Katriina Honkanen

Åbo Akademi University

Judith Butler

'It is Historically Constituted' Historicism in Feminist Constructivist Arguments

This article explores the historicism of feminist constructivism. It focuses on the work of Judith Butler, and explores how the idea of history and elements of temporality are used in her theory of materialization. It argues that the radical historicism implied in the Jamesonian request 'Historicize!' can become a self-defeating enterprise. The hypothesis is that historicism has been used as a kind of 'black box' in feminist constructivism. The article points out the way in which constructivists rely much too easily on history as evidence, and talk about history as if it stands outside construction. This ambivalence in constructivist thought is prevalent. The article proposes that feminist theorists of materiality recognize the predominance of self-evident notions of historicity in constructivist theories and start practising a strategic forgetting of history.

constructions; anything that has a history is contingent and thus constructed. To understand the meaning of an object often requires knowledge about its history and its historical emergence. In other words, the present state of things is explained through the historicity of meaning. Our understanding of sexuality, for instance, is explained through investigating how meanings of sexuality were historically produced. I point at these tendencies, which I have encountered, to indicate the epistemological value that historical knowledge -this consuming fever of history -has gained in feminist thinking. It is my wish to contribute to a feminist theorizing of issues in relation to historicity 1 [START_REF] Colebrook | Feminist Ethics and Historicism[END_REF][START_REF] Colebrook | New Literary Histories: New Historicism and Contemporary Criticism[END_REF][START_REF] Ermarth | Sequel to History: Post-Modernism and the Crisis of Representational Time[END_REF][START_REF] Ermarth | Agency in the Discursive Condition[END_REF][START_REF] Felski | Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Post-Modern Culture[END_REF][START_REF] Irigaray | The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger[END_REF]. In this article, I propose that it is the epistemological hegemony of historicist constructivism that enables the predominant state of theory within feminism. As a feminist constructivist and epistemologist myself, I want to discuss the meta-narrative status that history has gained. I claim that feminist constructivist arguments depend on such aspects of historical thinking that are otherwise problematized by feminist epistemologists. One of these aspects is foundationalism, with another being universalism.

To make my point, I discuss the ways in which historicity is used in feminist theories, especially Judith Butler's constructivist theories, to see where and how the idea of history stands as a ground for knowledge, as this is one of the most powerful undertakings of the word 'history'.

Generally, there are different uses of the term 'history' in feminist theorizing. First, history can be understood as meaning being about the past. History can also be seen as representing the past and the things that actually happened there. The strongest usage of the word 'history' implies an understanding where history has happened and is for real. On the other hand, history can be understood as fully discursive. How is history used in feminist constructivist arguments and what makes these usages effective in particular arguments? The different uses of 'history' imply different textual purposes.

My interest in theorizing constructivism in relation to historicity stems from the observation that the debate about the usefulness of poststructuralism for feminist epistemologies often concerns the nature and depth of historicity, and not historicity as such. The debate often focuses on whether phenomena should be seen as situated in history or constituted by history. For example, is 'matter' to be understood through its situatedness in a history that lies 'outside it', as a context, or should 'matter', in a Butlerian sense, be studied in such a way as to show how historicity constitutes matter? What is under debate here is the depth and reach of construction (see, for instance, [START_REF] Butler | Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex[END_REF][START_REF] Carlson | Kön, kropp och konstruktion. En undersökning av den filosofiska grunden för distinktionen mellan kön och genus[END_REF][START_REF] Kirby | Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal[END_REF]. The question that constantly pops up is 'are things fully, or thoroughly constituted, or are there remainders of non-constituted constancies?'

It is especially in relation to materiality and the 'constructedness of materiality' that the place and nature of historicity should be rethought.

Butler is concerned with 'unsettling' an understanding of matter where matter is presumed and operates as a foundation for meaning (Butler, 1993: 30). I welcome this unsettling and want to broaden its space by questioning the place of historicity in relation to matter. Feminist constructivists who attempt at unsettling 'matter' should be wary about using historicity as a 'black box'. Some work has been done within feminist theory that attempts to rethink the constructivism with which feminism has operated [START_REF] Braidotti | Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming[END_REF][START_REF] Butler | Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex[END_REF][START_REF] Carlson | Kön, kropp och konstruktion. En undersökning av den filosofiska grunden för distinktionen mellan kön och genus[END_REF][START_REF] Cheah | Mattering[END_REF][START_REF]Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality[END_REF][START_REF] Grosz | Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism[END_REF][START_REF] Schriempf | Re)fusing the Amputated Body: An Interactionist Bridge for Feminism and Disability[END_REF][START_REF] Vasterling | Butler's Sophisticated Constructivism: A Critical Assessment[END_REF]. One of the key issues here is a call for a return to the biological roots of the body, or to materiality, and a simultaneous effort not to anthropologize the whole issue of constructivism [START_REF] Cheah | Mattering[END_REF][START_REF] Irigaray | The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger[END_REF]. Instead of bypassing the materiality of bodies, these theorists have wanted to look at not just the meanings and ideologies that categorize bodies, but also at bodies themselves. In spite of the feminist critique of essentialism there is, in the mainstream of science, a neo-deterministic and discriminatory trend (Braidotti, 2002: 137) in attempts to 'return to biology'. 2 In my view, feminists need to historicize the ways in which matter has been understood. Historicizing becomes problematic only when it becomes self-evident and when the place of historicity (and discursiveness) is fixed in relation to matter as that which 'constitutes or effects matter'.

