ABSTRACT
It is incontestable that autobiography is difficult. As Paul de Man put it, ‘…the theory of autobiography is plagued by a recurrent series of questions and approaches that are not simply false…but that are confining, in that they take for granted assumptions about autobiographical discourse that are in fact highly problematic’ (de Man 1979:919). And if the theory of autobiography is problematic, the use of the autobiographical, or what I will call a personal voice, within cultural theory highlights some crucial epistemological questions now facing the human sciences. As Lawrence Grossberg recently observed, the autobiographical voice is often understood as an individual’s search for identity rather than a critical strategy in cultural interpretation.1 However, I will argue here that the use of the autobiographical can be made to question implicitly the relation of self to experience, researcher to researched, and the production of knowledge itself. Therefore, I will reframe his reservations as a series of questions: does the autobiographical voice presuppose an unmediated subject? What conception of subjectivity is inscribed in autobiography? And, what is the nature of the truth produced through autobiography? As autobiography is ‘discovered’ by more and more theoristsfrom Paul Smith’s critical turn (Smith 1988:100) to the selfreflexive move within ethnography-it is increasingly important to articulate these questions, and ask about their political import.
