Shapeshifters, shadows,

mentors and allies in a

lifelong learning journey:
lessons from television
Nod Miller, University of East London, UK
Paper presented at SCUTREA, 31st Annual Conference, 3-5 July 2001, University of
East London
The prologue

IN this paper I conceptualise my experience over the last two years in terms of the most
recent stage in a lifelong learning journey, and I use elements of narrative theory in order
to analyse aspects of my travels. Since this paper represents a continuation of
auto/biographical exploration conducted over some years in assorted papers and chapters,
it might be appropriate to conceive of this as the latest episode in the long-running drama-
documentary Miller's Travels. Here I examine the way in which my journey has been
illuminated by guides and fellow-travellers who are represented in the cast of characters in
my story of learning.

The characters may be understood in terms of the archetypes, such as shapeshifters,

shadows, mentors and allies, which feature consistently in myths, fairy tales and the texts
of popular culture. My analysis is illustrated with examples drawn from recent television
output, in particular from HBO's drama series The Sopranos (1998-2001) and from Big
Brother (produced in 2000 and 2001 by Bazal Productions for Channel Four).

Previously on Miller's Travels

In earlier published work I have examined the insights into aspects of lifelong learning
which may be gained from analysis of products of popular culture and highlighted the way
in which such products impact on personal experience, subjectivity and identity-
construction. I have analysed the intersection of my experience with cultural artefacts such
as television series (Miller, 1999) and popular songs (Edwards and Miller, 2000; Miller
2001a) and have deconstructed the way in which I draw on images and sensations from
popular culture in making sense of the everyday. In a conference paper last year I set out a
model based on a metaphor of autobiographical narratives as media production (Miller,
2000), and this current paper sets out to sketch in more detail that part of the model
concerned with the use of archetypes in assembling my cast of characters.

Narrative theorists such as Propp (1968) and Campbell (1973) have demonstrated how
myths and stories across the ages may be seen to feature common characters, themes and
structures, often built around the ordeals and lessons of a heroic journey. The Hero's (or
indeed, Heroine's) Journey is a powerful metaphor for exploration of how lifelong learning is
experienced, performed and accomplished and it resonates closely with the theme of this
conference. I have found that this metaphor has helped me to make sense of my learning
experiences at home, at work, in contrasting organisations and cultures, and in the virtual
worlds of imagination and cyberspace.

The main titles: introducing the cast

Whichever way I tell my story of learning, it is rarely a solitary tale. Just as my photograph
albums throng with group shots, from street parties and gatherings at Butlin's holiday
camps during childhood through to snaps of my successive communal households in the
1970s and '80s and more recent large-group learning events, my preferred social
environments have always featured groups. My favourite media texts, from classical myths
to sitcoms, always feature collectivities of comrades and fellow-travellers rather than lone
heroes or heroines.

My pattern of academic production in recent years reflects this pattern. When I attempted
to count (for auto/biographical research purposes) the total number of collaborators with
whom I had co-written and published, I abandoned this feat of memory when I counted
over forty.

I reflected that my list of 'everyone I have ever written with' might be compared with the
installation by the contemporary British artist Tracey Emin entitled 'Everyone I have ever
slept with 1963-95'. And over the course of my life I must say that in general my writing
partners have been at least as significant as their sexual equivalents, although, for the
most part, the two categories do not overlap. Allies in my learning journey include many
significant others in my invisible college of adult educators, including my co-editors of this
volume and some others whose names appear on the back cover. My lifelong learning has
also been aided by an array of influential mentors. I am frequently reminded of the
intellectual debt I owe to a number of senior colleagues in the fields of education and social
science, without whose encouragement my academic career would scarcely have got
started.

