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Reflective Practice

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Writing With Invisible Ink: Narrative, confessionalism and reflective practice

Alan Bleakley

Online publication date: 18 August 2010

To cite this Article Bleakley, Alan(2000) 'Writing With Invisible Ink: Narrative, confessionalism and reflective practice',

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Re ective Practice, Vol. 1, N o. 1, 2000

W riting W ith Invisible Ink: narrative, confessionalism and re ective practice

A LAN B LEA KLEY
Cornwall Institute of Professional Studies (in partnership with the U niversity of Plym outh, U K ), C ornwall College, Penhaligon Building, P ool, Redruth, Cornwall TR15 3RD, U K ; e-m ail: a.bleakley@cornwall.ac.uk

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Re ection on practice through the m edium of creative writing offers a narrative m ode challenging instrum ental approaches to re ection as logico-scienti c knowing. However, such creative writing m ay be dom inated by a discourse of personalistic hum anism and the personal confessional genre, with attendant internal contradictions, such as unre exive accounts of personal `discovery and `growth . A counterargum ent is offered drawing on social constructivism . Subjectivities supposedly revealed by personal confessional m odes of writing m ay be constructed by the genre, as confessional practices producing confessors. Alternative paths to writing critically re exive praxis are suggested; and aesthetic, erotic and ethical issues arising out of a critique of personal confessional writing are discussed. W riting is seen as homage to language itself, where language offers the very am biguity, uniqueness and value con ict that Donald Scho n characterises as the `indeterm inate zones of practice that we m ust inhabit effectively in establishing practical artistry as the heart of re ective practice.
AB STRA CT

It is not that we are connoisseurs of chaos, but that we are surrounded by it, and equipped for coexistence with it only by our ctive powers. (Frank Kerm ode)

Introduction Re ection on practice through the m edium of writing is now a rm ly established praxis in education (Bolton, 19 99 ). Further, re ective practice is shifted to a critical and personal `re exivity (U sher & Edwards, 19 94 ) where both the form of writing and the status of the author are interrogated and problem atised. R e exive practice m ay be encouraged through what is loosely term ed `creative writing, based on a privile ging of narrativ e over m ore instrum ental form s of knowing that Bruner (1986 ) describes as `paradigm atic or `logico-scienti c . `N arrative is em ployed here as social practices that `tell a story (Bal, 19 97 ) or are them selves storied. N arratives also produce knowledge and identities (Currie, 19 98; G ibson, 199 6). As Bruner
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(199 6, p. 126 ) points out, while scienti c knowing offers a contrast to narrative intelligence, and m ay stereotype narrative as m ere story or ction, `The process of science m aking is narrative . Through W ittgenstein s notion of differing `language gam es , Lyotard (1984 ) also distinguishes between narrative and scienti c m odes of knowledge, where scienti c logic relies on privileging the language gam e of denotation, to the exclusion of other discourses. Narrativ e knowing is stereotyped as unscienti c and underdeveloped, and as not offering a legitim ate basis to inquiry. For Lyotard, the postm odern m om ent is characterised as a crisis of such legitim acy, in which a challenge is m ounted to the dom inant m etanarratives of rationalism that characterise scienti c language gam es: explanatory closure and certainty. In a postm odern clim ate, local narratives, or `little stories , proliferate, as a return to a kind of tribal storying, accounting for the explosion of interest in local or ethnic identities (Blake et al., 19 98 ). To `narrate (from the Latin na rrare, `to know ) is then to give an account in story form , even where content m ay be `factual . N arrative knowing is an aesthetic apprehension offered through a variety of genres and their adm ixtures: social-realist, dirty-realist, surrealist, m agical-realist, epic, tragic, com ic, lyric, tragi-com ic, confessional, biographical, autobiographical, psychobiographical, detective, soap, erotic, rom antic, fantastic, fem inist, heroic, picaresque, historical, travel, m acabre, postm odernist, hypertextual, and so forth. These varying genres provide a background against which practices m ay be articulated and understood, or re ected upon. In writing as re ective and re exive practice, and as narrative inquiry, practice identities can be seen to be socially constructed by various privile ged language gam es, in ected through differing genres. W here, however, are the m odels of creative writing for practitioners who enter the educational culture? Perhaps in uenced by the arid and overdeterm ined stylistic conventions of the Publication Manual of the Am erican Psychological Association now in its 4th edition (199 4) and 368 pages long endorsing an em pirical tradition and an objective reporting (Zeller & Farm er, 199 9), m uch academ ic writing in education can be said to lack body and im age: vitality , m ovem ent, sensuality, sinuousness, uidity, character, presence, im m ediacy, im pact, and m etaphorical depth. Caught within a set of conventions, such writing tends to be conservative, resisting innovation. This is not sim ply because academ ic writing deals with ideas, and so tends to be abstract, for ideas can prowl like an anim al, bite back, die on you, grab your attention, or walk away. Ideas can be sensual, em otional and im aginative. G ood theoretical writing should em body ideas and strive for style. Further, if re ective practice can operate not through writing but as writing (Bolton, 19 99 ), then the kinds of writing em ployed will constitute the kinds of re ection enacted. Flat, literal, instrum ental and technical-rational writing will produce sim ilar styles of re ection and re ective subjectivities. A cadem ic writing that follows quasi-scienti c conventions can be seen to privile ge the social-realist genre in its tendency to objectively describe and report through a naive realist worldview. Practice identities are then constructed in this social-realist m ould. However, re ection on practice can be m ediated through other, `creative

