control over their time. During
busy times at work, children become strangers to their overworked parents
(Hertz, 2001), and new technologies provide managers with new means of controlling
work time. At call centres or in offices, even working from home by computer,
mangers can monitor the number of calls taken or the amount of time spent
working at the computer. This is graphi- cally illustrated in Paul's biographical
narrative, in which he began by talking to me about his work for a large bank,
where he started out selling insurance from a call centre. As I was listening
to Paul's story, many of the sociological theories of modernity and flexible
capitalism started to come alive for me, especially in his description of
his job, which illus- trates how working life has become subject to new technologies
and new forms of control. In his first job for his current employers, Paul
spent all of his time in a call centre selling insurance by phone. The workers
themselves did not control the pace of the phone calls and the calls were
all monitored for time duration and content. A dialler contains all the phone
numbers that each worker must call in order to sell an insurance policy and
it also records the number of calls made each day. At the end of each call
the salespeople have five minutes to `write up' the call on computer and,
when they are finished, they press a button on the dialler to call the next
number on its list. The dialler also records how long each call takes and
how long each salesperson is waiting for someone to answer the call. In addition,
calls are often recorded to make sure that a thorough list of products is
being offered to potential customers. Managers also monitor the salespeople,
making sure they spend no more than five minutes writing up the results of
each call. Workers at the call centre developed a technique of `slacking'
by staying in update (that is, writing up their calls) longer than the allotted
five minutes, thereby dictating the pace of the calls. Managers spotted this
strategy and began warning salespeople who stayed in update too long. The
whole process is therefore rigorously monitored, and Paul tells me there is
little opportunity for `slacking' among the workers, so that there is little
they can do to control the pace of their work. This leads to `burnout', with
workers becoming demoralised and literally `giving up' on the job, or adopting
a `couldn't be bothered' attitude to targets. When they hit burnout, workers
move to other parts of the company where work is more interesting or manageable,
or just move on to another company. Paul has now hit that point and has just
moved to another section of the company. While Paul felt that his current
job allows him plenty of free time away from work to pursue other interests,
he has worked in places before – and
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knows
of plenty others – where the shift systems play havoc with the possibility
of normal life patterns or of maintaining a social life. In this respect,
Paul currently counts himself lucky. From my record of Paul's story it seems
that while he has time to devote to his own personal development in his leisure
time, he regarded work in the call centre as abstract activity and unrewarding,
illustrated by the fact it commonly led to burnout. Indeed, his move from
the call centre to another section of the bank was because he requested a
more person- ally rewarding position – a request granted to him because
he was thought to be a good worker. However, despite the micro-management
of time within the working day, it is the destruction of the long-term time
duration within flexible capitalism that most affects people's lives. Sennett
asks what are, for me, crucial questions about how people can make their lives
and selves under such conditions. `How can long-term purposes be pursued in
a short-term society? How can durable social relations be sustained? How can
a human being develop a narrative of identity and life history in a society
com- posed of episodes and fragments?' (Sennett, 1998: 26). In particular,
how do we develop `those qualities of character which bind human beings to
one another and furnish each with a sense of sustainable self [?]' (Sennett,
1998: 27). This is why flexible capitalism can corrode character, because
it eats away at the very social fabric that sustains a long-term narrative
of self, one that is created with others in relations of loyalty, commitment
and purpose. At this point, however, there is a danger of getting carried
away by a too linear and simplistic sociological narrative. Flexible capitalism
has not only enslaved us in new regimes of micro-management of time, and
disrupted the possibility of developing long-term biographical narratives
solidly located in place; it has also freed us from some of the shackles of
the past. Comparing myself with my parent's generation, which stayed in jobs,
traditional roles and places all their lives, my own biography is freed from
some of these restrictions. As an academic, I can choose to a large degree
when and where I work, although some of these freedoms are cur- rently under
threat. I am not bound by the rigid timing of the working day that my father
experienced in the textile mills, or that Paul is subject to in the call centre.
