Abstract
This article draws on psychoanalysis to theorize artifacts as data in a postsecondary classroom setting. Psychoanalytic theory offers nuanced frames through which to interpret this data. What psychoanalysis alerts us to are the multiple and as such irreducible meanings of experience. Importantly psychoanalysis allows reading of this data for its affective moments. What does it mean for students to bring personal artifacts into a classroom? What sorts of meanings are ascribed to artifacts? What are the layers of narratives that are revealed when students speak to memories of photographs and objects? How might artifact work permit the outside self to be present inside an educational setting and generate a sense of reciprocity?
In a postsecondary school exercise designed to collapse the boundaries between outside and inside students bring into a classroom an array of artifacts and tell an associated story. Over time I have become increasingly interested in the objects students select, the associated stories they tell and combined, their rich potential as data.
The act of speaking to an image and object requires the student to consciously slow down. The student is required to be present to the object, a printed version of a photograph, and story for the duration of time it takes for these artifacts to make their way around the room. As each presentation ends the photo and object are placed on a table. At this point the traces of stories held in each image and object rest side by side just as the students rest side by side as they return to their respective seats having spoken their stories. In listening to the stories students bring into the classroom the split between an “outside” self and an “inside educational institutional” self becomes manifest. Simultaneously as this split makes itself known in the act of speaking to the photograph and object there is a momentary collapse of this binary because there is a shift in the authority of knowledge.
Objects and photos from class presentation 2011
The objects are inert and it is the spoken story that creates animation and engenders life. Affect and memory emerge in this exercise. The object and photograph that a student brings into the room is the self-made manifest.
In the above image there is a worn leather jacket. Before this student was born this jacket belonged to his uncle who had tragically died in a motorbike accident. The student holds and carries the memory of an uncle he has never met, an uncle who is passing away and a father who is the last of his siblings. He spoke as though this situation was not all that significant. Yet this was the story he selected to tell and the jacket that he keeps. The student presented a colored photograph of two children running from the sea. This image is of the same student as a little boy with his cousin. The picture was taken not far from where he grew up. There is a sense of happiness in his memory of being at the beach with the cousin and then an emergent sadness at the subsequent loss of these holidays. The jacket and the photograph are drawn into relationship not just because they belong to the same young man but also because they signify loss and forbearance. The jacket then becomes a metaphor for all the losses—the cousin, the unrealized possibility of the uncle, and the impending loss of the other uncle. In listening to his stories the simultaneous presence and effacement of affect created an uneasy tension. Despite the content of his story being one of impending loss his manner effaced this emotion.
I am interested in the layers of expression in these presentations. Britzman, D. and Pitt A. (1996, p. 122) note in a discussion of a pedagogical approach designed to enhance preservice education student’s exploration of an affective realm:
We were concerned with how to stage a pedagogy that is exploratory rather than content driven, even though content is important to how we work precisely because of its affective power.
I am also concerned to attend and enable affective spaces. In an analysis of fragments of resistance Britzman (2010, p. 243) notes, “Imagine if these doubts could be spoken to others and heard as desire. What would they have to say and how would our listening be effected?” In each student’s presentation it is possible to hear something of desire if only partial. The very act of presenting the self through object, story, and memory is a space in which these doubts are made manifest as though each student takes the opportunity to say this is what is inside of me, this also what I bring into this educational setting. Britzman (2010, p. 243) notes “In the court of ordinary, quiet and painful resistance, the listener’s desire is also on trial”. Initially I wanted to see how well the student could attend to the formal composition attributes of the photograph. How successful I had been in preparing students for this assessment task would be demonstrated in their adherence to the criteria of the exercise. However, the satisfaction of this desire meant I was in danger of not hearing what else was being said. Further, I don’t see myself as escaping implication in what I read into a student’s presentation and subsequent story. As Britzman and Pitt (1996, p. 122) note, I am required “to listen for the dynamic in the student’s response as opposed to thinking we already knew what they meant when they raised a question, refused to implicate themselves in their interpretation as they rushed to application.”
The Past
What knowledge of the self does a student carry into postsecondary education? What are the prior experiences of the authorization or not of objects in classrooms that may have caused parts of the self to be ejected? Objects in early school life are significant and these objects are often the focus of sanctions designed to curtail imaginary and affective possibilities. Allmer, MacLure, MacRae, Holmes, & Jones (2011, p. 3) note in relation to objects that children attempt to bring into school:
Already we can see, then, how objects are implicated in the social and moral order of the school. Seemingly inert, their arrest at the threshold of the classroom suggests that they have a lively potential for causing trouble on a variety of fronts—pedagogic, emotional, and social. It is worth noting that the capacity for trouble that is stored in objects amounts to recognition of a sort of agency. When objects travel from home to school, outside to inside, they become potential agitators, both in the sense of agents with the power to make things happen, and infiltrators who come from ‘outside’ to stir up unwanted actions and feelings. Objects must therefore be ‘disciplined. And in the process, children themselves are disciplined: ie led to adjust themselves to the values and practices of the school as these are revealed in the discipline of objects.
