Saying something with nothing: Refusal,avoidance and resistance in participant non-response

Abstract

The relational processes of dialogue in biographical storytelling extend beyond manifest tales. Untold stories of unlived experience are also composed with an audience in mind and performed as communicative acts. This paper considers how and why research participants in a Mass Observation Archive study declined to respond to a life-writing task. Drawing on the sociology of nothing, we argue that their patterns of non-response were motivated by subjective intent and constitute meaningful social action. Despite having little or nothing to say about the substantive content of the topic, these participants told us plenty about how they felt about the challenging methodological process. In their accounts, we identified three modes of disengagement: commissive refusal, omissive avoidance and ambivalent resistance. Respectively, these involved consciously dismissing the task with reference to morals and values; surface amenability masking an evasion of deeper engagement; and confused, uncertain vacillation between approach and retreat. We explore the intrapsychic and interpersonal relational dynamics at play in each of these narrative modes and consider the authorial power of saying ‘no’.

Introduction

Since the narrative turn in social research, we have recognised that qualitative methods involve communicative and performative acts of storytelling. These relational processes of dialogue inform the transactional exchange of hermeneutic knowledge. Participants compose accounts of lived experience, which are interpreted by the researcher(s) as audience. In this respect, autobiographical life-writing mirrors the process of relational psychotherapy, as a joint attempt at making sense of biographical self-identity. Similarly, the situated encounter between participant and researcher involves phenomenological processes of mutual perception, imagination and intersubjective reflexivity. Whatever stories are presented and emerge as research ‘findings’ are only one of many possibilities for deciphering a text.

This raises the question of what other, alternate versions of narrative truth (Spence, 1982) might lie beneath the surface. For every research tale that gets told, there is an infinite array of hidden, unspoken or unheard subtexts that could reveal different sides of the story. Researchers have an ethical imperative to listen to the meaning in these latent, tacit messages, seeking to understand their authors’ meanings and motivations. What is being communicated through the act of staying silent, and what do ‘reluctant respondents’ (Adler and Adler, 2003) want us to know about the things they have not said? Accordingly, this paper analyses a set of data from participants who declined to engage with a life-writing task. We examine their accounts for presenting conspicuously absent content, and consider the reasons they gave for non-responding.

Our discussion is contextualised within the broader sociology of nothing (Scott, 2019). Reframing the field of phenomenological inquiry, this theory explores the realm of negative symbolic social objects that biographical subjects apprehend. No-things, no-bodies, non-events and no-where places all contribute to the storying of lost experience. Nothing is a meaningful form of social action, accomplished through acts of commission (with conscious intentionality) or acts of omission (by passive default), both of which create novel ‘somethings’ in hidden, concealed forms (Scott, 2019). Saying ‘no’ is a powerful act that unfolds in relational contexts, communicating a perspectival stance within a dialogic dance. Shifting the focus from substantive content to methodological process, we investigate why people might say nothing (or very little) about nothing, and how the stories they compose convey negative authorial intention.

Relational processes in self-narration

Storytelling is a universal human tendency. The narrative mode of thinking (Bruner, 1991) helps us to structure and make sense of social experiences, lending order, coherence and meaning to the relational self (McAdams and Ochberg, 1988). Narrative composition also shapes biographical identity (Holstein and Gubrium, 2000 [1995]; McAdams, 1993) by connecting significant episodes in a logical sequence (Polkinghorne, 1988) and creating a sense of temporal continuity between past, present and future versions of self (Brockmeier and Carbaugh, 2001; McAdams, 2006). This dynamic process of revision constructs a mimetic symmetry between chronological and lived time (Bruner, 2004; Ricoeur, 1980), supplanting claims to historical memory with accounts of narrative truth (Spence, 1982). Storytelling produces rather than reflects empirical reality, and simultaneously reconstructs the authorial subject.

In this respect, autobiographical life-writing has been compared to the practice of psychotherapy (Pollen, 2014; Shaw, 1994; Williams, 2012). Like autoethnography, it is a research method of creative exploration through analytical self-observation (Ellis and Bochner, 2006). This offers a transformative opportunity for restorying the self (Schafer, 1994), by challenging sedimented life-scripts (Spinelli, 2015), giving expression to hitherto concealed voices and interpretively reframing the subject’s internal landscape (White and Epston, 1990). This is an intra-personal discursive process of self-relating (Stam, 2006) between different perspectival positions. Narrative conversational acts occur within the reflexive social self (Mead, 1934) through internal dialogue, allowing encounters with oneself (Bruner, 2010) and the discovery of new meaning. Creative writing is used as a therapeutic tool to this end, for example when working with survivors of trauma (Pennebaker and Evans, 2014), and arguably provides a portal to repressed or unconscious material (Ogden, 2005).

