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Gender and narrative identityLois McNay aa Somerville College , Oxford, OX2 6HD, UKPublished online: 19 Nov 2007.

To cite this article: Lois McNay (1999) Gender and narrative identity, Journal of PoliticalIdeologies, 4:3, 315-336, DOI: 10.1080/13569319908420801

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Journal of Political Ideologies (1999), 4(3), 315-336

Gender and narrative identityLOIS McNAY

Somerville College, Oxford OX2 6HD, UK

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the idea of the coherence of the self and theimplications this has for an understanding of gender identity. It is in thinkingthrough ways in which coherent notions of self-hood are maintained that asubstantive account of agency emerges. A re-formulated account of agency iscentral to understanding how men and women negotiate the processes of genderrestructuring that have been unleashed by the de-traditionalising tendencies oflate capitalist societies. Paul Ricoeur's conception of the narrative structureof the self goes some way towards suggesting a more active or creative substrateto agency than the post-structuralist exclusionary paradigm of subjectification.The temporalised understanding of the self that the idea of narrative capturesalso goes some way to overcoming certain oppositions around which thought onidentity tends to revolve, notably the dualism between essential versus con-structed concepts of identity and that of authentic experience versus ideologicaldistortion.

Introduction

Post-structural thought, particularly the work of Michel Foucault, has had a hugeimpact upon the feminist conceptualisation of the construction of gender ident-ity. The post-structuralist deconstruction of idealist and unified notions of thesubject and associated emphasis on the socially arbitrary nature of meaning hascontributed significantly to feminist work on the construction of sexuality andgender identity. Despite this productive convergence, there are certain difficultiesconfronting a feminist appropriation of post-structural theory, notably thosearising in connection with the lack of detailed account of subjectivity andagency. This paper focuses on one of these problems, namely the question of thecoherence of the self, which tends to be neglected in the post-structural emphasison the contradictory and dispersed nature of subjectivity. I argue that it is inthinking through ways in which coherent notions of self-hood are maintained,both on an individual and collective level, that a more substantive account ofagency emerges. A re-formulated account of agency is central to understandinghow men and women negotiate the processes of gender restructuring that havebeen unleashed by the de-traditionalising tendencies of late capitalist societies.

An examination of how a coherent sense of the self is constructed connects

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to a more general claim about post-structural thought, namely that it has anessentially negative understanding of the process of identity formation orsubjectification that forecloses a substantive account of agency. This is to saythat if subjectivity is understood to emerge from a dialectic of freedom andconstraint, it is the latter moment which is privileged within post-structuralthought; subjectivity emerges from processes of exclusion, negativity and dis-avowal. Such exclusionary paradigms of subjectification result in a one-dimen-sional notion of agency because they do not go beyond a rather inadequateaccount of the individual's capabilities to deal with conflict and difference interms other than disavowal or repression. I counterpose this with Paul Ricoeur'sconception of the narrative structure of the self which goes some way towardssuggesting a more active or creative substrate to agency. The process of activeappropriation that is central to the construction of narrative identity suggests amore substantive and autonomous model of agency than is offered in exclusion-ary paradigms of subjectification. It indicates that, even if it is not realised, allmodes of identification imply a moment of distantiation which forms the basisof reflexive understanding. This signals a revised approach to the often over-stated rejection of the category of identity and consequent endorsement of apolitics of non-identity that is prevalent in certain types of feminist andpost-structural theory. The temporalised understanding of the self that the ideaof narrative captures—i.e. the self has unity but it is the dynamic unity of changethrough time—also goes some way to overcoming certain oppositions aroundwhich much thought on identity tends to revolve, notably the dualismof essential (stasis) versus constructed (change) concepts of identity and that ofauthentic experience versus ideological distortion. In sum, the idea of temporalcomplexity at the heart of narrative identity offers a way of conceptualising themediated nature of gender identity in late-capitalism and also the uneven andnon-synchronous nature of change within gender relations.

Gender and time

Understanding the various implications of a concept of time for a theory ofgender is an increasingly important concern in feminist thought. In part, theintroduction of a temporal dimension to an account of gender identity goes someway to overcoming a well-known difficulty with post-structuralist thought,namely the extent to which its critique of identity results in the dissolution of anynotion of the coherent self.

The stress on the fragmented nature of subjectivity may result in an 'essential-ism of the elements' where the connections between the multiple subjectpositions assumed by an individual remain unthought.1 The emphasis on theessential fragmentation and dispersal of subjectivity varies within post-structuralist thought: from Baudrillard's celebration of the schizoid as theparadigm of subjectivity, through the Lacanian stress on the lack that perpetuallydisrupts the illusion of symbolic unity, to Foucault's idea that identity is asocially specific phenomenon constructed through the interplay of technologies

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of domination and practices of the self. Despite these differences, the orientationof this work is towards demonstrating the constitution of a fragile subjectivitywithin contradiction, conflict and exclusion. The burden of such theories is nottowards explaining how, despite the dispersed nature of subjectivity, individualsare able to act autonomously which presumes an ability to maintain, at somelevel, a unified conception of self.

Whilst many feminists have been receptive to the post-structural critique ofthe originary subject, they have also had reservations about following the logicof the dissolution of identity to its conclusion. For some feminists, one of theproblems with the dispersion model of identity is that it deprives emancipatorytheory of any concept of subjectivity through which the experiences of mar-ginalised groups can be recovered and politicised.2 As Laclau and Mouffe put it:'analysis cannot simply remain at the moment of dispersion, given that "humanidentity" involves not merely an ensemble of dispersed positions but also formsof over-determination existing among them'.3 Another problem with the disper-sion model is that it tends to conceive the coherence of self as an imposedillusion or discursive effect. The deep-seated nature of gender forms is explainedthrough ideas of inculcation or socialisation, but these are top-heavy categorieswith over-determinist implications. Such ideas also lack an account of thehermeneutic dimension of experience, exemplified in Foucault's account ofthe disciplinary inscription of docile bodies. Determinist models do not captureadequately the discontinuities of the experience of gender. For example, how itis that, despite the compulsory nature of heterosexual norms, there seems to bea lack of correspondence between these norms and individual practices? Theyalso do not recognise sufficiently the inherent unevenness of symbolic codesevident in, say, the difference between the ideas of the ideological and thesymbolic.4

The failure of post-structural theory to conceptualise the temporal dimensionsof identity results in a bifurcated account of subjectivity as fragmented and influx or as inexorably shaped by normalising social forces. One way to under-stand the durability of gender identity without falling into such aporia is to beginto conceptualise the relations between gender identity and aspects of time. Thereare many ways in which this relation can be thought. For example, recentfeminist work on embodiment attempts to elaborate a more dialogieal notion oftemporality in order to bypass simplified theories of identity formation as aone-sided and uniform process of imposition.5 Rather than thinking of gender asa quasi-permanent structure, it should be thought of, in Butler's phrase, as 'thetemporalized regulation' of socio-symbolic norms and practices. Linear modelsof time as a series of punctuated instances are replaced by a more dialecticalunderstanding in which the constraints of social structures are reproduced, andalso partially transcended in the historical practices of agents who are orientedtowards the uncertainties of the immediate future. The individual's transcen-dence of the immediacy of the present through encounter with unforeseen eventsopens up a space of variability and potential change within gender norms. On theother hand, temporalising the concept of gender also suggests the active

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and constraining presence of the past within the present in so far as theliving-through of gender norms constantly reinscribes them upon the body.

