Notes on: Pitt,
A and Britzman, D. (2003) 'Speculations on
qualities of difficult knowledge in teaching and
learning: an experiment in psychoanalytic
research'. Qualitative Studies in Education
16 (6): 755-76.
Dave Harris
[This is an intriguing investigation into the role
of emotions in higher education and the
difficulties presented by challenging
knowledge. In a pleasing self reflexive
twist, the authors note of the same difficulties
affects those who attempt to write about or
narrate these problems, an encounter their own
emotional components. These components are
understood through Freud's notions of 'deferred
time'[what might be seen as the way in which past
events and experiences get united with present
ones in both directions], and phantasy [the
process of attempting to symbolize unconscious
forces, using whatever resources come to hand -
infantile ones often invoke imaginary elements and
classic misunderstandings of symbols, especially
the phallus.Phantasy is the first and still the
most basic way of making sense argued Deleuze]. There
is also transference, where fantasies and more
rational forms of narrative come together.
One of the first examples includes classic
difficulties with learning at school acted out by
becoming a punitive teacher - what is going on
here is that a phantasy of proper education is
being enacted, and this phantasy includes punitive
teachers. Other examples include some
familiar cases where people have felt so
challenged by new knowledge that their very sense
of self has been challenged, so that there is a
tension between rational knowledge and emotional
commitments to the self. Sometimes, academic
knowledge strengthens the sense of self - this is
'lovely knowledge', but there is something about
academic life that challenges and questions this
nice cohesive picture and produces difficult
knowledge instead. The experienced academic
reporting this particular clash was able to
reconcile it by splitting what she thought into
belief on the one hand and knowledge on the other,
but this still cannot reconstitute a coherent
self, and ends in some other phenomena described
by feminist thinkers like Lather -ruin and
mess. A third example raised the issue of
the relevance of research among committed
political activists, and the tensions between
conventionally acceptable academic knowledge and
what might be seen as more immediate
knowledge. Again the whole thing led to
doubts about academic knowledge, complicated in
this case by the intrusion of an erotic desire to
be liked and to be helpful.
The researchers indicate that the same problem
affects their own research, that they also devise
questionnaires with a mixture of fantasies and
rational insight, and interpret them in the same
way. Interviewing academics lead to the
additional problem that some respondents saw the
same difficulties, not just reporting their
experiences as data, but commenting on the
difficulties of representing their experiences in
the forms that were acceptable.
Our project on difficult knowledge would have done
well to use their questionnaires (which are
actually more like a series of prompts to guide
reflection). Several of our findings would
also provide examples analogous to the ones above
- my particular clash with Nial leads to an angry
response from him, possibly as a fantasy of proper
education or of proper lecturers. One of the
other respondents clearly demonstrated some of the
clashes between academic knowledge and practical
knowledge, although rendered slightly differently
as conventionally professional stances combined
with strong personal beliefs about alternative
health provision. Erotic tensions are also
apparent, for example in stories of students
forming crushes, or, more generally, in the
evident desire of many of the respondents to be
liked, and to be seriously disappointed when they
discover they weren't.]
What makes knowledge difficult, and how can we
represent such knowledge? The first question
sees difficult knowledge as a kind of trauma . The
second question particularly concerns the ways in
which the knowledge becomes 'other'. Our
interest is in the psychological processes
involved, but pedagogical and methodological
issues are involved. The context is the
emergence of postmodern challenges to the
authority of knowledge in the university.
Critical and affirmative pedagogies have shown
some of the breakdowns in understanding that
arise, when people focus on historical traumas
like slavery, and the pedagogical difficulties of
how to learn from them. Post structuralist
challenges in qualitative research, including
those of Lather have
also raised questions about concepts such as
'voice, identity, agency and experience' (756),
while examining how individuals develop knowledge
(including researchers). What results is a
tension between the problem of narrating
experience and the impulse to do so, part of the
general 'crisis of representation' where the
language to represent experience is considered to
have its own discursive effects, 'the logical
priority of expression over experience'[a rather
odd way to put it]. Philosophical, pedagogical and
methodological issues are combined into 'a
complex'.