Relational processes also occur through inter-personal dialogue in both life-writing and psychotherapy. This raises questions about the epistemological status of self-inquiry. The narrative turn in qualitative research (Denzin and Lincoln, 2003) is comparable to the relational turn in psychotherapy (Loewenthal and Samuels, 2014) in pointing to the social context of knowledge production. Shifting the focus from story content to styles and manners of telling (Samuel and Thompson, 1990) highlights a distinction between the life-as-told and the life-as-lived (Bruner, 1987), which creates a crisis of representation (Denzin and Lincoln, 2003). At the macro-level, critical humanism (Plummer, 2003) recognises the wider, collective stories to which individual tales contribute (Richardson, 1990) and forges connections between private troubles and public issues (Mills, 1959). At the micro-level, therapeutic and research interviews involve situated, performative encounters (Langellier, 2001) as direct relational acts (Bruner, 2010). The immediate co-presence of observer and observed makes storytelling a form of communicative joint action (Blumer, 1969) that reflects their relative social positions and dynamics of narrative power (Plummer, 2019). Both fields recognise the role of the recipient in co-constructing life documents and call for reflexive self-awareness of their human vulnerability. Just as qualitative researchers have criticised the ‘black box’ model of academic competence (Scott et al., 2012), the myth of the untroubled therapist (Adams, 2014) has been called into doubt.

The combination of these intrapersonal and interpersonal relational processes makes autobiographical writing a polyvocal conversation (Jackson, 2017). Within narrative studies, the hybrid concept of ‘auto/biography’ reflects the interconnectedness of self and other in personal and social worlds (Parsons, 2019; Stanley, 1993). Multiple perspectives converge within the text, as authors move between alternative narrative versions, discursively repositioning themselves (Davies and Harré, 1990) and speaking to different audience members (Polster, 1995). When preparing their responses to directives, MOA participants imagine the potential readers, preferring to write to someone or for a particular purpose (Sheridan, 1993). They may envisage the figure of the archivist or academic researcher, often drawing on gender stereotypes: a tall, bespectacled female librarian or tweedy, shuffling male professor (Shaw, 1994). This is comparable to the imagoes (McAdams, 1993) and invoked companions (Stern, 2004) that counselling clients describe in storied accounts of their internal worlds. It also mimics the psychodynamic process of transference (Freud, 1915), whereby clients perceive and relate to their therapists according to their own unconscious motivations. Shaw (1994) points to various transferential processes in MOA life-writing, including projection, identification, deflection, evasion, resistance and ‘creative forgetfulness’ (Olney, 1980). Similarly, clients in psychotherapy may withhold information, modify, adapt and selectively edit their stories (Hill et al., 1993; Rennie, 1994) if they (mis)perceive their therapist as bored, judgemental or dismissive (Glass and Arnkoff, 2000; Maluccio, 1979).

In the immediate context of the research or therapeutic encounter, this suggests dramaturgical motives of self-presentation, whereby actors tailor their performances to suit each situated audience (Goffman, 1959). Additionally, MOA writers may take into account the wider social impact and reception of their words. They make an implicit contract (Shaw, 1994) or autobiographical pact (LeJeune, 1989) with the researcher, consenting to their private writing entering and being accessible in the public domain. Perhaps life-observers feel a burden of social responsibility: understanding that once an experience is written, it cannot be erased (Sheridan, 1993), they may be cautious about revealing too much. Both therapists and researchers share an ethical commitment to minimising the power differential between themselves and their participants or clients. However, life-writing methodologies are more constrained by the permanence of the written word and the lack of opportunity for verbal clarification.

Reciprocally, readers may imagine the lives of autobiographical subjects, inferring the existence of material beyond the manifest text: for example, the writer’s physical appearance, social characteristics, domestic situation and relational network. Shaw (1994) compares this to the psychodynamic process of countertransference (Freud, 1915), whereby therapists project their own emotional dilemmas and desires onto clients. Since the relational turn, it has been acknowledged that the psychoanalyst is not a neutral ‘blank screen’ who brackets out their preconceptions (Husserl, 1913), but rather that they enter into co-constructive dialogue with the client in the room. The practice of active listening espoused in both counselling (Mearns and Thorne, 2013) and interview research (Gubrium and Holstein, 1995) suggests that audience reception is an interpretative act, which reconstructs the story in the process of its telling. Thus, the hermeneutic circle connecting subjects with their texts (Gadamer, 1960) implicates authors, narrators, listeners and witnesses in sharing joint responsibility and ownership for the document produced (Pollen, 2014).