On a macro-structural level, a concept of time is central to an analysis ofchange and diversity in gender relations, and there are several ways in which itcan be thought, as macro-changes in overarching gender regimes, as theconvergence of time and space expressed in the sedimentation of institutionalpractices, or as the intersection of different forms of time and the way in whichthese impact upon the lives of individuals.6 Here, however, the aspect oftemporality and identity that I focus on is the hermeneutic issue of the narrativeinterpretation of time as essential to a coherent sense of self. I argue that a notionof the fundamental role played by narrative in the construction and interpretationof identity suggests a way beyond the antinomies of dispersion versus unity,contingency versus fixity, that is one of the dilemmas of post-structural thought.The notion of narrative shares the post-structural emphasis on the constructednature of identity; there is nothing inevitable or fixed about the types of narrativecoherence that it is possible to construct from the flux of events. Yet, at the sametime, the centrality of narrative to a sense of self suggests that there are powerfulconstraints or limits to the ways in which identity may be changed. Unlike thepost-structural account of constraint in terms of an external determining force,the notion of narrative suggest that constraint is also self-imposed. Individualsact in certain ways because it would violate their sense of being to do otherwise.Conceptualising the narrative dimensions of identity yields a notion of thecoherence of the self which is neither determinist, on the one hand, nor idealiston the other.

Narrative and feminist theory

The focus on the narrative dimensions of identity is, of course, not new. Manycritics have commented on the constitutive role it plays in the construction ofsocial life. In Barthes' words, 'narrative is international, transhistorical, transcul-tural: it is simply there, like life itself.7 The implications of an understanding ofsocial action in terms of foundational narrative structures have been widelydiscussed in history, cultural and literary studies.8 The concept of narrative hasbeen central to the feminist critique of objectivist accounts of individualisationwhich are regarded not only as determinist, but also as tacitly reproducing amasculinist view of the world. Narrative becomes a central analytical tool forfeminism because a cluster of issues associated with gender and sexuality areregarded as particularly amenable to narration.9 However, although it is centralto a feminist analysis, a dichotomised understanding of the concept of narrativeoften emerges where it is regarded as either a mode of imposing patriarchal orderor as a repository of authentic knowledge. Micro-sociological work on personalnarratives often tends towards a problematic separatism evident in Violi's claimthat because of the exclusionary nature of symbolic forms, women are confinedto a particularist mode of self-understanding and 'the generalisation of individualsubjectivity does not take place'.10 Other feminist accounts of the role played by

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narrative in the construction of desire tend to remain at the level of structuralanalysis and hence lack a hermeneutic dimension. De Lauretis emphasises theextent to which narratives of desire are intertwined with other social practicesand extratextual codes which are non-specific to the particular form and matterof expression of the iconic sign.11 Nonetheless, there is little understanding of themechanisms of agency, of how individuals interweave these differing narrativestrands. As a result, the structuralist emphasis on the construction of desire tendsto reduce an understanding of gender identity to the dimension of sexuality.12

In sum, both structural and interpretative feminist perspectives share arepresentational conception of narrative which perpetuates the false antithesisof narrative as either 'a mode of imposing order on reality or as a way ofunleashing a healthy disorder'.13 Despite differences, representational conceptsshare the view that narrative is one mode amongst many of imposing order uponthe chaos of experience. This contrasts with Ricoeur's more substantial conceptof narrative as ontological which holds that experience has a pre-narrativestructure or a 'being-demanded-to-be-said'. Narrative has ontological statusbecause it is the privileged medium through which the inherent temporality ofexperience is expressed. As the fundamental mode through which the temporal-ity of being is experienced, narrative simultaneously gives shape to identity andis the means through which selfhood is expressed. Such a concept of narrativeidentity helps to throw new light on the opposition between essentialism andconstructivism around which work on identity often revolves.

Ricoeur on narrative identity

For Ricoeur, narrative is a universal feature of social life, it is the fundamentalmode through which the grounding of human experience in time is understood.The temporality of the human condition cannot be spoken of in direct discourseof the phenomenon, but must be mediated through the indirect discourse ofnarration. There is an inherence or mutual implication between constitutingtemporality or 'being in time' that is the condition of possibility of humanexperience and the lived experience of phenomenological time. Yet, at the sametime, these two temporal dimensions are incommensurable. Narrative attempts tobridge this incompatibility through the construction of a third time thatinterweaves fiction and history; however, its failure to do so results in themultiplication of temporal aporia.14

As the primary medium in which temporality is thought, narrative forms anirreducible dimension of both individual and social identity; it expresses both theobjective structures which predetermine the subjective operations of conscious-ness and the intentionality of subjective consciousness. Narrative structures areontological in that they are grounded in the 'pre-narrative capacity' of lifeunderstood as a 'being-demanded-to-be-said' inherent to the structure of humanaction and experience.15 Narrative interpretation is central to action in that it isonly possible to distinguish it from the biological phenomena of physicalmovement or psycho-physiological behaviour through the utilisation of the

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networks of expressions and concepts provided in natural language. Through asynthesis of the heterogeneous elements of experience, narrative plays a key rolein the endowment of human practices with meaning; it is constitutive of a'semantics of action'.16 The narrative interpretation of experience points to thesymbolic nature of human action: if human action can be narrated, it is becauseit is inherently symbolic in nature. The same movement of the arm, for example,can be understood, in different contexts, as a way of greeting, of hailing a taxi,or of casting a vote. Action is only readable because it is symbolic.17 Compre-hension of human action is not only dependent on familiarity with its symbolicmediation, but also with the temporal structures that evoke narration. Experienceis always ascribed a 'virtual narrativity' evident, for example, in psychoanalysiswhich implies that the story of a life arises from the re-configuration of untoldand repressed stories into 'effective stories which the subject can be responsiblefor and which she takes as constitutive of her personal identity'.18

Ultimately, narrative structures mediate a tension between stasis and change.Narrative imputes meaning and coherence to the flux of events but can neverachieve closure in that it must, to some degree, accommodate the emergence ofnew possibilities. Ricoeur explores the interplay of stasis and change withinidentity through the categories of idem (sameness) and ipse (selfhood). InRicoeur's view, many thinkers have failed to recognise the constitutive roleplayed by narrative in the construction of personal identity and thereby reduceit to a static, atemporal category of sameness (idem). Idem accounts of identitycannot offer a dynamic, temporalised notion of the self (ipse) as constancythrough and within change. Idem identity implies permanence in time in termsof sameness and similitude and it finds its paradigmatic expression in numericalidentity. The qualitative notion of identification corresponds to this idea of idemidentity in the sense that is based on a notion of extreme resemblance, wherecognition is recognition.19 Idem identity is not reducible to corporeal identity butobviously the acquisition of embodied identity through a process of symbolicidentification falls under the sign of idem.

The weakness of the criterion of similitude or physical continuity for anunderstanding of identity is that it cannot fully account for the question ofchange in time which may erode resemblance. Ricoeur gives the exampleof how, with distance in time, resemblance becomes suspicious as a plea foridentity in the case of the trials of war criminals.20 There is then a notion ofpermanence or continuity in time that is not reducible to the question of asubstratum of similitude or the perpetuation of the same: 'Is there a form ofpermanence in time which can be connected to the question of "who?" inasmuchas it is irreducible to any question of "what?"? Is there a form of permanencein time that is a reply to the question "Who am I?"?'.21 This more abstract notionof identity is ipseity or self-hood that necessarily invokes a notion of futurity,illustrated in the instances of the promise and friendship that imply a constancyof the self through and within change.