Alongside the characters who are obviously on my side, my tale of learning also features
dramatis personae representing darker archetypes such as shapeshifters and shadows.
Vogler, in a discussion of archetypes in storytelling, has this to say about the former:
'Shapeshifters change appearance or mood, and are difficult for the hero and the audience
to pin down. They may mislead the hero or keep her guessing, and their loyalty or sincerity
is often in question.' (1996: 75) He goes on to say this about the shadow: 'The archetype
known as the Shadow represents the energy of the dark side, the unexpressed, unrealized,
or rejected aspects of something. Often it's the home of the suppressed monsters of our
inner world. Shadows can be all the things we can't admit, even to ourselves.

The qualities we have renounced and tried to root out still lurk within, operating in the
Shadow world of the unconscious.' (1996: 83) In the historical period with which I am
dealing here, I found myself wrestling with murkier aspects of myself more often than I
liked. But that is to run ahead of the story.

A quick plot summary

In January 1999 I took up a new management post in the university where I had been
working for four years. I was in the midst of plans for a year-long learning festival for which
I had responsibility. I was living with my partner Rod in a generally contented state in East
London, in a house full of books, cats and teddy bears.

In February my parents returned from a visit to Australia.

Almost immediately my father was taken ill and was admitted to hospital for what was
expected to be routine surgery. He soon developed medical complications which resulted in
his spending seven weeks in intensive care, mostly unconscious, until he died. Dad's
funeral took place just after Easter. Over the next few months my mother spent much of
her time in our house. I was feeling increasingly stressed at work.

Rod and I spent August 1999 on holiday in California, where I had my fiftieth birthday.
Towards the end of the holiday I began to have mild panic attacks, and I cried a great deal.
The Autumn of that year passed in a blur of senior management meetings and policy
papers. I was having trouble sleeping.

I began 2000 with a five-day group relations laboratory at the Tavistock Clinic, from which I
returned with renewed energy. I made determined efforts to reach understandings with
colleagues with whom I felt I had rather tense relationships. The Festival of Lifelong
Learning was launched successfully with a series of events in the spring of that year.

By the summer Rod and I had decided to look for a property which could accommodate my
mother as well as our various collections of objects and technologies, and we put our house
and my mum's on the market.

In the Autumn I embarked on a series of meetings with a counsellor; this experiment in

therapy concluded before Christmas. In November one of my academic mentors died of
cancer and early in 2001 I attended a memorial event organised in his honour. Several
close friends became seriously ill in the months that followed. Morale in the university
community reached a new low as a financial crisis set in; many colleagues moved jobs, and
some sought retirement packages.

Now, in the spring of 2001, I am conscious of having travelled a long way in the last two
years. I am still in transit, and still unsure of my destination. My mother's house is about to
be sold, but the sale of our London house has just fallen through and we are back on the
market. I am looking forward to the end of the Festival and to some time to reflect on
where to take the next phase of my working life.

As I read and edited an earlier version of this summary I was struck by the impression that
this has been a rather morbidly introspective period of my life. So I will add (not too
defensively, I hope) that I did more than mope about feeling miserable. For example, I co-
edited four collections of papers (including this volume); and my CV tells me that I also
wrote and published seven single-authored chapters or articles and sixteen co-authored
ones. Some aspects of professional life moved forward.

Act I: dramatic threads

An important element of my life history narrative during this time has been the continuing
conversation with friends, some of many years' standing, alongside whom I travel. In the
course of immensely nourishing interaction with these allies and mentors I have been able
to laugh at, to make sense of and to cry about distressing, bewildering or sometimes joyful
life events. Themes, dramatic threads or questions which run through this conversation
include those of generation (Isn't it strange to be fifty years old? How can I have reached
such a great age? Often I feel stuck in adolescence or stranded in the 1970s.); mortality,
death and illness (Everyone's parents die eventually, but it's still hugely significant when it
happens to you. How can I best help when my friends get ill and how do I deal with
reminders of my own frailty?); work and career (Is it necessary to make a choice between
scholarship and management? Am I losing touch with my radical roots in adult education?);
crises in the home and in the family (How and where do I want to live?).