This invites a curiosity about what is going on in these processes of transactional exchange. Psychotherapists discuss the significance of the intersubjective ‘between’ space that separates two persons (Benjamin, 2004; Buber, 1958; Orange et al., 2015). Phenomenologically, this region forms a bridge between self and other, allowing mutual (mis)perceptions, inter-experiences and meta-perspectival communication (Laing et al., 1966) to occur. This is a creative and playful area (Winnicott, 1965), a liminal zone (Turner, 1967) of potential, in which anything can happen and any objects may emerge, giving it a mysterious quality of alchemic unknownness (Spinelli, 2015). Thus, the narrative account that emerges from the therapeutic dialogue has a transcendent existence beyond the two individuals who produced it. The between space assumes a reified, animated power as a ‘third eye’ watching over the relational process (Bion, 1967). It is in this ‘triangle space’ of the analytic third (Ogden, 1999) that certain some-things become figural and other, no-things recede. This raises the question of what implicit signals are exchanged beyond the dialogue and what meta-communicative messages are being conveyed. What is being said by saying nothing, and what do non-respondents want us to understand?

Methodology

This paper focuses on the analysis of Mass Observation (MO) data. The Mass Observation Archive (MOA) was launched in 1937 and operated until 1950, before being reinstated as the Mass Observation Project (MOP) in 1981 (Hinton, 2013). The Archive is a vast collection of written accounts of everyday experiences and opinions of self-selecting members of the British public (Shaw, 1994). It has received contributions from over 2500 volunteer panellists (Sheridan, 1993), with around 500 actively writing at any one time (May, 2017). Typically, three times a year each panellist receives a ‘Directive’ asking them to reflect on a range of topics. The focus on self-observation over social reportage highlights the value of MO as an autobiographical resource (Hinton, 2016). Following on from the preliminary phase of our larger project (funded by the Leverhulme Trust) we commissioned a MO Directive on the theme of ‘Nothing and the “road not taken”’. Our brief asked panellists to write about one thing (person, object, event or experience) that they perceived as being absent or missing from their lives, reflect on what this meant to them and describe the feelings it evoked.

Our Directive received 195 responses – 159 electronic submissions and 36 postal submissions - of which 29 form the basis of this paper. This subsample includes respondents who gave negative or non-responses to the Directive task. Its composition mirrors the general demographic bias of the MO panel (Kramer, 2011), with a majority of older women writers. There were 17 women and 12 men, whose ages ranged from 35 to 90 years, the mean age being 60. Although questions concerning the MO panel’s representativeness endure, researchers engaging with the Archive prioritise preserving the complexity of individual lives and ‘luminosity of single cases’ (Hinton, 2016; Langhamer, 2016). Rather than aiming for demographic ‘purity’ (Sheridan, 2012), scholars recognise the deeply dialogical relationship between the MOA, volunteer panellists and its users, endorsing the co-constructive quality of the data as mutually imagined (Pollen, 2014).

Our project received approval from our institution’s ethical review board. Key issues to consider were anonymity, confidentiality, data storage and re-use (Andrews, 2013; Corti and Thompson, 2004; Heaton, 2004). As standard, MO panellists are reminded not to identify themselves or others in their responses, and consent to all necessary permissions relating to future use of their writing before they first participate. The Archive gives each panellist a respondent identifier code, made up of the first letter of their surname and number: for example, A123. We have changed these codes to pseudonyms to animate each character and improve readability.

We gave particular consideration to the emotional impact of the project on both participants and researchers (Walkerdine et al., 2002). Our Directive acknowledged that this topic might evoke a range of feelings, and we encouraged respondents to take their time, writing only as much as they felt comfortable. Although we hoped the task would be satisfying and meaningful, we were careful not to suggest that it could have a therapeutic benefit. We also reflexively engaged with our own emotional processes, particularly the impact of reading through the data. Some of the stories resonated with our personal experiences of ‘nothing’, and we were aware of the emotion work (Hochschild, 1983) that we performed to manage these responses.

Committed to the phenomenological context of discovery (Reichenbach, 1938; Schmitt, 2017), we worked inductively, beginning by engaging with each account in turn, before observing emergent themes, patterns and processes across cases (McAdams, 2015). Appreciating the ‘thickness’ (Plummer, 2001) of the qualitative data, we adopted a tripartite analytic approach, noting thematic, structural and dialogical aspects (Riessman, 2008). From this whole dataset, we identified a subsample of 29 writers who had provided negative or non-responses to the task. These cases formed the basis of our analysis below.

