Claudia Lapping

Recontextualising ‘Play’ in Early Years Pedagogy: Competence, Performance and Excess in Policy and Practice

ABSTRACT This paper traces the way discourses within early years policy and practice impose meanings onto the signifier ‘play’. Drawing on Bernsteins conceptualisation of recontextualising strategies, we explore how these meanings regulate troubling excesses in childrens ‘play’. The analysis foregrounds an underlying question about the hold the signifier ‘play’ maintains within discourses that appear antithetical to traditional understandings of ‘play’.

The ethics of interpretation: the signifying chain from field to analysis

This paper attempts to describe the relationship between the embodied practice of fieldwork and the written articulation of this experience. Starting from Valerie Heys conceptualization of ‘rapport’ as form of ‘intersubjective synergy’, a moment of recognition of similarity within difference – similar in structure to Laclau and Moufffes conceptualization of hegemony – the paper explores how we can understand these moments of recognition as positioned within a complex web of signifying chains that interlink social, psychic and linguistic means of representation. Laclau and Mouffes logics of equivalence and difference and Lacans account of the production of meaning through metaphor and metonymy provide a theoretical language through which to explore chains of meaning in two fragments of data drawn from a study comparing disciplines and institutions in higher education. My argument is that an awareness of these processes of production of meaning is necessary to the development of an ethical mode of interpretation.

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

Following recent debates within Psychosocial Studies, this paper explores the interpretive trajectories initiated in contrasting conceptualisations of the relation between subject and other. Starting from a discussion of countertransference, I go on to examine Lacan’s notion of the ‘action of interpretation’ and what this might look like within the practice of research. My analysis is organised around instances from an interview-based research project investigating unconscious relations in academic practice. These instances relate to moments of disruption to disciplinary or methodological identities. The analysis thus draws attention to shifting locations and modes of articulation of desire within research.

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

ABSTRACT 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.

Journal as methodological archive: introduction to a cataloguing system for insecure knowledge

I have just started reading Derrida’s (1998) Archive Fever. I was introduced to this text in Paula Salvio’s paper for this issue, and now I am playing with the notion of journal as archive. It makes me a little bit nervous, playing with a new idea that is both enticing and not fully grasped, or not quite grasp-able, but I want to try, for a moment, as it seems to offer an appropriate way of introducing this special issue on Psychosocial Studies. In the opening pages of the book, Derrida traces aspects of the word, ‘archive’, and its association both with the idea of commandment, ‘this place from which order is given’ (1), and with the Greek arkheion: ‘The residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded’. He explains the role of the archons as both guardians and interpreters of official documents:

Psychical contexts of subjectivity and performative practices of remuneration: teaching assistants’ narratives of work

Abstract A range of sociological work has theorized neoliberal regulative regimes, suggesting the contradictions contained in the enactment of policy and foregrounding the painful effects of these processes on subjectivities produced within performative school cultures. This paper contributes to this body of work by tracing the movement of desire in teaching assistants’ subjective relations to workplace practices of remuneration. We do this through an analysis of a series of group- and individual-free associative interviews with teaching assistants working in primary schools. Drawing on a Lacanian account of the way processes of identification channel affect, as desire, through signifying chains within a discursive field, we explore the associative chains of meaning that overdetermine the subjectivities produced within performative practices of remuneration. We suggest that the complex and contradictory chains of signification embodied in the school environment constitute a space where fragile teaching assistant subjectivities reiterate previous relations to an ambiguous Other.

Benign violence: education in and beyond the age of reason

In Benign Violence, Education In and Beyond the Age of Reason, Ansgar Allen confronts readers with a disturbing history of schooling in Britain. Allen’s particular focus is upon processes of examination but, as he suggests, the testing of the child cannot be separated from the broader formal mechanisms of education. The ‘violence’ of the title refers to the ‘myth’ of meritocracy that Allen argues lends legitimacy to unequal societies. He also points to a perhaps more explicit form of violence through schooling, the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century belief in eugenics and the obsession with the scientific classification of the child. The impact of such views, Allen suggests, reverberates across the decades and echoes can be discovered in current practice. Throughout Benign Violence, Allen moves between two different meanings of examination; the formally administered test assumed to measure general intelligence or specific ability in a child, and the more Socratic notion of the examined life. Allen argues that ‘these two “varieties” function together in the construction of docile subjects’ (xvi) and that the deliberate conflation of the two began to occur in the nineteenth century when ‘school examination developed confessional attributes’ (39). The blurred boundaries between education and morality can be seen in schools established at this time that aimed to ‘civilise and Christianise’ children. The ‘object of schooling’ became ‘to cultivate the moral depth of teacher and child’ (43). Despite the harsh nature of physical punishments meted out for seemingly trivial infringements, the focus upon the interior life of the child increased rather than lessened the violence of the school. Physical punishments could be rebelled against in ways that an encroachment upon the soul could not. It can often seem that today’s schools are similarly held accountable for all aspects of a child’s development and mental well-being including diet, exercise, sex and relationships education and even happiness. As in the nineteenth century, today’s teachers are expected to embody stipulated