In the global world of academia, I could also try to relo- cate myself in
another country if I so wanted. As Giddens (1991) has noted, in late-modernity
biographical narratives are no longer set by tradition – by moral codes,
work routines, or roles – passed from genera- tion to generation. In
post-traditional societies the self becomes a reflexive project involving
the constant revision of biographical narratives. To do this we now look
to various forms of knowledge, such as self-help
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books
or taking guidance from counsellors and therapists, in order to decide how
to live. But these freedoms are highly variable under flexible capitalism,
with the creation of what Lash and Urry (1994) refer to as `reflexivity winners
and losers'. That is, the control of time and place, and thus the control
over the revision of one's biographical narratives, depends on one's class
location and, with it, the power and privilege to shape our lives. Giddens
is wrong to imply that we all share the same power and equal access to knowledge
on which the reflexive project of the self is based. I would also add that
it is questionable to fix in advance, as Rustin (2000) suggested, the ontological
assumption that biographies make society and are not merely made by it, because
the experience of people in this respect will be variable depending on their
power to influence their own biography. For example, Sennett has found that
`flextime' – people working on different, individualized schedules – has resulted in work in the evenings or nights being passed on to the less
privileged classes (1998: 58). Those with more choice over how and when they
work are mainly among the more privileged, and they can also afford to bear
some of the risks of flexible, short-term capitalism. Both the advantages
and disadvantages of the loss of tradition and the greater flexibility in
peoples' lives can be seen in Paul's biography. Below, he was reflecting on
his life so far and how he sees this as fragmented and yet full of possibility.
In terms of his working life, Paul looks back at his past and says that you
could divide his CV up into four year chunks: a working life lived in four-
year fragments. He spent four years working for an electricity company, four
years running his own business, three years at University studying for a degree,
and since then a number of years in various sales jobs. When asked about the
future, Paul made it clear that he has no plans beyond the immediate year,
professionally or personally. He clearly felt that `a year is a long time',
and that `anything can happen between now and next year'. This lesson comes
in particular from the last company he worked for being sold and all the employees
being made redundant, and also from the breakdown of a long-term relationship.
If you can't know what is going to happen to you in a year, it is better not
to plan and to be prepared for anything. However, these sentiments were not
expressed with a hint of fatalism, more a readiness to meet future challenges
head-on, and a feeling that he is now better equipped to deal with uncertainty
and the unforeseen. Comparing these experiences with those of our parents'
generation, who kept jobs and relationships for life, Paul did not express
a hankering after the past. The high turnover of employees at the bank where
he works is an illustration of the way people now switch jobs as easily as
our parents'
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generation
would change a suit of clothes, but again this uncertainty can also provide
opportunity. Paul felt that if you were looking for a promotion or another
position, this provided the condition for rapid opportunities: `you're not
waiting for someone to die' before you can step into a better position or
a more interesting job. The fact that a career is no longer carved out for
life is a problem only `if you're directionless'. In other words, if people
themselves lose a sense of direction and purpose, if they begin to drift aimlessly
or get depressed, then they are lost. There is no preordained path to save
people from drifting. Furthermore, Paul has seen the failure of those who
work with him who believe they can find an easy niche for themselves and stay
there: for those who think `the place owes them a living', he has seen `doors
shut to them'. Employers now look for direction and motivation from their
employees. So for Paul, the past is fragmented and the future unknown: but
the world of insecurity is also loaded with possibility. Looking at this narrative
sociologically, it mirrors Bauman's (1995) notion that contemporary life is
lived in fragments and also reflects many themes in Giddens's (1991) work.
In particular, Paul's story seems to give credence to the idea of the reflexive
project of the self, in that Paul believes one has to be continually revising
biographical narrative to keep a sense of direction and find one's way in
the flexible modern world. Traditional, custom bound routes through life do
not exist anymore. As an articulate and educated person, Paul also clearly
feels he has some of the necessary power to revise his narratives and steer
his reflexive project of the self. But what he says above also reveals two
paradoxes. First, that one must not drift and instead must maintain direction
and purpose, and yet one must also be prepared for anything because one cannot
know what will happen inside a year. This is the paradox of agency – all of us have varying degrees of reflex- ive power to revise our own narratives
and projects, yet this control is lim- ited by many factors that we cannot
influence. Indeed, under the sway of flexible capitalism, the number of unpredictable
and uncontrollable ele- ments in life has multiplied. The second paradox is
that, in the workplace, employers expect more self-direction and motivation
from their employees yet subject them to stricter and more detailed micro-management
of work activity. However, there is another important distinction opening
up in flexible capitalism, one that also marks the difference between social
classes – the experience of surface and depth, and the relative ability
to exploit the advantages, and avoid the disadvantages, of the two. As Sennett
(1998) notes, less powerful workers do not always gain the knowledge and
skills to attain a deep understanding or mastery of their task. Where understanding
of work is superficial, the identity of the worker is `light'.
