The power of voice and the voice of power: the epistemology of the speaking / theorising subject	 
Valerie Hey
Brunel University
Linguistic Ethnography Seminar 19th April 2004
valerie.hey@brunel.ac.uk

Department of Education
Brunel University 
Twickenham Campus
300 St Margaret’s Road
Twickenham TW 1 1PT

Draft Please do not quote without permission 

Abstract

Poststructuralism is now an orthodox position in critical social science research and analysis. It is not of course a single/singular position but is perhaps best conceived of as a theoretical assemblage. In this assemblage certain concepts have gained prominence notably: subjectivity, discourse, identity and identifications, ideas that elaborate a network or capillary model of power. Feminist materialist poststructuralism is a position within the theoretical field that seeks to en/gender a poststructuralist sociological imagination. - One that by its nature problematises the power relations of academic knowledge production and the forms of rationality on which it has been built.  
Taking up a position as a feminist academic is thus inherently dilemmatic. At the level of the epistemological – the practice entails asking how we assert our rights to: know, knowledge and to ‘know the other’? This directs attention to questions of the power of representation. 
At the level of the ontological as embodied knowers from somewhere, what forms of ‘extra – discursive’ experience configure our research practices on/with others. 
For me this concerns the intangible role of the psychosocial, the emotional as well as the persistent historical shaping of women’s positioned subjectivity as relational.  Can a feminist-inspired materialist poststructuralist methodology contribute to the emergence of a new form of rationality? My interest is in the untapped potential of poststructuralist reasoning to explore these issues through examples of the social praxis of research which itself remains under-theorised as a (very peculiar/particular) practice.

The power of voice and the voice of power: the epistemology of the speaking / theorising subject	 

This presentation is focussed by 3 developments 
1.	The first one has been the development and limits of feminist poststructuralist theory (The London Feminist Salon Collective 2004)
2.	The discussion in feminist methodology about reflexivity (Gill 1998) and 
3.	the feminist-inspired debates about theorising social class(Skeggs 2004) 

What they all share is a focus on a relational problematic – in the first case in conceiving gender as a binary accomplishment – in the second in seeing methodology as about the unavoidable entanglements of knowers and what it means to ‘know’ the ‘other’, and in the 3rd case in insisting on the co-constructed ‘classificatory practices’ that constitute social class relations. 
What I try to do in this presentation is to review previous separate papers on  aspects of feminist poststructuralist practice in an attempt to integrate their ideas about the  lived relations of research (drawing from an earlier paper on rapport), with ethnographic conceptualisations of social difference (Hey 1997) to push the logics of poststructuralist thought together to argue against the reflexive modernity thesis (Beck, Giddens et al. 1994)
Is it possible to construct research practice – a methodological imagination that keeps in view the micro,meso and macro. 
This struggle takes me back to the central importance of the feminist theorisation of public and the private and forward to indicate an analytic vocabulary that is, I think, latent rather than fully explicated in feminist poststructuralist re-conceptualisations of the social. My engagement seeks to contribute to the making of an emergent language, one that ties sociality, the psychosocial and social difference more securely together in order to better characterise ‘new times’. 

So what I am struggling with in my own thinking is the need to better explicate the unfinished promise – of feminist poststructuralism – or rather to better understand its implicit assumptions and limitations. What I present here is my first effort to bring some ideas into a fuller conversation with each other.
First we need some working definitions – some excavation of intellectual resources that have been influential and to me personally inspiring - as much to orientate the discussion as opposed to being its warrant. 
This definition of feminist poststructuralism is both tantalisingly generative but very vague:   

Ideas 

Post structuralism is a term applied to a very loosely connected set of ideas about meaning, the way in which meaning is struggled over and produced, the way it circulates amongst us, the impact it has own human subjects, and finally the connections between meaning and power. For poststructuralists, meaning is not fixed in language, in other cultural symbols or in consistent power relationships. It shifts as different linguistic, institutional, cultural and social factors come together in various ways. Meaning is influenced by and influences shifting patterns of power. And finally it constitutes human subjectivity which is again regarded as shifting, many-faceted and contradictory’.
(Kenway, Willis et al. 1994) p189

In the context of the classic sociological problematic of the big and small -Jane Kenway alludes to the urgency of finding a pliable theory:

“a particular difficulty which all commentators face is how best to understand the relationship between the big material and structural shifts to everyday and to changed structures of feeling. What is needed is a theory which considers the relationship between globalizing influences and personal dispositions, the reordered conditions of individual and collective life’ 
(Kenway 1997) p3

Feminist poststructuralism thus promises us generative social theory that assists in understanding contemporary social relations and their entanglements, including those of gender, social class and other social differences. This position has a profound intellectual interest in understanding how larger historical discourses are ‘taken up’ to be lived by individuals and groups to constitute themselves. It is most profitably seen as a methodology – a theory about research, a creative intellectual bricolage. A methodology that seeks to conceptualise power relations, language and subjectivity, subjectifications as co-constructed  material relations. 
I posit feminist poststructuralist work as having an ideological take on language that is distinct from other positions in linguistics and the ethnography of communication, though it is closely connected to critical discursive psychology. 