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form s of writing or literary genres. Paradoxically, where writing as re exive practice turns to exam ine subjectivities and identities, the privile ged genre appears to be personal confessional, with its introspective gaze, and anecdotal, value-laden expression. This genre of writing is identi ed with `confessional practices (U sher et al., 199 7) that m ay be seen to constitute a generic identity: practitioner as confessor. Bolton (19 99 , p. 19 3) claim s that `W riting as a re exive practitioner, a m arriag e of the accepted praxis of re ective practice and the craft of creative writing, can enable dynam ic learning from practice . Such `dynam ic learning is seen to involve cognitive, intuitive and affective dim ensions: understanding, self-insight, and release of stress. It also facilitates interpersonal learning through sharing of writing practices to `support the building of team work . Moreover, the kind of writing that best produces dynam ic learning is `creative , rather than technical, `akin to that used by the novelist, poet or playwright (Bolton, 199 9, p. 19 5). Such expressive `Artistic (creative) writing is argued to be m ore powerful than descriptive or functional writing. First, it turns the fam ilar into the strange, problem atising the habitual, and challenging and subverting naturalised assum ptions. Second, it offers a way of accessing tacit knowledge, which, as Scho n (1987 ) argues, is the knowledge m otor that drives successful re ection-in-action. A nd third, it deliberately offers a range of expression excluded by m ore technical m odes of writing. Further, writing is valued over speech, where it is seen to be not lim ited by the spontaneity and im m ediacy of expression and then presents both a m ore com plex option for exploration of ideas and feelings, and a safer option, through which privacy is valued. W hile supporting both the valuing of writing over speaking as a m edium for re ection upon practice, and the em phasis upon form s of writing that are explicitly aesthetic and `explorative and expressive (Bolton, 19 99 , p. 19 4), there are problem s with the larger perspective in which Bolton em beds these two approaches. Her argum ent is essentially hum anistic and personalistic that writing as practice re ection is personally therapeutic, for `Asserting yourself (Bolton, 199 9, p. 19 5), and for personal growth as well as professional expertise: `A practitioner cannot support another in growing if they are not growing them selves (Bolton, 199 9, p. 19 6). Here, Bolton does not apply a re exivity, where the hum anistic bias in such statem ents is not critically interrogated. `Growth and `developm ent are fram ed in idealistic, optim istic term s, forgetting that tum ours grow, econom ies in ate, obesity is growth, and populations grow beyond the capacity of their resources. Hillm an (199 5, p. 45), in a stringent attack on notions of personal growth, notes that `growth seem s the proof of power taking charge of your life, em powered . G rowth is usually taken to m ean expansion, differentiation, progress, synthesis, m aturation (growing up), or becom ing creative. Yet it can also be viewed as a deepening (growing down), intensi cation, shedding, repetition, or em ptying. Further, Bolton stresses that writing as re ective practice should be facilitated to offer conditions of support and safety for free expression of practitioners as authors. This view is characteristic of the counselling culture s largely unacknowledged wholesale introjection of a literal reading of M aslow s `hierarchy of needs , which claim s that safety factors m ust be satis ed before `high er needs such as autonom y and creative expression can em erge. Again, the discourse can be seen to discipline,