Given the interpretivist epistemology that underpins our analysis, we are mindful of the limits to any claims to knowledge (Silverman, 2017). Indeed, the co-constructive, polyvocal and situated qualities characteristic of the double hermeneutic (Giddens, 1982) at play in narrative inquiry limit the validity of analytic interpretations (Devery, 2006). Although we adopted a reflexively engaged approach that held in tandem a hermeneutics of faith and a hermeneutics of suspicion (Josselson, 2004, cf. Ricoeur, 1980), there was inevitably a potential for ‘narrative smoothing’ (Spence, 1982). Given the always provisional nature of human stories (Polkinghorne, 1988), there is no final and ‘true’ narrative interpretation to be found (Stanley and Temple, 2008; Tamboukou, 2008).

Findings

This subset of the data comprises 29 participants who gave negative or non-responses to the task. Interpreting their accounts, we identified three broad patterns of disengagement, each indicating a different dialogical style. The majority of participants fell clearly into a single category, although some could be assigned to more than one. In all groups, some participants broke the performative fourth wall by adding a layer of meta-communicative commentary to their text. As well as (or instead of) narrating substantive content, they told us how they felt about the process, and acknowledged the social situation of research storytelling.

Firstly, some writers made an explicit refusal to answer the Directive, citing articulate reasons and motivations to explain their choice. This suggests acts of commission (Scott, 2019), as individuals took personal responsibility for deciding to ‘say nothing’, and communicated these intentions directly to us. Secondly, some writers avoided the task by subtler acts of omission (Scott, 2019), perhaps unaware of their motives for ‘non-saying’. Their responses appeared to be fulsome and detailed, but we noticed how they sidestepped the more challenging aspects of the task, such as the process of deep self-reflection. Thirdly, some writers displayed an ambivalent stance, which we have called resistance. These people made sincere attempts to embark upon the journey but found their progress thwarted by uncertainty and doubt. They would take tentative steps towards telling their tale but then hesitate, falter or veer off-course.

Refusing to answer: Acts of commission

The first category of non-response involved writers consciously deciding not to engage with the task. They cited various reasons for this, each of which seemed to provide a communicatively rational (Crossley, 1998) explanation for breaching their implicit contract. The MOA panellists understood that they were transgressing the normative code of conduct and situational proprieties (Goffman, 1963) of the research relationship, and sought to disavow the attribution of a deviant identity (Davis, 1961). Justifications are one form of accounting procedure through which actors take responsibility for an act but deny that it was wrong (Scott and Lyman, 1968). This forms part of a wider interpretive repertoire (Potter and Wetherell, 1987) or vocabulary of motives (Mills, 1940), tacitly held between members of a discursive community. By citing one of these justifications, speakers make identity claims of belonging and align themselves with shared moral codes (Stokes and Hewitt, 1976).

Many of these participants misinterpreted the Directive as being focused on the topic of regret, and objected to this featuring as a biographical theme. Their justifications tended to invoke a higher power as an indisputable source of authority (McKinley and Dunnett, 1998; Scott and Lyman, 1968), lending moral weight to what might otherwise be seen as individual obstinacy. For example, Lavender politely declined to answer, referring to her Christian faith as a reason why our questions were not her concern: ‘I believe that someone is watching over me and eventually all will be well. My apologies that I can’t answer this properly’. Others invoked more secular value systems, such as humanism and positive psychology (Seligman, 2017), advocating a cheerful, optimistic outlook. Percy chastised us for condoning melancholic ingratitude:

I have so much to thankful for in my life that writing at length about having missed out on something is problematic – self-indulgent . . . I know that compared to others less fortunate I have no reason to dwell on what might have been.

This 81-year old went on to comment on the insights that came with older age: ‘I think there is much to look forward to. No more gazing into the rear-view mirror!’ A third participant found similar comfort in their ideological stance, but hinted at a lurking sense of underlying fear:

I prefer to think of things in as positive a way as possible . . . I feel slightly uneasy thinking too much of what ifs of relationships so have decided not to delve into this. (Oliver)

Another writer realised that they had ‘got the wrong end of the stick’ in thinking that the topic was regret; they expressed relief that they were not ‘going to have to spend ages rehearsing my many failings and misdemeanours and telling you precisely how awful I felt about them’ (Michael).