My reading of feminist postructuralism is that it deploys a discursive theory of power as positional, positioning and requiring a subject’s self-positioning – because it is about identity/identifications.  Yet this cultural move is never dislocated from the structuring dynamic interplay of social and material forces that stand beyond the linguistic. 
According to Foucault: 

'Power is employed and exercised through net like organisation. And not only do individuals circulate between the threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power' 
(Foucault 1980) p.98.

This metaphor of the 'net' seems to me to capture (quite literally) the way people do talk to each other, about themselves and their ‘other’.  When they do this they are mired inside matrices of meanings and relationships through which they are compelled to learn about their differential ability to exercise power. Hence we can see within the shifting micro-exchanges of inter-personal communication (whether these are natural conversations or interviews) people often start in one place and end up in another - put out or put into another position of prestige or shame (Rossiter 1994). Talk de and rethrones as well as includes and excludes. Recently, feminist poststructuralist work has stimulated a vivid intellectual exchange between the 'psycho' and the 'social' in which psychoanalytic concepts have been put in play with a great deal of welcome creative sociological (Walkerdine, Lucey et al. 2001)
In my own work I have been interested in tracing movements and manoeuvring through fields of symbolic regulation at the level of the inter-personal but always with an interest in the intra-personal.
This is how Phil Cohen expresses the psychosocial relations of research

‘...that research and its writing are an encounter between the “Other Within” - that other sex, generation, class, race which is imagined as both limit condition of what is known about the self - and the External others who are the object of investigations which they always in some sense elude’. 
(Cohen 1997) p17

In short, research always involves the subjectivity of the researcher and knowledge production theorised from this position is seen as an inter-subjective accomplishment.
Reading feminist auto/biographical informed work (especially from poststructuralists e.g. (Steedman 1986, Kuhn )) placed in view the cultural-ideological work undertaken in the intimate social braiding of maternal, paternal and child relational ties through which young subjects learn their place. This particular discussion of ‘distinction’ is part of a long-standing feminist tradition that insists we need to appreciate the private, personal, public and political as constructed inter-relations. 

Intellectual labour then can be constituted in part as an ‘identity project’ as some ‘ex’ working class situate themselves as classed or rather ‘re/classed’ subjects within the rhetorical accomplishments of their texts – a move, I argue that situates them as political subjects.  I will return to this specific ‘situated knowledge’ production later.
Other work drawing more on Bourdieu has greatly enhanced our capacity to think about social difference, most particularly the formation of class as practices (Reay 1998a, Skeggs 1997)
Combining perspectives drawn from the ‘English’ school of feminist poststructuralists (Hey 2003) is persuasive for my purposes because such work considers how subjectivity and subjectification arises as the ‘subject’ moves across her shifting personal encounters with the discursive and material world. But she is not detached from those moments when she is fixed by the play of power or when she fixes herself also. 
Skeggs notes the ways in which working class women produce an account of themselves that is always ‘conscious’ of the classifiers’. As she puts it:
‘...in every judgment of themselves a measurement was made against others. In this process the designated  'other' (based on representations and imaginings of the respectable and judgmental middle class) was constructed as the standard to/from which they measured themselves. The classifying of themselves depended upon the classifying systems of others 
(Skeggs 1997) p74

This echoes Cohen’s reading on research as always being shadowed by imaginings of the self and the ‘Other’ but crucially inflects this as a material relation.
Taken together these texts offer significant combinatory resources for a new reading of late modernity – a sociology of the social through sociality rather than individuality/individualization and an account of research that is also radically relational.
We need as I have argued a different figure, to characterise new times/research one that carries the movement of a self in relation to others, a 'planetary', subject moving across the altering classificatory, space of symbolic regulation. 

Theorising subjects positioned in the 'social' and 'sociality' enables us to see the ‘doing’ of contextual shifts from moment to moment in ways that the slower velocities of large abstractions have little chance of capturing. This neglect or under-theorisation of 'action' is ironic given that what drives the sociology of late modernity is the recognition of the effects of molten capitalism (Bauman 2000)
I have argued that a productive methodology needs the capacity to resist disappearing into the processes of individualisation it is struggling to understand. Beck’s’ subjects are remarkably abstracted from social relations. 
I think what we need to foreground is a subject entangled in the claims of belonging as the divisions of gender, class and 'race' within which she is struggling to find space to speak and claim a self, sometimes in some new ways. 
Stuart Hall’s move to reconceptualise a non-essentialist notion of [racial] desiring/difference as ‘the product of distributive relations’ captures the dialectical‘ economy that I find very productive in explaining the indissoluble necessity of self/other relations. His description allows us to people discursive relations so that we can connect the macro-meso and micro levels of discursive production: it allows for the play of history and the crucial notion of interdependencies that construct the conditions of ‘the relations of ruling’:
Contrary to the superficial evidence, there is nothing simple about the structures and dynamics of racism....It is racism’s very rigidity that is due to its complexity. It’s capacity to punctuate the universe into two great opposites masks something else; it masks the complexes of feelings and attitudes, beliefs and conceptions, that are always refusing to be so neatly stabilized and fixed…All the symbolic and narrative energy and work is directed to secure us ‘over here’ and them ‘over there’, to fix each in its appointed species place. It is a way of masking how deeply our histories actually intertwine and interpenetrate; how necessary ‘the Other’ is to our own sense of identity; how even the dominant, colonizing, imperialising power only knows who and what it is and can only experience the pleasure of its own power of domination in and through the construction of the Other.
   {{Hall 1992:16}} 

