De-centring the autonomous subject: different beings and becomings emerging from place
relations for trainee counsellors.
Shanee Barraclough.
Educational Theory, Policy and Practice Research Hub Presentation 7 Oct 2014
The area I am going to talk to you about today, in considering our theme of playing with the
posts, is counsellor education, an area in which I lecture and am completing my PhD.
It has been challenging to decide which aspect of my PhD research and also potentially
which of the posts – post-modernism, post-structuralism or post-humanism - to focus on in
the short time I have today – especially given the major influence of these ‘posts’ in my
counselling teaching, and now my research, and also in my therapeutic practice with clients
over the previous 20 years.
However, with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri’s post-humanist concept of the rhizome in
mind, reminding us that we are always ‘in the middle, between things, without a beginning
or an end’, (D&G, p25) it seems apt that I proceed from the middle, or where I am at this
point in time with my research.
Hence, my aim in this presentation is to share some aspects of my own rhizomatic research
journey, in a potentially rhizomatic presentation, that is ‘proceeding from the middle,
coming and going, rather than (necessarily) starting and finishing (D&G, p25). At the same
time, I hope to give you an understanding of how I have been thinking with the ‘posts’ in my
research in order to think and feel differently about the possibilities for student-counsellors’
being and becoming through and with counsellor education.
Inspired by post-modern and post-structural models of therapy in my counselling practice
over many years, in particular the notion that identities are shaped within language and
discourse, it was inevitable that I would again seek such influences in my research. With a
focus on theorizing differently - due to the limited theorization of any kind (Grafanaki, 2010)
- the lived experience of counsellors-in-training, particularly in relation to their evolving
counsellor identity or subjectivity, I chose ‘collective biography’ as a method for this
research.
I use here a post-structural/post-humanist notion of subjectivity as a self that is always in
process, always in relation with both animate and in-animate other, and is produced within
power relations. Thus, I am not looking for a stable, fixed or essentialized version of a
counsellor subjectivity, but rather at an entangled production of its ongoing, always
emerging, being and becoming. I also like, and use, Chris Weedon’s definition of subjectivity
as ‘the conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions of the individual, her sense of
herself, and her ways of understanding her relation to the world’ (Weedon, 1997, p32).
Collective biography as a method aligns with these views of the self. With its feminist roots
in the memory work of German feminist and socialist Frigga Haug and her colleagues
(Gannon, Walsh, Byers & Rajiva, 2012; Cornforth, White, Milligan & Claiborne, 2009) ,
for the purposes of
my research, I have adopted the post-structural strand of collective biography developed,
from Haug’s original memory work, by Bronwyn Davies and colleagues (Davies & Gannon,
2006; 2009; 2011).
Although this method, as a site of data generation, continues to evolve through different
iterations, influenced more and more by the post-humanist thinking of Deleuze and Guattari
and others, my use of it comes from Davies et al earlier descriptions.
Thus, consistent with their writing, my aim was for a small group of counsellors-in-training
to meet together over a period of time, and engage, individually and collectively, in
practices of storytelling to re-member the deeply felt sensory, embodied detail of their lived
experiences as counsellors-in-training, through technologies of telling, listening, writing,
drawing, making and re-shaping.
The purpose of fleshing out such moments of lived experience, in contrast to a
phenomenological aim, was in order to examine the contexts and discourses through which
individuals are constituted and constitute themselves. As Bronwyn Davies and Susanne
Gannon say, ‘the detail of the telling makes visible the constitutive work that is going on and
that has gone on…’ and through this the (illusion of the) autonomous subject is made
possible. (Davies and Gannon, 2006, p:176).
In addition, they suggest it is through such telling that we then begin to see and experience
mo(ve)ment (Davies, 2009), transformation or ‘becoming’ other than who we have been.
Davies calls such mo(ve)ment ‘doubled action’ and suggest that ‘in dwelling in, and on,
particular moments of being’ (Davies, 2009, p:9) through collective story-telling, writing and
re-writing, we open up new possibilities for seeing, being, and ultimately becoming, both
individually and collectively.
Thus, it was my hope that through engaging counselling students as participants in such a
collective biography group, that I could research and theorize their entangled materialdiscursive processes of being and becoming counsellors, whilst simultaneously offering
them a beneficial process to be a part of. Ultimately all eight counsellors-in-training I
approached chose to take part and we met as a collective biography group for up to three
hours at a time, on eight occasions, over the period of one year.
In the time I have left I want to share with you some ‘findings’ alongside my initial attempts
to think these findings through post-humanist theory, in particular through Karen Barad and
her material feminist theory of agential-realism outlined in her book ‘Meeting the universe
halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning’.
Here she
presents a theory about entanglements. She says ‘to be entangled is not simply to be
intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent,
self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not pre-exist
their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intrarelating’ (2007, pix). Thus, in following Barad’s thinking, I argue that counsellor subjectivities
continually emerge through, and as part of the entangled intra-relating that is existence.
Intra-actions in Barad’s theory are not just between human bodies and words however. In a
significant ontological turn, the production of subjectivities becomes about how we intra-act
with both human and non-human other bodies. I will return to this notion of intra-action in
relation to the data.
Data are re-presented here as selected stanzas from a ‘rescued speech poem’, another
attempt at playing with the posts in my research. The concept of the rescued speech poem
is taken from a narrative therapy counselling context, where clients’ words are directly
recorded by the therapist and rearranged into a poem (Behan, 2003; Crocket, 2010). The
aim here is similar, not to simply reflect back what was said by research participants as a
true representation of experience, but to offer a form which enables the complexity,
multiplicity and richness of stories to be told. Poetry has ‘space between’ which allows for
tentativeness, silence, and ambiguity to be held, thus de-centring coherent, linear narratives
and the spoken voice as dominant representations of knowledge.
