The Stuff Through Which We Represent Our Lives: An Interview with Anna Poletti

Anna Poletti’s Stories of the Self: Life Writing After the Book is a remarkable new monograph that we were lucky enough to publish in the Post-Millenial Pop book series which Karen Tongson and I co-edit for New York University Press. One of the things we pay attention to as we consider books for the series is the corpus of works that are being discussed. We certainly have some books that drill deep into a particular medium but we have a bias for books that adopt a comparative approach – that encourage us to trace a theme or trend across multiple media platforms, that ask us to read one medium in relation to another. And that is one of the reasons I was drawn to this particular project. 

From the first, she was arguing that our understanding of the autobiographical or “stories of the self” or “life writing” had been shaped largely by the properties of print, even if we expand book culture to include newer forms such as the graphic novel. She wanted to expand beyond that canon to reflect upon how people (such as Andy Warhol) left an account of their life through many boxes of seemingly random stuff, how entrepreneurs crowd sourced shared cultural memories via digital platforms, how queer filmmakers constructed accounts of the ways they constructed their identity via collages of borrowed media materials, and how the role of the camera in certain documentary films allows us to reflect on what it means to become an observer of our own life experiences. The book is organized around a series of such case studies, each of which pose important questions at the intersection of life writing, media and cultural studies, and gender/sexuality studies. 

This interview will give a portrait – intellectual but also as you will see personal – of a remarkable and original author reflecting on a subject that literally touches each of us where we live. Thanks to Poletti for being willing to address my questions under what were difficult circumstances for her.

You write, “Autobiography matters—culturally, politically, historically, socially—because it puts individual lives ‘on the record,’ and in so doing creates a scene of apprehension: it is a cultural and social practice that makes lives available for engagement by others and responds to the fundamental need to make ourselves legible in the social field.” What might a comparative media studies approach, then, contribute to our understanding of the different ways that people make their lives visible and apprehensible to others? What are some of the examples of media practices you discuss in your book?

Autobiography is examined in a variety of disciplines such as social sciences, sociology, literary studies, psychology, philosophy, cultural and media studies, and history. But the understanding of what autobiography is, and what it can tell us about the world varies a lot across these fields. For sociologists and historians, autobiography is often data—collected through interviews, or sourced from pre-existing archives—that is used to inform a study into a particular phenomenon (historical or contemporary), and for psychologists and philosophers, autobiography is a cognitive, social, cultural and linguistic practice that forms part of the basic building blocks of personhood and social life (identity, sense of community, sense of personal and shared values etc). In cultural and media studies, autobiography is not really studied as autobiography but as identity work, or community building activity that takes place in specific communities or online spaces. Here, scholars rarely use the term ‘autobiography’ because it is associated with books. Therefore most of the insights into autobiographical practice that have been developed in life writing studies do not cross the disciplinary divide.

Stories of the Self is a book that tries to point out two things: to media studies scholars, it wants to demonstrate that the ways of reading, conceptualizing and talking about life writing developed in life writing studies can be useful for answering many of the key questions that media studies scholarship seeks to understand—from the question of how trust is being reshaped by technology (Bodó), to how social media has reshaped traditional media industries through its emphasis on personal identity (Marwick). However, a lot of the work undertaken in media studies that examines the rise of personal storytelling, or the shifting importance of autobiography to specific elements of the social and political world, focuses solely on digital technologies and their impact. I think a comparative media studies approach is vital if we are to really understand the nature of the changes digital technology is bringing about. Yes, most of us have an online life, and digital technology is integrated into our everyday forms of communication and living, but our lives are still lived in a material world—teeming with objects such as birthday presents with wrapping paper and cards, childhood toys, novelty coffee cups and family heirlooms. Many of the impacts of digital technology have local, material impacts on people’s living conditions. I don’t think we can fully grasp the impact of digital technology on the world if we analyse it in total isolation from the gritty material embodied world we inhabit. 

So my starting position is that we are both digital and analogue, if by analogue we mean being material, geographically and temporally located and bounded. (Lockdown in the pandemic has brutally reminded most of us just how local and material our lives are.) A comparative media studies approach as I use it involves a constant movement between digital and analogue forms, in order to see what insights into autobiography and its role in shaping the social field emerge when we take media affordances and materiality seriously as conditions for autobiographical statements and their reception. 

On the flip side of this, for my colleagues in life writing, I wanted to write a book that (ironically) pushes the field out beyond the world of the printed book—beyond memoir and comics and autobiography—and that tries to challenge the tendency in the field to make claims about the power of life writing (which you quoted) that are sometimes really claims about what the printed book is and does (Poletti). This is a continuation of work I began with my doctoral study, which looked at zines as a unique form of autobiography, and in my collaborations with Julie Rak on digital life writing (Poletti and Rak) and drag. 

In life writing studies, we do study digital forms of life writing, and there is a long tradition of studying other forms of life writing that are not published, such as diaries (Lejeune) and letters (Jolly; Stanley and Jolly)—so it is not as though we are as book-bound as our colleagues who study the novel. Stories of the Selfasks a pretty basic question: Is a life really “on the record”  if it appears as one of over hundreds of thousands of postcards contributed to PostSecret ? Or as a selfie on an Instagram feed? And does our commitment to understanding autobiography as a dynamic, flexible, rich, and grounding cultural practice that informs the social field mean that we exclude from our purview all the examples that don’t seem to fit the scholarly consensus of how and why autobiography matters because they are too large or too small or too weird to be easily assimilated into ‘the record’?

