Abstract
In this volume, Wolff-Michael Roth provides a critical but partial reading of Tony Brown’s book Mathematics Education and Subjectivity. The reading contrasts Brown’s approach with Roth’s own conception of subjectivity as derived from the work of Vygotsky, in which Roth aims to “reunite” psychology and sociology. Brown’s book, however, focuses on how discourses in mathematics education shape subjective action within a Lacanian model that circumnavigates both “psychology” and “sociology”. From that platform, this paper responds to Roth through problematising the idea of the individual as a subjective entity in relation to the two perspectives, with some consideration of corporeality and of how the Symbolic encounters the Real. The paper argues for a Lacanian conception of subjectivity for mathematics education comprising a response to a social demand borne of an ever-changing symbolic order that defines our constitution and our space for action. The paper concludes by considering an attitude to the production of research objects in mathematics education research that resists the normalisation of assumptions as to how humans encounter mathematics.
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Notes
Lacan’s diagram, as reproduced by Roth as his Fig. 2, comprises the lower levels of Lacan’s more sophisticated graph of desire, as discussed by Žižek (1989, pp. 87–129). Žižek discusses the interplay of discourse and enjoyment (jouissance), where enjoyment comprises the emotional flows that are activated that transcend mere discourse.
This resistance would take the form of jouissance, a surplus to the discursive experience.
I have not followed Derrida in reading Lacan in the original French, even though Derrida and Lacan, alas, never quite reached final resolution on each other’s obscure texts, despite both of them being French.
Lacan’s iconic example is of a young child looking into a mirror and recognising the image as herself, an image that suggests a completeness that may not be experienced.
The rather troubled notion of the “whole person” must have slipped into the text accidentally.
Lacan’s subject was “barred”, as in Roth’s Fig. 2, to emphasise the gap between the subject’s place of enunciation and the enunciated subject. There is a difference between the individual and the way that individual implies herself through her descriptions of the world. Similarly, in naming my son Elliot there is a gap between how I visualised that name and how Elliot now lives it.
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Brown, T. Subjectivity and cultural adjustment in mathematics education: a response to Wolff-Michael Roth. Educ Stud Math 80, 475–490 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-012-9400-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-012-9400-3