Having set out a pretty large stall pointing up some key ideas or precepts derived from my reading of feminist poststructuralist thinking. I want next to turn to consider praxis. 

Praxis: 
 
Interestingly, whilst there has been a veritable cultural industry in poststructuralist theory, very little written about how to ‘do ‘ a feminist poststructuralist analysis. This is less a matter of marginalisation in the market for cookbook methodology, than that this position (possibly more than most) is one that in uniting both ontology/epistemology together asserts a political and politicised subjectivity. 
So that feminist poststructuralism is also and crucially an identity and identification with a particular ethical conviction about the need to identify and contest gender and class and social difference injustice - a commitment that takes us beyond technicist notions of methodological training and well beyond textual warrants. 
As will have been clear it rejects the claim that we can ‘bracket off’ the personal through technical procedures – the aim is precisely to pay more analytic attention to the ‘personal’ as it animates theory and research. Here we can draw on Rosalind Gill’s recent helpful discussion about the relations between epistemology, experience and reflexivity in feminist work.

What we produce are readings or interpretations, warranted to be sure by local evaluative criteria, but not underwritten in any final or definitive way by epistemology. Instead they remain unfinished and open to dialogue. Let us be upfront about this. In this way politics can take its place next to epistemology –centre stage in the knowledge production process’. 
	{{Gill, R 1998, 39}}

As noted before the epistemology/ontology distinction collapse does not render easy deconstructions in practical ‘how to’ books. But it is ironic that feminist poststructuralism’s embodiment as a practice of the self, often makes its practice implicit and thus possibly obscure. 
One of the aims of this paper is to try to be more explicit about my own feminist postructuralist praxis. 
Next I turn to some

Stories from the Field – The Self and her Other

As is obvious feminist poststructuralism is a position from somewhere I have written in several places about the ‘autobiography of the question’, as a way that locates the producer of the knowledge in her ambiguous place in the ‘field’ as well as recently commenting upon her ambivalent place in the academy in a deconstruction of the academic division of labour as a contract researcher (see (Hey 2003)  
All these commentaries involve self-exposure which, is never an innocent and always a performative heavily invested {possibly narcissistic, pleasurable because vengeful?} activity {{Kehily 1995}}. 
Beverley Skeggs has critiqued the ‘autobiographical’ turn in ‘ex’ working class women’s accounts of higher education (Skeggs 2004)The argument being that narrating a working class self is an effect of the operation of power since it has historically worked as a confessional moral project with only ‘respectable’ working class women writing into formats devised by the bourgeoisie. (Steedman 2000). I have also recently read a paper entitled the Parrot or Pitbull (Childers 2002)which is also critical of these ‘voice’ moves amongst the ‘ex’ working class feminist academics to speak about themselves and their experience.  Apparently the ‘parrot’ sits on her rage then splurts it out whilst the ‘pitbull’ charges around presumably intimidating everyone. 
There is something in these characterisations but I think there is so much more in the move to shut down these voices. I do not have space or time to engage these critics here, but what I want to insist upon is that the English school of feminist poststructuralism, is a very specific collective political project that rearticulates a very empowering class-consciousness that breaks from how class relations that are gendered feminine have previously been experienced as lived on/in the skin as a private individual sense of stigma and shame. This is something of a detour – so I will ‘park’ this discussion and return to the ‘field’ tales – I want first to consider the specific role of the intellectual in her field of study.   
 
Doing Feminist Poststructuralist Work in the Academy : Intellectual Pretensions: Professional identity 

In commenting upon the positioning of intellectuals Pels drawing on Bourdieu(Bourdieu 1991) writes about: 

‘the mistaken identity which intellectual spokespersons postulate on the basis of the structural homology between their own contradictory position as the ‘dominated dominants’ in the fields of cultural and political power, and that of the dominated tout court  in the broader fields of social classes’ 
(Pels 1999) p72

This is not quite how I would ever wish to characterise the identity of ‘ex’ working class female subjects in their current role as researchers in contemporary UK HE. In abstract there may be scope for an indulgent over-identification with the ‘dispossessed’ and the global intellectual tundra can be colonised by iconic nomadic intellectuals but these tend not to be English, tend not to be in education and tend not to the female variety.  

