The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

These, in turn, have a profound effect on shaping autobiographic narrations and
understandings.
While the prison seems to represent an extreme case of a coercive biographic institution,
Svensson’s arguments can be extended to understanding the biographic character of
other institutions of social order and regulation such as schools and political
organisations. These institutions are also characterised by rules and codes, and the lives
of their members become a subject for registration, regulation, evaluation, classification
and record‐keeping. What emerges is a documentary record, which talks to the history
of these institutions, and to their discursive frames, which shape the life narratives of the
individuals who constitute them. The resultant archive stands as testimony, not merely
to the existence of these institutions and their members, but to their capacity to
constitute subjectivities and biographic possibilities (and constraints), as a key element
of the social knowledge that they produce.
The biographic process should not be seen as characterised by a passive relationship
between subject and biographer, in which the biographer is in some sense in command
of the life of their subject. Indeed, there is always a struggle for control over the story of
a life. This may involve a struggle between the biographer and the subject in which the
narrativisation of self entails more than merely leaving traces, but actively organising
and laying the groundwork for the production of a life. This need not be on the scale of
taking “a pre‐emptive strike for control of the biographical space”, as described by
Evans in the case of Simone de Beauvoir. De Beauvoir had sought to provide “the
authoritative account of her life” with a “conscious determination to construct a
particular kind of life and person”. This she did through the production of four volumes
of autobiography as well as accounts of the death of her mother and of her life‐long
companion, Sartre. Through these works, De Beauvoir constructed herself through the
masculinist mode, as being of “ungendered rationality” with a refusal to engage with
the feminine. 121 There was a conscious attempt to construct a particular kind of life and
121 Mary Evans, ‘Masculine and Feminine Biography’, pp 112‐113.
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