Narrative Community-- Review & Response from the Author, Chaim Noy

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LINGUIST List 19.1512

Wed May 07 2008

Review: Sociolinguistics: Noy (2007)

Editor for this issue: Randall Eggert

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1. Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay, Narrative Community

Message 1: Narrative Community
Date: 07-May-2008
From: Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay
Subject: Narrative Community
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Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/18/18-2462.html
AUTHOR: Noy, Chaim
TITLE: Narrative Community
SUBTITLE: Voices of Israeli Backpackers
SERIES TITLE: Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology
PUBLISHER: Wayne State University Press
YEAR: 2007

Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata

SUMMARY
This book by Chaim Noy illustrates the theatrical performances of storytelling
by Israeli backpackers. It is based on forty-five narrative interviews with the
backpackers and those interviews are represented in a non-authoritarian quasi
direct discourse. He divided his book in three parts with nine chapters.

The first part includes two chapters on the critical introduction on the ''who's
who'' of the backpackers and the methodological aspects (sampling, individual
non-quantitative interviews, ethnomethodology etc.) of the survey, where Noy
describes his own involvement as a backpacker as well as a researcher with
self-reflexivity.

The second part deals with the ''Quotations and Voices'' and is divided into six
chapters. In this part Noy structures his corpus collected from different
domains (from the ''real'' site of mountains, roads, hotels to the virtual reality
of the television station) and he deals with different modes of representations.
The journey begins with floating quotations and ends with the problematic
question of self-transformation. This self-transformation comes as a ''comic
relief'' in the context of the whole theatrical representation by Noy, as he
himself calls this an ''intermezzo''. Thus, this very term places the whole text
within the semantic world of 18th century musical opera. Though, ''intermezzo''
refers to a transitional moment in between two musical movements in the 19th
century use of the term, I have stipulated the meaning of the ''comic relief''
taking cue from Noy's description of his experience of smoking marijuana
(''Arriving at the Destination: No Transcendence'', pp. 24-5).

And again in the third site, the question of self-transformation is depicted
with a summary of the previous chapters in the epilogue and appendix. Noy
self-consciously reports the ''no transcendence'' phenomenon as emancipation is an
''impossible real'' in the world of cursed Sisyphus.

EVALUATION
This book typically reflects the instances of double writing(s): an academic
performer looking back on his own research on backpackers and simultaneously, as
a performer of the backpacking rite, the author describing his own experiences
as a participant. Thus, there are two experiences, which are articulated by Noy
as a member of an institutionalized academic community and a member of
backpacking community as well. This type of discursive formation needs both
introspection and retrospection, and in that case, Noy is at once an insider and
outsider - he is swinging to and fro to his exterior and interior with an
exceptional command. While the retrospective introspection in the realm of
academic ritual (say, as for example, preparing and submitting a Ph. D. thesis
on Israeli backpacking) has been done by maintaining a low profile, Noy is
excellent in re-representing his experiences on backpacking. And in all these
cases, he is like a stalker (cf. Andréi Tarkovski's film ) - he is
stalking/interrogating his own wis(h)dom(s) as it is found in two realms of
rituals: institutional academic and institutional (in)voluntary traveling - a
traveling from the mechanical solidarity of the military experience to the
joyous and blissful riding with supposed organic solidarity. This type of
structured polyphonous writing with epistemological intervention and
self-reflexivity (similar to that of some feminist writings, cf. Donna Haraway),
of course, needs another type of alienation, especially alienation in the
Brechtian sense of the term.

Noy himself deployed Turnerian (or Gennepian) structure to depict the
performance of backpacking with a tacit as well as covert critique of global
consumerist tourism. As readers, we could also build up a parallel structure to
articulate Noy's double as well as parallel journey. If Turnerian formula is
just ''initiation-liminality-incorporation'', Noy's introspective double journey
(as a member of academic society and as a backpacker) and his post-Ph. D.
retrospection might be structured as follows: initiation (to the academic
socialization)-alienation (from both domains of institutional academics and
backpacking)/estrangement - writing a book on prior two-tier experiences.