Against this background, I take a closer look at some of Judith Butler's constructivist arguments, which are widely cited and used within feminist theory. Moreover, I argue that in current feminist theory there is a tendency to collapse constructivism into history. This limits the possibilities for thinking about change. A rethinking of discursiveness and materiality, as simultaneous processes, is hindered by a historicism that privileges the force of discourse in its relation to matter and materiality [START_REF] Irigaray | The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger[END_REF]. Thus, unquestioned historicism also has consequences for theories of corporeality.

THE FORM-MATTER DISTINCTION

Within different constructivist theories, historicity is a central part of theoretical argumentation. As an example of this, one can consider Judith Butler, who argues that 'history is constitutive of discourse itself' (Butler, 1993: 282), or Rosi Braidotti, who argues that history is 'a destiny for everybody' (Braidotti, 2002: 41). In feminist accounts that use historicity, there are two ways of understanding history. The first is to understand history as a form affecting the meaning of matter in different ways yet still leaving matter the same. For example, when history is seen to affect the meanings attached to women's bodies. The second is to understand history as constitutive of matter. For example, when history is seen to constitute the materiality named 'women's bodies'. In that case, the process of materialization is seen as a historical process, making matter (in a Butlerian sense). The first line of argument understands history to be a concrete material phenomenon, 'the past' that is given a certain form through the writing of history. The materiality of history, or the past, is unchangeable, whereas the narratives and forms given to it are variable. 3 In the second line of argument, historicity predates matter.

An example I wish to use in this article is the sentence 'Women in Finland got the vote in 1905'. Particular historical sentences, such as this, can be read as consisting of true statements concerning what has happened in a particular context in the past. It can be argued that this sentence is performative in its capacity to produce a textual meaning as a part (prop) of my argument in this text. The problem with the above sentence is that it is a 'false description of facts'. The correct sentence is as follows: Finnish women got the vote in 1906 (Manninen and Setälä, 1990). The materiality of history, or the event (1906), is unchangeable whereas the narratives and forms given to it are variable.

In the second line of argument, historicity predates matter. History in this case is made of sets of norms, or intelligibilities and is in a sense equated with 'meaning' (in general). It consists of sets of powers that are formative of matter and that operate through materialization. In this case, historicity is there before the 'vote' and even the chronology, which enables the entity '1906' to appear, is historically constituted.

To be able to better understand the complex relationship between materiality and historicity, I use the form-matter distinction as a tool in my discussion. Concerning this Judith Butler writes:

We might historicize the Aristotelian notion of the schema in terms of culturally variable principles of formativity and intelligibility. To understand the schema of bodies as a historically contingent nexus of power/discourse is to arrive at something similar to what Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish as the 'materialization' of the prisoner's body. (Butler, 1993: 33) Schema means form, shape, figure, appearance, dress, gesture and grammatical form. Butler states that matter never appears without its schema, its form. In this sense, Butler opposes a notion of matter where it is seen as something that is just there, awaiting varying forms. What is notable is that Butler historicizes the form. The historically contingent formative level is a materializing power. Is history there 'before' any matter, enabling materialization? What is this history 'composed of'? If the form is historical, then the materialization, or the formation of matter, is also historical. Butler's constructivist argument further states that feminists should not take materiality as an irreducible phenomenon, rather they should conduct a critical genealogy of its formation (Butler, 1993: 32). This genealogy of formation is a history of form(ation). In order to broaden the feminist critique of essentialist accounts of materiality, I propose that the place of history in relation to matter is problematized. I also suggest that, for the sake of conceptual clarity, the materiality involved in our notion of history should be investigated.

One interesting aspect in the relationship between these two uses of the form-matter distinction, which I have just described, is that they use the same 'source material'. In the first case, the concrete materialities of the past, events, acts, changes and continuities are seen as 'historical material' that is 'about the past or from the past'. The second line of investigation, the line of 'materialization', also needs its historical and empirical objects, be it that these are read as instances of materialization or of a social constitution. The second approach also needs to use empirical objects that are 'about the past' or 'from the past', even if these might now be those invested in present bodies 'carrying the past in them'. In both cases, history is formative: either history is conceptualized as a way to form narratives based on past materialities, or it is conceptualized as a way to account for/narrate the formation of matter. It seems that the same tool is utilized for telling different stories about construction. The same grammar rule can be used for different purposes. Placing the word in another sentence has effects. From the ontological point of view, the tool is the same: the historical being of objects. There have to be objects that 'carry history', that in their very being are historical. Historicity should be rethought at its ontological level in order to make a difference (Laclau, 2000: 183).

