Stories as Desire: Rethinking Narrative Inquiry via Psychoanalysis and Its Ontological Consequences

• In Event: Thoughts Awaiting Narrative Researchers: Narrative Inquiry as "Public Scholarship" in the Age of Postqualitative Research

Abstract

Purpose:
Qualitative inquiry is largely embracing the ontological turn in contemporary social theory as a means of decentering ideas like representation, knowledge, and the subject (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013). I argue that narrative inquiry, due to its commitment to the human construct of story, exists as a space wherein these theoretical interventions might provide practical and ethical opportunities for educational researchers and theorists to reimagine educational sites and practices. Drawing from a narrative study of prison abolitionists that attempted to understand critical public pedagogies in the formation of activist identity, this paper takes up an ontologically centered psychoanalytic approach (Voruz & Wolf, 2007) to interrogate the very notion of narrative as a heuristic or a concept that can be called data.
Theoretical Framework:
The paper will utilize Lacanian psychoanalytic theorizing to dislocate the causal, even heroic, vector that storytelling has taken up in Western culture. Here, I am interested in Lacan’s work on the Real – a bare ontological fundament existing a priori to language – and how that work intersects with the materialist philosophical work conducted by Deleuze and Guatarri (1986). These theorists’ combined contributions work together to help understand an ethical space of interactivity that exists beyond/between language, yet they articulate means of reading the desire-laden elements of language (particularly story) as a way into these spaces (jagodzinski, 2006). In essence, all narrators become unreliable in the telling of their stories, as language is altogether inadequate in representing their Real lives. Stories become more of clues, desirous fantasies that simultaneously hide and reveal the unconscious. I use these theoretical approaches a means for rethinking education from an ontological, and ultimately ethical basis, one rooted a connection to the Other that cannot be represented in language (Fink, 2013).
Methods, Techniques, or Modes of Inquiry:
study that serves as my basis for this theoretical reconsideration stems from a four-month series of interviews and observations with a group of prison abolitionists working in Phoenix, Arizona. Data was collected, reframed into storied accounts, and worked through a process of narrative construction (Barone, 2001). The final product was a novella-length collection of stories that attempted to articulate the processes and tensions inherent in learning an activist identity. These data are currently being reconsidered and rearticulated via the theoretical lenses detailed above, and this reworking will provide the basis for the present paper.
Scholarly Significance:
It is my hope that this work will help to reinvigorate theoretical inroads into narrative inquiry and its fundamental tenets. Currently, narrative inquiry seems to have taken the notion of story for granted, despite the theoretical advances mentioned above, as well as those offered a plethora of other philosophical dispositions. Further, it is my hope that rethinking the humanist underpinnings of narrative might also lead to a rethinking of the humanist underpinnings of pedagogy itself, specifically the ways in which the label human has been utilized as a means of domination (Author, 2013).

Author

• Jake Burdick, Purdue University