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We create meaning in temporal movements by concentrating on a time span, be it short or long. Our narrative competences allow us to influence the flow of time and transcend the fleeting moment of the present. We extend our focus on the present by establishing connections to the past, present and future to explain the things currently going on. The narrative format with a beginning, middle and end is a form of knowledge that we use to give meaning to temporality while we try to interpret and understand life as such.
Horsdal, 2011, p. 24
Prelamination1
In autobiographical tasks, subjects are invited to describe their past, present, and/or future personal lives, either orally or in writing, using life stories or autobiographies (Stolarski, Fieulaine, & Zimbardo, 2018, p. 11). The techniques of narration based on stories consist in using a beginning of history or phrase as stimulus, from which the subjects elaborate the sequence. “This elaboration may concern a complete history, the portion of a sentence from which the beginning, or the beginning and the ending are given” (Stolarski et al., 2018, p. 11). To catch biographies seems to be an easy doing, but a deeper view into the procedures of ‘doing biography’ (Alheit & Dausien, 2007) will open up many questions: Why are we interested in biographies (for adult education)? Where do historically lay the roots of biographing and biographizing? What key roles do narratives and narration, narrating time and narrated time play on understanding (auto)biographies timewise? Accordingly, this paper asks about the historical, epistemological and methodological background for adult education and learning to conceptualize biographical temporalisation(s).
Analogous to history as a processual self-reference (Nassehi, 2008), biography is a self-description in which a person based in the presence describing, observes and narrates a series of events and thus refers to him/herself in a processual way. Thus, biography or the narration of it is not identical with the course of life and with what (apparently) 'really happened'. This also marks the difference between life-circle (visible as curriculum vitae) and biography. Biographical narrations are both, highly selective and at the same time (re)constructive. The frame of reference is a person’s (biological) lifetime, “a measure2 of time, a quantifiable stretch or duration, which is the time span of an individual human life” (Alheit & Dausien, 2018, p. 880). But, this touches only on a subject, though, which Kade and Hof refer to as “first level” of the “time potential of biographical research (in educational sciences)” (Kade & Hof, 2010, p. 146). By analysing (auto)biographical narrations and texts whose structures are genuinely based on “temporality3 and sociality” (cf. von Felden, 2020, p. 23), they offer access to, first, collective temporalities (e.g. time regimes4, time institutions like school and curricula), secondly, social patterns of time (e.g. in calenders, synchronicity), and thirdly, individual modalisations within time (e.g. temporal experiences such as speeding up, slowing down, maturation, boredom).
Thus, the focus of this paper is where time and temporality are contingently set as a category through biographizing. Time is not only a quantity for describing physical processes (e.g. movements), but also - similar to space - a variable for reconstructing relational constitutional of sociality and individuality (cf. Elias, 1988; Nassehi, 2008; Sorokin & Merton, 1937). With the modern era, time as an expression of movements is then radically rethought in terms of use and formability. Therefore, the modalisation of individual time in concern to social and world temporalisation becomes part of identity formation: “(…) the increasing speed of social change and individualisation as a mode of sociation are the reason why identity formation in late modernity is realised as temporal per se, and by this, a matter of individual responsibility” (von Felden, 2020, p. 36). The idea that the nature of time can be shaped and is a matter of individual responsibility created a “Zeitgeist” (a socially epochal overall structure of time-spirit) from which the notion of (auto)biography could emerge in a very first place. In this respect, the paper refers to biographical temporalisation(s) and illuminates where and how biographical work enable temporal sensitivity for (adult) education over analysing individual and subjective modalisations of time in the context of collective temporalities (e.g. Horsdal, 2011; Schilling & O’Neill, 2020; Schmidt-Lauff & Hassinger, 2023; von Felden, 2020). To approach these topics, I will firstly point on (implicit) criteria of time in the mega-category (auto)biography and argue for a biographical temporalisation in adult education (with a genuinely temporal) focus. Secondly, references of biographical temporalisations will be elaborated over biographising-forms changing in the course of time (historically), and, the ‘modern’ relational conceptualising of doing biographies by interlacing past, present and future. Methodological considerations will then demonstrate the particularities of biographical narrations reflected in terms of temporal indexicality. Finally, the paper will close with a brief critical reflection and outlook on future approaches to temporal biographical work in adult education.
