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London Society of the New Lacanian School
Richard
Gombrich, Keith Hayward, Vincente Palomera, Robert Snell and
Guests
At
University of Westminster
£45/£25 secretary-londonsociety@blueyonder.co.uk
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Rallying the spirits. By Janet Low, MA PhD
Filling in forms, parroting phrases, following procedures, ticking boxes, pretending to be an object may all be useful tactics from time to time, but if you want to think, teach, get something done that’s worth doing, and stay true to the enlightened idea, then there has also to be a space left for the human subject.
British Higher Education Policy in the last 30 years has attacked the basic idea of education. Today, it is conceived more as a means to an economic end. Before, economic success was needed in order to support the good of the country. It seems that things have been turned on their head (Gombrich, 2000).
Massive increases in the number of students have accompanied real reductions in funding for libraries. Academic staff contracts have become more and more unstable while the Research Assessment Exercise has pushed people to say how wonderful things really are. An underlying ideology has sprung up that professionals are untrustworthy, while the administrators apply quality audits in the hope of creating efficiency. See Andrew Sparkes (2007) for an imaginative response to the effects of this on the staff and students in universities, and Max Travers (2007) for a sociological enquiry into the process across a number of different fields (eg policing, nursing, lawyering, teaching, lecturing, auditing, and prison management.)
There has been an unprecedented explosion in the idea of audit across all kinds of professional practice, and for the last few years there has been a growing call for an all-embracing culture of protection (see eg Power, 1994, 2004). For some reason, a discourse of public protection has got stuck onto the back of the discourse of audit (Neocloeous, 2008) and the unexpected consequence has been to undermine the very people whose job it is to make sure that things work (Curtis, 2007).
Audit and protection are flooding every corner of professional life and so The London Society of the New Lacanian School (a psychoanalytic group) has decided to organise a meeting in London for 20th September. It is conceived as a kind of rallying point: a forum in which to speak about the reality of audit culture and to hear from people who have been studying and conceptualising it from different points of view. A series of interviews have prepared the way for the meeting, and are being posted onto the independent practitioner web site (http://ipnosis.postle.net/pages/UN-CONHome.htm); Marilyn Strathern (Anthropology) and Michael Power (Accounting) are amongst the first of these.
‘Scratch Clubs’ are being held in the upstairs room of the Jeremy Bentham Pub, London WC1, where discussions of these scholarly texts are underway. An open group of scholars and practitioners are getting together over lunch to try to understand what is happening and to think what might be done to limit the obvious damage (contact Janet.low@mac.com for more info, and see http://unintendedweber.blogspot.com/).
Psychoanalysis, philosophy, criminology, government, sociology, accounting, anthropology, business, are only a few of the different disciplines that are putting their heads together to figure this out. We hope you will want to join in.
Janet Low
sociologist and practicing analyst
Refs
Adam Curtis, (2007) Whatever happened to our dreams of freedom? BBC2
Richard Gombrich (2000) British Higher Education Policy in the Last 20 Years: the murder of a profession. Talk given at the Tokyo Graduate Institute of Policy Studies, 7 January
Mark Neocleous (2008) Critique of Security, Edinburgh University Press
Michael Power (1994) The Audit Explosion, London Demos
- The Risk Management of Everything (London: Demos, 2004)
Andrew Sparkes (2007) Embodiment, academics, and the audit culture: A story seeking consideration. Qualitative Research.
Marilyn Strathern (2000) 'The tyranny of transparency', British Education Research Journal, 26: 309-21. Also published in H Nowotny & M Weiss (eds), Shifting boundaries of the real: Making the invisible visible, vdf Hochschulverlag AG an der ETH, Zürich, 2000.
Max Travers (2007) The New Bureaucracy: quality audit and its critiques. London Policy Press.