In thinking with the theory of Barad, my aim is that the following stanzas tell of one
participant’s intra-action with the material-discursive nature of places and spaces in
constituting and re-configuring who it is possible for her to be and become in relation
specifically to her counsellor subjectivity. Intra-activity refers to the ways in which the
discursive or language practices and the material/matter are understood to be mutually
constituted in the production of subjectivities.
The poem, some of which I will read to you, speaks of one participant’s responses during a
group meeting in relation to questions about the place(s) that were shaping their identities
as counsellors. Participants were asked to write in response to a series of questions during
the time in between meetings. In listening again to this poem, I was particularly reminded
of Weedon’s definition of subjectivity as ‘the…thoughts and emotions of the individual, her
sense of herself, and her ways of understanding her relation to the world’. This subjectivity
in terms of becoming-counsellor is, I think, particularly evident in the words of this poem, as
is the material-discursive intra-activity of places and spaces in their production of her
subjectivity in this space/time mattering.
This place
It’s too much
It doesn’t feel safe
I feel uneasy
my heart drops
I’m in survival mode
110% burnt out
I am so tired
It was made clear to me
you need to be at the staff room every lunchtime and interval and network
with the teachers so they learn to trust you,
get to know you.
I had to keep doing that
I need to completely blob out
I need quiet
I’m just exhausted
I don’t want these people around me talking to me.
I started kind of retreating
staying in my office
or trying to go off for a walk or something
I’d kind of get pulled up about it
‘you need to go over to the staffroom’.
Now if I ever do spend time in my office
I feel really guilty and
it made me feel bad about myself because
I couldn’t go and do
what I needed to do.
It’s my room for the day, which is really good
I tried to convert it
put some nice colourful things up
make it my space
so I can cope
Put more effort
into making myself more positive
open the windows
put more things in for the students
stretch myself
make myself feel more present in the space
but,
it’s hot and stuffy,
claustrophobic, like a prison cell
thin walls
talkback radio, music, blaring from these speakers
grumpy kids, they can’t think while they’re talking
mindfulness and relaxation I can’t even do
it’s too loud, always in my ear
I just want to leave.
Being in a counselling space within a school
was really hard
all of these things that I feel are so anti-counselling
‘take just 20 minutes to chill out’ or
‘go for a walk in the park, go look at the flowers’
that’s what they need and
it calms them down but,
if I was to do that
I’d get in so much trouble
I have done it a couple of times
I have signed them in as being with me
and I get really scared
when I do that
I hate feeling like I’m gonna get in trouble
it’s not that long ago that I was out of school myself
it’s not what’s the best thing for the client
I feel sad.
Part of thinking with post-humanist theory is to begin to see and understand how matter
functions in the intra-actions. Through the telling and re-telling and finally the re-shaping
of this participant’s story in poetic form I have attempted to produce the beginnings of an
understanding of subjectivity constituted in the inseparable connections between the
linguistic, social, material, political and biological (Mazzei & Jackson, 2012, p 119). We can
begin to look for how the forces of counselling rooms and staffrooms and schools and
gendered, aged, raced bodies work together, in a way that according to Mazzei and Jackson
(2012), move us away from what is told toward what is produced in this intra-action. In this
poem, we see this counselling student’s subjectivity produced as guilty, tired, sad, and
burnt-out and yet, under the illusion of the humanist, autonomous subject, still attempting
to stretch herself, make herself more present, make more effort.
Through her telling and re-telling in the collective biography group this participant begun to
understand the complex and entangled web of wider forces at work with her in producing
her subjectivity. For example, a beginning analysis starts to show the intra-activity of the
hot, loud, claustrophobic, thin-walled counselling room with the teachers’ need for trust
with the networking with teachers in the staffroom with her own need for quiet in between
clients with student’s needs for spaces to calm with the rigidity of school rules for all with
her own relatively recent schooling history…and, and, and…
An important distinction in this theory is made in terms of agency, which is worth noting at
this point. ‘From a humanist perspective, agency is something possessed by humans, and is
seen as the ability to act on or in the world’ According to Barad’s post-humanist theory, the
meanings made and the choices for who and what participants can be and become are not
ones owned or contained within individuals, who act upon their own will. Agency here is
dispersed, distributed, decentred throughout the shifting, dynamic, intra-acting materialdiscursive phenomena. That is, the agency to be and become a certain kind of counsellor in
the counselling room at a particular time, is not owned within each of the individuals. As
can be seen here, it is dispersed through the complex and entangled material-discursive
network of bodies, spaces, furniture, rooms, buildings, objects and so on.
Conclusion: What does this way of thinking offer?
•
The opportunity to use theory to think differently in order to produce different
knowledge – it is political
•
The opportunity to recognise identities/subjectivities as generated relationally – not
only in relation to other bodies but in relation to the places/spaces we inhabit
•
The opportunity to challenge current dominant universal, developmental, normative
theories of counsellor development – i.e. from novice to expert and instead posit a
process of becoming which is dynamic, creative and always in process.
•
Ultimately, possibilities for reconfiguring student counsellors’ understanding of their
own subjectivity with and through reconfiguring the pedagogy of counsellor
education
REFERENCES
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: quantum physics and the
entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham & London: Duke
University Press
Davies, B. & Gannon, S. (2006). Doing collective biography. Maidenhead, UK: Open
University Press.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: capitalism and
schizophrenia. Original work published 1980), trans. B. Massumi
(Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press).
Jackson, A.Y. & Mazzei, L. (2012). Thinking with theory in qualitative research:
viewing data across multiple perspectives. New York, NY : Routledge
Weedon, C. (1997). Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist theory, 2nd edn.
Wiley-Blackwell.
Malden: