Lapping, Claudia; (2013) Institutional accountability and intellectual authority : unconscious fantasies and fragile identifications in contemporary academic practice. In: Maxwell, Claire and Aggleton, Peter, (eds.) Privilege, agency and affect. (pp. 88-105). Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke.

Text (institutional accountability and intellectual authority) institutional_accountability_and_intellectual_authority_unconscious_fantasies_and_fragile_identifications_Amended_6th_May_2013.doc - Submitted Version Download (105kB)

Abstract

In my analysis of instances of data emerging in my recent interview with academics I attempt to trace both the structure of privileged fantasies within higher education institutions, and also, very speculatively, to suggest some aspects of the mechanisms by which participants in the project construct relations to these fantasies that help them to redirect the affect associated with repressed signifiers of desire. Identifications/relations to the social fantasy have a dual purpose: they produce, for the subject, a legible, socially recognizable identity and they permit a re-articulation of repressed desire. This unconscious movement of desire via symbolic relations between elements of discourse, the very undecidability of the subject, replaces more humanistic notions of ‘agency’. My analysis thus attempts to shift the focus of our understanding of higher education from individualized agents to unconscious relations to institutional and social fantasies of knowledge and accountability.

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