All these observations might be subscribed by Noy himself as he confesses at the
moment of building up a semiotics of performances: ''Note that these semiotics of
performance are true of academic discourse as well: alas, this book, too offers
you - the reader - ritual accesses, a souvenir of sorts...'' (p. 197). Thus, in
writing this book, Noy took a post-modern turn, though that was not sufficiently
articulated due to his over-dependence on the structural theory. Though, his
tensed struggle for reaching the so called post-modern turn within his third
journey (the first one is his academic journey, the second one is backpacking,
and the third one is writing the present book) is important in many accounts as
this struggle to write this book may lead Noy to write a travelogue on his
journey in the institutional academic loci and that yet-to-be-written book may
take cue from Gouldner (1979, who did work on the neo-Hegelian interpretation of
sociology of Academics), Galtung (1980, who did extensive work on Scientific
Imperialism), Phillipson (1992) or Foucault. If Noy would take this project in
the near or far future, he might quite firmly tackle the metamorphosis of
material capital to cultural or narrative capital as he has repeatedly referred
to this particular transformation in his book in the context of backpacking, but
I emphasize this same phenomenon in the case of academics, where cultural
capital is re-produced (Gouldner, 1979) instead of being produced by the members
of the technical intelligentsia. And Noy is in no sense a member of that
community, technical intelligentsia; rather, he is an organic intellectual in
becoming. Noy did not fully develop a culture of critical discourse (Gouldner,
1979) as commonly used by the members of the technical intelligentsia in this
work; instead he has used non-authoritarian quasi direct discourse (Volosinov,
1986) in italicized parallel texts that matches with his transcriptions of
interviews. The pseudo marginality of those italicized texts is fore-grounded
bypassing the foreclosure of self-reflexivity as it is found in usual academic
texts. Thus the self-reflexivity of the analyzer and analyzed, subject and
object are merged together to constitute an ultimate book. I, as a reader, have
enjoyed my journey in reading this book as I have received at least a breathing
space in linguistics, where this type of self-reflexive discursive formation is
really rare.

However, the ambivalence on the part of Noy, or his swinging between modernity
and post-modernity, or structuralism and post-structuralism leads me to brood
over a question: what happens if Noy would deploy Foucauldian or Derridean
anti-method or their discourse on power in this text? This problematic question
may lead to a writing of another book, where the well-known problems of
ethnomethodology and participant-observer may be eradicated by pointing out the
metonymic (thus a case of condensation) transformation of the interviewees.
Though Noy mentions the names of Foucault and Derrida, two master initiators of
discourse, and even Derrida's book in the bibliography, their respective
approaches to texts is insufficient in the author's tackling of the textual
situation. In the case of discourse analysis, Noy prefers structural
representation rather than that of deployment of post-structural (non-)analysis.
Peculiarly enough, although he mentions Foucault's name in relation with the
discourse on power on page 15, his name is excluded from the index and
bibliography. This is, to me, not a mistake, but is a Freudian slip, which might
be returned as a repression in his future projects. In fact, traces of so called
''post-modern'' discourses are acted as rem(a)inder ( a la Lacan) for his present
and future work on the theatrical performance of backpacking as well as academic
society.

Surprisingly enough, there is no reference to Benedict Anderson's (1983)
imagined community. As the author is building up a hypothetical notion of
'narrative community' in Diaspora, where stories are traveling, a dialogue with
Anderson is much expected. Readers of this book might be enriched if there were
a sustained dialogue that could be performed with Anderson regarding the
traveling narratives and formation of an imagined community in Diaspora. I will
be waiting for this dialogue to link it with the Lacanian triad
''Real-Symbolic-Imaginary'' in the context of imagined/real/symbolic narrative
community. Moreover, the hypothetical conditionality of the host-guest
relationship (Noy himself initiated this relationship, cf. p. 79) or politics of
friendship in the context of searching for sacred geography may also be
philosophically elaborated. Sometimes, I am disturbed by the Orientalist gaze of
Noy as he, in a few instances, represents India as an exotic world of
''mysticism''. However, we are thankful and obliged to Noy for writing such an
exceptional book related to many inter-disciplines.

