CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland
The Interpellation of Experience Sessions
Organisers: Niamh Stephenson and Dimitris
Papadopoulos
The interpellation of experience I
Selby, Jane (Charles Sturt Universtiy,
Australia) BABIES AND PSYCHOANALYTIC LANGUAGE: CONFOUNDING IDENTITIES
I describe some laboratory-based activities of babies, between 6 and 10 months
old, sitting together in groups with no adults present. These activities
challenge the perennial distinction between individual experience and social
context. We can see basic group work amongst infants including multiple systems
of communication and simultaneous engagement with more than one other. This
challenges the dyadic conceptualisations of infant sociability, needs and
capabilities which dominate discussion of infant development and which assume
communication is 'phatic': intersubjective 'attunement' without specific
content. By contrast our observations of infant groups prefigure a notion of
group intelligence with evidence for idiosyncratic changes and development of
meaning of actions within a group setting, highlighting complex psychosocial
emotional dynamics. Considerations as to how to describe what we see as holding
specific and changing meanings for these non-verbal humans requires discussion
of epistemological uncertainty in representation and interpretation. Such
uncertainty is not only in the eye of the beholder. I argue that the
descriptions of psychoanalytic practice, especially the emotionally laden
processes of projective and introjective identification, provide concepts for
insight into a) what is happening in these infant groups and b) what happens
between language users in forming and communicating between and within
themselves. In particular I examine the 'confounding' of experiences between
individuals. This approach requires an acknowledgement that emotions, and
defences against experiencing them, are part and parcel of social and
interpersonal context.
Papadopoulos, Dimitris (UC Santa Cruz,
USA) TRAVELING EXPERIENCE. CLEAVAGES, ALIGNMENTS, AND CLOSURES OF EMPIRICAL
EVIDENCE
It is probably not only a rhetorical cliché when we speak about the existence
of two cultures in psychology: One culture relying on an empiricist and
objectivist approach, and the other attempting to do justice to the
irreducibility of subjectivity. Mainstream objectivist currents in psychology
assume that reality is preordained and attempt to progressively uncover it
through acquisition of new empirical data about individuals' experiences. The
other culture assumes that the understanding of reality depends on the position
from which we act and attempts to reveal it by visualizing the experience of our
social locatedness. Both cultures even if seemingly antithetic -- rely on the
concept of experience. This is not the case only because of the malleability of
this concept but mainly because experience is a constitutive aspect for the
production and management of political individualism which is essential for the
social organization of modern North-Atlantic societies. In this paper I will
examine to what extent the transmutations in the content, usage, and practice of
experience -- when it travels across different communities, sociocultural spaces
or scientific paradigms -- can question the apparent alignment between
experience/individualism/positivism. If we take it that political individualism,
the cult of inwardness, social positionality and experience are functional
aspects of specific social technologies in contemporary liberal geoculture, then
how is it possible, if at all, to escape the usual conservative interpretations
of the concept of experience and to counter the connected desire to maintain and
conserve the given?
Langsdorf, Lenore (Southern Illinois
University, USA) PROCESS AND PERSON: A RHETORICAL-CULTURAL ANALYSIS OF
SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE
A human act is a potential text and can be understood (as a human act and not a
physical motion) only in the dialogic context of its time (as a rejoinder, as a
semantic position, as a system of motives).
--M. M. Bakhtin, "The Problem of the Text"
The philosophies of substance presuppose a subject which then encounters a
datum, and then reacts to the datum. The philosophy of organism presupposes a
datum which is met with feelings, and progressively attains the unity of a
subject.
--Alfred North "Whitehead, Process and Reality"
The absolute principle is creativity, not order; it is freedom, not necessity. .
. Not God, nor the devil, and not some particularly wicked individual or social
system is the ultimate source of suffering and conflict in the world. Rather it
is the chance intersections of lines of creative activities that bring creatures
into conflict, frustration, suffering. . .
--Charles Hartshorne, "The Darkness and the Light"
The approach to subjectivity I take in this paper requires a comparative
consideration of the substance metaphysics that is an ingrained and rarely
noticed way of thinking in Euroamerican culture and theory, in contrast to the
process metaphysics developed in the work of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles
Hartshorne. The paper is situated, therefore, at an intersection of cultural
studies, philosophy of culture, and rhetorical analysis. The conception of human
subjectivity as processual, rather than substantial, that I outline at the start
of the paper is based in Whitehead's philosophy of organism, particularly as
developed in Hartshorne's thinking on creativity and order. In the second part
of the paper, I use this conception of subjectivity as the basis for
rhetorical-cultural analysis of subjective experience as neither determined by
sociocultural/material conditions, or formed through individual effort. In order
to argue for the formation of human subjectivity as dependent upon, but not
determined by, "the dialogic context of its time," which I explicate
as an nexus of praxis and poiesis, I draw upon a case study--the transformation
of personality documented in testimonies of Christian Science healing--on which
I'm currently (January 2002) working.
Rafanell, Irene (The University of
Edinburgh, United Kingdom) SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SELF: TWO VIEWS
My research uses Bourdieu's concept of Habitus to explore issues regarding the
constitution of social identity. I examine the possibility of discussing a
'sex/gender habitus' and highlight some of the processes by which society
constructs and naturalises sex/gender identities. While Bourdieu's concept
provides some useful insights into the 'social' nature of our identities, it
also presents some analytical shortcomings. These are resolved by the
Perfomative Model of Social Institutions, principally developed by Barry Barnes,
David Bloor and Martin Kusch. These scholars provide more analytically developed
notions of the nature of the social, the self, and the social construction of
social identities. Moreover, their notion of the social as a 'collective
accomplishment' fundamentally transforms the current sociological understanding
of social phenomena. My paper will aim to contrast these two Social
Constructionist views of the constitution of the self.