Act II: including some video inserts

During the period under discussion, I wrote and delivered my inaugural lecture (Miller
2001). For those not familiar with the esoteric rituals of British higher education I should
explain that this is a grand public lecture to mark elevation to a professorial chair, a rite of
passage which marks one's incorporation into the academic establishment. Since one
aspect of my professional identity is that of media sociologist, a task I set myself in the
lecture was to sum up each decade in televisual texts. In case it is not obvious by now, I
confess freely here that, unlike many of my contemporaries who tell me they have no time
to watch television, I watch it a good deal. In my lecture, the 1950s were represented by
clips from Andy Pandy (an early example of the BBC's offerings for pre-school children),
from the television coverage of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and from Take Your
Pick, the first popular quiz show I remember watching on a regular basis. I had little
difficulty in representing later decades through the same medium. For example, the mid-
1960s are encapsulated for me in Ready, Steady, Go!, one of the first British examples of
'youth' programming, transmitted early on Friday evenings and marking the end of school
for another week. Seinfeld is the show which will always represent the 1990s.

In choosing my clips of each decade, I was trying to capture something of the way in which
my auto/biographical memory is tied up in media products. As I watch grainy images of
Motown performers on Ready, Steady, Go! I experience of echoes of past sensations and
emotions, just as I revisit earlier selves when I listen to CD reissues of tracks from much-
loved albums which I once owned on vinyl. The videos and the small silver discs are
imprinted with my auto/biographical history, and they form invaluable technological aids to
my self-exploration and to the documentation and analysis of my lifelong learning journey.

Although we are still in the early days of the 2000s, several programmes have imprinted
themselves strongly on my consciousness. These include: the quiz shows Who Wants To Be
A Millionaire? And The Weakest Link, which hold a grisly fascination in their mini-dramas of
schadenfreude; 'reality' television shows such as Big Brother, which are more fully
developed narratives of inclusion, exclusion, rejection and triumph; and American drama
series such as ER, Ally McBeal and The Sopranos, all of which move regularly between
comedy, tragedy and melodrama.

The two examples of television output on which I want to focus for the purpose of my
present analysis are The Sopranos and Big Brother. The central character in the first of
these series, an everyday story of New Jersey Mafia folk, is Tony Soprano. He is a gangster
boss who at the beginning of the series has begun to experience panic attacks and
embarks on a course of psychoanalysis in order to help him with his symptoms of stress
and mid-life crisis. During his therapeutic sessions with Dr Melfi, he explores emotions
which arise from the contradictions between his location in an outwardly conventional
middle-American family and his professional activity amongst the gang members and
villains who constitute his 'other family'. Routine conflicts between Tony and his wife and
teenage children are juxtaposed with treachery and murder amongst the mob. Over the
course of the series screened to date we see Tony struggling to make sense of his life and
to adhere to the moral codes of his Italian peasant roots, wrestling at the same time with
the roller-coaster experience of transference and counter transference through which he
passes during sessions with his therapist.

I did not immediately mark out The Sopranos for my viewing pleasure; the previews of the
series made it quickly apparent that it featured heavy doses of on-screen violence, about
which I am squeamish. I spent most of Pulp Fiction fearfully hiding my eyes. However, the
soundtrack, the complex characterisation, dense plotting and quick-fire (and sometimes
incomprehensible) dialogue of the Mafia tale wove a powerful spell. The series soon took its
place amongst those gems of the television medium whose closing credits always evoke in
me pangs of disappointment. Clearly some of the appeal of this drama lay in the fact that
key scenes chimed with aspects of my own life history: Like Tony Soprano, I was
experiencing milestones in my life course, dilemmas over work, home life and relationships
with parents and colleagues, doubts about who and what to trust, fears of betrayal and
uncertainties about self and identity.

I became conscious of elements of The Sopranos featuring in my dreams, and the extent to
which this fictional text had become mixed up in my real-life experience became apparent
to me one morning at the end of a counselling session, most of which I had spent in
contemplative silence.