Identity is constituted through a fusing and overlapping of the idem and ipseidentity. Ipse announces itself as idem in so far as the question of 'who am I?'

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is overlapped by question of 'what am I?'; for example, selfhood is alwaysunderstood partially through reference to constant corporeal and psychologicalcriteria such as character and habits.22 At the same time, these two dimensionsof identity are irreducible to each other in so far as they are separated by whatRicoeur calls an 'interval of sense' opened up by the polarity of the two modelsof permanence in time.23 It is in narrative that the mediation of these twotemporal dimensions of identity is sought. Without recourse to narration, thesubject would be condemned to an antinomy. Either it would have to posit, inan idealist fashion, a subject identical to itself through a diversity of differentstates, or, it must hold a constructivist position that the identical subject isnothing more than a 'substantialist illusion whose elimination brings to light apure manifold of cognitions, emotions and volitions'.24 The narration of identitycreates a meaningful order from the variability and discontinuities of life bygrounding the self in the similitude of idem. At the same time, narrative allowsthe exploration of the potentialities of the self relatively freed from the actuali-ties of idem character evident, for example, in imaginative and philosophicalexplorations of the themes of freedom and necessity. In extreme cases, thecomplete detachment of idem from ipse can result in an apophantic apprehensionof the self that provokes narrative crisis. For example, memory of traumaticevents is often fragmented, tied to bodily experience and overwhelminglyintense. The threat that these overpowering physical memories pose to a stablesense of identity means that trauma survivors are frequently unable to constructnarratives to make sense of themselves and their experiences: the sense of selfcollapses.25

An important implication of Ricoeur's work on narrative as an irreducibleelement in the symbolic construction of identity is the extent to which it throwsinto question the opposition between essentialist and constructivist approaches toidentity. The inherent temporality of Ricoeur's concept of narrative identityre-formulates this dichotomy between fixity and contingency such that identityhas the dynamic unity of narrative configuration. This concept of dynamic unityestablishes a potentially fruitful convergence with feminist attempts tounderstand gender identity as durable but not immutable.

Beyond stasis and change

The implications of an understanding of identity in terms of ipseity for a theoryof gender may, at first sight, seem rather obscure. Ricoeur develops the conceptprimarily in the direction of its ethical ramifications in that the idea of constancythrough change, exemplified in the promise or in friendship, implies a founda-tional commitment of the self to other.26 However, the construal of identity asa dialectic of idem-ipse also has important implications for a feminist socialtheory in that it yields a notion of identity somewhere in between the self-reflexive Cartesian ego and the pure contingency of the Nietzschean subject:it mediates 'the pseudo-alternative of pure change and absolute identity'.27

The self has unity, but it is the dynamic unity of narrative which attempts to

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integrate permanence in time with its contrary, namely diversity, variability,discontinuity and instability.

A potential objection to Ricoeur's notion of the self is that the imputation ofan ontological status to narrative introduces a tacitly transcendental conceptof identity.28 Ipseity, however, is not to be understood as some transcendentalessence of self that can withdraw from empirical reality. Rather selfhood ishistorical ab initio; it does not presume a fixed essence beyond the fact of theinherent temporality of human existence. Narrative is an ontological structurebut it is not totalising. There are always aspects of human existence that escapeunification in narrative.29 Nor is narrative the sole means by which temporalityis perceived. Ricoeur acknowledges that there are other modalities throughwhich time is experienced, such as the lyrical dimensions of consciousness.30

Nonetheless, although it is neither totalising or exclusive, narrative is founda-tional to the formation of coherent identity.

This positing of narrative temporality as a foundational dimension of identityis interesting for feminist thought on gender which has become caught up in thedebate over essentialism and, as a result, has shied away from making sucharguments.31 The conflation of ontological arguments with the attempt to imputea fixed core to identity needs to be questioned if a more substantive understand-ing of the enduring aspects of identity is to be broached. Most feminists nowrecognise that the debate during the 1970s was overpolarised and that the termessentialism has become an 'exegetical cliche' almost devoid of any analyticalcontent.32 Nonetheless, there remains a general reluctance amongst social con-structionist feminists to conceptualise the coherence of the self beyond theessentially structural accounts of performative reiteration, symbolic positioningor ideological inculcation. In other words, the relational nature of identity hasnot really been elaborated beyond a formal account derived from post-structuralthought. The process through which identity receives its form and substance isunderstood through an essentially abstract understanding of meaning asthe product of a series of differences.33 An implication of this formal account ofthe relational nature of identity is that it often invokes a rather unqualified notionof contingency where there are as many possible subject positions as meaningsevident in some of the claims made in recent sociological literature on identitytransformation. An unqualified notion of the contingency of identity results in anominalism which validates the notions of plurality and instability per se,evident in the following claim that 'the overwhelming variety of subjectpositions, of possibilities for identity, in an affluent image culture no doubtcreate highly unstable identities while constantly providing new openings torestructure one's identity'.34

Feminists have challenged this nominalist account of the formation of identity,arguing that gender is not simply one of a series of possible subject positions,but one of the key symbolic distinctions through which society reproduces itself.It is difficult, if not impossible, to have a socially meaningful existence outsideof the norms of gender identity in a way that is not the case for, say, nationalor religious identities. As Butler puts it: 'if human existence is always gendered

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existence, then to stray outside of established gender is in some sense to putone's very existence into question'.35 Abstract accounts of the relational natureof identity fail to capture the depth and ineluctability of gendered significationin the construction of identity. Against the formal account of contingency offeredin post-structural thought, some feminists have attempted to construe therelational construction of identity through the concept of inter-subjectivity. Thisresults in a more socio-centric understanding of the production of meaning and,therefore, a more thorough account of the embeddedness of gender norms.However, in the work of feminists such as Chodorow, Gilligan and Benjamin,the reliance on object relations theory produces an implicitly normative notionof the relational dynamic which is regarded as a characteristic inherent tomaternal identity. The relational nature of identity is also formulated in a lessexplicitly normative fashion in the idea of a 'politics of location'. This may giverise, however, to a reification of identity in that an insistence on the embedded-ness of the self within a certain configuration of relations often imputes a rigidityand authenticity to a particular social location, failing to recognise that: 'the selfand purposes of the self are constructed and reconstructed in the context ofinternal and external relations of time and place and power that are constantlyin flux'.36

It is essential, then, for feminists to think the relational nature of identity interms that are neither normative or nominalist. Ricoeur's notion of narrative issuggestive in this respect. Identity is contingent upon a particular set of socialrelations; it is not fixed, but neither is it purely arbitrary in that some narrativeshave deep historical resonance and durability. Against notions of a free-floatingcontingency, narrative provides a way of conceptualising how identity has shapeand a relative inertness that renders it resistant to change, as Stuart Hall puts it:'some stories have a much longer structuration, a longue duree, almost ahistorical inertia. Some stories are just bigger than others. Certain social forceshave been attached to them historically, and they are likely to go on beingattached to them'.37 For Ricoeur, meaning is not just an effect of the relationalstructure of language, it is also an 'event', that is, the product of a living mediumof communication. The plurivocity of discourse is not a function of words inthemselves, but an effect of context and the creative nature of inter-subjectivecommunication.38 The notion of narrative captures this socio-centric idea ofmeaning as event by suggesting that, whilst it is open to re-configuration, themutability of identity is constrained and over-determined by culturally sanc-tioned meta-narratives that form the parameters of self-understanding. Narrativeis a manner of speaking that imposes a certain number of exclusions andrestrictive conditions that the more open concept of discourse does not necess-arily imply. The self may always be in state of re-configuration in order toincorporate the flux of experience; however, it is not completely arbitrary oropen-ended.