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The
flexible productive process – in which workers can be moved around
easily and interchanged – is characterised by user-friendly tasks whose
deeper logic need not be penetrated. In contrast, workers higher up the social
scale tend to have more qualifications and to acquire deeper levels of knowledge
and skill at work. Sennett does not say so, but in compari- son to the light
identity of lower level workers, the identity of the more powerful, skilled
workers, has greater `weight'. Their biographical narra- tives have more continuity,
bound as they are into the development of career through the acquisition of
skills and knowledge that contribute to the building of character. Something
of this can be seen in Paul's biographical narrative. Below, Paul was talking
about his transfer to a different section of the bank, something he requested
in order to give him more personally rewarding work. This involves a search
for less abstract and more concrete activity, which has more depth and can
add to the development of character. Although he still sells insurance, Paul
has now moved to another section of the bank and his reasons for doing so
are interesting. His new work involves him looking after the `premier customers',
that is those with a high income who are already customers of the bank. This
job brings a higher income, but more importantly it allows him to deliver
a more personal service to clients. Gone is the dreaded dialler, meaning that
Paul can now manage his own time and regulate his pace of work. This allows
him to build a rapport with his customers and also deal with the brokers of
the insurance policies. Instead of being at the mercy of the dialler, Paul
now has the ability `to manage a case'. What this means is that he can get
involved in this work in a deeper way, not just staying at the surface of
the task, attempting to make a quick sale. He has to have more knowledge about
what he is doing and to go into each case in more depth, but also he is building
relations with customers and brokers and using his communication skills. This
gives the new work greater depth: he is not just learning more, he is able
to involve himself with the people he is dealing with, making the work more
meaningful. Paul also has greater control over work-time and this has reduced
the stress he felt from the repetitive nature of his previous section, controlled
as it was by the technological and personal surveillance of tasks. Here, we
find Paul not only beginning to manage his own time and deepening his knowledge
of the job, he is also using and building qualities of character in relation
to others through his work. An all-round sense of control, depth, and character
is reflected in the above, and we will find this in other areas of Paul's
biographical narrative. For now, though, we can say it is the degree of control
each of us has over biographical time, place, and selection of narratives,
that marks out our
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social
class location, along with the power to resist some of the more destructive
forces of modern society. There can be no sense of narrative coherence to
bind together an identity when one is constantly subject to change that one
cannot control. Again, under such conditions, the experience of being is one
of lightness rather than weight, of insubstan- tiality and a lack of anchoring.
As Milan Kundera says in his novel, The unbearable lightness of being, the
more weighted we feel, `the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real
and truthful they become'. Without weight, we `become only half-real, [our]
movements as free as they are insignificant' (1984: 5). Kundera then asks,
`What shall we choose? Weight or lightness?' But the ability to choose between
these two ways of being in the world is as variable as our other choices,
dependent upon our power to choose. As individuals, then, we have different
degrees of power and ability to establish some depth in our lives, along with
a degree of narrative coher- ence to our sense of self. We also have different
degrees of power to at least temporarily arrest the flow of liquid modernity
and establish with others a character. Individuals who have less power to
affect these things may feel themselves more open to the exploitative and
corrosive side of flexible capitalism. One strategy to salvage character,
identified by Sennett, is to adopt the narrative of `career' to create a sense
of coherence, agency and responsibility in the face of a continually changing
world. He takes Lippmann's definition of career, which is a narrative of `inner
devel- opment, unfolding through both skill and struggle' (Sennett, 1998:
120). With this there develops a sense of responsibility for one's conduct
that is bound into a more long-term vision of life, one that is leading to
some aim or has purpose. All aspects of flexible capitalism would seem to
under- mine the possibility of such a narrative, and yet Sennett found people – who had ostensibly been the victims of flexible capitalism – developing
just such a narrative. They were ex-employees of IBM, computer programmers
who had been laid off when that company began to fail in the 1990s. After
explaining their predicament through narratives which, first of all, blamed
the managers of the company, then the globalization of the economy, the men
eventually settled on a narrative in which they figured as having miscalculated
their own careers by not seeing the trends developing in their own industry.
They then began to develop narratives of career, through which they started
accepting responsibility for not taking more chances in their professional
lives, instead staying with IBM for the long-term company benefits (which
rapidly disappeared as the company hit trouble). Even though the theme of
the narratives was failure rather than success, the programmers began to tell
stories in which they figured as agents, possessed of will, choice and responsibility.
The stories also followed a
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traditional
narrative pattern that was centred on a period of crisis – in this
case, losing a job – which became the locus of change and transformation.