Biographies, time and learning
Biography can be in a first step generally defined “as a time-specific form of the description of an individual’s life” (Kade & Hof, 2010, p. 146). The activity of narrating one’s own life is inscribed in a long tradition (traveller stories; ‘Bildungsromane’; autobiographies). It is, that ‘authors’ represent and narrate their own existence “as a way to develop oneself” (Alhadeff-Jones, 2017, p. 132). For adult education what is important is an imbedded transformative idea, that, as biographical development and unfolding one’s own biography, the “self-shaping in this process is a kind of a temporal modality” (Kade, 2011, p. 29) that is bound onto the present and connected to the past and the future. Moreover, biographical identity “is open but not entirely indefinite” (Kade, 2011, p. 29) and adult education and learning can furthermore be seen as enabler for self-shaping. Drawing on the humanistic meaning of ‘Bildung’, such developments of identity and unfolding one’s own biography, refer to transformational coping via higher-order learning processes (cf. Koller, 2012; Marotzki, 1990). Bildung implies an expansion of the individual possibilities of self-determination, and an increase in reflexivity up to a critical distancing from the flow of life. More than in the concept of education, such learning processes are indeterminate and open and are directed against a linearly progressing future orientation and utilization and even resilient (cf. Pongratz & Bünger, 2008; Schmidt-Lauff, 2019). Biographical approaches therefore “have privileged an understanding of personal development, growth, or manifestations of human agency as experienced by subjects located in specific historical and social contexts” (Alhadeff-Jones, 2017, p. 132).
This is where biographical research and practice in (adult) education comes in to better understand the temporal relationalities of self, identity and subjectivity. In his work on biographies Jochen Kade unfolds its potential on how education and learning aim at “enabling and generating the uniqueness of individuality” (Kade, 2011, p. 29) without sacrificing embeddedness in society. In an increasingly functionally differentiated modern society, it is now becoming a condition sine qua non, as it were, that allows people to be located within society only when they become individuals (e.g. by lifelong and lifewide learning). The locating principle of inclusion becomes central for the individual identity, not any more as social-identity but as social-differenced individual identity (Merrill, 2023). The self-created, differenced identity still sticks to be unmistakable, unique - and thus a constantly state of being (re)created. The development (creation) of the subject's identity is therefor never completed, but shows itself as a permanent, open process, which not only concedes the parallel existence of different partial identities, but emphasizes the process of creative subject performance.
Focussing on learning as a process rather than a product, biographical work in adult education contributed to the development of a broad range of biographical research, methodologies and practices focusing on the processual (time) aspects of diversification in socialities (Merrill, 2023; Nassehi, 2008), identity formation (von Felden 2020, 2021), self-development (Bueno, 2018; Deppe, 2020) or training (Alheit & Dausien, 2007):
From a temporal perspective, the implementation of life history and bio graphical methods by adult educators constitutes a resource helping individuals shaping the temporalities constitutive of their own lives. It provides them with an opportunity to gather and organize heterogeneous experiences, moments and aspects of their existence to elaborate, through the formulation and the sharing of a (written and/or oral) narrative, a more or less cohesive whole giv ing a specific consistency to their history. (Alhadeff-Jones, 2017, p. 132)
Drawing on (auto)biographies the voices of adults in texts and oral narrations (e.g. interviews) are used for biographical analyses in research and practice in adult educational. The analysis of (auto)biographies, genuinely based on temporality and sociality, aim on revealing collective and individual-subjective forms of “temporal (re)ordering (…) a person’s life” (Alheit & Dausien, 2018, p. 891). Central question is, how do people (re)construct their identity temporal throughout their lives (and) in the context of lifelong learning?
References in biographical temporalisation
Biography in the course of time: historical reference
Historically, educational sciences have been influenced by the way in which societies understand time (cyclical, linear, irreversible, and fluid; cf. Wendorff, 1980). Educational systems, pedagogical concepts, didactics, but also epistemological ways of its understanding and its methods of research are tied “to human history” (cf. Dolch, 1964, p. 364).
