Steven D. Brown

Teacher Stress and the Management of Accountability

In this article we explore how teachers can draw upon the language of stress to perform strategically important and often politically sensitive social acts. Our aim will be to show that the description of teaching problems as a matter of ‘stress’ has important social and political implications for teachers. To do this we draw upon interviews with Scottish secondary school teachers; these interviews have been subjected to close textual analysis, informed by some of the basic principles of discursive psychology. The analysis shows teachers flexibly employing stress as a way of managing their own accountability, and of making sense of their institutional roles and relationships. To conclude, we suggest that employing stress as an individualized category not only suppresses its flexibility, but also encourages both teachers and their employers to offer token measures to manage it at a psychological level, rather than engaging in proper debate about the state of the profession.

Being Affected: Spinoza and the Psychology of Emotion

This paper describes the relevance of Spinozas Ethics for contemporary thought on the psychology of emotion. Spinozas account of the passions completely inverts the Cartesian primacy given to mind. For Spinoza the critical task is to formulate an ethics of knowing, which begins with an understanding that body and mind are two attributes of the same substance. Increasing the capacity of the body to both be affected and affect others is the means by which the knowing subject progresses. The article sketches out the key concepts involved in this system and shows how they sensitize us to a post-cognitive understanding of emotion in Prousts Swanns Way.

It's a scream: professional hearing and tape fetishism☆

Abstract This paper addresses the roles of taping and tapes in the arenas of academic Conversation and Discourse Analysis, and in a recent American trial of therapists which constituted a major development in the Recovered Memory/False Memory debate. Our argument is that two seemingly opposed features of the practice of hearing tapes—tape fetishism and professional hearing—are in fact interdependent. By tape fetishism we mean the treatment of the tape as a direct and evidential record of a past event, and thus as a quasi-magical time machine. Professional hearing is a trained method of hearing—as developed, for example, in conversation analysis. The joint operation of these features prevents us from seeing that all hearings are mediated, and that their reports are interpretative. The paper sets out to analyze modes of mediation: the analytic glossing of voiced but non-linguistic sounds (laughing, crying, screaming) and the use of rhetorical descriptions in media reports of taped sounds.

The Baby as Virtual Object: Agency and Difference in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit

Neonatal intensive care work may be understood as a network in which doctors, babies, parents, technology, and medical care are associated together in a complex social topology. The boundaries of what counts as the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) are always shifting. The regular appearance of new members, new patients, and new technologies means that much effort must be expended to hold the unit together as a functional entity. We examine how the baby (the neonate receiving care) acts the ‘object’ around which the unit is continuously ordered. The identity of the baby—what it is, what attributes are considered important, what effects it generates—is changeable. We present an argument, drawing variously on debates in the sociology of translation (that is, John Law, Bruno Latour, Kevin Hetherington and Nick Lee, Annamarie Mol, and Marilyn Strathern), the monism of Henri Bergson, and the ‘objectivity’ of Michel Serres, which identifies two ‘functionally blank’ actors in the NICU—a bilirubin machine and the baby itself. Both act to slow down and to stabilise networked relations. However, the ‘hybrid agency’ of the baby also acts as a resource that enables the network to turn back on itself or to be ‘cut’. We outline how this process appears to operate and the way in which it serves to resolve issues of accountability.

Lost in the Mall with Mesmer and Wundt: Demarcations and Demonstrations in the Psychologies

This article analyzes the demarcations made within psychology as a feature of the “memory wars”—the current controversy around “recovered” or “false” memory. As it is played out inside professional psychology, the dispute features clinical practitioners acting largely as proponents of recovered memory and experimentalists as proponents of false memory. Tracing a genealogy of this dispute back to a pair of original sites (Mesmer’s salon and Wundt’s laboratory), we show how the traditions’engagement in three modes of scientific demonstration varies systematically in terms of the modes of social relation inherent in their epistemic practices and the kinds of “reliable witness” these practices produce. We conclude that whereas the experimentalist tradition is able to transporttheir produced witnesses from oneto anothersite of demonstration with relative ease, the clinical tradition has much greater difficulty in doing so and thus has to engage in a variety of compensatory demonstrative strategies.

RETHINKING AGENCY IN MEMORY: SPACE AND EMBODIMENT IN MEMORIES OF CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE

Contemporary ‘forensic’ models of memory emphasise the need for continuity and stability in relation to self‐hood and identity and attention can be too readily focussed upon the ‘literal’ and ‘accurate’ recollections of past events. Such concerns, however, neglect the practical uses of remembering in specific contexts and moments in time. Attending to these practical uses of memory can enable a reading of the contradictory positions and ambivalences experienced by individuals aiming to make sense of a complex set of memories of child sexual abuse. Part of the reason these memories are experienced as highly complex is related to the ways in which such memories hold survivors accountable for not only the past, but present sexual actions, where management of choices take place. Drawing on Haakens feminist transformative model of memory and Halbwachs ideas on group membership, we argue for a reworking of remembering by inviting an engagement with its relational, practical and collective qualities. Issues surrounding the organisation of social spaces in negotiating choices and agency, the localised contexts of remembering and the way in which the body is called on to manage these issues will form the basis of the analysis. Specific attention will also be given to how the past and present interrelate with regard to the management of adult survivor identities.

Collective Emotions: Artaud’s Nerves

The literary and dramatic work of Antonin Artaud is typically considered to be animated by the complex relationship of the author to the ‘madness’ which culminated in his incarceration at the Rodez asylum. This paper argues that that the category of ‘nerves’ provides for a different approach to Artaud’s work. The feeling of ‘nervous suffering’ is treated here as a collective emotion, defined as a mode of relating to others and to the ‘social body’. In his letters of the late 1920s and 1930s, Artaud’s nerves take on three forms—an expressive system; a social nervous system and a message‐bearing system. In each case what is at stake is how the emotion of nervousness results in a mutual articulation or ‘surfacing’ of the boundaries between Artaud’s body and the energies which define the body of the collective. The inherent contradictions which obtain in how Artaud attempts to manage this relationship are described. Nervousness is primarily a matter of collective organization and only secondarily a matter for personal consciousness.

Bonga, Tromba and the Organizational Impetus: Evolution and Vitalism in Bergson

Beginning with a heartfelt homage to Bonga and Tromba, two beautifully designed clockwork toys, the paper considers how evolutionary theory has become a powerful explanatory framework in organization theory. Evolution is typically invoked as a means of managing our wonder or curiosity with the ‘organizational impetus’ seemingly underpinning specific organizational forms, which in turn leads to an inversion and transvaluation of the organic and the mechanical. The work of Henri Bergson is discussed as a possible corrective to such ill‐conceived recourse to Darwinism. Bergson theorised process in and for itself and allows us to situate the organizational impetus as ‘élan vital’—the unfolding of change, without direction, without plan, along multiple lines of evolution. To study organized forms in this way is to engage with a ‘new extended biology’ that both recognizes the irreducibility of organized form to historicity and allows for a separation of form from potentiality.