Figure: Postcard posted to PostSecret blog under the title “Classic Secrets”

I wondered what might happen to autobiography studies if it no longer relied so heavily on the book as its default object, but took a promiscuous approach to what counts as autobiography—what could we say about autobiography then? A comparative media studies approach provides a coherent way of tracking autobiography as a practice that occurs across media, without losing sight of the fact that it is a coherent genre of social action (Miller)—a reliable yet also flexible way for people to communicate and achieve all kinds of things together. We can all recognise autobiography, for example, when it appears as the opening of Greta Thunberg’s influential Ted Talk , or in documentary film’s such as Catfish. But each use of the genre is also a use of media, and I wanted to keep that at the centre of my thinking.

So, in the book I examine a mix of analogue and digital media forms including documentary films largely made with consumer grade technologies, crowdsourced autobiographical projects such as PostSecret and The Moth, and selfies. But I also wanted to include limit cases—that might not initially seem to fit the category of autobiography—in order to better account for materiality and its role in autobiography on the ‘analogue’ side. For this I turned to documentary television, and visual art—where issues of concern to media and autobiography studies could be thought differently. One chapter considers digital technology in relation to surveillance and the kind of shadow autobiography that is written when our data is collected by corporations and governments and subject to algorithmic reading. To think this issue I turn to two projects that remediate surveillance files from the mid-twentieth century: Steve McQueen’s End Credits and Australian Indigenous activist and scholar Gary Foley’s reading of the surveillance file kept on him by Australian security services. Together, they allowed me to explore the question of scale and autobiographical meaning from a comparative media studies angle—an issue central to many of the current debates about the intersection of digital technology, personal communication, and surveillance capitalism.

The only thing that is not in the book is a life writing text published as a book—although there is a short discussion of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. My comparative analysis moves across digital and analogue media forms outside of print culture and its products (books, magazines and so on)—to return to the quote in your question, I wanted to know what ‘on the record’ really means (and if it still has meaning) if we no longer assume that it refers to the ‘the printed record.’ The commonality across the media forms, though, is that they are all media of inscription—an idea I take from the work of Lisa Gitelman and N. Katherine Hayles—which refers to any media device that can “instantiate material changes that can be read as marks” (Hayles, 24). Returning to Thunberg’s TedTalk – the live performance is a separate form (tailored to engage the people in the room) that is ephemeral, while the video camera used to record it is a media of inscription.

Your book can be read as contributing to the broad cross-disciplinary project of new materialism or as I call it in my own recent writing, stuff studies. Daniel Miller talks about stories told through "the medium of stuff," which would seem to be literally true in your discussion of Andy Warhol's archive of boxed papers and other "stuff." so, talk a bit about how and why materiality enters your analysis.

Stuff studies seems to me to be a vital tool for understanding the intersection of the analogue and digital planes of our existence. Our digital lives are embedded in consumer capitalism through surveillance capitalism (we are surveilled so we can be sold stuff and the internet is a powerful portal for the buying and selling of stuff). The work of people like Miller and other anthropologists of material culture is vitally important, I think, for those of us in cultural and media studies who want to move beyond an observation that the internet is a commercial and commericializing space, to understanding the pre-existing currents in relation to stuff that online shopping spaces such as Amazon and Etsy have connected to. For me, this means continuing my interest in the power of handmade objects to function as powerful vehicles for autobiography (an approach I developed in response to trying to understand how zine makers used handmade zines), and continuing to try to find ways to account for the stuffness of autobiographical texts—to not just read them as narratives and treat the media and materiality they occur in them as secondary, as a physical package that does not signify, but to try to learn how to read autobiographical texts as both narrative and material and to give equal weight to materiality when accounting for autobiography as a process that creates a scene of apprehension between people.

So materiality enters my analysis through my insistence that any autobiography is also a choice of media form and a material object and we must learn how to read and account for both of these things if we are to feel confident that we are grasping what the text is doing. When I was planning the book I wanted to explore autobiography as a material practice, and so I turned my attention to the cardboard box—a ubiquitous and invisible material object that is, I argue, actually a media for autobiography. I am not an anthropologist, so I did not seek out people to interview about their relationship with cardboard boxes, instead I turned to culture—where was the cardboard box used? This is what led me to Warhol’s Time Capsules and then the challenge became, how do I bring my skills as an interpreter of texts to  612 cardboard boxes of stuff? Is it even possible to ‘read’ the Time Capsules as an autobiographical artwork?

I had two options when looking for examples of the cardboard box to analyse—Warhol, or Stanley Kubrick’s boxes. Kubrick actually designed his own cardboard box for manufacture (he was particular about how well the lids fit), and his archive is a great example of how cardboard boxes are not just containers for stuff, but a technology that facilitates certain relationships with and through stuff. This to me is what is stuff studies allows us to consider: the way stuff means and allows us to make meaning: when we have a strong and ongoing interaction with specific materials they become an important element of our lived experience (they become part of our lives) and they become a means for us to live in particular ways.

 Anna Poletti is Associate Professor of English Literature and Culture at Utrecht University (the Netherlands). They are a researcher of contemporary life writing, and a co-editor of the journal Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. They are the author of Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation (with Kate Douglas, 2016), and Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture (2008). With Julie Rak, they co-edited Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online (2014).