The temporal reference of historicity also applies to changing autobiographical concepts and its presence in education (Bueno, 2018; for adult education Schmidt-Lauff & Hassinger, 2023 for an overview). Within the ‘temporal aspect of historicity’ (cf. Schmidt-Lauff, 2008, 2012, 2018) a development of (auto)biographical concepts and research (in educational sciences) becomes visible for the European epoch of the Modernity. The discussion and order of identity and self are often thought to have been the starting points of “biographical forms of self-presentation”, especially since the second half of the 18th century - an era and social situation which “accords (the individual) higher self-esteem” (Fischer, 2018, p. 463; cf. Deppe, 2020). Autobiographical motives can indeed already be found on “grand victory steles of the ancient Near East” and “judgments of the dead” have been known “since the 2nd millennium BC” (Brumlik, 2010, p. 20). Later on, in the early modern period religiously transformed e.g. in so-called ‘Sündenbiographien’ (sin biographies) as a self-disciplining instrument (cf. Nassehi, 2008, p. 319). But, a certain kind of sensitivity to time is required to encourage personal reflections and to transcend the linear form of a “life’s chronicle” (Leitner, 1982, p. 118).
During the second half of the 18th century, the individual is more and more “temporalised” in a dynamic and new fashion (Kade & Hof, 2010, p. 148), as identity is now based on a temporal structure equivalent to the model of an increasing dynamic world. The constitutive and configuring process of identity takes account of both, changes in an individual’s lifetime and of “the individual’s responses deemed necessary to constantly changing demands from society” (von Felden, 2020, pp. 33-34). As Böhme asserts, “What lacks identity because it is in a constant state of flux, regains identity by creating a temporalised context (Böhme, 1997, p. 695, cited by Kade & Hof, 2010, p. 150). This contextualisation as identity, however, follows a socio-historical, modernised interpretation of “biographical self-identification” (Leitner, 1982). As temporalised individual as the subject becomes the heart of biographical research in history, literature, educational sciences, and other disciplines.
Another aspect needs to be looked at: in no way can “historical time” be assumed to be a reality in biographical narratives. Episodical reconstructions of “history as a processual self-reference” (Nassehi, 2008, pp. 200-201) opens up the past as “inner-history” (Söhner, 2020). By the method of “Oral History” historical events are weighted differently (e.g. by eye witnesses) based on its “communicative structuring” (Söhner, 2020, p. 12). Studying history and the historical artefacts by biographical representations will help to better understand contrasting phenomenon and different perspectives on the same epochal demarcations. The influence of collective narrations up to mass media stagings like researched in personal memories of the nazi era (Söhner, 2020), in feminist biographical research (Merrill, 2023), or actually in reactions on the pandemic crisis (Volkmer & Werner, 2020) becomes over biographical research that is more intelligible.
Temporal formats in Biographies
Interlacing collective temporalities, time standards and time institutions with individual and subjective time experiences and living of time is the analytical core of “scientifically (re)constructed biography” and “biographical self-identification” (Leitner, 1982, p. 201). (Auto)biographical narratives follow a genuinely temporal format. Narrating illustrates developments and changes (cf. Horsdal, 2011; Lucius-Hoene & Deppermann, 2002; Ricœur, 1984; von Felden, 2020) and is a temporal act itself (cf. Bieri, 1972; Leitner, 1982; Mead, 1969).
Biographies interlacing past, present and future: the time-triade
Biographies have “always a purpose, located in the present and future; they give stability, create identity, and offer solace. (…) Simultaneously it allows to unveil the socio-cultural change in collective historical interpretation” (Schilling & O’Neill, 2020, p. 3). Life-stories or biographies deal with the idea of (re)structuring past occurrences as historical events or as lived experiences, which is then the subjective past:
While reconstructing past biographical events and processes, we always refer to our current understanding of time and our future biographical projections. Our understandings are not simply formed in a linear past-present-future (...). How we understand and experience time through forms of memory is a key aspect of the study of life story accounts and can be readily explored using creative methods. (Schilling & O’Neill, 2020, p. 2)
Biographies are therefore a complex matter and subject to permanent construction through the interlacing of the three temporal dimensions of "past”, “present” and “future” (the stronger differentiation as past-future, present-past etc. find in section “Relational-temporal differentiations: Interlacing of the time modes”). Relevant to biographical temporalisation is not only the embedded distinction between individual and subjective time experiences and objective (historical, chronographic) events, as described above, but also the essential reference to the three temporal dimensions of past, present and future. Within the process, biographing past, present and future are modelized and their relations modified. Referring to McTaggart’s philosophy of time (1908; for interpretation see also Bieri, 1972; Kornwachs, 2001), there are two main temporal-relations5: On the one hand, all events are ordered in relation to each other in terms of “earlier than” and “later than” and “simultaneous with” (B-series) (McTaggart, 1908 as cited in Bieri, 1972, p. 16).