What I offer is a rather more mundane unheroic account of doing ‘intellectual labour’ using a feminist poststructuralist rationality that builds upon the classic (clichéd?) feminist insistence that the personal is political. I’ve written before about the nature of contract research in the academic division of labour that is classed and gendered and racialised (see above) A better metaphor for research relations as a contract researcher in HE is as an ‘au pair’ or as the ‘leg work’ as one of my friends was called.  Within this account I have traced how the discursive themes of ‘head work’ versus ‘leg work’ relay a historical classed and gendered ideology that positions the intellectual as the disembodied bourgeois subject who is produced against his excessively embodied irrational plebian female other.  

Ex- Working Class Feminist Poststructuralist  Perspectives  

In contrast to the idea of the ‘heroic intellectual’, the focus of Pel’s critique, ‘ex’ working class feminist academics have taken up the auto/biographical ‘I’ in a much more ambiguous way to talk about the their mobility as dis/locating and splitting their relation to the ‘disadvantaged’. Many have written about the ‘oddity’ of learning the new ‘rules of the game’ as contemporary ‘strangers within’ seeking to meet the demands of another class culture. Believe me, the higher education habitus has language, custom and practice as strange as visiting any ‘exotic’ part of the world !. 
For nomadic displacement does not get anywhere near the contradictory experience for a certain generation of working class girls who know work in higher education. Certainly the last thing feminist working class ‘nomads’ do is to imagine themselves tribunes for women or the working class. Not only because assuming any singular proxy position, simplifies the lived reality of the would-be advocate, let alone the would be advocated for!. 
In short, the class dis/location(s) of feminist academics undercuts any structured homology. What their discourse reveals is a concept of subjectivity as split, as sundered by the difficult pleasures of shifting position. Social identities are not quite like a new wardrobe of clothes, we do not just take them off and put them on. We live the present within the shadow of the past:  What this implies is a level of social experience stronger than memory – as I noted earlier this is a politicised consciousness that looks both ways back and forth all the time.
For many of the authors: 

class experience is deeply rooted, retained and carried through life rather than left behind (or below). In this sense it is more like a foot which carries us forward than a footprint which marks a past presence’
(Mahony, Zmroczek 1997) p4

Taken together CM authors argue and their narratives exemplify how gender works class over and class works gender over. Moreover, and importantly, the notion of the inter-relational is multi-dimensional and references not just the concept of living difference as socially and psychically determined but seeing this ‘relational’ self produced through the emotionally charged claims of others upon us: as I pose it elsewhere:

Discourse here is viewed not only as the historic patterning of forms of knowledge/power but much more prosaically and immediately in the registers of social recognition or refusal of those we love, desire or wish to be with - these are our be/longings 
(Hey 1999a, Hey 1999b)

My earlier take on this ‘in depth’ reading of relationality sought to connect the regulation of desire and difference in female friendship as a way to mirror Hall’s modelling of the symbiotic self In respect of girls’ agonistic relations:

Girls have to make sense of themselves against other girls but they have to do so not in conditions of their own choosing. We can locate some of the features of girls' relations here. We have seen that girls' longings for certain girls, for a sense of belonging to certain groups, and argued that these affinities resonate as another politics of ‘desire'’ played out in the in and exclusions of personal forms of feminine intimacies (cf. Steedman 1986:33) There is however, more to it than that. Not only were 'places' desired, they were loathed, not only wanted they were repudiated. Moreover, given that the ‘places’ were embodied by ‘other’ girls and all they represented - looks, clothes, manners, forms of sexual self display or ‘cleverness’ - we should not be too surprised to discover that the various economies of girls’ friendships carried both intense sources of personal affiliation as well as forms of social antagonism.
(Hey 1997) p136

Next I turn to a retrospective view on ‘field’ relations of rapport between ‘Carol’ and myself as she became one of the gatekeepers of the friendship study.  I became very interested in re- theorising rapport after a searing critical incident, which I documented in the study – as ‘desperately Seeking Sandra’ 
‘Troubling the Autobiography of the question’ (Hey 2000)was one of my first attempts to push harder at the logics of a postructuralist position in the context of the field relations of social difference. Here the focus was on reconceptualising rapport as radically relational. It was directly stimulated by a paper I went to at AERA by Patti Lather in 1998 – called ‘Against Empathy’ in which she argued for a deconstructive polytextual practice.  She argued that research relations are always imperialistic. 