It is interesting to note this assumption, widespread amongst the participant subset, that the Directive was skewed with a negative bias. Even though we had carefully composed the text to be neutral and balanced, mentioning a range of positive and negative emotions (not only sadness, envy and regret but also relief, pride and gratitude), it seemed that many people read the invitation through a filtered lens. Psychoanalytically, this could be viewed as projection, a defence mechanism involving the attribution of one’s own feelings to others (Freud, 1916). Phenomenologically, meanwhile, it reminds us that we perceive the world according to our habits, routines and expectations, as well as conventional frames (Kaufer and Chimero, 2017). In popular culture, the poetic motif of the ‘road not taken’ (Frost, 1916) holds a romantic appeal, evoking sentiments of wistfulness, nostalgia and sorrow (May, 2017).

Some of the participants expressed frustration with such ‘indulgent’ ideas, impatiently dismissing the task. Martin objected, ‘The Directive presupposes that we may uselessly wish that there was a different outcome . . . Why would I wish to consider any part of my life as problematic?’ Mildred concurred: ‘I do not have regrets about the past or present and the future is so uncertain that I do not like to think about it . . . I don’t remember brooding or wishing for something’. Others were blunt and unapologetic, voicing outright criticism. Hetty misread our open-ended guidance and accused us of the opposite, ironically revealing narrowness in her own distorted view: ‘Your idea of calling it Nothing is very ill-named I think. Nothing evokes many things and is used in many contexts but not the one you are after’. The ultimate and most extreme version of projected ill-intention came from Ophelia, whose emphatic refusal was justified by intimations of criminal responsibility:

So no! Very sorry but I am not going to be submitting the directive you asked for! It is too much to face up to & think about. I cannot but worry that the suicide numbers are about to rise significantly & in direct proportion to those M.O. contributors who are falling headfirst into the depths of despair.

Avoiding the call: Acts of omission

The second type of non-response was more subtle, and at first glance appeared compliant with MOA research procedures. These participants read the Directive carefully and took its intent seriously, engaging with the topic theme and considering its wider social value. However, when it came to reflecting on their personal experiences and applying the ideas to themselves, they drew a blank. Phenomenologically, any symbolic objects of relevance were recessed in the background of the perceptual field, inaccessibly held out of awareness (Heidegger, 1927; Husserl, 1913). Scanning their biographical landscape through the perspective of hindsight review (Freeman, 2010; Misztal, 2020), there were no focal figures on the horizon, just an empty space. As one participant put it, perceiving the absence of substantive content, ‘Nothing stands out to me’ (Tabitha).

This illustrates how negative phenomena can be produced through acts of omission (Scott, 2019). Subjects do not consciously reject, dismiss or refuse the prospect of a tangible ‘something’, but rather feel passively lacking, deficient in or unconnected to potential objects. They drift into the default position of being or doing without, perceiving that within this world of objects (Merleau-Ponty, 1945) there is simply nothing there. Without anything of substance to remark upon, omissive non-responders practise non-saying (Scott, 2019): rather than not-saying something, they do not have anything to say.

This was shown in the opening sentences of many accounts, as participants expressed feelings of reluctance and hesitancy. They seemed doubtful of whether they could contribute to a Directive that lacked obvious personal resonance. As one panellist told us candidly, ‘When I first read the introduction to this my reaction was to say to myself “well, that’s not for me” and just pass it by’ (Bertie). Yet their attitudes were not dismissive, like the commissive refusers above. On the contrary, these writers were at pains to emphasise their efforts, intentions and desire to participate, and a sense of frustration and disappointment at not being able to:

I have thought about this topic for some time and find it very difficult to comment on. (Lavender)

Having given this subject considerable thought I am at a loss to understand how to respond. (Martin)

This isn’t an easy concept to get my head around, I’ve given it two days thinking about to get this far, my opening paragraph. (Phillip)

I confess that, faced with this task, my mind is continuously drawing a blank. (Sandra)

Tentatively, we suggest that something else might be going on here at the level of intrapersonal process. Meta-communicative narrative statements (reporting on the experience of writing rather than the content of the words) create a distance between the author and their text, foregrounding the immediate situation while concealing the historical past (Fludernik, 2003). Whether we conceptualise this as a blockage in the psychodynamic unconscious (Freud, 1916), a disconnection between the experiencing and remembering selves (Kahneman, 2012) or an interruption of self-relational dialogue (Cooper, 2003), it seems that these participants were struggling to access material that they felt intuitively was buried in their biographical pasts. Logically, this makes more sense than assuming that nothing was there: any human life contains infinitely more lost or non-experiences than actualised, positive ones (Scott, 2019), and it is reasonable to assume that everyone could, if prompted, think of something they have not done/had/become. It is beyond our scope and remit to speculate on the nature of these intrapsychic mechanisms, but we can observe the communicative practices through which their effects manifest.