This time series is invariable: an event that is earlier than another will always remain so and will never be later than it, just as the later of two events can never become the earlier. The same applies to the simultaneity. (Bieri, 1972, p. 16)
On the other hand, events are not only distinguishable chronologically, but are relational to each other (“before”, “after”, “now”, “in future”). In the A-series, the indexical notion of 'now' is subject-dependent and marks the moment at which it is pronounced. “This order, unlike the first, is not constant: an event that is present was once future and will once be past.” (Bieri, 1972, p. 16). Both types of ordering are interrelated. This means that temporal relations cannot dissolve into separate dimensions, but turn out to be variable in individual-subjective time experiences and ultimately uno actu in the semantic temporalisation of biographic narration (more in 3.).
Accordingly, for such processes of ordering, Peter Alheit and Bettina Dausien talk about “doing biography” (Alheit & Dausien, 2007) which marks biographing also as a transition or process. By doing biography as temporal ordering we use specific cultural patterns (Levine, 2006). Coherence is just as important as contingency and transformation (cf. Koller, 2012; Schäffter, 2012; von Felden, 2020; in contrast cf. Kade, 2011 6).
Carmen Leccardi defines “biographical time” as “outcome” of the processes relating to past, present and future, it “can be understood as the temporal dimension that emerges as the outcome of the processes through which subjects relate to the past, live their own present and enter into relationship with the future” (Leccardi, 2013, p. 251).
In his “Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness” (1893-1917/1985), Husserl formulates this “how” of a temporal setting-in-relation of the internal and external as a play of real events and lived experiences as well as sensations. According to Husserl, the internal time-consciousness (Wahrnehmung) continues to produce ever new levels in different modes of “presentification” (Vergegenwärtigung) either as retentions or “primary memories” in the sense of a flow of consciousness, or, as “forward-looking” protentions in the sense of irritating the flow of consciousness (Husserl, 1985, No. 11-12, 45). Husserl does not differentiate between objectivity and subjectivity but between reality and consciousness, between the world and the way we experience and perceive it. The fact that the “stream of consciousness” (Husserl, 1985, No. 24) is also a self-reflexive process is highly relevant to biographical research: “We can ‘grasp’ it, we can observe how it is continuously changing from phase to phase” (Husserl No. 24 (199), lines 1-4).
For adult education practice and the professional action (e.g. as “biographical mentor”) are part of a temporal-sensitive knowledge, that such reflexive moments of a stream of consciousness do neither unfold in a chronologic nor in a linear way. Reflections (narrated or just thought) are moving around between past, present and future relations. As narrations they appear along long-lasting memories (“in my childhood I was already interested in…”), short retentions (“since I started the course…”), present moments (“now, when I am learning together with my colleagues…”) and future protentions (“when I know more about, I will start…”). Remembering means looking back at the past from the present, thus creating connections between the present and the past. Past events are being recalled to mind in new and thus often modified ways, which can be understood as a process of (re)construction.
The interlacing of the three time-dimensions (past, present, future) in adult learning processes is a strong moment in biographical-narrations like the following quote drawing from an interview (Schmidt-Lauff, Brečić-Ločičnik, & Berendi, 2022) with a woman, doing formal-learning in a musical course, can show:
After my divorce, it was kind of a healing for me to go to this community, regularly turning my attention to something new that I have always wanted to learn (musical programming) and engage in new activities connected to music … also, just for the sake of learning something new, to develop myself as a person, as it seemed a good idea to face new challenges for personal growth. (Schmidt-Lauff, Brečić-Ločičnik, & Berendi, 2022, p. 27)
In the study “Time dimensions of the biographical” (Zeitdimensionen des Biographischen, 2021) Heide von Felden (2021) investigates biographical transitions as processes by qualitative a long-term study. Her focus is on processes into retirement, learning dimensions of the third age and reflections on getting older. Her interviewees dealt with the subject of the finiteness of life as well as the art of living in the post-professional life phase. She reconstructed the narrative of one of her interviewees e.g. as an example, where learning-time over the lifespan changed “from resistance to reconciliation”, with a learning attitude named as “becoming oneself” (von Felden, 2021, p. 278). Another interviewee did not change the conceiving of learning-time over his live and is typed as “searching without arriving”, with a continuous learning attitude as “infinite movement” (von Felden, 2021, p. 406). This extract may in short show how narrative reconstructions contribute to example for a time-sensitive understanding about the ways how different or similar learning-time is conceived throughout one’s own life.