Concepts from psychoanalysis, especially 'the
unconscious, phantasy, affect and sexuality' all
undermine the notion of transparent
representations of expression. They also
challenge objective chronology. They focus
on the ways in which human beings theorize about
themselves [especially when you ask them just to
describe their experiences]. Such discourses
are 'socially sanctioned', but this can never
fully represent experience, which exceeds or even
resists discourses. Educational discourse is
a perfect example, dealing with 'outside' issues
of representation but also encountering 'inside'
attempts to describe or relate to personal
experience. What goes on is Freudian
transference, where a personal 'libidinal history
of learning'relates to accepted means of
knowing. This tension, 'representational
crisis', can be uncovered if we examine the
problems in narrating difficult knowledge [and
teaching and learning in general].
Three particular concepts are useful when
examining knowledge [and/of] experience- 'deferred
action, transference and symbolization'
(757). These processes leave traces in
narratives, and these traces are 'difficult
knowledge'[sic - a little bit odd here if traces are
knowledge]. P&B understand these
processes through examining psychoanalytic writing
and also their own research activities about
thinking about difficult knowledge. We get
to the difficulty of representing teaching and
learning itself, with allied problems such as what
counts as data, [with the research process
described quite fully in terms of offering a
series of prompts to teachers and students to
reflect on their experience - the list of prompts
is found in an appendix].
Steiner has illuminated some of the questions by
talking about the difficulties in reading poetry,
a useful metaphor of learning. Poems can
resist simple interpretations because of their
'evocative qualities'. This produces a 'felt
tension between idea and affect'[where idea here
means some rational concept?]. We can
experience a poem but find it difficult to recount
its meaning, and Steiner offers four strategies:
'contingent difficulties require homework to fill
in the reader's gap of knowledge; modal
difficulties concern the problem of constructing
relevance; tactical difficulties draw attention to
conflicts within the poem between innermost
meaning and public statements; and, finally,
ontological difficulties are met when the poem
calls attention to the very possibility of
understanding and communication as we know them'
[reminds me of the 4 challenges to validity in the
ISA in Habermas] . However, the necessary
social dimension of education is not well
addressed by this metaphor, and Steiner does not
consider phantasy.
Work on trauma in the humanities offers another
metaphor. Trauma arises when an event
produces excessive signification which resists
meaning, while delivering 'affective force'
(758). It has been called '"unclaimed
experience"'- an experience which is important but
which cannot yet be grasped by knowledge.
One result is 'primal helplessness, and the
incapacity to respond adequately', and these
qualities can also be found in early experiences
in learning, as well as the later return of
anxiety when facing new knowledge. Even so,
trauma is not completely useful as a description,
since we're talking about educational encounters
which produce conflict but not necessarily
permanent connections. It might be more
important to see how people actually construct
accounts on an ongoing basis through transference
and by producing narratives of teaching and
learning. If this was the first question about how
difficult knowledge arises, a second one extended
to the narratives being produced by researchers
themselves, 'tracing the difficulties of
representing teaching and learning in research
itself'.
Research also operates with 'deferred action',
when new ideas are connected with past and present
experiences [through what phenomenologists llike Schutz calls
'through-and-through-interconnectedness- of-
subjective-time', or what Bergson calls
duration]. The significance of an event is
delayed. We can feel its effects before we
understand it. It also takes time to realize
the impact of earlier events. We find these
processes in trauma, but also in more conventional
phenomena, [including educational activity].
The point is that new experiences can still show
traces of earlier experiences, and earlier
experiences can be revised. This is
established in clinical practice, for example.
The implication is that understanding is [not just
a technical, cognitive operation, but] 'a problem
of symbolization'(759). This affects theory
as well which is also a narrative. [The
usual way of understanding it is that data is
gathered which yields theory, but] data itself is
produced by a process of symbolization. This
means it is not open to empirical tests or simple
observation, but involves 'speculation and
belief', and is produced by both 'conscious and
unconscious dynamics'. So is theory.