Firstly, some participants adopted a non-subjective position, speaking from a collective or universal standpoint rather than their own individual view. They used the second person voice to address the reader (‘you’), generalised pronouns (‘we’, ‘us’) and indefinite pronouns (‘one’) when telling their stories, as if to deflect attention away from their private subjectivity and imply a neutral, impersonal stance. They meta-narratively accounted for their non-responses by indicating this position as being detached and omniscient, separate and external to the referent of the task. For example, Bertie wrote,

We only have one life . . . And any other possibilities are imaginary. For all of us, there are things that have turned out well or badly, or not happened at all . . . But once they have happened (or not) we go on living our actual lives, not the might-have-been life.

This technique of dissonant self-narration (Lejeune, 1989) may have served to shield the writers’ inner worlds from scrutiny and protect their vulnerability, by diluting the poignant potency of whatever they revealed. It created a discursive division between the narrator and their text, stretching ‘the gap that exists between the subject of enunciation and that of utterance’ (Lejeune, 1989: 35). By foregrounding the present moment of interaction with the reader, storytellers obscure the identity of the original protagonist. Recalling the idea that life-writers imagine a pluralised, populous audience (Polster, 1995), perhaps these authors were trying to hide their experiencing selves in the crowd or erase them from the scene.

A second and related strategy was to engage in abstract reasoning, by referring to moral principles, ideological positions, political debates or philosophical wisdom rather than the individually exposing stance of experiential knowledge. This shifted the responsibility for disengagement with the task away from the personal and particular towards the universal and general. Whereas the commissive refusers took bold and direct personal ownership of their decision, this group deflected towards wider social stories and collective ‘public issues’ (Mills, 1959). They sidestepped the task by implying that it was subsumed beneath a more important bigger picture, which they were keen to impress upon us. For example, Phillip pointed towards structural inequalities and social injustice, which made his individual struggles appear (to him) relatively trivial:

When it comes to studying the concept of loss, regret, emptiness . . . then I urge the reader to study those who have passed through our prison system.

Others held forth with a secular sermon, voicing ideal ethical standards of human conduct. They invoked existentialist notions of authenticity, freedom, choice and the search for personal meaning (Frankl, 1959; Sartre, 1943; Yalom, 1980), albeit paradoxically decontextualised from the situation of the living narrator. For example, Bertie told us that,

it is important that we accept our life, the one we have, not the one we might have had, or rejected, or lost. And to dwell on might-have-beens, or missed opportunities, or roads not taken . . . is to deflect ourselves from that central day-to-day life choice – to be ourselves.

Another participant referred to the ‘many worlds’ hypothesis in quantum physics to speculate upon the theoretical existence of alternate selves. This was a particularly shrewd manoeuvre, for the argument could be discursively couched in personal terms without actually revealing any self-substance:

I often reflect on the butterfly effect . . . I feel that every single day alternate realities are rejected by the finest margins, and events are so random, serendipitous, and compounding that I see my actual life as an infinitely improbable fine line traced through this vast possibility space. (Terence)

The third device we noticed was reverse-marked transposition. Here, participants did provide detailed accounts of personal experience, but composed them in such a way that missed the purpose of the task and actually did the opposite. Instead of telling stories about lost, absent or counterfactual negative events that had not happened, they described positive phenomena that had occurred or featured in their worlds. Reverse-marking is an epistemological trick used in cognitive sociology to demonstrate heuristic biases towards normative, value-laden thinking (Brekhus, 1998; Zerubavel, 1981). Swapping around the order of hierarchically ranked symbolic objects reveals which ones are conventionally privileged as the unmarked, preferred default in a politicised cultural context (cf. Becker, 1967). As an artistic device, it is used in stand-up comedy, through the juxtaposition of a feedline that leads the audience to expect a usual outcome and a punchline that delivers an incongruent result (Medhurst, 2007). The research design of this project had itself employed reverse-marking, by subverting the usual focus on positive identity formation and studying the inverse shadowlands of life behind the mirror (Scott, 2020). We wanted to explore how people connected cumulative sequences of unlived non-events in a negative identity trajectory (Scott et al., 2016).

It is indicative of the strength of this culturally normative pull to see how this group of participants then performed a further 180° turn, flipping the lens back around towards positive phenomena. Some made this move discursively within micro-units of text, such as a single sentence. Like the stand-up comedian, they would set up a narrative framework that led the reader to anticipate a ‘sad tale’ (Goffman, 1961), but then complete the story arc with a surprising upwards plot twist (Tobin, 2018). For example, Phillip said, ‘As a child I wanted love and affection, food and warmth within a loving home, I wanted safety. I got all that, and I’m grateful for it, too’. Other participants went to even greater lengths to compose a reverse-marked story. Gerald presented us with a cumulative sequence of positive happenings that had led to him meeting his wife: her choice of university, a mutual friend, his relocation and a shared period of caring for elderly parents. He emphasised the serendipitous synchronicity of these positive events and their absurdly improbable contingency. ‘Had any of these “moving parts” not aligned at precisely the right moment, it is quite likely that the relationship would have broken down’. Reverse-marking therefore seemed to serve a protective function, by reframing a challenging transgressive act as an invitation to display normative alignment (Stokes and Hewitt, 1976).