REFERENCES
Anderson, B. 1983. _Imagined Community: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism_. London: Verso.

Derrida, J. 1998. _Monolingualism of the Other; or The Prothesis of Origin_.
Stanford California: Stanford University Press.

Foucault, M. 1968. _The Archaeology of Knowledge_. New York. Pantheon Books.

Foucault, M. 1973. _The order of things: An Archaeology of Sciences_. New York:
Vintage Book.

Foucault, M. 1977. _Power/knowledge: Selected Interviews and other Writings_.
Ed. Gordon, C. Random House, Inc.

Galtung, J. 1980. _The True worlds: A Transnational Perspective_. New York: The
Free Press.

Gouldner, A.W.1979. _The future of Intellectuals and the rise of the New Class_.
London: The Macmillan Press Ltd.

Lacan, J., Granoff, W. 1956. ''Fetishism: The symbolic, the Imaginary and the
Real''._Perversions: Psychodynamics and Therapy_. New York: Random House.

Phillipson, R. 1992. _Linguistic Imperialism_. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Volosinov, V.N. 1986. _Marxism and Philosophy of Language_. Cambridge, Mass.:
Cambridge University Press.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay is a faculty member of the Indian Statistical
Institute, Kolkata, India. He has published more than 175 research articles,
papers, and popular writings in Bangla and in English in reputed journals and
academic magazines. He is now working on Silenceme, and on the concept of
''error'' in mad(wo)man's language.



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Comments from the Author, Chaim Noy:

Message 1: New: Review of 'Narrative Community'