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producing a governm entality through which, paradoxically, a strong set of rules obtains to ensure `autonom y . One prim ary regulatory practice is to create a clim ate of trust and safety in which confessions can be m ade and catharsis enhanced. Foucault provides a counter argum ent, em ploying N ietzsche s view that valuable praxis m ust also be `dangerous , where he im plies a m odel for re exive practice based on the Graeco-Rom an tradition of parrhesia or `truth telling (Flynn, 19 94 ). The parrhesiast purposefully seeks to challenge habitual patterns of thought and action especially in situations of `danger , as in pointing out the unworthiness of established or norm ative practices that are unethical, hypocritical, unre exive, congealing, or sloppy. The typical genre of writing that is (again, unre exively) em ployed or invoked in such a `personal developm ent m ode of re ective practice inquiry is the personal confessional (Foucault, 19 81 ). Such confessional writing, it is claim ed, `enables us to com e to know ourselves (Holly, 198 9). It is revelatory. A n alternative view, the contem porary parrhesiast m ight claim , is that such writing disciplines us. As previously noted, the very form of confessional writing we em ploy to apparently free ourselves from subjection to a lack of re ection com es to produce the objects of its inquiry as confessing subjects, thus form ulating a new layer of unre exiveness and subjection. Such writing is then not liberating or em powering, but rather offers a paradoxical discipline, as a technology of the self in which, as a practice of liberation, there are certain things that m ay be said and those that m ay not be said. G rowth becom es subjection to psychological rules. Personal growth is paradoxically aligned with capitalist econom ics, in which `experience is transparently `owned and `expressed rather than interrogated as a construct of hum anistic psychology and its technology of counselling (U sher & Edwards, 19 94 ). Ironically, participants in the hum an potential m ovem ent who cham pion confessional writing as em ancipatory nd them selves aligned with the very system s of econom ic appropriation of education they otherwise criticise as oppressive. R ecent critiques of hum anistic educational practices (Edwards, 19 97 ; U sher & Edwards, 19 94 ; U sher et al., 19 97 ) recognise a failure in such practices to interrogate their epistem ological underpinnings. Further, such practices characteristically do not note the potential narcissism in psychological and therapeutic introspection (Hillm an, 198 9; Lasch, 19 79 ), and the subsequent m arginalising of cultural and historical processes in privile ging personal developm ent (Bleakley, 199 6). M ost im portantly, cultivation of the personal confessional genre at the expense of other possibilities of expression in writing m ay fail writing itself. There is a tradition of critique in poststructuralism and deconstructionism , developed from Nietzsche, noting deep aws and contradictions in essentialist hum anistic perspectives that posit authentic selves, prom pting us to again reconsider the status of subjects, and to focus on writing itself as one of the m eans by which subjectivities are produced rather than m erely described, including the contem porary (and under-theorised) m edium of e-m ail com m unication (Derrida, 199 6). From an anti-hum anist perspective, writing m ay be seen as a m eans of expressing that desire generated from the absence of a centre of ontology (Lacan, 197 9; Zizek, 19 99 ), rather than the cultivation of a prom inent or `authentic presence.

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Writing with Invisible Ink Slippage : from professional practices to confessional practices

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The current interest in narrative ways of knowing and inquiry (as opposed to the scienti c m ode), as underpinning education practices and offering a prim ary m eans of re ective practice as writing, is then to be applauded (Bruner, 198 6, 19 96 ; Hatch & W isniewski, 1995; Kelly et al., 199 8). However, a fundam ental objection can be raised concerning the current dom inant taxis of such approaches. This is the valorising of the personal therapeutic effect of such writing, which privile ges the personal confessional m ode at the expense of other genres, and further, locates the confessional within a hum anistic epistem ology. This article challenges the dom inant hum anistic m odel, presenting an argum ent that offers hom age to language itself, acknowledging a debt to be repaid. The freely given gift of language dem ands at least the respect that we do not appropriate it, repeating the Enlightenm ent m istake of treating language both as a transparent m edium for explanation and closure, and for the naive and literal description of phenom ena rather than their production and im agination. A s Barthes (19 77 , p. 143 ) suggests: `it is language which speaks, not the author , while our culture is `tyrannically centred on the author . Lyotard (1991; in Peters, 19 95 , p. xxv) em ploys the term `the inhum an (not, it m ust be noted, the `inhum ane ) for a philosophy that is not rooted in personalism , but in language itself: `Hum anity is not the user of language, nor even its guardian , for language itself constitutes subjectivities in its perform ative usage. W hat is inhum ane or oppressive is the hum anist view of the ownership of subjectivity and of language, subscribing to a capitalist, rather than a libidinal, econom y. Lyotard (199 1) speaks of the `penetration of capitalism into language . R ather, we can again entertain the notion that the various discourses of writing produce the objects of their inquiry prim arily, writing about the self produces a range of subjectivities and does not reveal som e essential `truth of selfhood which we `develop or into which we `grow . Can we then have a narrativ e writing as re ective practice without a totalising `subject or authorial ownership? This would constitute an approach that appreciates the value especially of written language s inherent indeterm inacy, and thus resists or subverts notions of closure, as explanation, in re ective practice. W hile Scho n (19 87 ) him self adopts a pragm atic hum anism derived from Dewey, he is at pains to point out that re ective practice arises from inhabiting indeterm inate zones of practice, speci cally am biguity, uniqueness and value con ict. Scho n also rem inds us that our response to this should be to resist and subvert technical-rational problem solving, to adopt a problem -setting approach that is fundam entally aesthetic, as a practical artistry. Another way of fram ing this paradigm shift from the technical-rational to practice as artistry, or from the scienti c-rational to narrative or `storying accounts of practice, is to im agine that such a shift tropes the deep-seated literalism and concretism of educational practice that is the legacy of education s long-standing affair with post-Enlightenm ent positivism . The latter has of course offered educational studies a veneer of scienti c respectability, now eroded through qualitative approaches to the anatom y of re ective practice. Thus, education journals now publish articles