This narrative convention makes the crucial moment of change `legible and
clear, rather than messy, blind' (Sennett, 1998: 131): it is a focal point
in a continually developing saga, rather than the chance that leads us nowhere.
In taking responsibility and agency through this narrative there is also established
at its centre the sense of `I' so common in auto- biographical stories (Stanley,
1992). The sense of `I' is established in the face of conditions that demand
the flexible pliant self, one who can bend and adapt to all the conditions
that flexible capitalism can throw at him or her. However, as Sennett points
out, these narratives are not simple acts of resistance in the face of an
indifferent social, political and economic system: they speak of the deep
pain that comes with failure, especially in middle age, when many find themselves
consid- ered to be past the cut and thrust of new, aggressive industries.
Sennett says, `given the destruction of hope and desire, the preservation
of one's active voice is the only way to make failure bearable' (1998: 134).
This is so because, through the very structure that a narrative provides,
it acts as a form of healing, a way of recovering from the wounds inflicted
by a fickle world. However, Sennett's concept of career applies only to the
idea as it bears upon the world of work and the trajectory this sets us on
across the life course. Yet the notion of career can be applied to the narratives
we develop to order our lives more generally. Indeed, Goffman used the term
`moral career' to refer `to any social strand of any person's course through
life' (1961/1991: 119). This course will involve a sequence of changes in
a person's self and in his or her framework of imagery for judging self and
others. Because the notion of career involves changes, an important aspect
of it is the way we constantly reconstruct the view of our career when we
look back over our lives. A career is never a solid or stable thing, for
it is thrown into periodic states of reconstruction that select, and sometimes
distort, in order to form a view of the self. According to Goffman, we often
distort the facts or events of our lives to present ourselves as good or
worthy. When the story can not be presented favourably, we tend to disclaim
responsibility for the way things have turned out. Instead of being the agent
of the story – the `I' who makes things happen – I become the
victim of circumstance or chance. However, this was not what Sennett found; for those he interviewed, the claiming of agency and responsibility was enough,
in time, to help them come to terms with failure. The location of a sense
of agency can be seen clearly in Paul's narrative. Below, he was reflecting
on his fragmented working career, but recon- structing this in a way that
makes narrative sense from fragmentation.
105
It
is clear from Paul's story that he feels himself to be the main point of agency
in the narrative. His changes of direction in terms of career, which seemed
to happen every four years, he reflects upon as his own choice. Interestingly,
he sees this as stemming from success rather than failure. That is, it was
when he achieved everything he felt he could in a job, or saw the possibility
of getting more out of life by a change of direction, that he took the plunge
and did something different. However, that is not the whole story. Paul also
clearly expressed the view that life had taught him that you can't plan too
far ahead, that you don't know what will happen to you over the course of
the next year, so that it is not possible to be in control of every move you
make. Indeed, when referring to the fact that he hasn't sought employment
in the subject area he studied at University, Paul says he lost interest in
the subject because he changed so much over the three years of study. In other
words, he changed in ways he could never have predicted, so that something
he thought he might pursue as a career, he ended up not pursuing. There is
a strong counter theme in this narrative of learning these things from experience,
that life cannot be known in advance and controlled. As Paul is reconstructing
the narrative of his moral career, it is clear that he locates himself as
a powerful `I' at the centre of the narrative, choosing when to make moves
and knowing the reasons for this. The rea- sons given are ones of success,
of having achieved something and then moved on. Paul is therefore generating
what Gilbert Ryle referred to as `thick' rather than `thin' description (in
Geertz, 1973). That is, he is not simply recounting a series of random changes
that have befallen him, he is looking for the deeper sense of meaning to these
changes and locating the points of his own active influence over them. One
could say that this is the generation of `thick narrative', one in which he
is locating the points and the meaning of his own agency. At the same time,
there is a counter narrative at work within the overall narrative where there
is a sense of cir- cumstances – and even of the self – changing
in ways that was not con- trolled by Paul's own agency. These are not necessarily
failures attributed to some other agency, as Goffman would have it; rather,
it is the acknowledgement that biography is never completely within one's
own control: changes occur, and one must accept them with good reasons or
adapt to them. No matter how powerful an individual may be there are always
limits to that power, and this shapes biography and influences nar- rative.