Objects in childhood have phantasmagorical power. Given this much more than an inanimate object is being rejected at the classroom door. I am curious about what it means then for a student engaged in postsecondary education to bring objects of significance back into an educational institution? The selves that have been thrown out of the past classrooms both metaphorically and literally can sometimes return through these objects. So this exercise is an act of reparation where the self who has to be left outside can make a tentative foray in. Some of these objects were clearly those from childhood. If, as the above quote indicates, students’ enculturation into school has foreclosed on objects that carry affect and I would also suggest memories then a layering of experiences are possibly being evoked in bringing the outside inside the institution.
I am interested in thinking about the use of objects, memories, and stories in a postsecondary educational setting through approaches offered in psychoanalytic theory. I have noted in my retelling of one of the classroom presentations that something more is being spoken. However, what is being said, what that is representative of and how it repeats itself in the course of a student’s study is significant. Something can be said through the object as though it functions as a mediating point that provides a partial deflection from the student. Students are often asked unanswerable questions about their behavior. Usually around lateness in some form or another and lack of concentration. Somehow the answers to these questions can be suggested through the artifact work because these objects also carry phantasmagorical traces as though the object stands alongside the student. A student’s playfulness, nervousness, loss, happiness all manifest in the stories they tell about their objects. The affective space is what constitutes data and in this instance this space is a combination of objects, place, person, and the past. Psychoanalytic theory offers a way of reading this affective space.
I want to start by drawing on Object relations theory associated with the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein—(1882-1960). Object relations theory primarily focuses on our relationship to objects. For Klein the term object refers to a person as well as other objects. Our relationships to these objects are not static or wholly external but rather to a certain extent determined by our capacity to introject to internalize a given object. Introjection is defined as:
A process revealed by analytic investigation: in phantasy, the subject transposes objects and their inherent qualities from the “outside” to the “inside” of him/herself. Introjection is close in meaning to incorporation, which provides it with its bodily model, but does not necessarily imply any reference to the body’s real boundaries (introjection into the ego, into the ego-ideal etc.) It is closely akin to identification. (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973, pp. 229-230)
Bound up in our introjection of objects is the capacity to experience gratitude and happiness and from this basis to have a sense of generosity. The objects the students bring into the classroom carry a raft of associations. When the students speak I hear not just the description and story of the literal object but what that objects represents for the student. In this instance the leather jacket failed to protect the uncle and may speak to this student’s fear of not being able to protect himself from the impending loss of the dying uncle. The wish to know the dead uncle, the experience of the dying uncle and the grief of the remaining brother/father are expressions of negotiating an experience of deprivation of in Kleinian terms a “good” object. The forbearance and strength usually attributed to conventional masculinity is missing in these stories of loss. In Klein’s theory “the relation to the good object is deeply rooted and can, without being fundamentally damaged, withstand temporary states of envy, hatred and grievance”(1996, p. 215). In this student’s presentation about his uncle he conveys a sense of emptiness and I get the sense he does not have very much in reserve. However, by bringing the jacket into the classroom and speaking his story he opens himself to the possibility of modifying his experience of these objects.
In artifact work the exclusion of affect and emphasis on the rational collapses. There is a structure to the presentation of the photograph and object that requires the student to attend to a description of each but the story enables affect. The structure of the presentation functions as a rule or criteria of what must be attended to but the story emits affective moments often to the surprise of the student. Thus the object is akin to unconscious processes and analogous to Freud’s (1991) theory of dreaming where the object can be read as an instance of condensation. In Freud’s (1991, 1994) writing “On Dreams” he describes the process of condensation as initially difficult to ascertain:
It is impossible at first to form any judgement of the degree of this condensation; but the deeper we plunge into a dream-analysis the more impressive it seems. From every element in a dream’s content associative threads branch out in two or more directions; every situation in a dream seems to be put together out of two or more impressions or experiences.
Through analysis condensation in an individuals dream is understood by following the multifaceted threads of the dreamers associations. Freud understood dreams to be a product of an unconscious forever seeking expression of what has been repressed. To think psychoanalytically about the students work with the objects and what each one gives voice to in their presentation can be understood as allowing a partial representation of unconscious desires.