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that, albeit `rigorously , m ay, for exam ple, see m etaphor as a tool for evaluation (K em p, 19 99 ), or use alchem ical m odels and im agery as a m etaphorical background against which to better understand curriculum (Arm strong, 199 8), thus troping the literal. The personal confessional style is often invoked as transparent or `natural , or is taken literally, avoiding historical contextualisation or relativisation, through, for exam ple, the use of journals and portfolios as vehicles for re ection upon practice (Bain et al., 199 9; W insor et al., 19 99 ). This unre exive approach dem onstrates the pervasiveness of the genre (subject itself to the dom inant discourse of hum anistic personalism ). Through these invocations, the personal confessional narrativ e (as a speci c variant of autobiography) is offered as a revelation of an individual s interiority, usually centred on em otional life. Again, a constructivist view would see such descriptions of interiority as products of the genre itself, where identities are constructed through confessional m odes, rather than confessional m odes revealing identities. Foucault (1981 , 19 87 , 198 8) describes such confessional m odes as historically referenced `technologies of the self: ways of constructing and regulating the subject through self-surveillance within a network of power/ knowledge and truth/subjectivication effects. R eligious confession offers an obvious exam ple of a technology of conduct in which the person is subject to a variety of rules of behaviour and experience constituting a subjectivity, with attendant socially constructed deep em otional states such as guilt and pleasure. Sim ilarly , secular hum anistic confession (the core of pastoral care in education, and perhaps the norm ative product of the re ective journal), with its rules of self-regulation, offers a m ode of constructing identity within a speci c discourse of self-surveillance. N ussbaum (198 9) indicates som e lim its and supplem ents to Foucault s analysis, where Foucault does not consider that technologies of the self also produce speci c gender and class identities. The identity-form ing powers of secular confessions such as counselling and guidance practices m ay run deep. Thus, in educational settings, `pastoral power (Edwards, 199 7) and `confessional practices (U sher et al., 199 7) are now established discourses. Such `support activities are often allied with initiatives such as `widening participation and `retention strategies in further and higher education. W hile these are well-m eaning in principle, arising from a dem ocratic perspective, they lead for exam ple to `underprivileged students being identi ed as `other to `privilege d students, and then being positioned and constructed in a particular m anner. In this identity production the students are given a `class identity, and situated accordingly exactly the opposite of the explicit wishes of the initiatives. An Archaeology of Personal C onfessional Practices Vernant (199 1) discrim inates between three m odes of speaking and writing about the `subject , represented by three literary genres. First, biography de nes an `individual , placed in relationship to an institutional fram ework. Second, autobiography de nes a `subject , through storying one s life. Third, confession de nes an `ego or `person through intim ate revelation. (V ernant does not consider psychobiography, a