Poststructuralism and the case for reconceptualising rapport

If instead of this we critically position the narratives of  ‘shifters in position’ that I have outlined above we have some new coordinates of research praxis that sees rapport as reliant on experience, consciousness as revivified memory work (Crawford, Kippax et al. 1992) Put like this I want to argue rapport is not a bogus cosy humanist empathy trip (!) but hard emotional-intellectual labour.
Looked at from this angle rapport is not quite what it seems – is never fully achieved, stable or without fracture. Like human relations more generally, inter-personal rapport in fieldwork is wrested from the same complex relay of inter-personal - intra-psychic relations of sameness and ‘difference’ through which discourses of power/powerlessness are deployed.  What such a position also allows is the sense that whilst class can be thought as a material relation broadly framed by the relations of subordination and domination it is never lived in any singular way.

I assert this not only from the logics of the feminist poststructuralism but also from my own experience as it has impacted on my practice.  I have never felt the force field of research relations as singular monolithic states of rapport/’difference’. My ethnographic experience (in particular) suggests that research exchanges are messier, much more ambiguous encounters - processes of connection, disconnection, break, rupture and re-connection framed by, but necessarily requiring the movement across, the binaries of identity. I think of rapport as a material ethical practice. It is not, contrary to feminist mythologizing, a natural art form that all women are good at. 
Seeing rapport as a practice renders visible the complexity of fieldwork that is often as much about unconscious as well as conscious experience. At an individual level rapport can be occupied ‘imaginatively’ as a ’desired’ healing for the split self. This has particular purchase for the impulsions of those who have lived ‘shifting position’. Moreover, Mary Evans conceives of the narratives of all autobiography as informed by this desire for ‘completion’ (Evans 1999) 
I want to suggest that a ferment of multiple knowledges, are always in play in fieldwork only subsequently to be framed by social, intellectual, personal conscious moral choices conveyed in often laundered accounts that bleach out so much of what makes research intellectually exciting and emotionally exhausting. Formal dominant accounts of rationality tend to linearity and conservative forms of tidy texts – working like ‘the Common Agricultural Policy’ to set aside excess – here I want to note the loss of the emotions, feelings, frustrations, envies, jealousies, dislike, love, hate etc from serious academic work – the messy entrails of the social processes and effects of negotiating the relations of power we and our subjects are held within. 
Sustaining fieldwork when you actually appear to be ‘doing nothing’ except (hopefully) building trust and ‘getting on’ with people is exhausting. One false step can put your social research relations under jeopardy since social trust can dissolve in the trace of a voice shift, by your being in the wrong judgmental place or by often involuntary moves of the body indicating disapproval. These social glitches are as Hoggart and others remind us seldom innocent {especially in English} because they are indexical of all those micro-social relations of class power we live within (Hoggart 1990)
Rapport is always a process and thus always on the edge of destabilising. I want to illustrate why.

Knowing Me: Knowing You: Dreams of Escape: Part One 

When I returned to study girls I found some who were living similar backgrounds to the one I had ‘escaped’ from. Or rather more accurately I felt it as an imaginative re-entry to a strangely familiar territory, despite it being experienced 30 years apart and at different ends of the country.

Somewhat more complexly and unconsciously, my analysis also reflects my own memories of being a different sort of working-class schoolgirl. Carol’s story therefore is not only built through my recontextualisation of aspects of her own representations of herself, it is also mandated by inter-subjective forces - of memories of growing up with and against girls like Carol (see Chapter 1). In fact it was only in re-reading the original manuscript that I became aware that I had chosen the name of one of my former best friends as her pseudo-name!

...In particular, the fact that I am telling Carol’s story rather than she I both grew up with ‘Carol’s and grew apart from and against them. Carol self-consciously mimicked the differences between us in the last days in the field at Eastford - she followed me around pretending to write her observations into a book! The ‘text’ of Carol emerges out of the uneven interplay of all of these factors. p89

Certainly, the fact that I had at some level also ‘shared’ aspects of working class girls’ biography as well as certain middle class girls investments in education provided useful (and at times essential) cultural and inter-personal resources as did my prior experience as a secondary school teacher. I think it is possible to revisit these complexes of knowledges as a resource for recognising what ground of same/difference was worked between us in the course of fieldwork as well as within the politics of representation. 