I asked my therapist if she was familiar with The Sopranos, and explained how much of the
plot revolved around the therapeutic relationship. I remarked I had to admit to sharing Tony
Soprano's ambivalence towards the enterprise of exploring the unconscious, and concluded
with a light hearted quip about the fact that the boardroom battles of my work environment
had not yet resulted in murder. During my session the following week the counsellor made
much of this casual reference to the demons in my soul.

Big Brother is one of a crop of 'reality' television series which constituted a major media
talking-point during 2000.

Like Castaway 2000 and Survivor, Big Brother revolves around the device of throwing
together a group of strangers in a confined space and filming what happens. Castaway
2000, in which a group of thirty-odd Britons were marooned on a remote Scottish island for
the whole of the year 2000, had aspirations to be a 'social experiment' with educational
implications. But the other two series incorporated much more explicit game show
features, requiring participants to be voted out of the house or off the island and out of the
series at intervals. Part of the fascination of Big Brother lies in the clear construction of the
cultural island of the house as a goldfish bowl in which layers of observers (the television
crew and the television audience) may impact on the interaction in the household. The
second British series of Big Brother was promoted via the slogan 'watch, vote, control': a
reference to decisions about each successive housemate to be evicted being made on the
basis of votes from viewers. When I watched a documentary about the original Dutch series
of Big Brother early in 2000, my judgement was that it could only constitute compulsive
viewing for confirmed voyeurs or the terminally bored. If I had avoided watching Big
Brother I might have consigned it to the category of popular cultural forms soaked in
nihilism, of which Hobbs (1999) is persuasively critical.
Nevertheless, I soon became hooked on the first British series, and during a month-long
visit to the USA during the summer of 2000, I found myself drawn compulsively to the Big
Brother web site and its daily bulletins of happenings in the East London house where the
programme was taking place. My stay in the States also afforded the opportunity for me to
conduct comparative research on reality shows on either side of the Atlantic. Despite the
anthropological gaze which I trained upon it, I found the American version of Big Brother
pretty dull, but Survivor, which was reaching its climax when I was in New York, had a
certain repulsive charm.

A quick flashback

During the 1980s much of my professional activity revolved around a series of experiments
with the methodology of T group training as a means of exploring social and political
relationships. I was involved in the organisation of a large number of experiential learning
events and group relations laboratories (all forms of cultural island). A notable example was
the mini-economy, devised and implemented with Jim Brown; this was a four-day
residential event in which we created an economic system in miniature in order to explore
social relationships in a regime characterised by scarce resources and monetary inequality.
The event, still something of a legend in group work circles, took the participants through
four centuries of social and economic change, most of it backwards. The event
demonstrated the rich creativity of those who took part, although most also experienced
their share of trauma, not least my co-organiser and I; at one point we were cast into exile
from the system we had created, and threatened with starvation by revolutionary members
of our experimental community, who saw us as part of the repressive state apparatus.

Then in 1986 I was involved in the making of a television programme which formed part of
an Open University course on communication and education. For one section of the
programme I assembled a group of friends and colleagues, all of whom had worked in
experiential groups, and we conducted a T-group session for the benefit of a camera crew. I
found the process of assembling the material for the finished video fascinating and
absorbing. However, the BBC producer had a different view, complaining at length about
how difficult it was to select extracts from the T-group interaction which he felt justified in
airing on national television.

I recalled my conversations with that producer recently when I found myself absorbed in
late-night viewing of some of the live feed from the Big Brother house which is currently
being screened on a digital channel for eighteen hours a day (to not insignificant
audiences). I wondered whether my former colleague from the BBC had changed his view
of the demographic appeal of the minutiae of small-group interaction.