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contem porary developm ent of biography as m ediated confession, where another speaks one s intim acies.) W hile the classical world utilised biography and autobiography, confession was a later historical genre. A s Vernant (199 1, p. 322 ) notes: `the characterization of the individual in G reek autobiography allows no intim acy of the self . For the ancient G reeks, `The subject is extroverted . There is no `interior world he m ust penetrate in order to nd him self (p. 328 ). Rather, existence precedes consciousness, and `personal confession is not yet an established discourse. The personal confessional genre can be said to begin with Augustine s Confessions of 40 0 AD , and is fully form ulated in Rousseau s Confessions of 17 82 (begun in 176 7 and published posthum ously). N ussbaum (198 9) suggests that John Bunyan s Grace Abounding (1666 ) could be claim ed as the rst personal confessional text of stature, but this was a `spiritual confession , participating as m uch in Augustine s technique of spiritual confessional cleansing of the soul as pre guring Rousseau s secular personal confessional style. Boswell s and Gibbon s confessional texts of the 17 60 s could be claim ed as founders of the m odern, secular personal confessional genre, along with R ousseau, and these were progressed in particular through W ordsworth s Prelude (179 8 18 05 ), with its reference to an `organic self . The autobiographical text V ernant calls `confessional is developed in particular in England in the eighteenth century, and com es to dom inate R om antic writing of the nineteenth century. It proliferates in the twentieth century as the cult of personality, com ing to dom inate narrative accounts of life history, im ploding in postm odern sim ulations and parodies of the genre through `kiss and tell journalism , and television talk shows offering confession as live entertainm ent. The `subject of the confession is, rst, the object of the genre of autobiography; second, subject to the control of certain social, cultural and historical forces, which both generate and position subjectivities; and third, is subject to its own identity com plex: self-referential, self-knowing, and positing personal agency and autonom y. Thus, for N ussbaum (1989 , p. xii), the self is `less an essence than an ensem ble of social and political relations . The self is relative, constituted linguistically, genealogically and culturally in plural ways, and not `always present as an eternal truth (N ussbaum , 19 89 ). Confessional narratives do not naively `disclose , but serve political interests. N ussbaum notes that while eighteenth-century personal confessions by wom en authors som etim es offer a direct resistance to dom inant patriar chal views, for exam ple in their valuing of what the patriarchy regards as the trivia of daily life and personal intim acies, such accounts m ay also valorise fam ily life and reproduce dom inant gender hierarchies within the sam e texts. In Bolton s (1999 ) contem porary account of wom en prim ary health care practitioners utilising writing as re ection upon practice there is an unacknowledged bias towards cathartic accounts. This can be read as reinforcing the gender stereotype that wom en are m ore em otionally labile than m en. W hat em erges from N ussbaum s analysis is how strongly personal confessional writing, while claim ing individual identity or the value of the idiosyncratic voice, actually reproduces the norm ative values of bourgeois capitalism . The `self is seen as personally owned, and talked about through m etaphors of property it is a

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`consum ing subject em bodying `self interest in term s of entrepreneurial capitalism m ost fam ously espoused by Adam Sm ith (The Wealth of Nations was published in 17 76 ). `Self is valorised as essentially free, yet advertises clear class and gender positions and constraints. W hile the autobiographies of the period offer a site of difference, through which writing by m en and wom en offer differing tonalities and concerns, two synthetic m etanarratives are at work in these eighteenth-century accounts, which becom e dom inant them es in m odernism . First, both wom en s and m en s autobiographies by and large prom ote a bourgeois world-view, excluding other social interests. Second, a rational self is privileged, shown in identities that are constructed as consistent over tim e, transcending situations; and as unitary, transcending m ultiple or situated identities. Two hundred years on from the `invention of the secular personal confessional style, we are now inundated by its postm odern exam ples: `kiss and tell journalism ; lurid TV confessional shows, where catharsis becom es entertainm ent; the cult of psychobiography; an Am erican President forced to confess in public; soap opera confessions not im itating real life but creating life as sim ulation; psychotherapy and counselling sessions institutionalising and com m odifying confession; educators hooked on re ective practices that secure confessional narratives from their trainees as an initiatory rite em bodied as institutionalised portfolios of evidence of learning, and utilising the re ective journal as a prim ary writing m edium for re ective practice. W here the wealthy have `personal trainers for their narcissistic tness needs, m ass education has the training of the personal as an explicit goal. The postm odern m om ent offers a crisis of grand narratives, so that the self is no longer seen as rational, consistent over tim e, unitary and bound by ideology. Yet m odernist discourse still inform s personal confessional practices where they are teleological, striving to reveal a core or authentic self that is prom ised through `grow th or `developm ent techniques. N o wonder that educators stuck in a m odernist m ind-set are perplexed by the learning preferences of a generation whose identities have been de ned by channel-sur ng, sound-byte entertainm ent, sim ulation as reality, the im plosion of teleology, im m ediacy rather than delayed grati cation, and (in McLuhan-ese) the privile ging of the `hot involving m edium of the screen rather than the `cool distancing m edium of print. W riting O ut the `I In his early texts, Derrida (197 8, 19 81 ), after Lacan, insists that language as com m only used is subject to the law of the `nam e of the Father it is phallogocentric. Fem inist writers such as Cixous (199 1) and Irigaray (1985 ) concur, and expound a fem inine im aginary as the basis to a gendered writing style, a writing `out of the body , that subverts m ale-inspired traditions of confessional writing. In these fem inist readings of narrative, a `body of writing is seen as re ecting the bodily rhythm s and potencies of the wom an herself, as a re-inscription of that body, or a reconstitution of identity, speci cally through a ` uid im aginary (Irigaray, 19 91 ). Especially where speech is privile ged over writing, language is m obilised on behalf of logos and rationality rather than eros as certitude, explanation, and nal

