Built to Break: An Introduction to Theoretical Autoethnography

Hi, my name is Tio Savich, and I'm going to talk to you today about theoretical autoethnography. I am currently an adjunct instructor at Indiana University and the director of research at the critical trust collective for recognition studies, where I work with Dorcas Miao who presented a few weeks ago. I graduated in 2022 with my Ph.D. in math education. Because of my background, the presentation will include more mathematics than is common in presentations on qualitative methodologies so I apologize in advance to anyone who may be math-phobic.

Before doing any of that, just to give you a little bit of introduction to the topic of theoretical auto-ethnography.

Ethnography implicitly assumes that there's no outside to recognition. Ain’t no Other so othered that they can’t, at least, be recognized as “other.”

Qualitative methodologies that implicitly assume that inside and outside are exclusively different are quite popular.

Critiquing this exclusive difference can be understood as a critique of those methodologies, which is a contribution to current conversations. To be clear, I am not critiquing the goals or desires that gave rise to assertions of the unintelligibility of the Other. Instead, my point is that those assumptions arrest progress towards those goals because people are not objects.

Specific examples of these methodologies include those who assert that the global South can't be understood from the perspective of Western academia, or marginalized standpoints are inaccessible to oppressors. These risk unconsciously reproducing subject-object thinking by claiming that there is some outside to understanding.

But people aren't things. Subject-subject thinking is more primordial than representational thinking. The form of the subject is its formlessness, which is the infinite.

Further, rigidity in rules for what counts as the production of valid knowledge, sometimes called canon validity, reproduces ideology. For example, insisting on setting a theoretical framework before collecting qualitative data reproduces subject-object thinking enforcing an ideology that is antithetical to critical theory.  

Critical ethnography understands that understandings are structurally limited. The I, for example, cannot turn around and know itself. To know itself, the I must be recognized by you.

Theoretical autoethnography understands that too, and takes insights from different wisdom traditions, including Western and yoga philosophy, to better understand the I, me, and you and their individuality and generality under the justifiable assumption that there is no outside recognizability. As there is no outside to recognition, songs, poetry, art, logic, and mathematics are embraced as contributions to understanding.

I'll be developing these ideas throughout the presentation and will be happy to discuss them more at the end. But it is time to stop talking about what I am going to do and start doing it.

Let me now introduce the first song of today. Sand and Love is a love song my Dad, Rudy, wrote for my Mom before I was born. Much later, he played this song at my sister's wedding. Before playing the song, he explained it. His explanation will appear on the screen as the music plays.

My dad died in 2019. Since he died, repetition has been central to my work. Repetition is fractal-like in that fractals are self-similar. Kierkegaardian repetition is fractal-like in the sense that difference is what is repeated. It is self-similar by being different at each iteration. The self-contrariety of the determinate “no” (the determinate negation of determinate negation; “no”) is its self-similarity.

Romantic love is a focus of the song but not the focus of this talk; instead, please attend to themes of building and breaking, and his desire to be understood as evidenced by the explanation of the song he gave. Notice that his explanation moves the song from particularity to universality. By explaining his song, he moves it from a particular referent of “you” – my mom – to a more generalized other that references my sister and her husband but does not exclude others from understanding.

Notice that he's explaining the song to his child and consider how the stated goal of this presentation is a representation of this movement. I want this presentation to resonate and repeat that movement from particularity to universality. Let’s now listen to his music and read his words.

As I prepared the talk, I worried about playing that song.

I worried that you might laugh or leave. I have cleared a room or two in my time as a musician. But I fear, here, that you might find me unserious or anti-rational, and I fear rejection.

Recognizing this fear is a frustrated aspect of the desire for recognition allows fear to soften, returning the fear into its more basic moment which is the desire to be understood.

This doesn't settle fundamental existential uncertainties, but it has helped me with stage fright, for example.

Recognizing fear as the desire for recognition may help anyone who conducts interviews about sensitive topics.

If that sparks your curiosity, you might notice that the desire to recognize the recognition desire is a kind of a fixed point.

To expand on the desire to recognize the recognition desire, we might notice that it has two moments that correspond to two different existential fears.

The other side of the desire for recognition is that I want to be recognized as non-finite, which is to say infinite.

I am not an object, I am non-finite, I resist like anything, and then I resist that resistance.

When you speak, I listen more openly by rejecting my rejection before it fully forms, saying no to no saying.

The infinite is related to temporal decompression, but it really resists any descriptor. The form of a subject is its formlessness.

Picture thinking is when something is put forward or in front of as a subject towards an object, with the subject side erased. It is probably unavoidable, but it can’t understand the infinite.

Subject-object thinking has been critiqued in many, many ways. Later, I will critique picture thinking by treating “inside” as a fixed point, allowing me to conclude that inside is inside of inside only if inside is outside of inside. This does not make sense as a spatial predicate, but is interpretable through subject-subject thinking.