CONSTRUCTIVISM IN THE FIELD OF HISTORY

For the language of history to be useable for either positive or negative purposes, it has to be connected to the real or the 'empirical' in one way or another. Full-blown narrativism that denies this connection evacuates some of the political force that history is invested with. This is to say, it questions history as history, making it another form of literature. I think theorists of materiality should think through the interconnectedness between materiality and historicity. This is helpful in theorizing the connections between the discursive and the material.

Within the field of history, it is possible to talk about either the construction of facts (or knowledge?) or the construction of objects and materialities. It is possible to make a distinction between on the one hand, social and historical facts that are constructed, and, on the other hand, 'brute facts', or physical facts (natural laws, phenomena) (Carlson, 2001: 112;Hacking, 1999: 23). What is interesting here is that historical facts are usually considered constructed in the sense that they are based on temporal facts -the events that are seen to have happened. The brute facts of history are the 'events' and the fact that they 'happened' ('the vote'). What is also asserted is the 'chronology ' (1906), the fact that time goes forward and cannot be reversed. I wish to bring into consideration my question that whether postmodern or not, historians honour the 'brute facts' by adhering to strict methods of investigations, including such aspects as source criticism and epistemological discussions. History cannot be narrated without a connection to the 'real' -to events. My perspective, where the relationship between historicity and materiality is problematized, highlights, of course, the empirical foundations of the historians' work. I think that the foundational aspects in the way that feminists think about history also reside in these 'brute facts', in chronology and in the events that are connected to 'history as the past'. I think feminist constructivist theorists need to highlight the empiricism to which history is connected in order to be able to further think through the problematics involved in the connections between the discursive and the material.

Historical objects can be conceptualized as constructed in the sense that they are 'made', 'crafted' or 'formed' by past human agents, but to understand their historicity as constructed and to question them for being brute facts from the past, is usually considered a kind of unbelievable 'irrealism'. 4 Within the historians' world, this is an area that constructivism cannot enter, without becoming an absurd antirealism:

If there is any appeal of Realism which is wholly legitimate it is the appeal to the commonsense feeling that of course there are tables and chairs, and any philosophy that tells us that there really aren't -that there are really only sense data, or only texts, or whatever, is more than slightly crazy. (Putnam, 1995: 163) This commonsense realism concerning the 'there is' (tables and chairs), also has its historical dimension in the 'there was'. The commonsense feeling about there being chairs is as commonsense as being concerned with the fact that, of course, there 'has been'. The meaning of chairs can vary, but the materiality of chairs is a brute fact with a historical dimension. The materiality of the chair, or with my example, '1906', is a foundation and, the empirical nature of history as a science relies on this foundation.

There is an ongoing debate within the field of history, where postmodernist historians are seen to stand for the possibility of this kind of antirealism, denying the reality of Napoleon, '1906', the Berlin Wall, the Holocaust and so forth. 5 It is my attempt to try to understand this debate in order to advance poststructuralist feminist thinking about historicity. I think it is a telling example of the clash between historical empiricism and constructivist arguments. The empiricist historians consider objects real and historical in their physicality or materiality (for example, a pair of sandals found in Luxor -'Tutankhamen's sandals' -which are kept in the Egyptian museum in Cairo). The historicity of objects is considered to be a part of the real. It is one thing to state that the meaning of an object is constructed (the meaning of the sandal), which is upholding a constructivist epistemology, but it is another thing to endorse constructivist arguments on an ontological level (the sandal as a physical object). Are one's claims for constructivism ontological or epistemological? There is a possibility for slips between these levels (Hacking, 1999: 29;Vasterling, 1999: 19), where one shifts from talking about ideas to talking about objects and, I think it is the source of a lot of confusion. Consider the following denial:

The materialities, which phenomenologically appear to us as referents outside the semiotic, are not real objects, but rather truth-effects. (Chouliaraki, 2002: 92-3) Statements like this seem absurdly antirealistic for the empiricist historian if they are understood to be about the material reality (ontology) of historical objects (about the sandal as an object). The argument denies the materiality of objects and, for a historian, this would amount to a denial of the materiality of past events and a denial of the possibility for real events (there are no sandals). The difference between real events and illusionary events can be drawn in a way that becomes devastating to the writer of history. If I want to write history, I cannot give up the materiality and historicity of the sandal. When feminists use historicity to make constructivist claims, they should think through the materiality that historicity implies. If feminists, on the other hand, argue that all histories are narrations, they should, for instance, clarify how narrative history manages to 'constitute discourse itself' [START_REF] Butler | Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex[END_REF]. Within historiographical debates, 'antirealist constructivist' arguments are usually questioned by examples from some trends in historical revisionism, especially 'holocaust denial' (Iggers, 1998: 112;White, 1987: 76-82, 230). Are we to see the Holocaust as a truth effect? If one were to write a book titled The Social Construction of the Holocaust, or, using my example, The Social Construction of 1906, what would such a book be about (see Hacking, 1999: 4)?