Act III: back to the lifelong learning quest

If, in the spirit of the classic Heroine's Journey, I frame my auto/biographical story as a
quest for knowledge and understanding, it is to enlightenment about social behaviour to
which I most passionately aspire. I have tried in this rapid trip through some episodes of
my recent history to sketch some examples of the way in which television programmes
have aided my quest by providing parables for lifelong learning. Precisely how the process
works remains to be explored further in future texts, but in any case I do not expect the
grail at the end of my story (or over the rainbow or wherever) to manifest itself in simple
statements about what has been learned, gained or lost. I should find it impossible to sum
up in a sentence or two the learning which has resulted from my encounters with The
Sopranos and Big Brother. The sort of 'uses and gratifications' analysis popular amongst
media researchers in the 1970s (see McQuail, Blumler and Brown, 1972) of the way in
which audience members 'use' television for escapism, emotional gratification, catharsis or
educational ends seems to me to rest on a model of the relationship between subjectivity
and media output which is far too simplistic and mechanical.

Furthermore, although characters in both the programmes I have dealt with here have
appeared in my internal narratives from time to time as shapeshifters, shadows, mentors
and allies, there is no simple process of identification or one-to-one relationship between
character and function.

In the course of my research for this paper, I returned to an account I wrote nearly fifteen
years ago (and reproduced in Miller, 1989) of social experiments in my invisible college of
experiential groupworkers. Some of my analysis rested on a comparison which I drew
between the mini-economy and an earlier Scandinavian group relations laboratory held in
1970, known as the mini-society and described in Higgin, 1972. I argued that such events
might be read as 'texts of their time', in that they embody the preoccupations and
behavioural patterns of their own cultural and historical moment. I drew on Higgin's story of
the 1970 event, in which he suggests that participants in such events may be seen as
enacting scripts of eternal significance in groups, as well as giving more obvious 'signs of
the times', pointing out that in the mini-society 'There were bits of the Hamlet script, The
Threepenny Opera script, the Julius Caesar script, The Wandering Gypsy script, the
Dionysus script, the democracy-doesn't work- we-need-a-leader script, and of course the
any day-at-home-and-at-work script.' (1972: 648) I have seen elements of each of these
script variants in both Big Brother and in The Sopranos. At the same time, there are
elements in each of these texts which seem firmly rooted in the beginning of the twenty-
first century.

A sort of resolution

Every good story cries out for a satisfying (and preferably happy) ending, and here perhaps
I reach a limit on the parallels to be drawn between tales on television and my real-life
journey towards lifelong learning. The story I have constructed here (I hope) contains
elements of dramatic tension, plot development, descents into dark places and even the
odd climactic scene, but so far there is of course no final resolution or end of story. But I
find myself unaccountably cheerful, calm and confident as I reach the last page of this
particular script. The process of telling a story carries its own therapeutic charge. In any
case, I find myself looking forward to a brand new series of Miller's Travels to be screened
very soon.

References

Campbell. J. (1973) The hero with a thousand faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press

Edwards, R. and Miller, N. (2000) 'Go your own way: lifelong learning and reflexive
auto/biographies in postmodernity', in International Journal of Lifelong Education, vol.19,
no. 2, 2000, pp 126-140

Higgin, G. (1972) 'The Scandinavians rehearse the liberation' in The Journal of Applied
Behavioral Science, vol.8, no. 6,pp. 643-663

Hobbs, T.S. (1999) Shows about nothing: nihilism in popular culture from The Exorcist to
Seinfeld. Dallas: Spence Publishing Co.

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Miller, N. (2000) 'Lifelong learning goes to the movies: autobiographical narratives as

media production' in T.Sork, V.-L. Chapman and R. St Clair (eds.) Proceedings of the 41st
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Columbia, pp.267-272.

Miller, N. (2001a) 'I'd rather be a goddess than a cyborg: technobiographical tales, from
drains to divas' in F. Henwood, H. Kennedy and N. Miller (eds.) Cyborg Lives: women's
technobiographies. York: Raw Nerve

Miller, N. (2001b) Autobiographical narratives of innovation, lifelong learning, invisible

colleges and the media .Unpublished inaugural lecture, delivered 24 May 2001, UEL
Propp, V. (1968) Morphology of the folk tale. Austin: University of Texas Press (originally
published in 1928)

Vogler, C. (1996) The writer's journey: mythic structure for storytellers and screenwriters
(revised edition). London: Boxtree