Inner Space: Scales of Subjectivity
Inner Space: scales of subjectivity addresses questions on the scale of the human interior. How do culture and society attend to the formation of particular subjectivities? How do ethnographers address shifting between the scales of the personal and the political? How does the work of psychologists and psychoanalysts inform ethnographic research?
Participants:
Joao Biehl, Emily Martin, Ann Stoler
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Opening Remarks:
We are honored to welcome our panelists Emily Martin, Joao Biehl, and Ann Stoler who have each in their own engaging way tried to address and work through the slippery concept of subjectivity, and how best to define, interpret and represent it ethnographically.
In a sense, the question of subjectivity inherently incorporates notions of scale. It is where the grand schemas of social analysis – concepts like culture, society, history are metabolized into everyday life as it is experienced at the micro level of the individual. Yet it is not always apparent which tools in the ethnographer’s arsenal are best equipped to traverse this intersection between the institutional and the intimate.
Theories of the subject owe a considerable debt to Michel Foucault whose work provides critical theorists with a wide range of analytical tools with which to inquire into the social and historical processes by which subjects are made intelligible to themselves and others.
However, what we ask today is how to understand the subject beyond subjectification. By this, we mean taking seriously the insistence on the double meaning of the subject which panelist Joao Biehl calls attention to in his introduction to a co-edited a volume on this theme. A subject is one who is subject to a form of authority, whether it comes in the guise of diagnostic protocols, colonial regimes, or state health policy. However a subject is also one who possesses the capacity to act in and through the definitions that threaten to confine and constrict her.
What methods of inquiry are best used to apprehend the experience of the subject at the interface of the internal and the external? What are the forms and mediums that make up its particular archive? Are certain forms more illuminating than others? Is a personal diary, for example, more useful for ethnographic purposes than a medical record? Do we privilege personal narrative over the diagnostic categories created by expert practitioners? Or are both equally relevant, different avenues for accessing both the experience of the subject and her place in a larger system of meaning?
In terms of scale, we want to think carefully about where we draw the boundaries around subjectivity as an analytic concept, around the individual subjects that we engage with in the field, and around the collective subjects that have been a more traditional object of ethnography. When thinking about subjectivity, the unit of the individual person seems to be the focal point of inquiry. Yet the work of the panelists here shows the ways in which individual stories can be woven into narratives of relevance that give credit to the singularity of experience, while gesturing towards larger processes.
Emily Martin’s work, especially her latest book Biopolar Expeditions moves deftly between scales of social and individual significance. Interweaving historical, biographical, and sometimes autobiographical narratives, she challenges us to think about the dynamic relationship between the emergence of a diagnostic category and the forms of experience produced, yet not determined by it.
We find that Joao Biehl’s work in Vita as well as his co-edited volume on Subjectivity to be an insightful and generative exploration of the concept of subjectivity that like Catarina remains “in motion”. Through Catarina’s subject position vis a vis the Brazilian health care system and via her own words in her dictionary, we see that their might remain spaces of hope or at least a reclaiming of subjectivity and social life from a zone of social abandonment.
Ann Stoler’s work has tried to capture the ways in which people inhabit well-worn subject positions in ways not overdetermined by their rootedness in existing hierarchies. By taking seriously the traces of affect and intention lodged in unexpected forms, the archive becomes a place where a thinking and feeling subject can emerge.
We might begin by exploring how you all think about your engagement with subjectivity is? Is it a useful concept for you to work with? Do you engage with it explicitly?