I think that these complex issues and the problem of the historical real should be thoroughly theorized and taken seriously. It can be claimed that materiality always comes with a form. However, I can also argue that historicity is enabled by materiality, as historical narratives need material 'props' that are labelled 'empirical'. They need these to become referential and factual. Materiality is not solely constituted by historicity and theorizing. I do think that 'Tutankhamen's sandals' are a real materiality and one that I use as a 'prop' in this, my narrative about historicity. For a feminist theorizing of materiality, this means that we need to question the power of historicity and analyse the ways in which historical narratives use materiality. It is important to prevent feminist accounts where the historical forms thrive on a 'silencing of matter', as Luce [START_REF] Irigaray | The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger[END_REF] has written.

THE NECESSITY OF HISTORICITY

History is everyone else's and hence also women's destiny. (Braidotti, 2002: 41) When the practice of historicizing is seen as a universally legitimate way to ground knowledge claims, all disciplines in an interdisciplinary scientific setting have become/are historical. What does it mean to see historical requirements as a destiny for 'everyone'? What theoretical necessity turns history into 'norms', 'expectations' and 'power'?

This historicist-constructivist argumentation is so frequently repeated that it is taken for granted. Consider historicity in the following as an example of this self-evidence:

If post-modern-feminist critique must remain theoretical, however, not just any kind of theory will do. Rather, theory would be explicitly historical, attuned to the cultural specificity of different societies and periods and to that of different groups within societies and periods. Thus the categories of postmodern feminist theory would be inflected by temporality, with historically specific institutional categories such as the modern, restricted, male-headed nuclear family taking precedence over ahistorical, functionalist categories like reproduction and mothering. Where categories of the latter sort were not eschewed, they would be genealogized -in other words, framed by a historical narrative and rendered temporally and culturally specific. (Nicholson and Fraser, 1999: 114;my emphasis) The language of history is predominant in this argument. Theory should be explicitly historical, the categories used should be historically specific and 'ahistorical' categories should not be used unless framed by a historical narrative. The emphasis that I have added to this quote highlights the necessity to read historicity as a language and, also, to question its function in constructivist arguments. In my reading, there seems to be nothing but history and temporality upholding this particular demand for good feminist theory. The argumentation relies on history and is firmly situated within history. It is clear, here, how history is understood as a form, imposed on matter and capable of 'freeing' matter from functionalism (causality) and, of course, from ahistoricism (biologism, naturalism, determinism). This is certainly an example of what Linda Hutcheon referred to with her statement that:

One of the effects of post-modernism is that it reinstalls historical contexts as significant and even determining. The paradox of the post-modern is that it simultaneously problematizes the entire notion of historical knowledge. (Hutcheon, quoted in Heise, 1997: 14;[START_REF] Ermarth | Sequel to History: Post-Modernism and the Crisis of Representational Time[END_REF] The text by Nicholson and Fraser argues for a theory that is explicitly historical. For a theory to be explicitly historical, the categories that it uses must be contextualized historically. This means that according to this very model, every feminist theory is historically specific except for the theory of historical specificity. The theory of 'historical specificity' is not a historically specific theory. It becomes a method of constructivism and a universalizing rhetorical device.

I suggest that the necessity of historicity is also connected to a certain metaphoric use of history. In a metaphoric use, the question is not anymore about finite and particular narratives, i.e. histories, but, rather about the historicity of meaning. As an example, consider Butler when she argues for 'materialization' in favour of 'social construction':

What I would propose in place of these conceptions of construction is a return to the notion of matter, not as a site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effects of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter. That matter is always materialized has, I think, to be thought in relation to the productive and, indeed, materializing effects of regulatory power in the Foucaultian sense. (Butler, 1993: 9-10) Here, Butler refers to matter as a process instead of as a surface or a site that is influenced by history. To conceptualize matter as a process of materialization means that one has to investigate this process. The notion of matter is reconceptualized and historicized. It is historicized through the notion of form, through keeping the form-matter distinction operative and rendering 'form' historical. The 'process of materialization' is thus a historical process, where the 'regulatory power', the norms (that also are referred to as regulatory schemas, regulatory power), are seen as historical forms that materialize and stabilize over time (this is 'the Foucaultian sense'). Matter always comes with a meaning. To matter is to mean (that matter) and it is this meaning that in the end is formative, it is made of historical form (history here also guards against linguistic monism, whereby everything would be only and always language; although history is a language itself, it can be used in this way).

To summarize: feminist constructivist theories can argue through recourse to historical events and the presumption about the material realities of the past, as was the case in the example taken from Nicholson and Fraser. Second, feminist constructivist theories can argue through recourse to the historicity of meaning without reference to actual historical events in the ordinary sense. In both usages, history as a mode of thought and as a language enables the constructivist argument.