The entrenched nature of narratives of gender can be seen in the confusion andforms of backlash that have occurred as a response to processes of genderrestructuring over the last thirty years. In many respects, narratives expressing

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traditional gender norms are at odds with the increasing instability and com-plexity of the concrete practices of men and women. Heterosexual norms—expressed through the narrative of romantic love, marriage, reproduction andfidelity—are belied by the rise in divorce rates, the decline in childbearing,women's entry into employment. Yet the recalcitrance of these narratives isindicative of their embeddedness in institutional practices and individual dispo-sitions. The fact that certain narratives remain powerful even though they do notcorrespond to prevailing circumstances points not only to their historical embed-dedness but to their centrality in the maintenance of coherent identity. It is thefoundational nature of narrative to the expression of coherent identitythat Lyotard fails to recognise in his declaration of the obsolescence ofgrand-narratives in the era of late modernity.

Although individual lives are shaped within the parameters suggested byculturally sanctioned meta-narratives, individual identity does not simply bearthe imprint of these forces. Ricoeur's differentiation of identity into the dimen-sions of ipse and idem suggests a complex interplay between the embedded andtemporal aspects of identity which are held in tension through narrative struc-tures. The idea that there are entrenched elements to self-identity—that thecoherence of the self is grounded within what are perceived to be coredispositions (idem)—throws into question the nominalist dispersion of the selfthat marks much post-structural thought. Ricoeur's notion of narrative then alsosuggests a hermeneutic perspective upon the fixity of identity; the coherence anddurability of identity forms are not just imposed from without but also emergefrom within the individual. The temporal flux of existence motivates individualsto construct coherent notions of selfhood which may act as a powerful constrainton the ways in which the radical or unanticipated is incorporated into self-under-standing. Narratives and the psychological dispositions they inculcate canbecome so entrenched that they 'finally become recipes for structuring experi-ence itself... for not only guiding the life narrative up to the present butdirecting it into the future'.39 It is central to any understanding of the durabilityof narratives of gender that the attachment on the part of the individual to thesense of stability they impart—even if it is at the price of their subjection—istheorised.

Conversely, the idea that the temporally mediated identity (ipseity) is inter-twined with, but not reducible to, corporeal being reminds us of the incomplete-ness of understanding gender subjectivity predominantly as an issue of embodiedsexual identity. The notion of ipseity draws attention to the phenomenon, noted byRiley, of the intermittent nature of gendered self-consciousness. The temporalityof identity results in a movement in and out of gender.40 In short, a hermeneuticunderstanding of gender must attempt to map the ebb and flow of the experienceof sexual identity as it is mediated through other social roles and practices.

Ricoeur's understanding of the self as emerging from a dialectic, rather thanopposition, of stasis and change helps to unravel certain other dilemmas withinthought on identity, one of them being the dualism of authenticity versusideology. One of the claims underlying Riceour's assertion of the ontological

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status of narrative is, as we have seen, that all social action is inherentlysymbolic. All action and experience requires interpretation and it is in the act ofinterpretation that narrative acquires its centrality. The claim of the symbolicstatus of action reframes the relation between ideology and individual practiceswhich is normally conceptualised in terms of distortion or mystification. It alsosuggests that there is no sense in which a hermeneutic understanding of thenarrativised self can be understood as a retreat to an originary subjectivity. In thenext section, I will show how this problematises distinctions between ideologicaland primary narratives made in certain feminist micro-sociological work, whilstit resonates simultaneously with recent feminist theory on the ambivalentrelation between women and dominant conceptions of femininity.

Ideological and primary narratives

An ontological conception of narrative points towards the inherently symbolicnature of all action. Meaning is not inherent to action but is the product ofinterpretative strategies such as narrative. One of the implications of the claimthat action is symbolic in nature is that it throws into doubt conventional'negative' conceptions of ideology which, to some degree, are based on a notionof the illusory distortion of objective action. If action derives its significancefrom interpretation, then any distinction between ideological and other narrativeson the grounds of a separation between reality versus illusion is problematicbecause all narratives are interpretative in nature. Narrative order is neither falsein the sense that it constitutes an illusory coherence imposed upon the hetero-geneity of experience; nor does it signify authenticity in that narration alwayseffects a metaphorisation of the real.

This understanding of narrative problematises some of the assumptions ofstandpoint theory and other types of interpretative feminist sociology whichattribute an 'authentic' status to women's social experience. For example,Dorothy Smith's work on the everyday presumes a rupture in social conscious-ness between women's daily experience—'primary narratives'—and formal,impersonal modes of interpretation—'ideological narratives'—that form part ofan 'apparatus of ruling'.41 Smith explicitly rejects a simple distinction betweenideological and primary narratives, arguing that there is always an imbrication ofpre-given interpretative schemata within individual self-understanding to theextent that there is no 'one objective account of what actually happened'.42 Herimplicit reliance, however, on a Schutzian notion of a pre-social origin toconsciousness results in an over-rigid distinction in which primary narratives areseen to equate more closely than ideological narratives to the original temporalsequence of a given experience: 'Interpretations are, in principle, to be checkedagainst the original experience that the narrative "recapitulates"'.43 Ideologicalnarratives do not proceed in this fashion in that the formal encoding ofexperience for a particular end (e.g. legal) is more highly selective and imposesa 'conceptual agenda' that is not concerned with matching the raw material ofthe original experience.44

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Ricoeur's notion of the pre-interpretative or inherently symbolic nature ofexperience throws into question the idea that there can be any originary, rawmaterial of experience against which the 'deviation' of more abstract levels ofdiscourse can be checked. The inherent connectivity of narrative meaning, i.e.that meaning emerges only by placing events in temporal and spatial relation-ships with other events, questions the idea that a primary or original experiencecan be recovered.45 The construction of any narrative primary or otherwisealways involves an imaginative process of configuration that results in 'anunstable mixture of fabulation and actual experience'.46 In short, all narrativesinvolve a degree of objectification of and distantiation from given events suchthat 'there is no escape from the politics of representation'.47

