Subjectivity at work

In this thesis I contemplate the work that subjects perform when giving accounts of themselves, and the work that researchers might perform when working with those accounts. It is composed of a series of philosophical contemplations emergent from reflections upon my experience of conducting life-history narrative interviews with forty people aged between eighteen and sixty-five. It is motivated by questions about the practices through which subjects, their experiences and their accounts of that experience are constituted and articulated. It is motivated, too, by ethical questions related to the practices through which researchers engage with the accounts that subjects of research give of themselves. It is a reflexive project in which my presence as researcher and author is figured as an intellectual resource. This is accomplished through the inclusion of a self-conscious textual ‘I’ who gives an account of himself. I ask how we might understand biographical accounts of experience to have been constituted and performed as accounts, and their narrators to have been constituted and performed as narrating and narratable subjects. In pursuing these questions I trace and articulate those temporalised and spatialised practices and relations through which subjects are constituted, and constituted as intelligible to themselves and each other. I work to give an account of subjects as the play of possibilities within, and differences among, intersecting repertoires of regulatory and regularising technologies of subjectification. I resist, however, giving accounts of subjects that suggest that they are reducible to these technologies. I am, then, concerned with articulating a subject who is simultaneously, paradoxically, regulated and irreducible, knowable and not. These concerns are articulated and performed through contemplation of philosophical and ethical questions related to working with transcriptions of life-history narrative interviews. Rather than suppose the transcribed interview to be a patient text awaiting interpretation, I perform the act of approaching the text with patience. I work with transcriptions of narrative interviews as resources for the reflexive development of my theorising, and for the articulation and performance of patient theorising through deferral of close attention to one narrative until the final chapter. I work with theory in this way, not as if there is a hypothesis to be tested through research, but with research as a space through which questions of theory might be developed. I open the text to philosophical questions, propositions and concepts motivated more towards further openings rather than closures. It is an assemblage of thoughts, knowledges, relations, memories and forgettings which instantiate multiple trajectories that arc in multiple directions without necessarily meeting or arriving. It is a text of bits and fragments, absences and presences, inclusions and omissions, locutions and lacunae