Institutional Accountability and Intellectual Authority: Unconscious Fantasies and Fragile Identifications in Contemporary Academic Practice

Abstract

Different epistemological stances constitute different pictures of the world. This is a mundane truism but also a useful starting point for my attempt to construct one particular picture of academic practice in higher education. My picture of higher education explores instances from interviews with academics, to suggest a way of seeing what we might think of as an unconscious or an ‘other side’ of higher education institutions. This unconscious, I am suggesting, is constitutive of both intellectual authority and policy-driven institutional values. The approach I am taking suggests the productivity of interpreting these aspects of higher education practice as social fantasies that act both as a point of identification and as a limit to contemporary academic subjectivities. My methodology for the development of this argument, including both the construction of the interviews and the analysis of the project data, is situated within a particular epistemological framework that already repositions the concepts of affect, agency and privilege that are the focus of this book. This framework is broadly informed by Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, although I would argue that it is impossible and inconsistent to try to maintain a purist Lacanian position in the process of constructing and interpreting either research or psychoanalytic data. Lacan’s theory both directs the interpretive gaze and warns against the imposition of prior theoretical commitments onto the repositioned signifiers that constitute the object of an analysis.