TEMPORALITY AND CONSTRUCTIVISM: JUDITH BUTLER'S 'ALWAYS ALREADY'

In this section I use Judith Butler's theorizing as an example of constructivist rhetoric. I do this because her valuable constructivist language is widely cited by and useable for feminist theoreticians and should, therefore, be elaborated upon. When Judith Butler offers a critique of the prevailing ideas concerning woman, feminism, power, solidarity and the subject, the use of temporal expressions becomes most frequent. It is in instances of refuting a certain universality or essentialism, naturalism and these unquestioned and, thus, seemingly fixed notions or ideas that Butler relies on temporal terminology, such as 'from the start', 'pre', 'before', 'always already', 'in advance', 'never'. Here are some examples of the way that Butler uses temporality in her arguments: 'the "I" who would select between positions is always already constituted by them and the positions that the "I" claims must be given in advance'; 'Agency is always and only a political prerogative'; 'Subjects who institute actions are themselves instituted by prior actions'; 'Sex does not describe a prior materiality, but produces . . .'; 'Identity categories are never merely descriptive'; 'The cultural context is already there as the disarticulated process of the subject's production' (Butler, 1995: 42, 43, 46, 50). I have paraphrased Butler here to show what kind of arguments I have considered in my discussion. What is notable in these sentences is that 'constitution' and 'construction', or 'production', are often articulated together with the temporal notions 'always', 'already', 'prior', 'in advance'.

As I see it, Judith Butler challenges prevailing ideas about 'woman', 'agency' and so forth, through claiming that these have other meanings because they have a temporal 'pre' or 'before'. This other temporal location sets meaning in motion and also renders phenomena historical.

Usually 'always' means 'at all times' and 'already' means 'before this time'. Following from this, 'always already' would mean 'at all times before this time'. What is further notable is that 'already' is connected to the past, whereas 'always' is connected to the eternal or infinite. 6 With a combination of these meanings and usages, I argue that chronology is a central reference point in Butler's constructivist argumentation. Hence, the combination between chronology and constructivism should be theorized (for more on this, see [START_REF] Honkanen | Historicizing as a Feminist Practice. The Places of History in Judith Butler's Constructivist Theories[END_REF] to broaden the scope of feminist constructivist argumentation.

For Butler, (past) meaning is always part of the constitution of the subject in its making and the (past) meaning is reworked in its present iteration. Actually, the temporal 'before' is embedded in the eternal or infinite 'always already', regardless of any finite historical totality. The 'before' is 'always already' present in the articulation of meaning. The logic, or formal account of the mechanisms of construction where the 'before' 'always already' has to be in the 'now', operates regardless of its particular place in history. The fact that the 'new' -or the present -is always implicated in the 'old' -the before -is not considered to be a historically contingent fact. The old is in the new, the before is in the now. The temporality invested in the formal account of the mechanism constructivism is, in this sense, ahistorical (which is not to be confused with the nonhistorical as the ahistorical is grounded in a radical historicism). 7 It is this kind of formality that feminists should consider when using elements of temporality. These formal elements have to be theorized and thought through by feminists who attempt to change and transform constructivist thinking.

If one problematizes historicizing within constructivist theories, it is on the level of nows, befores, afters, on the level of events, notions of 'happening' and the temporality of 'acts': historicizing hides the minute empiricism that temporality implies. The 'constitutive moment' is understood as an empirical event because the moment has the character of the temporal now. The moment can be put into a chronology because it is 'of time', because it is datable, locatable and measurable, it is real, it is '1906'. In this way one can see the empirics and the materiality that a notion of time implies. It seems to me that chronology materializes time and history.

Chronological order involves an idea of the 'before' of the present (the past) -and the 'after' of the present (the future). Simple succession would mean indistinguishable instants (Ricoeur, 1985: 53). Chronology is the trick that manifests the 'real real' as minutely empirical, as measurable instants that follow one another. Conceptualized as events, dates, or years of the past (the stuff of history -'1906'), chronology is used as the empirical material that historical narrative is built upon. Chronology is easily conflated with an objective, measurable time. Chronology, as it is commonly used, refers to the quantitative aspect of time (Lindroos, 1998: 11-12). 8 Chronological order is stronger than simple linear succession. Linear succession can change direction without losing its character of linearity. Chronology implies a stricter arrangement of events in the order that they have occurred. A chronological order, when used in historical narratives, is causal -the first thing leading to the next and not the other way around. The theory of materialization when so influenced by historicizing constructivism, poses the question whether feminists universalize chronology without acknowledging and problematizing this.

A STRATEGIC FORGETTING OF HISTORY I call my own counter-approach to historicism 'virtual non-historicity'. This figuration describes the space of a feminist philosophy of history. It is a place that follows from feminist philosophies of history in their habit of strategically forgetting history. Feminist philosophies of history share an interest in problematizing historicity. Conceptualizing historicity as self-evident and necessary is opposed to my project of a strategic forgetting of history. Virtual non-historicity is a feminist response to the demand to always historicize. Methodologically, virtual non-historicity implies a deconstructive reading of historicist texts. A deconstructive reading traces the possibilities and places for 'outsides', it seeks to find the textual places where history or historicity is used as foundation -elsewhere. A deconstructive reading pauses at places where historicity becomes unresolvable. Virtual non-historicity is sceptical towards the use of history and understands historicity as problematic in itself.