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causation. Further, language is utilised unre exively, as a transparent m edium for explanation, rather than as a system in itself in need of explanation or problem atising. To restore language to its native indeterm inacy (as `the play of difference ) we need to restore the prim acy of writing over speech (writing, suggests Derrida, carries greater indeterm inacy than speaking), and conduct `parricide . W e could go further. W e do not sim ply need to kill the `father in language to encourage the em ergence of other voices, rather m odernist consciousness also needs to com m it suicide, in a death of the post-Enlightenm ent, uni ed `I , whose prim ary voice is the personal confessional genre. O r, we need to recognise the indexical, linguistic `I as reform ulating `identity in every speech act (Harre, 199 8). A s Barthes (19 77 , p. 145 ) suggests: `I is nothing other than the instance saying I . Then we m ay rediscover other ways of writing identities. W hy? Because the secular hum anistic, personal confessional m ode rei es, literalises, or concretises the `I , and here it is suggested that we need to trope the literal. Perform ative language can be seen to suffer through con nem ent to a narrow literal and technical m ode, and to a self-referential m onologic. Here, writing is starved of its possibilities, anaesthetised or dulled, unable to nd a plurality of aesthetic voices through m etaphor, im age, allegory; and unable to exercise itself as a dialogic im agination that would offer a world-orientation and com m unal practice (Bakhtin, 19 81 ). Hillm an (1983 ) suggests in Healing Fiction that not only do ctions, through their aesthetic possibilities, heal our literalism s or logico-scienti c ways of knowing, but that dom inant genres of ctions, such as social realism (in writin g `theory ), and confessional styles (in re ection upon `practice ), m ay them selves need `healing . W hile language works on us, we m ust work back on it in a re exive dialogue with language s registers and aesthetic possibilities, and with language s deep structure as the discursive production of identities through social practices. Perhaps education does not enlighten or em power learners, but heals the ctions through which they both represent and construct their lives. W here writing appears to spontaneously, and som etim es alarm ingly, `reveal som ething of oneself to oneself therapeutically, perhaps this is rather an effect of a shift in genre, or register, of writing itself, that heals the standard or dom inant ctional form (usually technical or social-realist, and often personal confessional). The therapeutic focus is then upon language healing language, such as m etaphor curing the curse of literalism and `plain English . Perhaps writing itself works to sensitise us to the world, rather than forcing us to further introspection (only serving what has been referred to previously as the capitalism of personal ownership of identity and `feelings , the rationalism of a uni ed self, and the im perialism of a therapeutic m ethod now infecting education). W riting as an art therapy m ay fail to attend to therapy of the art form itself. A therapy of writing would attend to its m ore obvious sym ptom atic failures such as a poverty of style in which the arts of rhetoric are lost to functional language providing instrum ental outcom es: form - lling, m em oranda, plain description, bullet-points, sum m aries, reports, task-based analyses, and pro form a. These puritan form s are purposefully devoid of surprise, indeterm inacy, invention, im agination, orid excess, disturbance, or `story that would offer a `Counter-Reform ation