Similarly the relationship of the student to the object is not unlike Klein’s use of objects in her method known as the psychoanalytic play technique where objects “present simultaneously a variety of experiences and phantasies or actual situations . . . ”(Klein, p. 40). For Klein the unconscious is being represented through the psychoanalytic play technique. Klein had a drawer for each child described as “part of the private and intimate relation between analyst and patient . . . ”(Klein, p. 40). Unlike the teachers who discipline the bad objects and authorize the good. Klein does not consider her provision of toys to be absolute and was happy for a child to bring their own toys into the analytic session. Britzman (2003, p. 42) remarks of Klein, “Melanie Klein felt the child was already under the sway of bellicose internal reality; the analyst’s work was to occupy these tensions, through interpretation to the child, without the promise of betterment and without appeal to authority.” If we consider again the disciplining of children’s objects in schools in light of the above analysis then clearly a child’s self-determination and expression of their own affective world is forcibly repressed through the use of authority. As Allmer et al. (2011, p. 3) note of the power of children’s objects in classroom setting:
Objects are a potential “distraction”, not just because they interfere with the pragmatics of pedagogy and socialization . . . but because they might remove the child, however fleetingly, from adult influence, and block her incorporation into the collective, purposeful space of the classroom. Choosing and chosen by an object, a child forms a bond that is not amenable to adult intervention. Operating through touch and other senses, mobilising desire and intense affect, the special object has a special kind of uselessness that renders it recalcitrant.
If education could be understood as a liminal space and as such capable of engendering tensions, pleasures and at times fraught with danger then the place of objects for children might be better understood. This would require a shift in what is considered purposeful in an early years classroom context. Klein thought that education represses infantile sexuality and culminates in the inhibition of thought and recommended that psychoanalysis play a part in the education of all children. Students can end up inhabiting a lethargic space, in part because they have been stripped of what is meaningful to them years before they enter a secondary or a postsecondary education setting. They have calved off affect and are embarrassed if emotion inadvertently surfaces. Shifting this experience through artifact work means a reintroduction of an affective space. What can be taken from Klein when thinking about classroom work with artifacts is not to occupy the position of analyst but to cultivate the capacity to occupy these tensions, pleasure and dangers alongside the student.
Often by the end of this unit of study the students have begun to understand photographs and objects represent stories and these stories are carried with them. The desire is to not just to retell the details of that story but also to give expression to layers of the self. Where there has been disconnect from the abstract analysis of photographs and objects there is a connection through this artifact work. The student’s final task in this unit of study is in small groups to find a local immigration story either of someone who has recently arrived in Australia or an immigration story of someone who is no longer alive. This brief has one qualification the student’s selected story cannot be of someone famous. Once the subject has been found the groups realize this person’s story through object and text and the story is exhibited in a museum. The artifact and memory work returns as the student’s negotiate the use of another’s photographs and objects.
Exhibition Launch 2010
The above image is the culmination of the work undertaken by students. This student told the immigration story of her great, great, great, grandfather. Before the start of this unit of study she was unaware of her families immigration history. In this image the student is sharing her story and the finding of the Bible with an older woman from the local community. They are standing next to the family Bible that originally belonged to the young woman’s great, great, great, grandfather. In the course of this young woman’s research she was told the story of the Bible and the owner agreed to lend it for a public exhibition. However, there was much anxiety about the safety of this object not just because of its historical worth, a Bible that dated from the mid 1800s. The student and the older woman recognize that part of its worth is that it stands as the object that holds the continuity of generations. The story of the Bible becomes in this instance an induction into a lineage that the younger woman has previously been unaware of. As the teacher I witness the depth of this experience for both women. This image captures what is a very complex and nuanced emotional space. The student understands the Bible represents an affective space and her work of realizing her own and the lenders families immigration story returns us to Klein’s theories of introjection. This Bible represents something more in the same way as the photograph and object presentations enabled something more to be said. This image captures a moment of reciprocity between the younger and older woman. The older woman’s gaze is directed toward the other with obvious pleasure perhaps because of the younger woman’s generosity in realizing a family story in a public setting. The younger woman’s section of the exhibition would not have been as strong without the Bible. Generosity and trust reflect the capacity of the experience as “good” in the Kleinian sense of the word.
Bringing something of the outside manifested in the artifacts into an educational-institutional setting opens an opportunity for dialogue about the self. When the students then engage in another’s story that culminates in a public exhibition facilitated through and set inside another institution, in this instance a museum, there is a sense of indirect reciprocity. This indirect reciprocity is the sensitive curatorial of another’s story through photograph and object.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.