Date: 31-Jul-2008 From: Chaim Noy mscc.huji.ac.il> Subject: New: Review of 'Narrative Community' E-mail this message to a friend Read Review: http://linguistlist.org/issues/19/19-1512.html First, I wish to thank the editor of this issue, Hannah Morales, for soliciting the review on A Narrative Community: Voices of Israeli Backpackers; and of course to Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay for producing such a thoughtful and thought-provoking (inter)text. Since the Linguist List is basically a linguistic list-serve, I was naturally quite apprehensive about the outcome of having my Narrative Community reviewed here. So one can imagine that I was happy to learn that Bandyopadhyay himself found the book ''a breathing space in linguistics, where this type of self-reflexive discursive formation is really rare.'' Now, while I can say a thing or two about what a ''breathing space'' is, I'll let myself proceed and relate to the review as a whole. Reading a review of a piece of work on which one has labored lengthily, such as an academic monograph, is always complicated. My own perspectives on my books' reviews, usually center around the question whether I have learned new things, or was challenged intellectually by the review. After spending all this time writing the book, it is not so easy to read new and unexpected things about the project. But this is precisely what Bandyopadhyay has done. He has recognized a few of the major axes on which the book pivots. For instance, the modern/post modern tension, guised as the structural/post-structural tension, which is a founding and creative tension in terms of the book's performance. That is in terms of what I expected the work to be and in terms of what it does to/with the reader. As the reviewer might have recognized, I am an incurable romanticist. And I deal with this incurability frequently in my own internal (and sometimes overt) dialogues. I inherited the romanticist mega-ideology from both my parents: from my father's Polish romanticism, heavily influenced by the Origin, i.e. Germen Romanticism, and from my mother's Zionist-Sabra (Jews born in Israel) romanticism. So I often weigh the consequences of being such a romanticist and the ways I can deal with my own romanticism (I elaborated a bit on this in (Noy, 2003) and intermittently, throughout Narrative Community). Where will/can romanticism take me, and how can the romantic desire be reflected upon? In the book, and Bandyopadhyay has noted this, I allude to a state of ''No Transcendence.'' This is where and how I talk about my repeated frustration and disappointment with romanticist desire as it meets contemporary academic settings (among other contemporary settings). I am left without a narrative (a structure), without a crescendo (transcendence). The romantic desire, which has motivated me to partake in the rituals of backpacking in Asia, and later in the rituals of academia, has brought a lot of grief and pain to me. After some years of trying to fit into this or that discipline (anthropology, communication, sociology, geography, are a few examples), my romanticism (pre-modern), and my post-modernism (essential trans-disciplinarity, not to say post-disciplinarity and non-disciplinarity), have left me outside (alienated) the high (fortress-like) academic walls; an independent scholar (read: unemployed). So one can see why it isn't too difficult for me to reflect (masterfully, as Bandyopadhyay indicated) on these realms. I do not need to really work hard at estrangement, for I am an outsider! (In conversations with mentors and colleagues, such as Prof. Erik Cohen of the Hebrew University, I/my academic wondering have been compared to Georg Simmel's. As flattering as this comparison is, I ask for action in my regards and not for reflexive/academic discourse). So I try to be wary of the romanticist traps into which I can easily slip (neo-orientalism, logical positivism and objectificationism, and so on), but at the same time enjoy the desire and see what good I can bring to which ever people I come in touch with on daily basis (from my family, through my academic life, to the segregations and oppressions in the city/cities in which I live: East/West Jerusalem). So the desire lingers on and I look forward to (being able to) write my next book, where I will surely adopt the reviewer's repeated recommendations: to step closer to or even over the edge of what he and I agree to be a ''post-structuralism/modernism'' threshold. As I indicated, I have nothing really to lose-I've given up on academia, and there's plenty of creativity to celebrate. Especially, if I take into account Bandyopadhyay's recommendation for the ''non-method'' way of going about the empirical research. Here again the reviewer's observation regarding Foucault and Derrida were accurate. I am not a Foucaultian and I know very little about Foucault's work (in fact, I don't even know what it means to write that ''I'm not a Foucaultian''). And indeed, misrepresenting Foucault in the index of the book is indexical of his absence, and of my struggles to be a romanticist-critical scholar. (But, more technically, note that the reference to Foucault is admittedly indirect and does not include date or publication, and refers to his influence on Judith butler). But Derrida has undoubtedly been my major intellectual influence (especially some of his less known works, Derrida, 1990)! This is why the notion of ''no-method'' really strikes a cord with me. Moreover, I had actually published no-method pieces (Noy, 2007, 2008). But I guess that when it comes to language and discourse (''linguistics''), my body becomes rigid and I regress; my movement is relatively restricted and so I produce structural work. This is so because I think of the genius of Chomsky and other chess players (my father, the folklorist Dov Noy, included), but I wish to refrain from elaborating further in this direction now. So I will conclude where I must, which is with the very first line of A Narrative Community: ''I still consider myself a narrativist in the romantic sense'' (p.vii), a ''still'' which I think the book unfolds. REFERENCES Derrida, J. (1990). 'Force of law: The mystical foundations of authority.' Cardozo Law Review, 11, 921-1045. Noy, C. (2003). 'The write of passage: Reflections on writing a dissertation in narrative/qualitative methodology', Forum of Qualitative Social Research [On-line Journal], 4(2). Noy, C. (2007). Sampling Knowledge: The Hermeneutics of Snowball Sampling in Qualitative Research [Electronic Version]. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 1-18 from www.informaworld.com/smpp/. Noy, C. (2008). 'Mediation Materialized: The Semiotics of a Visitor Book at an Israeli Commemoration Site', Critical Studies in Media Communication, 25(2), 175-195. Linguistic Field(s): Sociolinguistics