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explosion of style (Jencks, 19 96 ). Sim ilarly, personal confessional writing, invoked as narrative inquiry, can, as previously argued, also readily suffer from a paucity of aesthetic value. Such writing is characteristically, rst, m onological rather than dialogical, caught in a wash-and-spin cycle of interm inable introspection based (unre exively) upon self-exam ination as an idealistic cleansing and purging. Here, autonom y is preferred to heteronom y, or self-control to sacri ce to the other. Schrag (199 7) refers to this as the privileging of the `I-self over the `we-self , where the latter is a self em bedded in com m unity. Second, such writing is characteristically instrum entalised, as an extended curriculum vitae. Third, it is often trivialised, or super cial, as anecdotal account m istaking event for experience. Fourth, it is often cathartic, but without insight, leading to a fascination with feelings and sentim entality. And fth, it is characteristically in ated, or narcissistic, returning us to a m onologic bias. The psychological work involved in writing, as the m ythological grounding of psyche, is m istaken for `consciousness raising . Paradoxically, `consciousness cures us of having a psyche, where the latter is unpredictable, pathologised, indeterm inate, and, as Lacan suggested, structured like a language.
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The Erotics of Narratives of `Prac tice If secular hum anistic, personal-confessional narrative s, offered as therapeutic, repress, or m arginalise, other genres for writing `practices , what will happen to those repressed genres? In Freud s dictum , the repressed returns in a distorted form . One of the genres of writing that is m ost easily repressed by the em otional gusto of the confessional is, paradoxically, the erotic. There is nothing less erotic than exteriorising one s innards in gushing confessional m ode, for then there is nothing hidden, concealed, m ysterious, secret elem ents essential to eroticism in word and deed. Also, as m entioned above, the confessional m ode of hum anistic therapy has its root in puritan notions of cleansing and purging, as codes and practices of self-regulation and self-surveillance, which are anti-erotic. W here such confessional practices are bolstered by Protestant notions of capitalist ownership of `private experience, and entrepreneurial business practices that com m odify and com m ercialise technologies of the self in self-developm ent therapies, groups, and the workshop culture, language itself becom es com m odi ed, m arginalising its value within a libidinal econom y. W hat then becom es of repressed eroticism in writing `practice if it is overshadowed by self-conscious exposure of secrets and desires? It returns as an obscenity. A body of literature is em erging, notably by wom en writers such as Joanna Frueh, Jane G allop and bell hooks, which asks serious questions about the oppression of eroticism in `patriarchal educational practices. Frueh (1996, pp. 2 3) challenges `The erotophobia em bedded in the laws and lusts of the fathers for an erotic response to life is not speci cally genital but, rather, a state of arousal regarding life s riches. Further, she claim s a wide brief for such an apprehension: `erotic faculties affect all connections that hum an beings m ake with other species and with things invisible and visible. Erotics thus has an ecological and political dim ension. Frueh s pun `erotic faculties calls for a review of the perm eating anti-eroticism of academ ic life, rem inding us that repressed eroticism in teaching and learning m ay lead to

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distortions of practice, as unwanted and unethical sexual acting-out. Erotic educational practices m ay then be ethical. Education conventionally works, says Frueh, to `subdue erotic desire , to which her considered response is a `critical erotics , a way of doing criticism that does not deny eros or life-force and vitalit y: `The standard scholarly voice has been unitary, at, dry, and self-conscious. Erotic scholarship is lubricious and undulant. In a pun on the death of phallogocentrism , Frueh suggests that `The rigorous argum ents so valued by academ ics are testim onies to the fact that the thinkers have becom e stiffs. Teaching is recon gured as an elegant occupation that readily includes, indeed welcom es, bouts of indeterm inacy, shifting identities, lyricism , hum our, pun and play, elliptical practices, and the res of urgency and im m ediacy. Erotic educational practices m ay then be aesthetic. There is not just a love of learning, but a lust for learning. Frueh utilises perform ance as a m edium for `academ ic teaching, where self-presentation is offered as seductive text, supplem enting reading, writing, and conversation. Andragogy (as critical pedagogy in an adult register) is set within a libidinal econom y. All of these principles of eroticising academ ic life m ay of course be applied to re ective practice in its own right.
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Listening w ith (m)Oth er W hile writing has been privileged over speaking in this critical account of re ective practices through writing, we cannot readily separate writing and speaking, for we speak to ourselves and im aginary others as we write and read, and we speak about our writing to others. D errida s `otobiographies (Sm ith, 199 5, p. 75) refers to `ear-biographies , or `auscultation (the act of listening as an art of hearing) that one is both speaker and listener in a re-telling of life as autobiographical narrative. Listening to oneself can m ake one blush with em barrassm ent. (W hat a strange thing, in the absence of a watching other, dem onstrating how our em otions are also discursively produced.) Does this not tell us that autobiography is actually for the ear and eye of the other and not the author, such that heteronom y precedes autonom y? As D errida suggests, autobiography is not prim arily about self-confession or self-revelation in a subjective m anner, but is a m eans by which relation to an other is articulated. A nd, as Levinas (199 3) suggests, we are always `hostage to the other (D errida, 199 7). From a discursive position, in writing about m yself, `I am not in any case `revealing m yself but following the rules of the genre of autobiography and thus rehearsing the discursive properties of such system s. Subjectivities can be theorised as em ergent properties of the com plex historical system s of technologies of the self. In Freud s developm ental schem e m apping the relative prim acy of differing erogenous zones, we m ove from eroticism of m outh (feeding), to anus (toilet training), to genitals (sexuality). Freud, however, m isses the ear as an erogenous zone. Surely he is wrong about the traum a of the `prim al scene which he describes as scotopic (where we supposedly see our parents m aking love). D o we not rst hear our parents in the bedroom ? A helpful twist on our personal confessional com pulsions m ay be to shift register from speaker to listener from orality to aurality. W e