Both present both manifest and latent levels
[with latent ones produced by 'unresolved
psychical conflicts' at the affective level.
What both activities show is 'the dynamic of
transference', where new situations are understood
through older conflicts. [Academic
especially] representation is
therefore a compromise, revealing the
management of a crisis produced by the tension
between a desire for coherence, and 'an anxiety
over what coherence excludes'. When we
interpret, we try to develop a narrative, but
there is always 'something within narrative that
resists its own interpretation'. It is not a
matter of some primary experience producing
interpretation, 'no original moment in research':
yet we must use interpretations in narrative form
to do research.
Clinical practice shows some other mechanisms at
work. For Freudians, the idea is to
reconstruct some of the processes of symbolization
which associates events together. Freud saw
treatment as slow labour to produce a
narrative. In particular, 'reasoned
persuasion [was] futile'. Any interpretation
had to give full weight to the emotional
significance of the event. Yet uncovering
emotional significance does not happen simply once
and for all, because of deferred action [which
threatens to connect new events as well].
The implication for education is that similarly,
events are not situated as either simply in the
past or in the present: specifically, the same
obstacles that affect teaching and learning also
affect to researchers' activities of representing
teaching and learning [it is not just a matter of
asking participants to recollect events and
discuss them reasonably]. Asking people to
recollect itself produces difficult knowledge, for
subjects and researchers.
When Freud was asked to recollect his own
schooldays, he realized that somehow he was
present in the past, and that the effect was to
reproduce 'childhood helplessness, dependency, and
desire to please' (760). Reflecting on past
learning repeated 'love, hate, and ambivalence' as
necessary parts of the transference. For
some patients, it was not possible just to
recollect experience, as a commentary by a more
recent psychoanalyst showed. Her patient was
a young boy showing disinterest in school
work. She got to the conflicts involved by
allowing the boy to reenact schooling in a game
when he played the part of 'the sadistic punishing
schoolmaster'. This was not the reflection
of an actual experience, however, but produced by
'phantasies of refusing to learn', where positions
were reversed, where helplessness became
domination. None of this was open to reason,
but followed a process of transference to the
present. The psychoanalyst herself was able
to experience the emotional reality for the boy by
participating in the game. As therapy
progressed, more effective kinds of symbolization
arose, something more distanced and constructed,
not a process 'where the symbol becomes collapsed
with the object it represents'[as in the infantile
phantasy]. This more constructed
symbolization showed [and permitted a therapeutic
grasp of] the effects of the 'archaic conflicts'
represented by current behaviour. Effective
symbolization dissolved the tensions of childhood
helplessness, but it is not just a matter of
imposing a more rational conventional kind - that
would be 'compliance' and 'coercion' (761). We see
that symbolization is not just a technical matter
of naming the world, but also expresses emotional
significance, a combination of idea and
affect. This is how creative thought
develops, but excessive affect can undo the
rational. It is like the agony of losing
beloved (also feared) objects, and the ecstasy of
finding new substitutes.
Learning always involves a' repetition of past
investment and conflicts', projected on to new
experiences. This transference is also
difficult to represent, because it is 'still
imbued with phantasies', not rational
representations. Research overemphasizes the
rational in pedagogy, but transference provides
both 'obstacles and promise', since strong
emotions both drive knowledge of new events, but
also tie us to past ones. Processes are
still invisible. Transference is also
necessary 'to sustain one's continuity', but it
also leads to the reemergence of 'unresolved
conflicts' and the whole emotional dimension of
knowledge in symbolization needs to be
acknowledged. The same goes for attempts to
develop rational accounts in research.
The research consisted of a thought experiment,
providing university teachers and students with
some prompts to describe encounters with difficult
knowledge. The results were initially
thought to be simple data, but they came to
realize that they were getting remarks on both
interpretation and data - 'there is no such
original thing as " data"'. It is 'utterly
difficult' to represent teaching and learning
(762), so the exercise itself became 'a metaphor
for difficult knowledge'.
