Which subject, whose desire? The constitution of subjectivity and the articulation of desire in the practice of research

Lapping, Claudia

doi:10.1057/pcs.2013.14

Cited by 15 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…I thought, he's not gonna like being dressed and washed and bathed, but he was quite happy, very happy, but it just … doesn't seem to be the same.But, rather than characterise the more critical comments as aberrant cases of collective hysteria in an otherwise harmonious life, we argue that these ‘islands of over investment’ index something important about the way in which identities are negotiated, and how discursive elements become fantasies that are variously enjoyed. We cannot know for sure what animates this enjoyment, since this would require intimate familiarity with the specific discourse of the subject (Lapping 2013; see also Frosh 2010) and focus groups, although intense and emotionally charged, can only offer but a cursory insight here. For some, the presence of frailer residents poses no threat to them; for others, though, we might argue that the perception of a failed promise to rejuvenate the collective has become something of a fixation which procures a kind of enjoyment.…”

Section: A Fantasy Of Rejuvenationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enjoying the third age! Discourse, identity and liminality in extra-care communities

et al. 2016

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Extra-care housing has been an important and growing element of housing and care for older people in the United Kingdom since the s. Previous studies have examined specific features and programmes within extra-care locations, but few have studied how residents negotiate social life and identity. Those that have, have noted that while extra care brings many health-related and social benefits, extra-care communities can also be difficult affective terrain. Given that many residents are now 'ageing in place' in extra care, it is timely to revisit these questions of identity and affect. Here we draw on the qualitative element of a three-year, mixed-method study of  extra-care villages and schemes run by the ExtraCare Charitable Trust. We follow Alemàn in regarding residents' ambivalent accounts of life in ExtraCare as important windows on the way in which liminal residents negotiate the dialectics of dependence and independence. However, we suggest that the dialectic of interest here is that of the third and fourth age, as described by Gilleard and Higgs. We set that dialectic within a post-structuralist/ Lacanian framework in order to examine the different modes of enjoyment that liminal residents procure in ExtraCare's third age public spaces and ideals, and suggest that their complaints can be read in three ways: as statements about altered material conditions; as inter-subjective bolstering of group identity; and as fantasmatic support for liminal identities. Finally, we examine the implications that this latter psycho-social reading of residents' complaints has for enhancing and supporting residents' wellbeing.

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Section: A Fantasy Of Rejuvenationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enjoying the third age! Discourse, identity and liminality in extra-care communities

et al. 2016

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“…Guattari suggests that the interpretation of moments of productive escape involves a sensibility to the multiplicity of 'real complexions' that 'do not have the same ontological colouring as each other ' (p. 18). Where the Deleuzian/Guattarian ontological orientation foregrounds politics as a sensibility to new materialities, the Lacanian (anti)epistemological orientation foregrounds an ethical commitment to ignorance, sensitive to the dangers of imposing the interpretations of the analyst onto the other (Lacan, 1991;Lapping, 2011Lapping, , 2013a. This contrasting orientation plays out in the contrasting conceptualisations of 'time', as virtuality, or as a traumatic and unknowable Real.…”

Section: The Production Of Chronological Temporality In Identificatiomentioning

confidence: 99%

“…My analysis of this data has drawn on psychoanalytic and psychoanalytically informed social theory, from a predominantly Lacanian perspective (Lapping, 2013a(Lapping, , 2013b. The analysis offered here also engages primarily with Lacanian ideas.…”

Section: Introduction: the Politics Of Time And The Subjectmentioning

confidence: 99%

The explosion of real time and the structural conditions of temporality in a society of control: durations and urgencies of academic research

Lapping¹

2016

Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education

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In the context of ongoing debates about the distinctive temporalities associated with contemporary regulative regimes, this paper explores the interpretive trajectories initiated in contrasting conceptualisations of the politics of time. This exploration is developed through analysis of interview data from a study of unconscious relations in academic practice. Section one uses one moment of data to contrast phenomenological, Deleuzian and Lacanian theorisations of the relation between time and subjectivity. Section two is an exegesis of Lacan's paper on Logical Time. This outlines the way temporality is structured in relation to the subject's guess about the expectations of the Other. Section three uses this to develop an interpretation of three temporalities that constitute the space of contemporary academic subjectivities. The final section considers the intensification of the juxtaposition of these incongruent temporalities, contrasting Lacanian and Deleuzian theorisations of time in the Real/virtual and their implications for both methodological and political strategy.

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“…This is the dimension of discourse in which the researcher 's investments are prone to play the greatest role, with a danger of reading in the text for what one is looking for or hopes to find, or giving in to the impression that the interlocutor and the respondent are speaking of the same object (e.g. Lapping, ). Finally, the Real of the text is the underlying ‘centre of gravity’, which simultaneously resists adequate representation or verbalisation by subjects.…”

Section: Lacanian Discourse Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading Formations of Subjectivity: From Discourse to Psyche

Brock

2016

Social & Personality Psych

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This article represents a critical overview of strategies to examine subjectivity in discourse, highlighting a series of methodological approaches, which seek to manage the tension between discourse studies' focus on social and cultural structures, and psychoanalysis' interest in unconscious motivations. One aim is to trouble the supposed opposition between discourse analysis and the psychosocial approach and to regard the latter as a possible extension of insights established by the former. It is argued here that psychosocial readings in general, and Lacanian approaches more specifically, offer a cautious, nuanced way of introducing psychoanalytic ideas into the analysis of texts. The first part of this article offers examples of discourse analytic approaches, which have explicitly sought to incorporate psychoanalytic notions, followed by a discussion of Lacanian discourse analysis -a method shaped directly by this psychoanalytic school's concern with language. The article concludes with a series of methodological injunctions for conducting a psychosocial form of textual analysis.After the 'turn to language' in the social sciences, the 1980s brought about a renewed interest in the formation and experience of subjectivity (Hollway, 2011). This article highlights a series of methodological approaches, which seek to manage the tension between discourse studies' focus on social and cultural structures informing the way subjects behave and conceive of themselves, and psychoanalysis' interest in unconscious motivations. It represents a critical overview of strategies to examine how subjectivity is 'produced and reproduced in the text, as embodied and "invested" discourse' (Saville Young & Frosh, 2010: 518), that is, how subjectivity is articulated by, and constituted through language. The aim is to trouble the supposed opposition between discourse analysis and a more psychosocial approach and to regard the latter as a possible extension of insights established by the former.Since the field of discourse studies is too vast to fully parse the distinctions between all of its subdivisions, the first part of this article offers examples of discourse analytic approaches, which have explicitly sought to incorporate psychoanalytic notions, focusing on interventions by Wendy Hollway and Michael Billig, who demonstrate two very different methods of accounting for subjectivity in discourse. This is followed by a discussion of Lacanian discourse analysis, a method shaped directly by this psychoanalytic school's concern with language and the analytic encounter. The article concludes with a series of methodological injunctions for conducting a psychosocial form of textual analysis ('texts' here broadly designating forms of transcribed data), using examples from the work of Claudia Lapping and Stephen Frosh.The move from discourse to psyche, or from language to what is seemingly beyond its confines, is one of the central methodological preoccupations of psychosocial studies. A psychosocial approach is of utility to those social rese...

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Which subject, whose desire? The constitution of subjectivity and the articulation of desire in the practice of research

Cited by 15 publications

References 10 publications

Enjoying the third age! Discourse, identity and liminality in extra-care communities

Enjoying the third age! Discourse, identity and liminality in extra-care communities

The explosion of real time and the structural conditions of temporality in a society of control: durations and urgencies of academic research

Reading Formations of Subjectivity: From Discourse to Psyche

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