Fixed points have to do with linguistic self-reference.

I argued in my dissertation that math and logic arise when language recollects itself anaphorically, with pronouns and variables.

Recently, I've been interested in fixed points which occur when a concept applies to its name.

For example, is a predicate is a predicate?

Yeah, sure.

But is a dog is a dog is not quite right. “Is a dog” neither barks nor bites because it's a predicate.

Fixed points could be interpreted as recollecting a concept as a noun by recursively embedding a predicate in the argument place of the predicate. But this is a lexical understanding, where words are recollected as objects. Sometimes this produces nonsense, but sometimes it produces an open question.

For example, recognizing the recognition desire is an open question. As I have explored recognition, trying to recognize it, new ideas and questions arise.

In some methodological communities, fixed points are stopping points that are often suppressed perhaps because they lead to infinite regress characteristic of picture thinking.

For example, ask what is the scheme of scheme? Or what does it mean to have a perturbation and perturbation? What is the ground of ground? Or what color lens must one put on to interpret colored lenses? Each of these are sort of stopping points, or they lead to infinite regress. For example, the scheme of a scheme of a scheme or meta, meta, meta, meta, meta theory, that sort of thing, which is characteristic of picture thinking.

However, there is a common fixed point in every academic discourse because every academic community is shaped by rejection, the no, and acceptance, the erasure of that no, or letting go of that no.

It is a common fixed point for all kinds of communicative action.

For example, I recently tried to get a paper published in a prestigious journal that covers the topic of the philosophy of mathematics. The editor said, I hope when this paper is approved, it's suitable for somewhere, but it's not here.

Rejection and acceptance shape every debate before those conversations even begin to unfold into explicitness, whether it is the possible rejection of a professor towards a graduate student or an editor maintaining the boundaries of whatever journal they are editing.

However, theoretical auto-ethnography takes an interest in recognizing recognition, negating negation, and criticizing itself, and I think doing that allows layers upon layers of rich understandings to arise that other theoretical discourses and communities may not have access to.

To me, the scheme of a scheme of a scheme is relatively boring – it is a repetition of sameness - but the negation of negation is a wellspring of possible thoughts.  

One major contribution of Phil Carspecken’s work is his reconstruction of yogic insights into the feeling body as an extension of Hegelian critical theory. Sit for a moment, and notice that you may be hunched, as you look towards the screen. Or you may notice a knot of muscle as an occluded region in the body in a body-scan meditation. When you attend to that region or stretch your shoulders, you might notice that the tension melts away. You may notice that this feels good, but you might not readily describe this feeling as ethical or rational. It isn’t right or wrong, correct or incorrect; it is somehow beyond social predicates. But subjective validity is very important for critical theory. Some norms feel terrible to enact.

In taking the “no” as an enabling condition and limit of knowledge that is a core structure in what we are, consider the knots and tensions in the body as temporal compressions that can be let-go-of. Determinant negation, synthesis, and building produce solidity and density. But we can let go of that tension, we can exhale, we can temporally decompress, and we can negate determinant negation with determinant negation. For really troublesome knots, we might have to engage the process of deconstruction to enact letting go as a rational process.

The determinate negation of determinate negation - letting go of those occlusions, letting go of those tensions – is a rational process, but it is embodied and may be quite different from what “rationality” means to most people.

Here's a picture of what I mean. Temporal compression of learning experiences, take all of these “no’s”, like a retriever is not a cat, a retriever is not a pit bull, but a retriever is a mammal and it is an animal. Recollecting those “no’s” compresses them into synthetic unities at various levels – words, sentences, paragraphs. Recollection can be interrupted with a “no” at any moment. I often trail off as I start to speak. 

If all that I can say or write compresses time through recollection, we might ask “have I ever been more than a memory?”

Because the series that Brian has invited me to speak at is particularly interested in time, I want to turn to a metaphor that I call the sound of time.

Sound, in the medium of air, is a wave of more compressed air and less compressed air. Below, air particles are represented with the black dots and a speaker pushes those dots into more compressed regions, and then decompresses them.

Embodied rationality – in fact, communicative action – is similar except the medium is time, not air. A speaker compresses their learning experiences into synthetic unities – words, sentences, paragraphs etc. – while a listener decompresses.

I think this metaphor has profound implications for understanding the relationship between space and time. Spatial thoughts arise through temporal compressions.

The metaphor can be deepened by considering hermeneutics. The hermeneutic circle is the idea that the whole of some speech act or text has to be understood in terms of its parts, and the parts in terms of its whole. Considering that as a temporally extended process may invite the parametric unwrapping of the unit circle into a sine wave, which is how sound is often represented.

This is an example of picture thinking, so it should not be taken as complete. In fact, the “no” seems to sometimes be sharply divided and self-propagating, so maybe electromagnetic waves would be a better representation. Moreover, if the speaker is mistaken for this drawing of a stereo speaker, the metaphor falls apart pretty quickly. Still, it may be useful.