Reordering learning processes along with their biographisation reveals the way how we experience learning-time as a specific form of time quality beside and outside other daily life activities becomes intelligible. In our studies about temporal gender implications on learning, we could show how learning increases stress and time pressure especially for women and during the ‘rush-hour-of life’ different from men (Schmidt-Lauff, Brečić-Ločičnik, & Berendi, 2022). But also, how learning helps the women to stop their linear time-rush and become a bit more relaxed during their learning. Stopping the stream and flood of activities may also generally open a time-window for learners to re-think and reflect upon their time flow of doing.
According to Leccardi, a “biographical continuity” is possible as product of the individual’s ability “to construct and reconstruct ever new frameworks of meaning” (Leccardi, 2013, p. 261). The fact that the future is uncertain and unpredictable must not necessarily result in a “paralysis of action” (Leccardi, 2013, p. 261), but on the contrary can mean to “have control over biographical time” (Leccardi, 2013, p. 263). Such control is no longer established through future “life projects” as in late modernity, but continuously by setting vague goals which remain quite individual and flexible (postmodern projectuality).
Relational-temporal differentiations: Interlacing of the time modes
Referring to Klaus Kornwachs’ (2001) philosophical “Logic of time - time of logic”, relational frameworks of time could be described even more precisely7. He distinguishes between a past of the past (VV8), a present of the past and a future of the past, then between a past of the present, a present of the present and a future of the present and finally between a past of the future, a present of the future and a future of the future (Table 1):
Table 1: Interlacing of the time modes
| … of the … | future (Z) (Zukunft) | present (G) (Gegenwart) | past (V) (Vergangenheit) |
|---|---|---|---|
| future (Z) | ZZ | ZG | ZV |
| present (G) | GZ | GG | GV |
| past (V) | VZ | VG | VV |
Source: Kornwachs, 2001, p. 169.
Observations:
Past of the past (VV): It is the fact of the factual; the final irreversible event.
Present of the past (GV): It is the current transformation of what is stored, of traces as a determination of degrees of freedom vis-à-vis the current influences.
Future of the past (ZV): Traces are erased, what has been stored disintegrates, facts are reinterpreted or forgotten.
Past of the present (VG): This mode is the most immediate past (see Husserl’s ‘primary memories’ as ’noema’ as formative experiences that resurface from memory) that can be used at any time; it is still reversible.
Present of present (GG): The topicality of the current. It is the mode of being of the consciousness, the processes and the dynamics (see Husserl’s presentification).
Future of the present (ZG): It may reach far into the future in so far as the anticipation of possible events determines current events. “Every cognitive act, every flight reaction, for example, has these anticipatory parts” (Kornwachs, 2001, p. 170).
Past of the future (VZ): “Too old to die young” demonstrates as a way of speaking a limitation of possibilities. The ways of anticipating the future change in such a way that drafts are put aside. “This past is no longer caught up by future events, but remains as a dusty, unrealized plan” (Kornwachs, 2001, p. 170).
Present of the future (GZ): Here the “inevitability” is meant, with which something of the possible becomes actual; that something comes towards us is always inevitable. Thus, the possible, in that it can become actual, is always present.
Future of the future (ZZ): The potentiality of the possible; its openness in principle.
Schäffter emphasises that such a specification produces further insights, for example into reflecting on the work with contemporary witnesses or biographical learning about authentic experiences or the “work of preserving memories” (“Erinnerungsarbeit” - Schäffter, 2012, pp. 124-126).
We illustrated for adult educational purposes this interlacing of the time modes by taking an example from biographical research in educational sciences (Schmidt-Lauff & Hassinger, 2023, pp. 125-126). It9 is about a woman re-entering working life “as a paradoxical experience”. The author highlights the impact of past experiences on future options for actions and demonstrates in this study, that structures acquired throughout women’s lives of using time “purposefully” seem to contribute to “smooth educational and professional advancement” (Feider, 2005, p. 20). Later, however, these internalised sequences of an efficient and meaningful use of time have a paradoxical impact as they prevent her from getting back to work (Feider, 2005, p. 33). Previous educational choices collide with present ideas of family and work, initially preventing the interviewed women from (re-)shaping her future. What we see here is a “past of the present” (most recent past, e.g. the birth of a child and parental leave), a “present of the present” (current event, e.g. the wish to get back to work) and a “future of the present” (anticipation of colliding temporal structures of family, childcare, job) as well as a “present of the past” (stored memory trace e.g. previously uncomplicated career stages). Without going into more details, this brief example could show how a relational-temporal dimensional analysis helps reveal further temporal nuances.