NARRATIVE AND THE PLACES OF EVERYDAY LIFE The effects of flexible capitalism
are contradictory, for just as it appears to be driving many into forming
more coherent, or `thick' narratives in
106
which
the self figures as an agent, so too is it encouraging people to seek out
the `depth' of place. For geographers like Casey, place indicates `an arena
of action that is at once physical and historical, social and cultural', as
opposed to the `volumetric void' of space in which all things exist (2001:
683). Place, then, is a historical, cultural and interpersonal context for
action, giving it a depth of meaning. As arenas of action, places are constitutive
of our sense of self, for they are the context of that historical agency of
which biographies are composed. I have already said that my aim here is to
try to understand how time, place and people are bound together in narrative,
and that it is dislocation in place, as much as in time, which is fragmenting
biographical experience in flexible capitalism. For Bauman (2000), it is the
dislocation in place and the movement of time that is so characteristic of
liquid modernity. This is because solids have clear spatial dimensions but
neutralise time, whereas fluids do not keep shape for long and are always
flowing in time. Thus the period of `heavy capitalism' was rooted in places – factories, `heavy plant', purpose built workers' housing, communities – whereas the current period of `light capitalism' is not rooted in place, but
always ready to move. Investment, information, communication, is always flowing
and exists in time rather than in place, for these things are associated with
mobility and incon- stancy. Also, for Bauman, it is those who can move and
respond instantly to changing conditions that have power in liquid modernity,
whereas those who cannot leave a place at will find themselves locked, as
it were, and become the dominated. Thus, `[d]omination consists in one's own
capac- ity to escape, to disengage, to “be elsewhere”, and the
right to decide the speed with which all that is done' (Bauman, 2000: 120).
However, once again, as we start to apply these metaphors the story becomes
more complex. For example, in flexible capitalism many are compelled to move
to find work or pursue careers, so that this movement is not always synonymous
with having power. As Sennett (1998) illustrated in his study, those workers
who are dislocated and forced to move around the country, or the globe, in
search of work are also the ones whose sense of character is most under threat.
The sense of dislocation caused by con- stantly moving between places puts
the sense of self in jeopardy, as places are `thinned out' and merge with
space (Casey, 2001). For example, in Sennett's study, Rico found that relations
forged in one place could only be continued after a move through the Internet.
While this provides a new means of keeping alive relationships that would,
in earlier times, have died, the Internet constitutes a thinned out place,
for interactions through the Internet are not embedded in any densely enmeshed
infrastructure. On the Internet, this is replaced with more ethereal interconnections.
These `thin' places are also open to continual reshaping and recon- necting
with others; they are as flexible as the capitalist society that
107
created
the technology, which, in turn, makes the transformation of place possible.
For example, programmes on television or items on the web melt into each other
as we switch channels or surf the net (Casey, 2001). However, as Casey goes
on to point out, the more places are levelled down, the more individuals seem
to seek out the places in which personal enrichment can flourish. He gives
two examples. First, the proliferation of films on video and DVD has not
meant the end of cinemas: on the contrary, more people than ever are going
to cinemas, finding them to be `real places with their own sensuous density
and interpersonal interest' (Casey, 2001: 685). Secondly, Internet book-selling
has not brought about the demise of the bookshop: instead, there now are bigger
bookshops than ever, many with their own coffee bars where people can read,
or meet and talk. Possibilities such as these have actually created a richer
environment for selves, who can now move between actual places and virtual
spaces, between embodied and disembodied relations. Once again, the power
of individuals seems to be constituted not so much in the ability to be totally
flexible and fluid, to have complete freedom of movement, but to be able to
choose when to move and stay at the surface of experience, and when to be
rooted and search out the depth of interconnection with others in a place.
If the search for identity is a struggle to arrest the flow and solidify the
fluid and to create the thick narratives that give form to an otherwise fragmentary
experience, so too is this struggle for identity expressed in the search for
places that can add some weight to one's being. In actual places one can
construct the kind of interpersonal relationships that one cannot in the
thin spaces of the Internet: embodied relations in which we can develop the
qualities of character that bind human beings to one another and create for
each a sense of sustainable self. This is clearly reflected below in Paul's
biographical narrative. There is one part of his life that Paul sees as not
open to change, and that is the place where he lives. Paul has lived his life
so far in one city in West Yorkshire. Asked if he would be prepared to move
to live somewhere else, Paul clearly said that he wouldn't, expressing the
view that it was important for him `not having to start over again'. So while
Paul has accepted many of the challenges of living under flexible capitalism
in his working life, he is not prepared to uproot and start again in some
new city or area of the country. When asked why this is, Paul stated it was
to do with practical matters like having to sell his house and find another.