15 topics reflecting various occasions when
meaning breaks down and needs to be repaired were
presented, including topics such as experiencing
hostility, anxiety, confusion, insufficient
knowledge, desire for relevance, obstacles to
learning and writing and others. The
intention was to show that conflict provokes
learning, but that emotions are engaged.
Participants received the document and considered
it and were then interviewed. However, a
process of doing the research also indicated that
there were obstacles both to interpret and to
produce interpretations: the emotions and
intellect were not easy to align. What
resulted was a series of 'plot driven narratives'
but also traces of what Kristeva 'calls
"pre-narrative envelopes"', an emotional
experience that produces [an initial orientation]
an emergent mental construct, a property of
thought, and which is difficult to
articulate. It is not just that affect is
attached to knowledge, but that knowledge does not
exist outside of emotional responses, or the
emotions produce a resistance to the construction
of narratives, as in the general crisis of
representation. When reading the
transcripts, manifest meanings are identified
first in the form of stories of identity and
experience, yet there was an apparent incoherence,
occasions when 'the ideal self cannot be
represented' (763), a latent content when meaning
loses its 'valency' and phantasies emerge both to
drive and inhibit the construction of
knowledge. There are signs of 'communicative
performance' in the language used, and hints of
the pre-narrative envelope. This is because
when people narrate an experience, they inevitably
'express their affective investments in knowing
and being known', and relive old conflicts about
what was worthy or worthless. This made the
whole research experience itself [develop a
metalevel].
Examples include an undergraduate student who
realized that knowledge could threaten her
conception of herself, by challenging defining
views [the example was reading work which
challenged Darwin]. Knowledge was sometimes
seen as 'something to be warded off'. She
also expressed anger at people who had concealed
knowledge from her, and how this interfered with
her ability to learn in classrooms. She saw
that knowledge could also create 'crises in belief
in others'. Nevertheless she agreed that
'others need access' to other points of
view. It is possible to detect two
phantasies: knowledge becomes a magical weapon
that beast those control and power, but it also
leaves her vulnerable by threatening beliefs, and
beliefs are seen as central to the self.
Another undergraduate student raised problems with
the idea that internal difficulties can be settled
once and for all. Knowledge derived from a
feminist course on mothering challenged her
previous theories of child development,
particularly in suggesting that the child
influences the parent. One consequence was
that she thought she might have to abandon those
previous theories, although she enjoyed them and
found them valuable. Having to choose
produced anxiety. There was also a conflict
experienced between the conventions of academic
work, and maintaining a coherent self. This
delivered manifest content about the peculiarities
of 'the daily work of academics', but the phantasy
was 'over populated'. It did offer a kernel
of truth about the authoritarian nature of
academic institutions, but the latent content was
more to do with struggles with knowledge, threats
to the self and to personal intuition. There also
seemed to be ways to neutralise the threat by
insisting that difficult texts are meaningless,
and teachers boring, but she realised that her own
thoughts could equally be dismissed if others
found them challenging. The account did
produce a dislike of fancy theory in favour of
practical ideas and methods [which the researchers
interpreted as offering a meta comment on
learning, moving to the issue of representing
learning]. The episodedid remind them that
it is 'threatening' to 'imagine the self as
influenced by knowledge' (765), and knowledge
seems to escape any attempts to divide it and
manage it like those above.
A professor also had strategies for managing
conflict from outside influences, and claimed that
experience would resolve them: she said that you
could distinguish academic analysis and belief
[the context was interpreting the Bible],
subsequently extended into dividing relative and
absolute knowledge. She related this to her
own experience in having to relinquish 'lovely
theory' which would equate knowledge and beliefs,
but which did not survive academic inquiry
[reminiscent of current debates in feminist
methodology on maintaining political commitments
to feminism with commitments to academic validity
and universalism, for example in Lather]. Learning
in this case led to a loss, because lovely
knowledge 'requires times when what is real and
what are phantasies are allowed to mingle'
(766). People still feel they have to choose
between them, however, and difficult knowledge
becomes something based on the 'ruins of one's
lovely knowledge'.
