ABSTRACT
The previous chapter raised a series of questions about the resistances that emerge within analysis, suggesting the way the repetition of methodological categories might be interpreted as discursive repetitions or psychical attachments that constitute a limit to the interpretive process. Throughout the book I have been arguing both for the impossibility of escaping existing conceptual vocabularies, but also for the possibility of using these concepts playfully and of maintaining a sense of that which cannot be captured within the terms of our interpretations. Nevertheless, it is very difficult, I think, to avoid moments, or epochs, of submission to authoritative methodological frameworks. In this chapter I am exploring my own articulation of a Lacanian conceptualization of repression, disavowal and foreclosure and I am trying to note the ways in which my attachment to this framework constitutes, perhaps, a resistance within my analysis. The chapter is based on my own analysis of data produced in an ongoing study investigating knowledge practices within higher education. The aim of the study is to produce an account of subjective/psychical relations within institutionalized, academic knowledge practices. In order to achieve this, the methodology draws explicitly on psychoanalytic approaches. The participants – eight academics working within the humanities and social sciences – have agreed to take part in up to eight interviews over a period of up to two years. Prior to each interview participants are asked to select a text that in some way represents their disciplinary interests. In the interviews participants reflect on their choice of text, their experience of reading/writing the text, and their thoughts and feelings about it. My interventions within the interviews are intended to elicit additional meanings or associations. I also share initial interpretations with the participant during the interviews. These interventions are intended to draw participants’ attention to ways in which they may be idealizing, denigrating, objectifying or identifying with aspects of their practice, and to provide opportunities for them to elaborate, correct or refine these interpretations. In practice, in the early stages of the project it didn’t feel as if
there was as much time as I had hoped to discuss and refine interpretations within my meetings with participants. Because of this, I built an additional stage into the research process. Between the fifth and the sixth interviews I am writing case studies of individual participants. With their agreement, I send the case study to the participant and this becomes the prompt for discussion in interview six. This chapter is based on three of these case studies, and also draws on these participants’ responses to reading my interpretations of the texts produced in our meetings. There are several strands to the argument developed within the chapter. The analysis explores the appearance and disappearance of signifiers of affect, politics and disciplinary methodologies within participants’ accounts of their practice and suggests that these signifiers can be troubling or difficult to position in the articulation of an academic identity. This is the main strand of my argument in relation to the data. However, I am also exploring the possibility of understanding these appearances and disappearances through a psychoanalytic conception of repression, disavowal and foreclosure. My starting point is a Lacanian conceptualization of these psychical processes, but the aim is to elaborate the specific mechanisms through which these modes of negation are enacted in the context of academic practice, and this necessarily detaches Lacan’s ideas from their clinical association with the diagnosis of neurosis, perversion and psychosis. Because of this, there is a question about the productivity of this analysis of methodological practice – if it is not a clinical diagnosis, what is it? My aim is to trace hidden or unknown dimensions of knowledge in order to unsettle conceptions of methodology that ignore or discount suppressed aspects of scientific and social scientific practice. Lacan’s conceptualization of the psychical processes through which signifiers are kept out of a signifying chain offers a tool by which to explore the network of suppressed and articulated discourses that constitute legitimized academic knowledge. However, my analysis rearticulates these concepts: the focus of my analysis is a social practice rather than an individual subject; and the objects of the processes of repression, disavowal and foreclosure are not the same as in the clinical psychoanalytic categories. In addition, the clarity of the distinction between repression and foreclosure is not always easy to trace in the data produced within my project. So, in addition to developing an argument about psychical relations to signifiers of affect, politics and methodology within academic practice, I am also exploring the recontextualization of psychoanalytic terms, and I am trying to note where my attachment to these terms constitutes a point of resistance within my analysis. The substantive argument developed in my analysis of the interview data is that signifiers of affect, politics and methodology seem to have significant effects in relation to the subject of legitimized disciplinary knowledge; they seem to constitute specifically charged aspects of identity in the context of academic research practice. What I mean is: it is possible to trace the way signifiers related to all three – affect, politics and
methodology – are either repressed or disavowed, or, alternatively, used as a reference to regulate and legitimize practice. Affect, closely associated with notions of subjectivity, has always had a problematic relation to scientific and social scientific conceptions of knowledge. Affective responses are not generally incorporated into the articulated procedures of research, and affective responses that emerge in the wider context or hinterland of the research process are also usually ignored or considered problematic or illegitimate. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that where conceptions of affect have been brought into explicit formulations of methodological procedures – as in some schools of psychoanalysis and literary studies – the position of this signifier is frequently contested or unstable. In a similar way political affiliations, although not as transient and necessarily subjective as experiences of affect, have often been associated with notions of ideology and prejudice that are in opposition to ideals of objectivity within the research process. Although many disciplinary fields within the humanities and social sciences position themselves as explicitly politicized formations of knowledge, there is still some uncertainty about the position of politics within academic practice. Research is frequently positioned as an objective source of evidence that informs the political process, and research that announces its political affiliations may be seen as in some way tainted or suspect. Signifiers of political attachment, like signifiers of affect, can be troubling objects in the context of academic practice and research. In contrast to affect and politics, methodology might be considered a defining feature of scientific and social scientific practice. Indeed, it might be possible to suggest that methodology acts as first signifier within any disciplinary field, the guarantor of the discourse. Nevertheless, or perhaps as a direct corollary of this privileged position, signifiers of disciplinary methodologies seemed to be troubling, in similar ways to affect and politics, in the interview accounts produced in the context of the study. What happens when the signifier that guarantees disciplinary identity is seen to be lacking? What happens when signifiers that put disciplinary identities into question reappear within academic practice? What psychical processes push and position signifiers within or outside discourse? These are the questions that emerged in my initial analysis of the interview data produced in my study. They are also relevant questions to pose in relation to my own engagement and my interpretation of data within the project. The next section outlines in a little more detail the conceptual structures of repression, disavowal and foreclosure, which I have used as a starting point for my analysis of relations to signifiers within my research data. The remainder of the chapter presents three case studies of participants in my project, academics working in departments of cultural studies, literature and politics.
