ABSTRACT
At the time of us writing, there were many features in the media celebrating the 50th anniversary of the student uprising in Paris in May 1968. Writing shortly after, the literary theorist Roland Barthes reflected on how the protests were centred in a dissatisfaction with the power relations endemic to university education at the time.
Just as psychoanalysis, with the work of Lacan, is in the process of extending the Freudian topic into a topology of the subject (the unconscious is never there in its place), so likewise we need to substitute for the magisterial space of the past-which was fundamentally a religious space (the word delivered by the master from the pulpit above with the audience below, the flock, the sheep, the herd) – a less upright, less Euclidean space where no one, neither teacher nor students, would ever be in his final place
(Barthes, 1979) It is unclear if the last fifty years demonstrate any progress, if it were possible for us to agree on what might be meant by progress – whether by moving towards prescribed states of affairs (e.g. “effective teaching”, “cure”), or through perpetual renewal. The protests fifty years ago coincided with a radical rethinking of how literary theory was understood with the emergence of a prominent group of thinkers, including Foucault, who marked a shift from structuralism to poststructuralism. Jacques Derrida, another key figure in this movement, identified this shift as an “event” in the history of the concept of structure and the possibility of a transcendental position, or “center”. As he put it: “The center is not the center. The concept of the centered structure … is contradictorily coherent. And as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of desire” (Derrida, 1978, p. 279). Echoing Lacan, who was writing at much the same time, Derrida was pinpointing the impossibility of stable analysis referenced to fixed points. Perpetual adjustment refuses the setting of fixed goals, thus activating a desire which necessarily mistakes its object. We have always lived in turbulent times, but the turbulence is perhaps now more readily acknowledged in and incorporated into our cultural forms, even in science where “ ‘Truth is always new’, and if it is to be true, it has to be new” Lacan (2008, p. 17). The master has indeed been 122like Doctor Who in changing appearances in unpredictable ways as he is forced to relocate in time and space.