Desire and Drive in Researcher Subjectivity: The Broken Mirror of Lacan

Abstract

This article offers an account of how a researcher's subjectivity might be seen as being stitched into the fabric of practitioner research. It uses Lacan's notion of the mirror phase in suggesting that the subject of reflection is not quite what he or she might seem to be. The Freudian concept of desire is considered in relation to the motivations that reflective research models produce. This is contrasted with his concept of drive read against a research attitude where excessive belief in the linguistic forms of such research risks usurping the life one might seek to locate. The article draws on a contemporary reading of the terms as offered by the Lacanian social commentator Slavoj Ž ižek. Two examples are provided of teachers carrying out practitioner research for higher degrees. These document the awkwardness the teachers experience in building conceptions of self through reflective work as personal ideas are processed in social space.T his article seeks to better understand how practitioner research affects researchers' sense of who they are and the world in which they operate. It considers how the stories such researchers tell contribute to an evolving sense of self but a self implicated in alternative understandings of social worlds. The article commences by briefly reviewing the status of the individual in successive understandings of practitioner research. It suggests that the selfaware individual of Gadamerian hermeneutics as present in early versions of action research (e.g., Elliott, 1991) has been usurped by an individual rather less sure of his or her personal and social boundaries. A specific theme to be pursued relates to how individuals craft personal experience through socially generated discourses. It is suggested that the researcher's subjectivity is a function of this crafting. Yet this process cannot have clear outcomes, as a strict separation between the individual and the external world can never be achieved within the discursive terrain of practitioner research.

Sliding subject positions: knowledge and teacher educators

“…To theoretically analyse how human subject identifications with subject knowledge might be understood, we shall draw on the psychoanalytical work of Lacan. This work has been discussed in educational contexts elsewhere (Brown & England, ; Brown et al ., ; Brown, ; Atkinson, ). In an earlier paper the present authors used dimensions of this analytical approach in describing how new arrangements in teacher education have led to university teacher educators differentially identifying with a professional demand to engage in research according to how knowledge was variously understood (Brown et al ., ).…”

From ethnographic ‘self’-discovery to processes of identification

“…In order to explore this embodiment of purposes and commitments I agree with many of the ideas of my ethnographic peers (see e.g. Brown, 2008;De Freitas and Paton, 2009) who have found use of Lacanian understandings of concepts like subject, identity and identification. More particularly, my view on identity is inspired by reworkings of the Lacanian theory from clinical concepts to social theory within a framework of political philosophy and discourse theory (Glynos, 2001(Glynos, , 2008.…”

Signifying “students”, “teachers” and “mathematics”: a reading of a special issue

“…A subject is subject to the specific discursive framework presently being applied and is recognised according to the degree of compliance. The subject, in his or her alienation, is obliged to express herself and be understood through externally imposed linguistic filters (Brown 2008b). In Duval's (2006) Piagetian analysis, for example, students fill their assigned space in the appropriate construction of child, seen as being at this or that stage, within the discursive order presented by the research author.…”