Resisting the process: Ambivalent positions

The third pattern of non-response was more confused, inconsistent and dynamic in form. Rather than holding a clear and distinct unidirectional stance, as shown by both the commissive refusers and the omissive avoiders, these participants did not express conscious intentions towards the task. We call this pattern resistance: a movement veering between engagement and withdrawal, push and pull, approach and retreat. Perhaps the prospect of delving deeply into their internal worlds evoked strong emotions that could not easily be faced, leaving the subjects feeling uncertain about whether or how to respond.

Ambivalence is a psychosocial relational state involving mixed, often polarised and contradictory emotions towards a symbolic object, such as an infant’s love and hate towards their caregiver (Klein, 1937). When these emotions cannot be reconciled, they manifest through feelings of frustration, confusion and agitation as the subject vacillates between alternate attitudinal positions (Craib, 1998). Making narrative sense of this is difficult, as the plotline does not cohere around a single thread (McAdams, 2006); acknowledging this makes the storyteller’s conclusion more authentic but phenomenologically ‘disappointing’ (Craib, 1998). Ambivalence suggests an intrapersonal process of self-relational dialogue, whereby the experiencing, remembering and narrating components interact from different perspectival positions. This might involve self-reflexive conversations between the agentic ‘I’ and externally appraised ‘Me’ (Mead, 1934), allowing authors to meet themselves through either intersubjective ‘I-Thou’ or objectifying ‘I-It’ encounters (Cooper, 2003; cf. Buber, 1958).

The first manifestation of this was hesitancy, which occurred in anticipation of the telling. These writers would not approach the task directly, but instead hover and dance around it, circumambulating the sensitive target (Jung, 1938). Some participants prefaced their accounts with statements about their reluctance to confront the topic, describing long periods of unreadiness, uncertainty and trepidation. They procrastinated about even beginning their journey, facing long delays. Winnie said, ‘It’s three weeks since I received this directive and most days I’ve thought about it and [been] pondering what to write’, and Lavinia agreed, ‘I’ve put off writing this one, because I think that I thought it was going to be quite tough to write’. Others explained how they had taken tentative steps towards the task but then backed away in fear. Their tone was confessional and apologetic, as if they believed that this was a worthwhile exercise but felt unable to proceed. Hillary said, ‘I have to say that I found this quite painful to do and have had several cracks at it’. Meryl elaborated on this, adding a metacommunicative comment that recognised the irony of her reticence:

It has taken me such a long time to write this first part. There have been several aborted attempts over the last three months to the point that I thought I may have to put this down as a non-event.

Another variant was restraint, which was shown in the act of the telling. These participants would ostensibly engage with the task and give a full response, but do so in such a way as to hold back and keep themselves safe. Here, we are reminded of Laing’s (1960) discussion of the false self, a protective persona surrounding an ontologically insecure core that is besieged by external demands. When one’s true, authentic self feels under threat by others invading, eroding or petrifying its boundaries, it makes sense to hide behind a defensive front and retreat to the depths of the mind. The false self appears harmonious and compliant, but this is only a façade: the actor performs red herring tactics of ‘prolonged filibustering to throw dangerous people off the scent’ (Laing, 1969: 177). For example, Kevin wrote about his decision to stop learning French after GCSE level, regretting that he only spoke one language. However, he followed this up with a confessional comment addressed directly to us, explaining the process behind his decision. This revealed that he was aware of a deeper and more painful loss being the ‘real’ issue of significance, but felt afraid and unready to go there:

‘I am sorry if the above seems rather silly or introspective. I was originally going to write about the absence of one of my best friends from university who died . . . [but] I found that recalling all that was simply too much and I couldn’t put the words down in any meaningful way to adequately express my sorrow at her absence’.

Our writers used this communicative strategy not only interpersonally, towards us as external researchers, but also intrapersonally, through the debates of an internal dialogue. They expressed conflicted and often contradictory views about how to contain and manage the different emotions that arose in response to the Directive. In existential terms, we might understand this as the anxiety that accompanies the human condition of freedom: the ‘dizziness’ of deciding between action paths (Kierkegaard, 1843) and the ‘vertigo of possibility’ we feel about committing to a choice (Sartre, 1943). Perhaps these participants imposed self-limiting boundaries upon their own authorial intent, to protect their true selves from the vulnerability that comes from frank disclosure.