A strategic forgetting of history is a feminist answer to historicism. Historicism requires that history always be remembered. This way it operates as a stop-sign, hindering transformation and new theoretical insights. Historicism leads to a temptation to repeat and speak in the language of history. A strategic forgetting of history is a major methodological tool that enables virtual non-historicity and a feminist philosophy of history.

The possibilities that a strategic forgetting of history enables become clear in relation to feminist theories of materiality. In theorizing constructivism and materiality, feminists gain from entering a virtual space. In theorizing materiality, it is essential to question the place of historicity in order to be able to broadly think towards transformation. In theorizing materiality, some feminists (Butler, Grosz, Irigaray, Braidotti, to name just a few) attempt to deconstruct the form-matter distinction. In theorizing the form-matter distinction, forgetting history means that 'the formative' is not prioritized by referring to the existence of 'historicity' and to the historicity of the form and its capability to 'constitute matter' without explicating the content and place of 'historicity'. To me, this means a widening of the space for feminists to continue theorizing materiality.

When theories of corporeality need historicity to support the constructivist argument about the historical constitution of matter, the room to theorize bodies and materialities without historicity is delimited. To think about materiality in a space of 'virtual non-historicity' becomes suspect and might even be accused of essentialism. I want to defend the possibility to forget history at strategic theoretical places in order to widen the scope of constructivist theorizing. Within a historicizing setting, a strategic forgetting of history, in times where materiality is theorized, is impossible. Every thing has to be thought of as being firmly inside the fixity of contingent, historical and contextual meanings. This kind of thinking hinders a deconstruction of the form-matter distinction and upholds the distinction by prioritizing the form, the discursive and the historical. With historicity, I refer to a mode of thought that enables the entity history to become an object of science, for instance, or to become a personal investment, or a shared horizon of reality, or a narrative. Historicity is part of the way we think. At times I have chosen to write the language of history, the grammar of history or the word history. I do this to highlight the fact that I analyse rhetoric. What are the rules of grammar that control the intelligibility of the word 'history' and what are the limits of this language in the particular text under analysis (for example, Judith Butler's theory of 'the performative' in excitable speech)? I use the word 'word' to distance myself from the heavy reality-effect that the ordinary understanding of the word 'history' carries.

In my usage, the word history refers to the different ways in which historicity, the historical part of our thinking, is made use of [START_REF] White | The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation[END_REF]. 'History' refers to accounts that are told or written within historicity, within the language of history. All different histories are enabled by historicity as a mode of thought. The word history also refers to an understanding of history as the past. With the word 'historicizing', I refer to practices of knowledge construction within historicity. Historicizing is a set of techniques used to construct histories. This use of the word 'historicizing' departs from the ordinary grammar of the word. Usually, historicizing is used to talk about 'taking into account the historicity of a phenomenon', or when 'accounting for' the historicity that a phenomenon is thought to have.

2.

For example, there have been several attempts to understand history through Darwinism and evolutionary theory in the recent debates on the 'H-History and Theory' email discussion list. One can also see a psychologizing trend. For all the discussion logs, see www.historyandtheory.org/.

History and Theory also published a theme issue on the implications of evolutionary theory for historical scholarship. See History and Theory (1999). For an example of evolutionary perspectives on history, see [START_REF] Landon | World History and the Eonic Effect: Civilization, Darwinism, and Theories of Evolution[END_REF]. See also, [START_REF] Fitzhugh | Agency, Post-Modernism, and the Causes of Change[END_REF], for a discussion of the implications of a 'biological turn' for the understanding of history.

3.

Hayden White has theorized the forms that historical narratives take and the content embedded in narrative forms [START_REF] White | The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation[END_REF]. 4.

The historical object is usually considered empirical in one way or another.

The documents that are used as sources have to be empirical in the sense of being material. The events -the objects of study -are considered to be empirical; they must have happened and they must be considered real. The empiricism or fundamental materiality and physicality of objects is already historical. 5.

See, for instance, Iggers (1998: 112); [START_REF] Kellner | Introduction: Describing Redescriptions[END_REF]; Megill (1998: 8-9); [START_REF] Mccullagh | The Truth of History[END_REF] and History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History (Vol. 40(4), 2001). 6.

Butler's frequent use of terms such as, from the start, in advance or prior to, always already and always and already, permanent or process hints at the centrality of eternity and infinity in constructivist argumentation. 7.

I read this as an operationalization of the idea of time as a flow of nowpoints, now-points that are 'of chronology'. In this sense, temporality is an operationalization of chronology whenever it implies causality and whenever temporality implies an irreversible order of the succession of events (see [START_REF] Honkanen | Historicizing as a Feminist Practice. The Places of History in Judith Butler's Constructivist Theories[END_REF]).