Working Class Girls [Different]  Dreams of Escape 

Carol’s home was not a work-free zone, like so many of the middle class girls I interviewed (and in part envied and resented). Yet, if she {like me at her age} was immersed in domestic labour, she also appeared to be more transgressive than I ever dared.  She was feistier and appeared to relish ‘behaving hard’ - a position which gave her apparent power as she struggled and battled for autonomy. This was waged over control of her household labour and her sexuality. She was always writing about ‘escaping’ from her bedroom window.
Her assertion scared me. It pulled me back to memories of similar girls I had feared. I can still see some of them now. These girls seemed au fait with make-up, fashion and dating and secure in the esteem gained as the objects of (heterosexual) desire in both secondary school and in the follow-on further education college. I, in contrast, was the serious studious speccy-four eyes intent on education as the only route through to a ‘respectable’ girlhood 
Carol positioned her self completely differently. She represented herself as the heroine of an altogether sexier aspiration -the fictional/fantasy – heterosexual romance. This text was an exemplary encounter with an ‘imagined’ boyfriend.  It was painful to recognize in Carol the cost, not only of her own material choices but also my own very different 'escape'.
When I was about Carol’s age (14) I too produced an inspired ‘dream scape’ too but my escape was imagined as neither drainpipe nor dramatic. On the contrary, my account was public commissioned by a school ‘housecraft’ task. The result was a highly invested lovingly detailed narrative of me as the housewife superstar in my ‘ideal home’. This was an imagined future conjured of gadgets and cleanliness. If it was escape - it was an escape from one household where I actually did the majority of household work [ironing, cleaning, the laundry to the launderette, making meals, washing up, child care etc] to a much more affluent middle class world of semi-detached homes, ‘appliances’ and ‘dream kitchens’! In this fantasy I had shifted myself from being my household’s main household labourer to being my own!  I do not recall anyone else in this narrative, just me and the pleasurable absorption in singular tidiness. As fantasies go it is odd both asexual and antiseptic, perhaps because in ‘respectable’ working class northern cultures ‘nice’ daughters did not ‘let men near enough’! 
But this position seemed to be the only possible position from which to make the move into further and higher education. So being back with Carol reminded me of exactly those splits I felt at the time between ‘respectable’ and the non-respectable ‘hard’ working class forms of femininity policed so ferociously by brothers and fathers. – Positions lived out as pro-or anti-schooling classed identifications. 
What is important here is the simultaneous play of difference as well as similarities  - to see more specifically that forms of being working class are split (Reay 1998b). Indeed, I have shown how Carol’s own sexual self was itself divided into contrasting public and private representations. Her ‘private’ diary was not at all of the ‘hard’ femininity – as a model of sensitive caring romance. 
It is not possible to assess how much these (troubling) empathies and differences impacted upon the ways I have chosen to understand any of the girls in my study. The point is more that of acknowledging the density of points of connection and rupture that lie beyond the compulsions of identity. The claim is that we need to recognize the dynamic provisional nature of identity, identifications and rapport. 
How one begins to theorise the weight of these inter-subjective and intra-subjective meanings is the question I am interested in.
I am mindful that whilst research is not a proxy vehicle for self-analysis. Yet these moments of ‘return’ speak to ‘former’ selves, to previous modes of cultural capital buried beneath middle class acculturation (Raphael-Reed 2001)  Moreover, Phil Cohen conceptualises ‘others’ marks upon our psyche as a  ‘hidden curriculum vitae’, formed by the projected desires of powerful others (Cohen 1999) I suppose I see the hidden curriculum vitae also as about ‘speaking’ unspeakable knowledges that are ‘disciplined out’ in higher education’s bourgeois habitus. This would suggest that we could see any ‘hidden curriculum vitae’ (under certain political conditions of collective action) as vital self-production -a resistant act towards those who would erase the difference of  ‘past lives’. 
The obligatory call for ‘rigour’ in research is often over-determined by the need to appear robust in the face of desire and difference. However, I am not endorsing any gross subjectivism.  My own position is a paradoxical, not to say unusual one, of psychic pragmatism!  We may have no choice but to accept that social relations and their theorisation also trace the uneven ‘unknowable’ power of the psychic, intuitive and autobiographic.  If so then it is possible to see that sometimes rapport and understanding emerges out of reflexive knowledges borne of class, gender as embodied biographical experience. 
As feminist researchers we may have impeccable credentials about equalising relations, of operating non-hierarchically yet we live enmeshed within those same relations of power we are commenting upon and seeking to change. Whilst this is acknowledged (Haraway 1988), the emotional concomitants of this positioning are unspoken. 
Yet for me, at times field work is best understood as both a socio-emotional as well as a rational economy - full of movements to and against an ‘other’ which are lived as a complex of empathy, indifference and hostility in other words a struggle. Saying this is not the same as grounding the project in mindless subjectivism.  The move is more about critical subjectivism - reconceptualising rapport sociologically without conceding it as a guarantor of the truth or indeed as the main substantive focus of any study. Rather there is a need to encourage an increased reflexivity about field relations which ‘do not work’, interviews that stall or research agendas that are simply undoable 
Few of us admit, let alone write about these unsuccessful encounters. When was the last time anybody admitted disliking anyone on fieldwork? This does not mean a retreat into ‘elective affinities’ as the ‘answer’ (see (Cohen 1997) since this would miss the point entirely of arguing for always seeing the potential for difference even within the apparent same.
It means our asking deeper questions about what is happening when we do successfully work the space between ‘us’ and ‘them’ alongside holding onto notions of agency even as we seek to insist on the constraints of structural and structuring forces. For those of us who are ‘shifters in positions’, I have theorised the construction of ‘rapport’ in research relations as a possible if temporary, stabilisation of split identifications – an imaginative space that holds in tension the ‘girl who we once were’ and the new female academic self. Whilst aspects of my past were reactivated, as rapport enabled me both to be ‘up close and personal’, theory shifted me onto more distant and analytical ground. After all, it was through an education in theory that I had ‘escaped’ into the privileged world of intellectual labour – the world of sociology and women’s studies. This was a world away from ‘Carol’s’ mode of ‘escape’. 
This model allows respect I hope, for the different sorts of knowledges/choices accounts that social power and social experience make possible and it offers one way to hold them in some tension in reflexive accounts of how we come to know what we know.
Coming to some Conclusions 
 One of the concerns underlying this review has been a niggling question of agency. Why is it the case, beyond any purchase of  ‘interests’ or indeed of the effects of power including opportunity that we invest in some discursive positions and not others? The theoretical and empirical elaboration of how identifications are secured (and broken) seems to me to require much more effort to explain. We need to make this conceptual move to avoid concerns about discursive determinism (Skeggs 1997, Raphael-Reed 2001)
My larger argument here is that feminist poststructuralist theory and a sufficiently pliable densely textured methodology can produce the subject in movement - the subject of  'identifications' as 'articulations' (Hall, 1996 p.6) as attempts by forms of symbolic, cultural and social power to fix – to call into place subjects. This is possible because the writers I have alluded to have all taken seriously the notion of the subject in the relational flux and fixity of sociality that allows us to map ‘fuzzy’ or ‘blurry’ subjects.
 