If the inherently symbolic nature of experience means that there can be nonarrative of authentic experience, on the one side, then it also implies that therecan be no pure ideological narrative on the other. Ideology operating through themedium of narrative clearly has a distortive function evident in the 'sim-plification, schematization, stereotyping and ritualization' of its forms.48 How-ever, the idea that these distortions are illusory obscures the extent to whichideology can only be effective because it in some way connects to social life:'unless social life has a symbolic structure, there is no way to understandhow ... reality can become an idea or how real life can produce illusions; thesewould all be simply mystical and incomprehensible events'.49 Ideology then hasintegrative as well as dominatory effects, it reinforces social identity, bothindividual and collective, through a process of 'iconic augmentation' that drawson the pre-interpreted elements of social life and re-configures them into newsymbolic forms. For example, social integration is achieved through the rep-etition and reinforcement of the mediatory symbolic forms—narratives andchronicles—through which a given community constructs and maintains itsorigins and identity.50 Specifically, the role of ideology is to conceal anypotential tension between the claims of legitimacy made by an authority and thebelief in legitimacy on the part of its subjects through the assertion of identityin the face of the antagonistic nature of social experience.51 Ideology then takesthe form of a 'surplus value' in the sense that authority requires a 'surplus value'of belief in order to legitimate itself: 'the difference between the claim made andthe belief offered signifies the surplus value common to all structures ofpower'.52 It is in generating this surplus value that the positive and negativeaspects of ideology as integration and domination converge. The integrativeeffect becomes distortive when authority is understood as domination, whenopen-ended social relationships are frozen into rigid hierarchies, when schemati-sation and rationalisation prevail.53 However, this 'pathological' form of ideol-ogy never completely predominates; it is always offset by its underlyingintegrative function which prevents any antagonism reaching its destructive pointand renders ideology an 'open system'.

The idea of ideology as an 'open system' suggests a way of understanding therelation between women and dominant representations of femininity in termsother than those of dissimulation and mis-recognition. The main problem with

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construing the symbolic construction of gender identity as the imposition of apatriarchal ideology is that the discontinuous nature and effects of representa-tions of femininity are disregarded with the effect that a coherent, unifiedfeminine subject is posited as a substrate of subordination.54 The identificationof women with, say, conventional notions of femininity is not a purely negativeone of mis-identification but can be understood in terms of a host of otherfunctions suggested, for example, in Holloway's notion of investment.55 Ideo-logical images may momentarily stabilise meanings, allowing individuals toidentify with or against persons or situations. This is suggested in Winship'swork on young women's magazines which, she claims, articulate visual codes offemininity in such a way as to offer readers a more assertive and confident senseof independent femininity.56 The narrativising of marginal experiences, whilstessential to the establishment of submerged female identities, never takes placein isolation from pre-given ideological forms. For a narrative to be meaningfuland to acquire some degree of social authority, it must draw, to some extent, onculturally dominant discourses of truth-telling; this involves a process of auton-omization where a given narrative transcends relevance to its initial situation.57

The illocutionary force of a narrative cannot reside in a putative privilegedrelation to true life, but emerges from its partial objectification in symbolic andideological forms.58 This is not to deny the role of ideological narratives in themaintenance of oppressive social hierarchies, but it is to suggest that the relationbetween narrative self-understanding and meta-narratives of femininity is morecomplex and unstable than Smith's distinction between primary and ideologicalnarratives allows.

Negativity and subject formation

Ricoeur's argument that the function of ideology cannot be explained only asdistortion draws attention to the negative terms in which the concept isconventionally conceptualised. In his view, ideology is an example of thefoundation of society in the irreducible capacity for creativity: the socialimaginary. As a manifestation of the ontological grounding of society inimagination, the concept is shifted away from the negative connotations ac-corded it in the representationalist paradigm and invested with an integrativefunction. The propensity to conceptualise ideology primarily in the negativeterms of dissimulation points, on a more general level, to the tendency inconstructionist work to construe the process of subject formation in the primarilynegative terms of repression and exclusion. This results in an impoverishedaccount of the mechanisms of individuation and of agency. This negativeparadigm, which regards identity per se as exclusionary, leads to a depletedunderstanding of agency in terms of a counter-logic of resistance, marginalityand non-identity. However, given that exclusion is the condition of possibility ofall identities and that not all identities are oppressive, there is a need todemonstrate how a coherent sense of self is not exclusively maintained througha suppression of difference and otherness. In other words, an account of

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subjectivity must also explain how individuals potentially have the capacity torespond to alterity and conflict in modes other than denial. Ricoeur's account ofthe process of mimesis that underlies the construction of narrative identitysketches out a more substantive view of the subject's capacities which are notjust based on the exclusion and denial of difference.

Explanations of the formation of feminine identity as a process of ideologicaland symbolic inculcation illustrate the problematic nature of the negativeconstrual of the process of subject formation. Identity formation is regardedprimarily in the negative terms of exclusion, the repression of difference or theimposition of an imaginary unity. With regard to Lacanian psychoanalysis,feminists have noted the difficult implications of the overwhelmingly negativeterms in which the assumption of feminine identity is construed. The univocalnegativity that is attached to the feminine position within a phallocentric ordermakes it hard to understand how subordination is anything but an inescapablecost of adult female identity.59 Social constructionist work also tends to viewsubject formation in the primarily negative dynamic of the exclusion of differ-ence and otherness. For example, a major theme of Foucault's work, fromPsychiatry and Mental Illness through to the first volume of the History ofSexuality, has been the demonstration of how modern subjectivity is predicatedon the exclusion and demonisation of groups whose behaviour does not conformto dominant norms.

The exclusionary paradigm has been inherited into certain types of feministtheory. For example, in her work on the performative reiteration of gendernorms, Judith Butler briefly acknowledges the presence of a potentially disrup-tive temporality at the heart of the most regulatory norms. However, the notionof performativity relies predominantly on a version of the Freudian idea ofrepetition compulsion, which is essentially a reactive and, according to somecommentators, an atemporal concept.60 This emphasis on the retrospectivedimensions of time—the performative as 'a repetition, a sedimentation, acongealment of the past'—leads to an over-emphasis on the internal uniformityof gender norms.61 Reiteration becomes a static rather than temporal act wherethe reproduction of the sex-gender system involves a ceaseless re-inscription ofthe same. This notion of time as a succession of self-identical and discrete actsrenders the dominant a hermetic and self-sustaining entity which can only bedisrupted from outside. This provokes the dualisms of subjection-resistance,exclusion-inclusion that limit Butler's work. Butler's static model of dominationcannot really offer a notion of decomposition from within and excludes asubstantive account of agency. In short, subject formation is primarily associatedwith disavowal and subjection.

The predominance of accounts of subject formation in terms of a negativelogic does not preclude an understanding of agency per se, but does make itdifficult to explain the mechanisms of autonomous action in anything other thana counter-logic of resistance or displacement. Agency is imputed to the individ-ual almost by default; she is able to act autonomously by virtue of hercontradictory social location. Individuals are never situated simply upon one axis

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of subjectification and the cross-cutting identifications to which this gives risemeans that actors never replicate dominant norms in a straightforward fashion.Whilst this theory of intersticial location provides an account of the conditionsof possibility for agency, it remains primarily a structural explanation which sayslittle substantive about the distinct capabilities of an actor faced with socialcontradiction. Agency, on this account, is still conceived in primarily negativeterms as resistance, disidentification or subversion of dominant norms, ratherthan as a capacity to act in an innovative or autonomous fashion. Accounts ofthe subject formed in domination provide little explanation of the capabilitiesof the subject beyond the paradigm of identification-disidentification; the abilityto respond to difference openly, to creatively respond to contradiction and soforth may be implied, but are not explicitly theorised.

Given these difficulties with an exclusionary paradigm of subjectification,there is a need to develop a more positive or substantive account of certainaspects of subject formation in order to explain agency more thoroughly. AllisonWeir argues, for example, that in order to overcome the 'sacrificial logic' thatdominates work on identity, it is necessary to develop non-dominatory concep-tions of individual identity which emphasise 'the ability of a person to relateto ... herself and ... to others in a meaningful way, to act and react self-consciously'.62 This re-conceptualisation involves recognition of self-identity asthe capacity to sustain and reconcile multiple and often conflicting meanings.Such a view of the ongoing constitution of the self arising from meaningfulresolution of apparent contradiction generates renewed understandings of inter-subjectivity and autonomy. It also runs counter to a dominant strand in thefeminist critique of identity which stresses the acceptance of paradox andcontradiction as part of non-oppressive subjectivity and thereby tends towards afetishisation of non-identity.63

The ideas of configuration and re-configuration that lie at the heart ofRicoeur's idea of the narrative construction of identity sketch out some of themore active and autonomous dimensions of agency. Along with thinkers such asCornelius Castoriadis, Michel de Certeau and Alain Touraine, Ricoeur's workforms part of a stream in continental social theory which attempts to draw outthe implications of the implicit creativity inherent in social action.64 Foucault'slate thought on the idea of a modern ethical practice based on an 'aesthetics ofexistence'—that one should construct one's identity with the same degreeof awareness as a 'work of art'—also signals an understanding of what HansJoas has called the creativity of action.65 By emphasising the creative dimensionof action, these authors variously highlight that even the most normative formsof behaviour presuppose imaginative elements; in Ricoeur's terms, social repro-duction rests upon a dialectic of innovation and sedimentation. An understandingof the creative dimensions of action or agency need not necessarily denote acelebratory populism, evident in types of cultural studies or feminist standpointtheory.66 Action is not purely creative; even the most obviously innovativepractice presupposes an incorporation of the tendencies of the social world in theform of routine and pre-reflexive forms of behaviour suggested, for example, in

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Bourdieu's idea of habitus. Nor, however, is agency purely rational or norma-tively oriented; as Joas points out, 'action that is appropriate to the situation andconforms to norms cannot simply be deduced from norms themselves, but oftenrequires that the actor devise a new and unfamiliar path of action'.67 Creativityis needed not only in order to realise norms and values in concrete practices; theexistence of values also presupposes a creative process by which values arefashioned and transmitted.

At the heart of Ricoeur's concept of narrative identity lies an understandingof the creative potential that is an implicit aspect of autonomous action. LikeBourdieu's work on habitus, this creative potential is realised through thedialogical temporality that agency presumes. Agency is an act of temporalisationwhere the subject transcends the immediacy of the present through actions thathave an inherently anticipatory structure. The dialectic of idem-ipse denotes thehermeneutic aspects of this intertwinement of the temporal dimensions of pastand future; it is only because individuals are turned towards the future that theycan possess and re-possess a past. The notion of repeating the past is inseparablefrom the existential projection of ourselves towards our possibilities. Theretrospective character of narration is closely linked to the prospective horizonof the future and agency arises in part from the tension between the horizon ofexpectation and the space of experience.68

The process of active configuration inherent to the construction of narrativeself-hood offers a more detailed account of how this dialectic between 'sedimen-tation and innovation' is managed by the individual agent. Central to thenarrative interpretation of the lifeworld is a threefold process of understandingand appropriation defined as pre-understanding, configuration and re-configuration. Mimesisi refers to the way in which a meaningful act of narrationor emplotment is dependent upon a pre-understanding of the world of action andits meaningful structures: 'to imitate or represent action is first to preunderstandwhat human acting is, in its semantics, its symbolic system, its temporality'. 69

There are three dimensions to this pre-understanding. First, a structural under-standing which denotes the ability to distinguish meaningful human action fromphysical movement or unreflexive behaviour. Second, the recognition andunderstanding of the symbolic nature of human action, for example to under-stand a ritual act is to be able to situate it within a cultic system and ultimatelywithin the whole set of conventions, beliefs, and institutions that make up thesymbolic framework of a culture.70 Finally the act of narration is dependent ona pre-understanding of the temporal aspects of human action, that is the compleximbrication of the three extases—past, present and future—that constitute thephenomenological experience of time.

From the pre-understanding of the world of action emerges the second levelof mimesis (mimesis2) which involves the dynamic character of the configuringoperation of narrative. Narrative and its chief strategy of emplotment does notinvolve the passive imitation of action, but rather its active mediation. Thedynamic element lies in what Ricoeur calls the 'grasping together' that isconstitutive of the configurational act in which narrative imposes order upon the

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heterogeneous fabric of events: 'it [narrative] draws from this manifold of eventsthe unity of one temporal whole'.71 The configurational arrangement transformsthe succession of events into one meaningful whole which is the correlate of theact of assembling the events together and makes the story followable. It imposesa sense of an ending and may establish an alternative sense of temporality in thatthe repetition of a story, governed as a whole by its way of ending, constitutesan alternative to the representation of time as flowing from the past towardthe future. The construing of narrative in terms of this dynamic act ofconfiguration reveals how mimesis is not simply an act of the imitativereproductive imagination but of the productive imagination.72

The final level of mimesis (mimesiss) involves the intersection of the world ofthe text and the world of the reader, or 'the intersection ... of the worldconfigured by the poem and the world wherein real action occurs and unfolds itsspecific temporality'.73 Whilst narrative structure over-determines the encounterbetween text and reader, the act of reading actualises its capacity to be followed.This blurring of the inside-outside boundaries of the text, or fusion of horizons,rests upon the double or split referentiality of the text. Ricoeur derives thisnotion from his work on metaphor where he argues that if the sentence is takenas the basic unit of discourse, it is possible to see how language refers beyonditself: 'language is for itself the order of the Same. The world is its Other. Theattestation of this otherness arises from language's reflexivity with regard toitself, whereby it knows itself as being in being in order to bear on being'.74 Thisidea of 'ontological attestation' runs contrary to structuralist accounts whichreduce meaning to direct referentiality implied in the correlation betweensignifier and signified. The force of metaphor, for example, resides not in itsdirect referentiality, but in the degree to which it creates new meanings orprojects a potential, alternative horizon, through its reconfiguration of the world:'Metaphorical reference ... consists in the fact that the effacement of descriptivereference ... is revealed to be ... the negative condition for freeing a moreradical power of reference to those aspects of our being-in-the-world that cannotbe talked about directly'.75 Narrative is also metaphorical in that it projects aworld in front of itself through its re-configuration of the world in its temporaldimension.