European Journal ofWomen's Studies 12(3)


Marie Dorte

The Søndergaard

Danish

Academic Desire Trajectories Retooling the Concepts of Subject, Desire and Biography

Keywords:

This article is an attempt to rethink the interconnectedness between discourse and subjective agency and to highlight methodological approaches to studies of gendering processes as a central part of it. The notions of desire, subjectification and biography are understood as mediated by narratives and metaphors, as a movement between the individual and her contexts. The transformative methodological project suggests conceptual retoolings as new analytic approaches to empirical analysis of the kind that aims to provide complex understanding of subjectification processes in lived life. The empirical field brought into the article as a means of explication deals with university cultures, and more specifically with a case of an assistant professor caught in conflicts between official academic discourses and more subtle political and gendered discourses. The author takes the concepts of desire trajectories, discursive authority, multifaceted discursive realities and past experiences (biography) into an analysis of the enacting forces involved in the processes of exclusion that finally ejects the protagonist in the empirical case from the university field.

Linda's story is about the process from her appointment to assistant professor, through years of intensive teaching and research, up to the rejection of her application for an associate professorship. Linda's case is particularly promising in relation to the mentioned methodological and conceptual ambitions since it raises a number of issues concerning the mutually enacting processes between the individual and her context. How, for instance, could we conceptualize the interaction as a flow, yet not 'just' as a straightforward and frictionless relation? And how may we understand and conceptualize the complexities that characterize individual processing of sociocultural discourse?

It is, however, already at this point relevant to address another question, namely: How is it possible to instigate new discursive practices given our subjectification through those that already exist? Basically, this is a methodological question aimed at the very idea of potential conceptual retooling. In an interview, Donna Haraway quotes the following statement by Marilyn Strathern: 'It matters which categories you use to think other categories with' (Lykke et al., 2004: 335). And she continues:

You can turn up the volume on some categories, and down on others. There are foregrounding and backgrounding operations. You can make categories interrupt each other. All these operations are based on skills, on technologies, on material technologies. They are not merely ideas, but thinking technologies that have materiality and effectivity. These are ways of stabilizing meanings in some forms rather than others, and stabilizing meanings is a very material practice. . . . I do not want to throw away the category formation skills I have inherited, but I want to see how we can all do a little retooling. (Lykke et al., 2004: 335) As Haraway indicates, our retooling of thinking technologies is not about throwing all discursive power overboard, but about deciding which categorizations to use and how to use them. We have to move with care in our selection and development of alternative categories needed for disrupting phenomena that are already discursively constituted. We must move carefully when we open up these phenomena by offering alternatives. We will have to bear in mind that the status of these alternatives is also only temporary. For these are the discursive conditions: We cannot escape discourse. We can move within discourse, find fissures, ruptures and contradictions to move with or against. We can, in Haraway's words, turn up and down, foreground or background, interrupt or leave alonein the search for alternative ways to push and move the already constituted towards new discursive practices.

Judith Butler formulates some of the basic premises for discursive existence and thereby of subjectification as follows:

and second, as what is taken up and reiterated in the subject's 'own' acting. As a subject of power (where 'of' connotes both 'belonging to' and 'wielding'), the subject eclipses the conditions of its own emergence; it eclipses power with power. The conditions not only make possible the subject but enter into the subject's formation. They are made present in the acts of that formation and in the acts of the subject that follow. (Butler, 1997: 14) The basic premises of subjectification constitute the simultaneous submission to and coming to subjective existence and agency through the discursive power embedded in sociocultural context [START_REF] Butler | Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity[END_REF][START_REF] Butler | Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex[END_REF]Foucault, 1979[START_REF] Foucault | Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of Political Reason[END_REF]. In an elaboration of this way of thinking, it becomes possible to pursue a conceptual ambition that aims to evade individualization without losing the individual and to avoid social determination without losing the contextual or sociocultural aspect. Subsequently, it also becomes the ambition to avoid universalizing on an all too concrete theoretical level (Søndergaard, 2002b).

DESIRE, DISCOURSE, SUBJECT

One could think of Linda's failure to be promoted in terms of a mismatch between her academic desire and the desire of those positioned with authority in the specific organization. Linda's ideas about the development of her academic discipline were rather different from the ideas of some of her colleagues. Making this suggestion, we must, however, think of desire as emerging and changeable, something that does not merely reside in Linda, but as something that is nurtured and confirmed, changed and reshaped through specific relational practices, in which those involved participate with their respective desire trajectories. All participants in these formative processes contribute to the constitution of legitimate and illegitimate discursive forms of desire, which in turn will become accessible for (new) participants to take up as their own. Bronwyn Davies writes along the same lines:

In various humanist guises, desire has been used as an indicator of who we 'really' are, as signifying an essence that is 'natural' and personal, as independent of social influence. But I argue here that desire is spoken into existence, it is shaped through discursive and interactive practices, through the symbolic and the semiotic. Desires are constituted through the narratives and storylines, the metaphors, the very language and patterns of existence through which we are 'interpellated' into the social world. (Davies, 2000: 37) 2 Desire in this sense is not something that can be fixed and confined to someone's interior. It is constituted through the interaction between the individual and the context, mediated by narratives and metaphors. Desire is created through discursive practices, and does at the same time become a basis for further formation of those practices. This does not, however, imply that desire will be experienced less emotionally, or that its seriousness or vital importance will be diminished for the people who live it. Desire is a form of will to live, a focusing of the will to exist, formed and reproduced through sociocultural interaction.