By this I want to suggest extending the current conceptual repertoire since what I think is called for is more work that examines the ways people can or cannot, will or will not, appropriate different sorts of discourses of the self and thus the other. After all the shifters in position provide some evidence that alert us to the slippery nature of the subject, one that is capable of 'capaciousness' (Redman, Epstein et al. 2002) as well as solipsism (McLeod ) What are the felt conditions that make these moves more or less possible?

A revitalised methodology?

I have sought in recent work to better spell out what a discursively based methodology can encompass in the context of policy analysis as it works through the multiple levels of social experience. I have called this Discursive Network Analysis or DNA for short as a means to trace these ideological message systems and what they seek to capture. 

DNA explores the production of meanings and knowledge (discourse) in the capillary action of power organised as the governance of practice (Rose 1990)in local sites.  Policy in this reading is seen as the cultural politics of social and material relations that are inter-personally realised through discursive positioning. This is always a remoralisation project in the context of interventions into the white working class community.(Gewirtz 2001)

Policy as the conduct of conduct (i.e. governance) does not arrive to layer over a subjectless space or place much less a deficit – but interacts with local customs/values that Skeggs argues always represent class struggles for legitimacy and hence respectability. In a local evaluation of policy in this case Sure Start Sure, if we are interested in tracking its implementation into ‘communities’ we need to find a way to think about ‘community habitus’ that the policy necessarily ‘meets up’ with. I have used a notion of a hybrid concept here what I call class community habitation – a mix between habitus(Bourdieu 1991) and habits (Peirce 1877). 
I intend to unpack the differences and overlaps between these two terms in later work. 
In sum, policy is peopled and people do policy to each other as discursive material relations as practices. This theorisation enables us to keep in view how the ‘addressees’ orientate to, or against, these new forms of evaluative address. What might mothers take up as part of Sure Start’s new ethical habitation? What I have tried to grasp is the social dynamics of Sure Start formed by the circulation/reproduction/repudiation of assumptions held by its key players, whether dominant, subordinate or marginal. 
Thus we can use DNA to excavate the Sure Start community co-habitation – habitation is my version of ‘field’/ habitus complex. Do these new resources offer affordances for creative movement or capture? Do their addressees become the new model mothers New Labour discourse implies, or do they invoke their own habitation? 
What I think the data indicates is precisely the blurry subjects in process – of women struggling to make something from as well as with (and sometimes) against these new  (discursive) resources. This is the mother of a child with speech and language difficulties talking about other parents: 

A Mother on her ‘Others’

The Parents could not care less that their kids not getting the right education, that their kids speech is not coming on properly ….it’s that sort of attitude oh it’ll come on….somebody else’ll sort it out for me …sort of attitude ..don’t; get me wrong not tarring everyone with same brush ..but there are a few parents in this area ….the ones that I get on with that are very concerned with their children’s upbringing and well being and education and so …
… (topic change) in my case I felt really bad about his diagnosis cos I felt I was doing too much…At home with my job, with my work and my job and I wasn’t giving him enough time …(topic switch back) About how much time they’re giving them …let alone where they are at night and what they’re learning it’s a shame …because Westfield is quite a friendly area people are friendly enough ..they just don’t’ care enough if that is the right way of putting it ..