So, who am I? The “I” is a no that says no to itself. If our interests in qualitative methodology turned towards understanding artificial intelligence, it might be useful to think about the “I” as a deterministic finite state automaton.

Or not. The “I” is not any of these pictures. And yet, paradoxically, perhaps they are useful. Perhaps the “I” has to travel outside of itself, into these representations, to be recognized by a particular you. Or perhaps not. Perhaps we can understand each other without ever saying a word.

In any case, there are problems with those representations that are pretty severe. Growth, development, iterative transcendence, that sort of thing can't be pictured. The hermeneutic circle is more of a spiral. I am not an object. The no is self-propagating.

And you might also say it's very abstract, in the sense that this is an example of abstract negation, and maybe can't the movement of the negative be understood through some example?

I want to give an example of the movement of the negative from a conversation I had with my four-year old daughter, M. She is actually my fiancé's daughter – I have only known her for about a year and a half. During that time, we have spent some time in front of a microphone. I love writing songs for the people I love. M does to. We were sitting around recording and talking, and she invented the term “divaded” which is when something is inside of a thing and then it's outside of the thing.

I'll play the conversation that we had, which just was nice because it happened to be into a microphone, so I captured it.

In my dissertation, I explained the concepts of inside and outside as they may arise from the feeling body. We can experience a kind of boundary of the skin. Then I wrote about how bounded regions in space go on to inform the idea of categories and hierarchical predicates, like dog and mammal. I then went on to talk about mathematical sets, which trade in these ideas.

I was trying to understand concepts, but I didn't have a good example of concepts that are inside of themselves by being outside of themselves in the sense that I didn't have a good spatial reference for that.

For example, the concept of parent can't be made sense of without the concept of child, nor can child make sense without parent.

The concept of parent is outside of itself in the concept of child, and the concept of child is outside of itself in the concept of parent.

For the concept of parent to make internal sense, it kind of has to travel outside to the concept of child and then back into itself.

I didn't know how to connect ordinary concepts like mammal and dog that can't kind of be represented spatially to concepts that are reciprocally sense dependent, like parent and child.

And I think part of that was bound by this lingering picture thinking where I was maybe assuming that inside and outside are exclusively different, which is my claim of a contradiction.

However, Y is outside of X is just incompatible with 1 and 4. So Y is outside of X could be compatible with 5.

So Y is outside of X is a less restrictive predicate under this idea of exclusive difference than the paired idea that X is inside of Y.

Representing exclusive difference on a matrix produces my assertion of a contradiction as a diagonal of “no”.

M then negated my assertion of a contradiction. She opened up the idea of inside and outside by negating exclusive difference.

By introducing divaded, she creates a predicate, x is divaded by y, that is compatible with inside and outside.

So Y is outside of X is just incompatible with Y is inside of X. So everything that's incompatible with Y is outside of X is also incompatible with X is inside of Y.

Consequently, we can think of 3, predicate, as being inside of 2, X is inside of Y.

That is, we can say X is inside of Y, so Y is outside of X. Could be said Y is outside of X is inside of X is inside of Y.

This assertion trades in a non-spatial sense of inside called incompatibility entailment.

If things are feeling really compressed and you are starting to separate from the presentation, take a quick breath. It is going to get worse and then better.

Okay, so we're going to substitute here the symbol for outside for X and for Y, which would yield the sentence outside is outside of outside is inside of outside is inside of outside.

Or that is a conditional, if outside is inside of outside, then outside is outside of outside.

If we substitute inside for X and Y, that would yield inside is outside of inside is inside of inside is inside of inside.

Or if inside is inside of inside, then inside is outside of inside.

Which is to say that inside and outside are self-divading concepts.

To be inside of themselves, they must be outside of themselves.

Which is, I think, a kind of breaking of the exclusive difference of inside and outside.

In order to be themselves, they have to be outside themselves, so they can't be exclusively different.

.

Russell's paradox is this idea that there's some set that's the set of all sets that are not inside themselves.

If R is not inside of itself, then by its definition, it must be inside of itself.

And if it is inside of itself, then it must be outside of itself.

This was really puzzling for mathematicians.

It torpedoed a lot of formalist thinking.

But we don't actually have to look very far for entities that have this attribute.

The idea is that the I is something that has to be outside of itself to be inside of itself.

For example, to understand each other, we have to be able to take first, second, and third person subject positions on their utterances. This relates to Habermas’ subjective, normative, and objective validity claims. It also has to do with Habermas’ rational reconstruction of George Herbert Mead’s insights into the “I/me” distinction and the generalized other. 

For Hegelian self-consciousness, the I only knows of I through you.

And just more generally, I have to be outside of myself to be inside of myself and inside of myself to be outside of myself.