Sometimes these rehearsed inner dialogues took the form of a bad faith narrative (Craib, 1998; Sartre, 1943), rationalising and justifying their non-response as something beyond their control and denying their choice to evade this freedom (Fromm, 1942). For example, Tabitha displayed an ambivalent change of stance throughout the writing of her account, moving from approach to avoidance. She began with an enthusiastic statement of intention to engage: ‘Wow! . . . this is so interesting and hugely complex . . . I recognise that there are so many times in my life when I could have chosen different roads’. However, she then declined to recount any examples, briskly dismissing the task as irrelevant to her optimistic and pragmatic outlook: ‘there is absolutely nothing I would change . . . my glass has always been half full . . . I’d always accept the hand I’d been dealt’. Underlining the point, she contrasted her perspective with an imaginary other, pitying their lack of a comparable insight: ‘I’ve read your list and all I can feel is a bit sorry that anyone would waste precious time dwelling on any of these’.

Finally, some people showed resistance by recoil and retreat, narrating this process to us in reflective appraisals of the task. Meta-communicatively reporting on the experience of reporting, they told us how they felt when they opened the Directive and realised the likely emotional impact of the topic. Perhaps these were the participants who most directly confronted the existential significance of nothing and recognised how deeply challenging the exercise could be. Many did make sincere attempts to answer the call, but found themselves halting, abandoning it or leaving it incomplete.

Two such writers adopted a darkly humorous tone, exclaiming with mock-despair at what they were being asked to do. We could hear the symbolic groans of anguish that led Clarissa to write, ‘Wowsers MOP, you really know how to sock it to us! This is an emotional one for me’. This person considered two lost experiences, choosing to write about the one that felt more resolved and declining the invitation to dig deeper. ‘The first is something I’ve still not sussed out for myself yet, so I’m going to go with the second’. Similarly, Michael playfully admonished us with ironic disapproval, telling us that, ‘This has been an absolute bugger to answer, I’ll admit . . . I was so shaken up by the questions’.

Two other participants embarked upon the writing journey but found it too difficult and had to stop. Once they had abandoned the task, the focus of their narratives shifted from content to process, as they explained the meanings and motivations that lay behind their non-response. For example, Evelyn wrote about being unintentionally childless by acts of omission. Having opened up this box and started to explore it, describing wished-for children, the participant suddenly stopped and abruptly broke off her account: ‘Enough I think – it’s all making me too sad’. Bryony deliberated over which issue to write about – ‘Unfortunately I am spoilt for choice’ – and instead redirected our attention to the challenge of writing itself:

You probably wouldn’t believe how many times I have started this directive. The first few times, I would have been very early, not late, in returning it. But here we are in May of the following year and it is still haunting me.

I decided some months ago that I just couldn’t complete this task, because some people’s lives just work out and some don’t and I am one of the latter. Each time I started typing, I ended up in a distraught state, in floods of tears. Last time, really I had finished it, but ended up deleting it all.

Conclusion

Observations of the human propensity for storytelling position the narrative mode of thinking (Bruner, 1991) as the principal medium through which we make sense of social experiences. There is also widespread consensus on the relational and contextually embedded quality to narrative practices and hermeneutic inquiry. Qualitative social researchers call for a greater focus on the communicative interaction processes at play within different dialogic domains, with each situated performance shaping the storyline that emerges out of countless narrative possibilities. This paper has considered the rhetorical dimension (Freeman, 2001) of participants’ non-responses to a life-writing task about the emotive topic of lost, absent or missing experiences. We have pondered on what the participants may have been communicating through their authorial acts of saying ‘no’, either by declining to respond altogether or by giving only limited accounts.

Our analysis identified three broad patterns of disengagement, each signifying a distinct dialogical mode: commissive refusal, omissive avoidance and ambivalent resistance. Respectively, participants communicated conscious decisions to dismiss the writing task by referring to a range of ideological rationales, subtler motives of surface amenability masking an evasion of deeper engagement, or confusion and uncertainty that manifested in alternating movements between approach and retreat. We offered tentative interpretations of the intrapersonal and interpersonal dynamic forces potentially operating behind these relational styles, drawing on psychoanalytic and sociological theories. However, we also acknowledged the limits to such modes of inquiry, due to the intersubjectively reflexive, mutually imaginative and perpetually provisional nature of all human stories.