(Auto)biography

"As we are now aware that great men no longer make history and that history shapes the individuals who satisfy its needs, we tell our stories to make our lives comprehensible as those of real people. History is comprised of layered events that are linked in some way, and the bond between memories and the contents of other containers is cemented by the telling. The transformation of an individual's life into a museum exhibit influences the future course of that life when it provides encouragement to continue the story, in other words, to live life in such a way that there is something to tell. Living solely to create a biography is in any case more productive than a life lived in unconscious repetition of the life itself." - Bozon Brock, "God and Garbage - Museums as Creators of Time" in The Discursive Museum, MAK, Vienna, 2001, p. 25, emphasis mineThis quote is meant to illustrate the influence a museum has in the career of an artist, specifically with regard to the mid-career survey. However, it struck me for two reasons, one in relationship to the Derrida documentary I saw two weekends ago and the other in regard to my own thoughts on (auto)biography.In the film, and as I mentioned in an earlier post, Derrida was consistent in his probe of the artifice of biography. He was especially fervent in his denial of biography as relevant to the lives of philosophers, though when asked what he wished earlier philosophers had written about but didn't, his answer was "Their sex lives." A biography immediately distances the life lived from the life described, and a battle between the two - assuming the person in question is still alive, as in Derrida's case - begins almost immediately. He explained that elements of his biography had slipped into his texts throughout the years, an assertion we can readily believe given the intensely personal nature of some of his published reflections (Circumfession, Memories for Paul de Man.) He seems to refute the idea of a life lived in the service of a biography, working instead from the assumption that the life/work and reflection upon it are necessarily intertwined. Yet for me consciousness of the making of a biography (whether by oneself or by others) automatically separates the two. I have noticed a disturbing trend in my own mind of late: my concern with the creation of a unified 'line of thought' that can be understood as a red thread running through my writing. The relief I felt the other week when discovering links between Jorg Heiser's article on "Romantic Conceptualists" and music I listened to at age sixteen perhaps only half stemmed from the excitement of my discovery. The rest came from my happiness at being able to link seemingly disparate parts of my life, thereby implying a certain coherence will eventually come of my future thought and writing. Is this consciousness of 'the big picture,' so to speak, common? Does anyone else think about this kind of thing? I was alternately energized and afraid of my responses to the last line in the above quote. On the one hand there is the idea of subsuming your life's work to a greater arc in the hope that a comprehension of the whole corpus can impart greater meaning than the individual parts. On the other is the fear of abstracting a life still unfolding. Can a balance be struck? What do you think? I'm sure it's something I'll continually grapple with, and no doubt this problematic relationship to (auto)biography will become a central aspect of my own.PS - I hope this line of thinking doesn't come off as pretense, especially in so blatantly juxtaposing Derrida's thoughts with my own. I am in no way making direct comparisons between the two, it's just that his words in the film are fresh in my mind and relevant to what the above quote made me think about.