However, he also said he feels `settled' where he lives, which seems to indicate
a sense of belonging to a place. But there is also another aspect to feeling
settled in the place he lives. A constant theme in Paul's narrative is the
importance of relationships, both at work and in his personal life, and relating
to others is clearly something that
108
he
regards as interesting and important. One of the main reasons Paul gives for
selling up his successful business and going to University as a mature student,
is that he and his partner had little time to build friendships outside of
their own relationship. University was therefore seen not only as an intellectual
challenge, but also as an opportunity to meet other people. Indeed, since
starting University, and from graduation onwards, Paul has built up a network
of friends located in the same region. He also has family in the area and
this provides a backdrop of continuity and shared history in Paul's biography.
Feeling settled in the place he lives also provides a framework of stability
as well as continuity in an otherwise uncertain world. This seems to be the
point of resistance in Paul's narrative, the part of his life he seeks to
protect from change, the sense of belonging someplace that he seeks to continue
into the future. Thus, while there is no sense from Paul's narrative of being
rooted in a particular community – there is no `we' to which the story
constantly refers – there is nevertheless the strong sense of the importance
of `per- sonal community': that is, the importance of friendship, family,
and rela- tionships at work. This seems to be the point of stability and resistance
in Paul's narrative, where he roots himself in a sense of shared continuity
and history through place. It also seems that place, and the personal rela-
tionships it contains, is the binding which allows him to create a sense of
sustainable self. His belonging to a place and its people provides the social
fabric that can sustain a long-term narrative of self and a moral career – a base from which he can reconstruct a narrative shared with others that accounts
for all the changes that have happened to him. CONCLUSION While `fluidity',
`flexibility' and `lightness' may be fitting metaphors for sociologists to
use in telling the story of our contemporary lives, it is far too simplistic
to assume that metaphors of `solidity' and `weight' are only useful in narratives
about the past. Certainly, there has been greater frag- mentation of the times
and places in which biographies are set, breaking the network of bonds with
others and creating a corrosive threat to the formation of character through
coherent narratives. However, it is perhaps an exaggeration to say that no
consistent or cohesive life strategy can emerge to deal with the social conditions
created by flexible capitalism and liquid modernity. While the power to form
a cohesive life strategy and continually revise biographical narrative is
limited by one's social class, Paul's biographical narrative, alongside Sennett's
findings, suggests some interesting possibilities for further research. In
particular, how individuals create thick narratives and moral careers that
locate a sense of agency,
109
responsibility
and meaning in the face of fragmentation, along with qualities of character
that bind them to others and create a sense of sustainable self. Individuals
may also have different life strategies for attempting to resist flexibility
and fluidity and make aspects of their lives solid. For Paul, place provides
stability and continuity, which he guards from change. It forms the bedrock
of his biography and sense of sustain- able self that allows him to meet the
challenges of a flexible world in which he has to have freedom of movement – a more slowly moving undercurrent in his life over which flows more rapidly
moving currents and changes. The resistance of social forces found in his
rooting in place allows for the more pragmatic approach he adopts towards
other aspects of his biography where he has to be ready for any unexpected
changes at any time. Given that under these circumstances modern individuals
have to be constantly ready to revise aspects of biographical narrative, as
social scientists we may have to rethink our strategies towards notions of
self and identity. The theoretical deconstruction of concepts like character
and self may only leave individuals more open to the corrosive and exploita-
tive effects of flexible accumulation. This makes it imperative for those
of us interested in biography and narrative to be more sensitive to the life
strategies individuals are forming to reconstruct identity within their moral
careers, thus working against the forces fragmenting the times, places and
relations of everyday life.
NOTES
1 An earlier version of
this paper was given as a keynote address to the Narrative, Memory and Everyday
Life conference at Huddersfield University, 3 April 2004. I would like to
thank the two anonymous referees for their comments on that earlier draft.
2 This interview was done
in one session lasting about an hour and a half, and was recorded by note
taking during the interview. This is why only snippets of actual quotations
appear from Paul's own words, the rest being my reconstruction of the general
contours of the narrative from my notes.
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NOTE
ON CONTRIBUTOR IAN BURKITT is a Reader in Social Sciences at the University
of Bradford. His main research interests are in social and social psychological
theory, the social construction of the self, and the relation between culture
and forms of human embodiment. He is the author of Social selves: theories
of the social formation of personality (Sage, 1991) and Bodies of thought:
embodiment, identity and modernity (Sage, 1999).