By disaggregating the idea of mimetic interpretation into the three levels ofprefiguration, configuration and re-configuration, Ricoeur complements struc-turalist notions of how subjects are positioned by and identify with narrativewith a more active sense of how individuals actively interpret and re-deploynarrative structures to make sense of their lives. Of particular significance is theidea that the process of reconfiguration is fully actualised in the intersection ofthe projected world of the text with the world of the reader. Here, interpretationrevolves not only around understanding the direct matter of a text (first orderreference), but also around the subject's ability to engage with the alternativevision of the world that the text projects 'in front of itself (second orderreference): 'What must be interpreted is a proposed world which I could inhabitand wherein I could project one of my ownmost possibilities. That is what I call

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the world of the text, the world proper to this unique text'.76 The interpretationof the proposed world that stands in front of the text has implications for thesubjectivity of the reader who, in order to understand the text, must not projectthe self on to the text but must give themselves up to the text, they must'unrealise' themselves in order to appropriate the text: 'As reader, I find myselfonly by losing myself. Reading introduces me into the imaginative variations ofthe ego'.77 This disappropriation of the self is not only the condition ofpossibility of understanding, but also shows how understanding involves morethan a simple act of identification but also always involves a distantiation whichforms the potential for critique.78

This idea of the simultaneity of the moments of identification and distantiationprovides an interesting counter to exclusionary accounts of subject formationwhich often result in a separation of the moments of identification and distanti-ation. In principle, constructionist accounts recognise that the process ofidentification central to the establishment of subjectivity within dominant normsis never straightforward. However, despite this, a tacit separation emerges, forexample in the work of Judith Butler, where identification becomes the mode ofrecognition of the 'coherent subject' and dis-identification the mode of recogni-tion of the excluded non-subject. In other words, the moments of identificationand reflexivity become separated and this engenders a further opposition be-tween a politics of identity which cannot 'afford to acknowledge the exclusionsupon which it is dependent' and a politics of resignification which risks the'incoherence of identity' through an 'unravelling of the symbolic'.79 Ultimately,this diremption echoes the problematic distinction between ideological andauthentic experience. By separating the two moments, Butler overestimates theease with which normative gender positions are assumed.80 Conformity to normscannot simply be inferred from the existence of norms themselves. It may oftenbe the case that the actor had to devise a new and unfamiliar path of action. Itis this capacity for independent and even unexpected action inherent to the mostmundane and normatively oriented behaviour that Ricoeur's notion of theinevitable grounding of the moment of mimetic identification in distantiationinvokes. Even when it is not realised in consciousness, the moment of distanti-ation is inherent to the process through which individuals invest in hegemonicmeanings, rendering it constitutively unstable. This is illustrated in Faye Gins-burg's work on women anti-abortionists which shows how the adoption oftraditional modes of feminine behaviour is often accompanied by high levelsof critical self-awareness.81

The separation of the moments of identification and distantiation also resultsin an implicit valorisation of non-identity evident in Butler's polarisation of apolitics of identity around a 'dangerous insistence' on coherent identity versusa more sophisticated process of symbolic resignification. This 'false antithesis'between identification and dis-identification does not adequately explain theinternal inconsistencies within the social construction of gender identity, nordoes the idea of dis-identification on its own provide sufficient grounds forradical political practices, as Nancy Fraser notes: 'Butler's approach does not

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give us all we need. Its internal normative resources—reification of performativ-ity is bad, dereification is good—are far too meager for feminist purposes'.82

Albeit inadvertently, Butler seems to assert the inherent subversiveness of the actof symbolic re-signification per se and endorses a politics of non-identity or theinchoate. The valorisation of non-identity is also evident in a suspicion of whatare regarded as the abstract concepts of autonomy and reflexivity.83 For Butler,the capacity for abstraction is regarded as problematic because it is based on aseparation of the subject from its cultural predicates.84 Like the dismissal of thecategory of identity, the rejection of any form of abstract thought arises from aunivocal conception of subject formation as always exclusionary. It is, however,necessary to question the validity of such a rejection because of the politicalimpasse in which it leaves feminist thought.85. This issue cannot be consideredhere. Suffice to note that Ricoeur's notion of the simultaneity of interpretationand critique, of mimetic identification and distantiation, provides a way beyondthese antinomies and sketches out the dimensions of a revised understanding ofnotions of autonomy and reflexivity. The dialogical temporality of narrativeidentity, poised between stasis {idem) and change (ipse), suggests that theidentical and non-identical are inseparable elements in any subject positionrather than discrete characteristics of a given social position.

Conclusion

In sum, there is a non-synchronicity and tension within gender identity which isunderplayed in the feminist tendency to consider gender primarily through issuesof sexuality. The idea of narrative identity signals the complex nature of socialtime which revolves around multiple levels of temporality—tempo, timing, therelation to past, present and future—that are simultaneously lived but notreconcilable. It is the extent to which these multiple temporalities are configuredinto a coherent pattern that is also suggestive of a more substantive accountof agency. In particular, the dynamic notion of agency inherent to the idea ofnarrative identity bypasses the aporia where the coherence of the self is regardedas either ideological illusion or as an expression of authenticity. If the self isunderstood as an unstable and indissociable mix of fabulation and experience,then this, in turn, suggests a revised understanding of the relation betweenideology and experience as one not simply of distortion but also of integration.With regard to the construction of gender identity, this indicates an ambivalentand open relation between women and hegemonic images of femininity whichcannot be understood in terms of accommodation or resistance. Hence, Ricoeur'sunderstanding of narrative as the medium in which the aporia of temporality aremediated, but never reconciled, renders it a more suggestive model of identityfor feminist theory than some of the temporally thin conceptions inherited frompost-structural thought. By drawing attention to the irreconcilable levels oftemporal experience, narrative provides a framework in which to examine thehermeneutic dimensions of the breakdown of traditional gender relations uponthe self. If the temporality of experience is not exclusively linear, additive or

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iterative, then change is experienced not as rupture or smooth progression but inan uneven and negotiated way, suggested in Beck's notion of 'biographies intransition' where the ways in which one lives becomes the biographical solutionof systemic contradictions.86

Notes and references1. E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics

(London: Verso, 1985), p. 116.2. S. Lovibond, 'Feminism and postmodernism', New Left Review, 178 (1989), pp. 5-28, pp. 28-9.3. Laclau and Mouffe, op. cit., Ref. 1, p. 1174. S. Benhabib, 'Subjectivity, historiography and politics', in S. Benhabib et al. (Eds.), Feminist Contentions:

A Philosophical Exchange (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 109-110.5. See, for example, J. Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London: Routledge,

1993); D. Cornell, Transformations: Recollective Imagination and Sexual Difference (London: Routledge,1993); S. Walby, Gender Transformations (London: Routledge, 1997).

6. Walby, ibid., pp. 8-12.7. R. Barthes, 'Introduction to the structural analysis of narrative', in S. Sontag (Ed.), Barthes: Selected

Writings (Oxford: Fontana, 1982), pp. 251-2.8. See the special issue on narrative of Critical Inquiry, 7 (1980).9. K. Plummer, Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds (London: Routledge, 1995).

10. P. Violi, 'Gender, subjectivity and language', in G. Bock and S. James (Eds.) Beyond Equality andDifference: Citizenship, Feminists Politics and Female Subjectivity (London, Routledge: 1992), p. 172.

11. T. de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (London: Macmillan, 1984).12. R. Hennessy, Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse (London: Routledge, 1992).13. W. Mitchell, 'Editor's note: on narrative'. Critical Inquiry, 7 (1980), pp. 1-4, p. 3.14. Attempts to express the lived experience of time in narrative results in the multiplications of aporias. There

are three particular aporia that the narrative form reveals. First, the aporia resulting from the 'mutualoccultation of phenomenological and cosmological time', that is the incompatibility between being in timeand the lived experience of time. Second, the aporia between totality and temporalisation expressed in thedisjunction between the three 'ecstases' of time: future, past and present. Narrative tries to totalise thisrelation through such devices as causality and closure, but, in Ricoeur's view, there is always an uneasytension between the 'horizon of expectation, retrieval of past heritages and occurrence of untimely present'(p. 250). This tension is manifest, for example, in the Utopian imagination, which places future expecta-tions in a critical relation with the present. Utopia introduces alterity into the present which unsettles thecertainty of the latter. Finally, there is the aporia of the 'inscrutability of time' and the limits of narrative.This refers to the way in which the ultimate unknowability of time pushes narrative to its limit. See P.Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. III (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 244-74.

