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.