Using biographical methods helps connect individual stories to collective (here: gender) experiences by locating a life story within a broader temporal collective social context: “Thus, more than any other method, biographical approaches reveal the complexities and inequalities experienced in people's everyday lives at both an individual and collective level”, like Barbara Merrill (a feminist biographical researcher) states (Merrill, 2023, p. 933).
Narrated time and temporal indexicality
Numerous passages on narratives and narration, narrating time and narrated time have shown that the context-dependency of language in space and time - the “temporal indexicality” - plays a key role in biographical research (cf. Leitner, 1982; Lucius-Hoene & Deppermann, 2002; Ricoeur, 1984; von Felden, 2021). Narration of a personal history provides material required for temporal-indexical analyses. Biographical narratives include explicit temporal vocabulary and implicit contextual knowledge about time (“temporal references”, cf. 2.) and embedded time experiences as “relations of the self to time” (cf. Schmidt-Lauff, 2008, 2018). “By presenting experiences in a temporal order, a narrator ‘gets them straight’, as expressed in everyday language, and suggests a particular interpretation of these experiences in causal or conditional terms” (Kokemohr & Koller, 1996, p. 94).
Sometimes creative methods like “walking interviews” (cf. Schilling & O’Neill, 2020, p. 2) are used to explore biographical temporalisations. Autobiographical walks are able to relate places and lived moments to one’s biography, by evoking involuntary memories while moving and sharing experiences. There is an everpresent potential evolving between the narrator and the researcher while the attunement to the landscape, other people, objects and landmarks that might spark the biographical memories.
First of all, biographical research in educational sciences differentiates between a double time perspective: narrated time and narrating time. Therefore, it is possible to distinguish between the 'narrating self' and the 'narrated self' in biographical texts. There is
(…) the perspective of the narrated time, which is the time in which the story took place, with its orientation centre at that time and the perspective of the narrating time as the time in which the story is told, the here and now of storytelling as the current orientation centre. (Lucius-Hoene & Deppermann, 2002, p. 25; italics author)
Whereas the narrated time is the time which is recounted (i.e. the time in which the story took place, narrating time refers to the concrete situation and the present situation of narrating itself).
These two perspectives are constructs under certain narrative conditions with a special focus on its reference to time. First, there is the narrator telling the story in the present situation of narrating in which recollected moments are reconstructed, retraced and transformed. The succession of the sentences does not reflect the succession of things or of what happened. In terms of time theory, this shows the difference between the “experienced time” and the “temporality of experience” (cf. Leitner, 1982, pp. 26-27). The narrative situation is a constructive interaction established through conventions of communication, role ascriptions, the narrator’s communicative intentions (“self-portrayal”) and through the interviewer’s influence when listening (cf. von Felden, 2020, p. 32). The moment of narrating is temporally just as relevant as temporalities in the narrative itself.
The time of language itself precedes all this and is based on the simple fact that narrating takes time: “Language cannot express synchrony in any other way than by diachronic extension: word follows word and sentence follows sentence. Synchrony therefore requires explicit representation in and through language.” (Leitner, 1982, p. 24; italics author).
This leads to a second temporal particularity: we may be able to experience different things at the same time, but need to describe and narrate them one after the other. This non-simultaneity of the simultaneous in every narrative is reflected in the principle of temporal sequences of spoken words.
Another - very specific problem of the German language - is that there is only the noun “time” (unlike the word “timing” in English). This conceptual narrowing of “time” as a noun conveys an objective condition as a result of which time is not only inexpressible as an occurrence in its processuality, but eludes analysis (cf. Elias, 1988). Elias suggests using the new verb form of “zeiten” (timing) (cf. Elias, 1988, pp. 8-9) to emphasise the aspects of using and modalising time.
A fourth temporal particularity is the specific time-independence of texts: We can read narratives of spring in autumn and we can read them recurrently - the present moment of living, the moment of telling and reading and analysing the narrative, however, cannot be repeated.
