The Uses of Narrative by Shelley Sclater

Author:Shelley Sclater [Sclater, Shelley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Media Studies
ISBN: 9781351301985
Google: JpsuDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-28T04:35:52+00:00

The great transformation, statistical representation and biographical method

In the course of our project, it became clear to us that concerns ostensibly about our lives in our post-communist country were indeed shared by many of our contemporary colleagues in the West in their interpretations of their own social environments. Only gradually did the suspicion mature in us that there is something wrong with the silently predicted specificity and absolute uniqueness of socialism. The particulars of socialism (and of post-communism) – notably the quiet but powerful mechanisms of informal networks under the formalised front of the regime and the ubiquitous ambivalence of relations between people and their institutions in general – began to come apart in front of our eyes. Through discussion at an international seminar we held on the SAMISEBE project, we came to realise that our effort to contrast the confused, hybrid and network logic of state socialism with the transparent, easily differentiable and clearly structured societies of the West was deeply flawed. The description of state socialism refused to contrast with the reflections of contemporary capitalism; in a perhaps somewhat caricatured form, it mirrored them!

Thus another great division that helps build the theory of so-called social transformation of the post-communist society, the strict distinction between HERE (transforming socialism) and THERE (stabilised capitalism), gradually decomposed. All that remained were relatively fine and sometimes mutually contradictory differences and asymmetries. The result of this has been that the essential dichotomy between the East and the West has been discredited for us. What has been described as the subversive habits of everyday resistance of subordinate groups may be generally understood as something very typical for all relationships between people and their institutions. The study of state socialism, precisely, shows this very well. Thus the study of socialism is valuable not only because it helps us understand state socialism itself and our own past, but also in making us better understand the quasi-modern reality of contemporary capitalism. That is why the phenomenon of socialism is as important for theorising about the current post- or non-modern West as the early stages of industrialisation and the philosophical projects of the Enlightenment are for theorising about classic modernity.

As sociologists, we were convinced that the study of an unconventional society (socialism) required an unconventional methodological approach. Standardised methodological procedures developed when studying ‘well-ordered’ modern capitalism cannot avoid failing when confronted with a transforming post-communist society. Biographies, in contrast, connect the private and the public, the universal and the singular, what changes and what lasts, precisely what was needed to understand the strange amalgam of tradition and modernity which we call socialism. Moreover, the issues presented to us by the downfall of state socialism interested us both personally and professionally: the issue of the various dimensions of time, especially the interweaving of biographical, generational and historical time; the relation between private worlds and their institutional frameworks; the problem of individual and collective identity in relation to the reconstruction of the past; shadow economic and political strategies and practices. In short, we were enchanted by the theoretical potential of biographies and life histories.

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