What affective attachment remains? A Ph.D.
student talks about her breakdowns in meaning
while constructing knowledge, which extended to
topics, theoretical frameworks, and relations with
people: the latter threatened scholarship since
she was studying committed female members of an
activist organization. This is part of a
more general relation between scholarship and
relevance. She came to see the relevance of
what the women were saying, and the validity of
their perspectives, as a challenge to outside
knowledge and to lovely knowledge. This 'may
well be a constitutive feature of any research
project' (767). The example also shows a
problem with voice and a tendency to manage its
complexities by reducing it to 'standpoint'.
Residues which are ignored in the exchange of
perspectives include 'the residue of sexuality' as
a source of difference, and this 'is neither
easily exchanged nor stabilized through
standpoint'. Again phantasies of
identification with research subjects can be
involved, and can take an erotic form, an
attraction to otherness, a desire to be valued.
The overall issue is what to do with one's own
subjectivity. Should we confront our own
fantasies of lovely knowledge? Should we
address the real issue of what [and who] our
knowledge is good for? We have to
acknowledge again that symbolization is involved,
not just presentation [including attempts at
respondent validity?].
This particular student also insisted, in
criticizing the list of prompts, that the most
important thing about learning is the relationship
to the teacher, their authority, and the tension
between forming good relations at the risk of
encountering knowledge that makes you feel bad
about your self, or alone. It is not just a
matter of acquiring knowledge. The
importance of the pre-narrative envelope seems to
emerge again. It also raised the question
for the researchers about the origin of
authority, whether it lies in the framework of the
course or the teacher. It is an issue for
symbolization again [whether it needs to include
the person of the teacher]. These questions
in particular showed the difficulties of doing
research, especially the needs to refer back to
the inside processes in constructing stories about
learning. Again, mere presentation seems to
have involve a necessary symbolization.
The presence of deferred action means no direct
assimilation of experience, a necessary revision
of events in the past, and uneven development [of
action and thought]. It is a mistake to try
to put things in a simple chronological order,
breaking with their 'affective logic' (769), and
to assume perfect understanding. Some
experience is unclaimed. 'Confrontation'
might be needed to reclaim it. It follows
that research data should be seen only as a result
of preliminary labour, offering 'both insight and
blindness'. This is often covered by
interviewers colluding with their subjects to
produce satisfying narratives. Freud realized
this possibility , and saw that resistance to
treatment could be seen as the patient wanting to
continue to produce 'carefully crafted' narratives
about symptoms: the therapist should not collude,
but should frustrate these efforts, forcing
patients to address other matters. For
researchers, there is a tension between' the pull
of mastery against the threat of fragmentation'
which can prevent new thought. Perhaps
research should be understood as 'provoking not
representing knowledge', developing a more
challenging and specific symbolization.
Perhaps it is asking too much of respondents to
deliver cohesive narratives [and too challenging
to 'provoke' additional thoughts?]. At least
we should recognize the problems both for subjects
and for researchers, and the need for labour to
overcome obstacles. One consequence for this
research was to revisit the notion of trauma,
which returned if only as a kernel, and not as a
pathology but as a useful 'metaphor for the pushes
and pulls between knowing and being known, between
fantasy and reality' between past events in
learning and the 'haunted present of learning',
between experience and narration. Using
psychoanalytic concepts has at least helped to
symbolize conduct of this research 'in ways that
exceed identity', and move towards thinking of a
new kinds of relations in the research process, to
understand 'this more ordinary yet ubiquitous
trauma of having to learn'(770).
[A useful note discusses the experience a woman
had in being accused of sexual harassment, and the
difficulties of narrating her story, especially in
the face of attempts to impose a chronological
order. Her attempts to argue that
transference was going on had no response, she was
advised to walk away when any such transference
arose - which meant avoiding any meaningful
teaching encounters. Another note likens the
processes described to cognitive dissonance, and
what happens when 'the uncanny' is encountered -
although there is an insistence that the familiar
can also be a source of difficulty.]
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