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would then have to ask ourselves: what is it like to listen to these interm inable confessional tales? Sm ith (19 95 , p. 55) rem inds us that autobiography loses itself to the personal confessional m ode when it becom es larded with pathos. The genre that carries such pathos is `a som ewhat depleted existentialism , in fact a watered-down, self-help, gospelised existentialism m ore or less concerned with claim ing autobiography as a m eans of consum erist self-revelation . This `high hum anist-existentialist version of autobiography as confession, offers a pretence of `wholesom e sincerity and constructs identity as unique, where life s program m e is to strive for authenticity. Sm ith s (199 5, pp. 56 58 ) attack on the personal confessional style notes that advocates of the m ethod confuse autobiography with `history of personality subject to `an ideology of individualism . In the confessional genre, `Both one s history and one s personality are exactly that one s own and one nurtures them like a sublim e com m odity with all the narcissistic grati cation that im plies. Such a `serene history of the self ignores the social construction of the subject and `should face up to the problem atics of a narrative of the subject. Further, `It is the subject not as he or she which is at stake, (in the confessional genre) but as the I which takes itself to be its own object or subject, univocal and present to itself. In Don DeLillo s (197 1) novel Am ericana, a key text in postm odern writing, a character says `I ve exhausted all hope of de ning who or what I am I thrive on im agery, it seem s to have a laxative effect. Sm ith notes that through the attack of poststructuralism upon the transparency of the `I as authorial, `self-reference becom es another illusion of self-presence: of the writer s or even narrative persona s autonom ous self-identity. The idea of autobiography `as a self-referential docum ent becomes `untenable in Sm ith s view. This is because the `subject of such docum ents `is m ade up from an arbitrary and changing ligree of discourses , where `the autobiographical subject is constituted by others and by the discourses which will have m om entarily photographed those others as subjects. The autobiographical subject is then both inter-textual and inter-subjective. W hile autobiography, in its confessional m ode especially , prom ises closure, it actually leads to necessary aporias: a life, m etaphorically, in tatters, necessarily selective, and porous. A life written in invisible ink. Secular hum anism s grip on the narrative m ode m ay thus lead to super cial and sentim entalised confessional writing as re ective practice, where aesthetic is suffocated. However, this does not m ean that we should abandon writing or storying as re ective practice. Rather, we m ight subm it each kind of practice to a discourse evaluation as we have done here with the use of `creative writing as re ection upon practice within the secular personal confessional genre and consider alternative strategies. This would offer a deconstruction leading to a reconstruction. Coda The philosopher Richard Rorty was once asked if politicians could bene t from a study of ethics, perhaps to generate som e guiding principles. R orty replied, som ewhat bem used, that politics doesn t need principles, but stories. He appears to be

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following Kant s dictum that principles without stories are em pty, or ethos needs to be aestheticised. The other side of this dictum is that stories without principles are blind, or narratives need to be ethically sensitive. O ne thing that is certain is that stories need to be interesting, they need to have aesthetic depth as well as ethical focus. The personal confessional genre, in its current therapeutic incarnation, so often offers stories without principles, or is ethically naive, illustrated daily on a host of confessional television shows. W here story is em ployed for educational purposes, speci cally the written form which offers greater access to language s wealth, such stories m ay `under-achieve , the genre as a whole in danger of subscribing to what Lasch (197 9), over twenty years ago, described as a `culture of narcissism in `an age of dim inishing expectations .

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