The initial construction here is of the OTHER bad parent/bad mother dependency, (someone else’ll sort it out for me’., of negligence, apathy and of having ‘given up’). But buried here in this same transcript is also the ‘real’ SELF  – the I who was ‘At home with my job, with my work and my job and I wasn’t giving him enough time …’ i.e. in other words a woman doing a double shift of two types of responsibility …the ‘guilty’ mother but then  ‘she’ ‘gives up’ (paid) work’ – then there is a quick slippage to construct those ‘others’ who are ‘irresponsible ‘couldn’t care less’.  Yet this mother knows the shared material circumstances of Westfield too:

A Mother’s Discourse on and of Blame	

As soon as you say it’s from Westfield then jobs disappear. My  (name of child) is taking the test for (name of) school I’ve been told by a couple of people who really shouldn’t have …...chances of getting in there is very very low.cos of where they come from. big big shame but they are really committing our children to a lifetime of actually being on the poverty line and their children are not going to get on in life. they’ve been turned down themselves cos the parents have been treated like second class citizens then the children are not going to get much better 

So we have points of reflexivity – points of contestation alongside the reproduction of the respectable/not respectable binary – (the division that has stalked the historical construction of working class femininity - as well as the voicing of the ‘other’ guilty mother inside the one who was  ‘doing too much’ but for her self – not her son. This dna reading points to the inter-relational – the intra-relational – in our talk are always others meanings  – (as Bakhtin notes) in this case the mothers/others – of ‘them’ stopping ‘us’ from getting on –as well as disengaged ‘bad’ parent’s who’ve given up – on themselves and their children too - what we have is a complex situated set of knowledges that have themselves been theorised as an emotional locational politics of class and gender. Forms of identity work that rework policy. 
My own take up of feminist poststructuralist work has been an attempt to connect sociological with cultural studies approaches. These positions variously imply, though not all spell this out - a reliance on a gendered ontology, as relationally oriented not to essentialise a notion of femaleness as much as insist that women as subject have been produced historically as unentitled to autonomous subjecthood and working class women in particular as unentitled to subjecthood full stop. 
Our role if we are middle class has been as the sex positioned as the mediators of the world of emotions and as simultaneous inductors of children into the world of bourgeois reason. The production, management, repression and simultaneous bearers of feelings are historically women’s stock in trade. 
For working class women – femininity has always been a ‘bourgeois fiction’ -  whilst not recognising the class self –disidentification (Skeggs 2004)has been seen as an act of refusal. But you also of course name class precisely at the point of this refusal. Since to ‘not’ become something does not means that you can ever fully escape this stigma of knowing yourself as a classed ‘deficit’.  

Feminist theorists have considered the symbolic and material processes and consequences of how the inscribing of classed and gendered subjectivity for women is a specifically personal, sometimes private, highly emotionally charged phenomenon. Regardless of how feminist authors differently take up the making of identification as symbolic control and contestation, this approach understands classed and gendered subjectivity as an antagonistic struggle often spun out of our most intimate relations. These local projects form part of the much wider contested distribution of cultural and thus material resources. So in arguing for the notion of a revivified poststructuralism, we need paradoxically to break from this obsessive attention to the notion of individuality, individualisation and individualism. 
I have tried to argue that it is the possibility of the practice, assumption, fantasy or inhibitions on autonomy that are foregrounded in poststructuralist feminist analysis with its radical attention to the other in the self – to the sociality of the self – to an ontology that is relationally formed.
Feminist poststructuralist methodology raise our suspicion about whether the story of new times as ‘the project of the self’ (Beck, Giddens et al. 1994, Giddens 1998) is basically the same old ‘bourgeois male as norm’ story - Is the 'new' subject of late modern neo-liberalism another spin on the 'old' modern subject?  
If so, this closes out questions of crucial interest to feminist poststructuralist  commentators, such as who are the gainers or losers in these new times? 
From a feminist standpoint the making of a self has never been conceived of primarily as a public project of rational singularity. It is theorised through a lexicon that points explicitly to its contested, excessive, relational and contradictory nature. Berger's metaphor of the mirror (Berger 1972)captured femininity as fabrication long before smarter theoretical vocabularies set recent fashion. Feminists insist that 'becoming somebody' (Wexler 1992)therefore is socially structured through the daily inter-personal mundane divisions of private life. 

What do our data stories then reveal of the modes of transmission or recontextualisation that carry the 'big material and structural shifts' into lives? How do subjects live the new times, as 'disordered' or self-invented personal dispositions?  What does the data say about the sort of relations of social division and sociability people inhabit? What forms of sociality and subjectivity persist and what are the social, material, psychological and symbolic resources that goes towards their gendered (raced, classed) making up? 
Many poststructuralist authors retain the crucial ability to register the force of these movements of the self and the other as dances of recognition and refusal.  They do so largely because they develop a series of dialogues between cultural studies, sociology, psychoanalytic theory, feminist social theory, poststructural analysis and postcolonialism.. 
My interest has been in trying to draw out from my own practice and recent work some implications of these fields of study for exploring sociality, the psycho/social and social difference in order to configure some linkages for what they can offer to a relational methodology better geared to reading and voicing local social relations in the context of the global structuring contexts of class, gender, race as the prevalent power geometries of the 21st century.

 

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