The methodical and linguistic focus on temporal indexicalities creates a temporal depth of reconstruction (Schmidt-Lauff & Hassinger, 2023, p. 130): Presentification means to temporalise structures, actions and identity. Biographies use concepts of time such as then, today, fast, idle, etc. which are “signs of their times” themselves. Narratives contain grammatically different tenses to portray processes, changes and dramaturgy and the speech tempo varies. Speech tempo variances depend, for example, on the emotional state (cf. de Oliveira Moreira, Campos Guerra, Lima, & Drawin, 2020), peculiarities of language (Italian, Swiss German, etc.) or dialect spoken. But there are also differences between generations and epochs expressing culture of time and temporal structuring (for comparative studies see Levine, 2006; for psychoanalytic strategies see de Oliveira Moreira et al., 2020).
Narratives also encompass selections from the “entire flow of events of a ‘life course’” (cf. Leitner, 1982, p. 16), which are then reassembled as sequences with omissions. Formats such as utopias or fictions can develop because narratives are able to create their own time. There is no “correct time structure” when the beginning and the end of an occurrence are defined individually and subjectively because “time already existed before a narrative’s beginning and will continue after its end” (Leitner, 1982, p. 28). From a linguistic perspective, the situational and contextual time dimension reflects for instance the way a concept of time is embedded within the communicative situation of a narrative interview. As described above, sociocultural contextualisations (e.g. milieu or generation) or socio-historical contextualisation (e.g. globalisation, crisis) also play a role because they foster the use of specific concepts of time, speech tempos, etc.
Identifying temporal semantics helps reveal the “symbolic character of time” (Elias, 1988) and the resulting consciousness-related and perceptual modalisations of time as “intrapersonal temporalities” (cf. Schwarz, Hassinger, & Schmidt-Lauff, 2020). Semantic reinforcement as used in time-related figures of speech, for example, which shape the mindset of an epoch, a generation or a milieu, serves not merely to “precisely describe the subjective conditions”, but rather to “provide imaginary anchor points of identity formation” (Kade, 2011, p. 41). Kade (2011) shows how the interview-situation itself - at the moment of the individual present - “stands in the middle of a process in which the currently significant life events are realized” (Kade, 2011, p. 41). The interview becomes part of the biographical process.
Critical summary and outlook on a time-sensitive professionalization
Biographies genuinely provoke time reflections, temporal work and inquiry, drawing on individual and subjective modalisation of time in the context of collective temporalities. Time is of central importance for researching and understanding biographies. Biographical temporalisations (as plural of conceptualisation of time in biographical research) include chronological descriptions of life courses, temporal semantics, sequential narrative rhetoric and indexicalities. The purpose of biographical temporalisation (in singular as paradigm for biographical research) is to untangle the interwoven the collective times, social patterns of time and their individual perceptions for adult education. By using narrative activities (e.g. traveller narrations, walking interviews) and texts (e.g. short or focused autobiographies) may provide sensitizing insights also about learning transitions, transformation and identity development.
An often-marginalized aspect is the using of biographies in adult education as part of a time-sensitive professionality (cf. more Alhadeff-Jones, 2017; Schmidt-Lauff, 2019; Schmidt-Lauff & Bergamini, 2017; von Felden, 2021). To support lifelong and lifewide learning professional knowledge and didactical-methodological competencies are not only about the time-management or organization of learning by seriation, sequencing, repetition, pauses etc. In our world of acceleration and speeding up crises, timewise knowledge about biographies is needed, which may help to better understand subjective relations to these dynamics.
The identification of antagonisms and tensions in crisis situations leads us to consider how learning and (trans)formative processes evolve through fluctuations between states, behaviours, beliefs, or postures. (…) Thus, the recognition and the description of such patterns may appear as critical. They may lead people to develop the capacity to interpret and eventually influence how they relate to the meaningful tensions and antagonisms that organize the course of their personal and professional lives, beyond specific perturbations. (Alhadeff-Jones, 2021, p. 320)
To quote (Original Sound) an adult educator about her personal experiences becoming a “biographical mentor in Adult Learning and Education” may close this paper but open for the pave of future discourses in a temporal-sensitive biographical understanding of adult education and learning:
Biographical work for me is a tool to support individual personal growth; a joint research and discovery at eye level, in which the direction and intensity are given by the biographer; the mentors accompany the process. The starting point is always a concern for the present. (Numrich, 2022, p. 83).
I have tried to show where and how biographical temporalisations contribute to a deeper epistemological understanding and more diversified methodical approach to time in biographical research. Time would not only be one variable among many in biographical research with a genuinely temporal focus, but the ultimate variable provoking a time-sensitive reconstruction.