The interpellation of experience II
Bradley, Ben (Charles Sturt University,
Australia) OF WHAT NOW IS COMPOSED: SYNCHRONY, DIACHRONY, REPETITION AND
DEVELOPMENT
The 1930s saw James-influenced "experiential modernists" like Gordon
Allport, Lois and Gardner Murphy establish that, in a genuinely psychological
psychology, we need a more considered understanding of immediate experience
(Pandora, 1997). This imperative arose from the ethical need to transform the
authoritarian politics of the laboratory that dominate 'scientific' psychology -
where the the experience of the highly-trained expert overrides that of
'subjects' - into something more democratic. Unlike phenomenologists,
experiential modernists took it for granted that immediate experience was
non-originary; as it was socially constituted. Thus 'the individual's'
experience was considered to be part of a supra-individual ecology or
inter-subjective 'field' that, for analytic purposes, transcended its 'causal'
antecedents (Allport, 1937, p.194; Lewin, 1943). This paper re-examines these
insights in the light of post-structural linguistics, dynamic approaches to
repetition and the analogy of music. In particular I focus on a psychological
puzzle implied by Saussure's differentiation between synchronic and diachronic
linguistic analyses. Physically, a 'simultaneity' occurs when objects or events
are co-present. But psychologically, the present is 'specious,' a theoretical
abstraction, and 'can never be a fact of our immediate experience' (James, 1890,
p.573). According to Saussure, this is because one's sense of the present (a
psychical 'simultaneity') is 'synchronically' organised in terms of both
syntagmatic and paradigmatic series, most elements of which are peculiar to the
individual and not (temporally) 'present.' The fact that these series are not
sequentially organised means that the changes that intervene between two
simultaneities have no place in either. This seems to make diachronic processes
irrelevant to the analysis of immediate experience and, hence, psychological
development becomes paradoxical. I argue 'development' must be reworked as
something that is not charaterised only as a set of through- time causal
processes ('roots') but is constituted 'paradigmatically' as a changed quality
of the present ('fruit').
Stephenson, Niamh (UC Santa Cruz, USA)
THE CONTINGENCY OF EXPERIENCE
In this paper I interrogate the tension between two broad differences in the way
in which experience is positioned in contemporary work in psychological cultural
studies. Firstly, critiques of objectivity foreground the relationship between
subjective experience and knowledge. This implies the need to (somehow)
incorporate analyses of experience in our efforts to advance and to understand
knowledge claims ((eg "situated knowledge" is one take on this
problem). The interpretation of experience is validated as a politically potent
endeavour. Secondly, the turn to discourse in psychological work compounds
criticisms of the subject of much psychology ie the rational, autonomous
subject who has privileged knowledge of his/her experience. Subjective
experience is cast as a discursive effect The interpretation of experience is
useful for what we might learn about discourse but researchers adopting this
broad approach eschew making any claims about the subject of experience. Here
the analysis of experience is one route, no more valued than any other, to
understanding discourse. I will argue that both positions focus on experience as
interpretable (albeit contestable) without adequately theorising the contingent
nature of experience, nor the elements of experience which appear to escape
elucidation.
Hodges, Ian (University of Westminster,
United Kingdom) POWER, SELF AND ETHICS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL AND OTHER DISCOURSE
In this paper I present an analysis of the relationships between psychological
discourse and power in which the notion of 'subjectification' which refers to
the processes through which persons are 'made subject' to discourse - takes
centre-stage. For Foucault (1992, Rabinow, 1997) a key means by which power has
its effects is through the production of truth concerning oneself. Rose (1990,
1996) more fully explored the ways in which psychological (especially
therapeutic) discourses enjoin individuals to 'assemble themselves' as ethical
beings, reminding us that practices of the self are always more than linguistic
constructions but rather emerge from a heterogeneity of discursive and
non-discursive practices, architectural forms, locales and claims to authority.
Here I explore these regulatory practices of the self through an empirical
analysis of therapeutic discourse which draws upon Foucault's later work on
ethics. I also discuss recent work which has aimed to further expand notions of
sexual (queer) identity through linking alimentary and sexual regimes (c.f.
Probyn, 1999a, 1999b) and explore ways in which attention to practices of
ethical self-formation enables an understanding of the relationships between
'psychological' and cultural processes.
Neyzi, Leyla (Sabanci University,
Turkey) SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE IN ALTERNATIVE MODERNITIES: LIFE STORY NARRATIVES
IN THE GLOBAL CITY OF ISTANBUL
This paper takes off from an oral history study on generational identity in the
global city of Istanbul to ask, how are we to conceptualize subjectivity in
alternative modernities? How do "subjective" accounts in these
contexts (in so far as they are available) differ from conventional (e.g.
Western) accounts, and how may we go about theorizing them? How do we construct
the notion of "private" in contexts where the official, the public and
the collective shape individual lives and narratives, and what does this imply
about the very notion of subjectivity itself? I will use examples from life
story narratives of members of different generations, placing the discussing in
the context of the history of the Kemalist modernity project in Turkey from the
1920s. I will argue that ethnography and oral history are important means by
which to approach subjective experience suppressed by official and mainstream
history as well as by ethnic/religious communities themselves.
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