15. P. Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, Vol. II (London: Northwestern University Press,1991), p. 19.

16. P. Ricoeur, 'Life: a story in search of a narrator', in M. Valdes (Ed.), A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection andImagination (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991) p. 433.

17. Ricoeur, ibid., p. 434.18. Ricoeur, ibid., p. 435.19. P. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 116.20. P. Ricoeur, 'Self as Ipse', in B. Johnson (Ed.), Freedom and Interpretation: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures,

1992 (London: Basic Books, 1993), pp. 104-5.21. Ricoeur, op. cit., Ref. 19, p. 118.22. Ricoeur, ibid., p. 128.23. Ricoeur, ibid., p. 124.24. Ricoeur, op. cit., Ref. 14, p. 246.25. S. Brison, 'Outliving oneself: trauma, memory and personal identity', in D. Meyers (Ed.), Feminists

Rethink the Self (Oxford: Westview Press, 1997).26. Ricoeur, op. cit., Ref. 19, pp. 169-202.27. Ricoeur, op. cit., Ref. 16, p. 437.28. For example, P. Anderson, 'Having it both ways: Ricoeur's hermeneutics of the self, Oxford Literary

Review, 15 (1993), pp. 227-52.

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29. P. Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction: Conversations with Francois Azouvi and Marc de Launay(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), p. 88.

30. Ricoeur, ibid., p. 93.31. An exception is Rosi Braidotti's work on a 'politics of ontological difference' based on a re-formulated

notion of essentialism as a historical category. R. Braidotti, 'The politics of ontological difference', in T.Brennan (Ed.), Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1989).

32. T.Brennan (Ed.), Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 6-9.33. P. Dews, The Limits of Disenchantment: Essays on Contemporary European Philosophy (London: Verso,

1995), pp. 4-5.34. D. Kellner, 'Popular culture and the construction of postmodern identities', in S. Lash and J. Friedman

(Eds.), Modernity and Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 174.35. J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 132.36. M. Somers and G. Gibson, 'Reclaiming the epistemological "other": narrative and the social constitution

of identity', in C. Calhoun (Ed.), Social Theory and the Politics of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994),p. 65.

37. S. Hall, 'Interview on culture and power', Radical Philosophy, 86 (1997), pp. 24-41, p. 32.38. P. Ricoeur, 'Structure, word, event', in P. Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations (Evanston, IL:

Northwestern University Press, 1974).39. J. Bruner, 'Life as narrative'. Social Research, 54 (1987), pp. 11-32, p. 31.40. D. Riley, 'Am I that Name?' Feminism and the Category of Woman in History (London: Macmillan, 1988),

pp. 96-7.41. D. Smith, The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge (Boston, MA:

Northeastern University Press, 1990), p. 142.42. Smith, ibid., p. 157.43. Smith, ibid., p. 159.44. Smith, ibid., p. 160.45. Somers and Gibson, op. cit., Ref. 36, p. 59.46. Ricoeur, op. cit., Ref. 19, p. 162.47. S. Hall, 'What is this "black" in black popular culture?', in D. Morely and K.H. Chen (Eds.), Stuart Hall:

Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 473.48. Ricoeur, op. cit., Ref. 15, p. 182.49. P. Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 8.50. Ricoeur, op. cit., Ref. 15, p. 196.51. Ricoeur, op. cit., Ref. 49. pp. 260-1.52. Ricoeur, ibid., p. 14.53. Ricoeur, ibid., pp. 260-266.54. P. Adams, 'A note on the distinction between sexual division and sexual differences', in P. Adams and

E. Cowie (Eds.), The Woman in Question (London: Verso, 1990), p. 107.55. W. Holloway, 'Gender difference and the production of subjectivity', in J. Henriques et al. (Eds.),

Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity (London: Methuen, 1984).56. J.Winship, 'A girl needs to get "street-wise", Feminist Review, 21 (1985), pp. 25-46.57. Ricoeur, op. cit., Ref. 15, pp. 153-4.58. L. Gilmore, Autobiographies: A Feminist Theory of Women's Self Representation (London: Cornell

University Press, 1994), pp. 23-4.59. See L. McNay, Reconfiguring Gender and Agency (Cambridge: Polity Press, forthcoming), ch. 3.60. R. Smith, 'The death drive does not think', Common Knowledge, 5 (1996), pp. 59-75.61. Butler, op. cit., Ref. 5, p. 244.62. A. Weir, Sacrificial Logics: Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity (London: Routledge, 1996),

p. 185.63. E.g., B. Honig, 'Difference, dilemmas and the politics of home', in S. Benhabib (Ed.), Democracy and

Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996);I. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

64. In Anglophone sociology, the central idea of Giddens's theory of structuration, that every act ofreproduction is an act of production, also highlights a more substantive view of agency. However, apartfrom highlighting the 'knowledgeability of actors', Giddens's work does not really consider the basis ofthis knowledgeability within the dynamics of subject formation.

65. H. Joas, The Creativity of Action (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996).66. L. McNay, 'Michel de Certeau and the ambivalent everyday', Social Semiotics, 6 (1996), pp. 61-81, p. 66.67. Joas, op. cit., Ref. 65, p. 233.68. Ricoeur, op. cit., Ref. 14, p. 258.

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69. P. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. I (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 64.70. Ricoeur, ibid., p. 58.71. Ricoeur, ibid., p. 66.72. Ricoeur, ibid., pp. 67-8.73. Ricoeur, ibid., p. 71.74. Ricoeur, ibid., p. 78.75. Ricoeur, ibid., p. 80.76. P. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 142.77. Ricoeur, ibid., p. 144.78. Ricoeur, ibid., pp. 94-5.79. Butler, op. c i t . , Ref. 5, pp. 113-6.80. J. Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 90-1.81. F. Ginsburg, 'Dissonance and harmony: the symbolic function of abortion in activists' life stories', in

J.W. Barbre/Personal Narratives Group (Eds.), Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and PersonalNarratives (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989).

82. N. Fraser, 'False antitheses: pragmatism, feminism, and the linguistic turn', in S. Benhabib et al. (Eds.),Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 162.

83. This hostility to abstraction originates with the feminist critique of patriarchal thought and the implicitlymasculinist nature of its supposedly objective categories. Within relational feminism, abstraction, or theperspective of the general other, is regarded as based on a denial of the connection to the other, on aderogation of the embodied, feminine perspective of the concrete other. Habermasian feminists attempt toincorporate the perspective of the concrete other into the possibility of a distantiated critique, but thiscritique is grounded in rather problematic arguments about the putative universality of communicativestructures.

84. A. Weir, 'Toward a model of self-identity: Habermas and Kristeva', in J. Meehan (Ed.), Feminists ReadHabermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 267.

85. see T. Hill, 'The importance of autonomy', in E. Kittay and D. Meyers (Eds.), Women and Moral Theory(Towtowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1987); L. McNay, Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender andthe Self (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 102-5.

86. U. Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992), p. 137.

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