Butler has similar thoughts on the will to existence, but she emphasizes the survival aspect in the way power exploits people's desire to live:

As the condition of becoming a subject, subordination implies being in a mandatory submission. Moreover, the desire to survive, 'to be', is a pervasively exploitable desire. The one who holds out the promise of continued existence plays to the desire to survive. 'I would rather exist in subordination than not exist' is one formulation of this predicament (where the risk of 'death' is also possible). (Butler, 1997: 7) Compared to Butler's articulation, my definition of desire would, additionally, emphasize the pleasurable takeover of specific forms of subject positions and discursive formations.

For Linda, it is a desire in relation to the university arena that is bound up with a particular form of disciplinarity and with particular disciplinary traditions in and through which to think. The desire is in Linda's case linked to particular types of theories/theoretical discourses, to an extensive crossdisciplinary movement, and to a rethinking of the boundaries of the discipline to which she belongs. It is also a desire that is concerned with specific kinds of interaction, which in this particular field are organized around teaching situations and research cooperation. Linda describes the joy of working in these modes. She experiences moments of insight that she cannot imagine being given a chance to obtain in any other working environment, or through any other types of paradigmatic orientation. In other words, it is a relatively intense passion that she experiences in this kind of practice. On the question of what she likes about university work, Linda says: . . . it's the kicks, isn't it? They come when you discover something new. They come -they come in the actual . . . they come when I write, that is they also come . . . sometimes when I give talks. Giving talks can be really great as well. That is, teaching can be quite tough. But when I can inspire somebody else, that is when it -I am regarded as a very committed teacher, and when I am able to sort of . . . I want to pass on my enthusiasm for my field, right? And when I can see that I've done this -I think that's really fantastic. But even just sitting studying: Wow! And writing something, and 'now it dawns on me that' . . . when these moments of insight come.

Linda has pursued and refined this desire through many years of study and many years of constructing academic 'competencies'. The opportunities for pursuing and reproducing this desire have been linked to her unfolding of 'competencies' and practices as well as to her participation in relevant networks and potential spaces for development. In this sense, it is not possible to consider this desire as an interchangeable, easily transferable aspect of Linda's subjectification. First of all, her desire trajectory has a prolonged history of constitution. Second, it moves as process and practice between herself and a powerful environment that keeps reproducing its formation.

Saying this, I want to emphasize that the notion of an exclusively individual desire, a construction reiterated in many academic and everyday discourses, is unfeasible. A desire has to derive its sustenance from somewhere. However, if the context that sustains it is disconnected from the very place of its actualization and development, the person's processing of desire will either gradually be transformed, or she/he will become isolated and detached from their current context.

My efforts to conceptualize desire consequently identify the phenomenon as a process in discursive practice. Moreover, I emphasize that 'discourse' is not unitary. On the contrary, it includes many and often conflicting discursive practices within the same space. 3 Some of these conflicting discursive practices will work to fight, destroy or undermine each other. Some will be experienced parallel with one another, without provoking any significant mutual interaction. Others will integrate in mutually supportive, challenging ways. Let me clarify these theoretical points by relating them to Linda's story.

MULTIPLE, INTERACTING AND/OR CONFLICTING DESIRE TRAJECTORIES

Linda's desire to teach, to do research and interact with students and colleagues, and to take up particular theoretical discourses, was, arguably, reasonably well received and responded to in her everyday life at the university department. Her desire encountered corresponding desire trajectories among colleagues and students. To formulate this in terms of everyday discourse, we would say that Linda had colleagues who shared her professional commitment, and the students showed a great deal of enthusiasm for the kind of disciplinarity that she offered. Her way of defining and practising the discipline was received as a new, promising suggestion of future expertise.

At the same time, Linda was involved in research projects outside the department. Together with others, she had obtained external funding for a project that would create an even better space for the development of the academic desire that she pursued and was a part of. This did not simply provide a space for academic development; it also pointed towards a potential for increased legitimacy of the academic discourses Linda and her particular network were enthusiastic about. The collective processing of desires, in which Linda, her colleagues and students were involved, were thus not the only things that contributed to legitimizing this particular form of academic practice. External forces that were more wideranging, prestigious and financially resourceful, than the ones inside the department, played a role, too.

Linda was not blind to the fact that other academic desire trajectories were present in her department; lived by other colleagues, who had other networks and access to other supportive forces for legitimizing their professional practices. Linda saw this. To some extent, she was also aware of the fact that this other form of professional practice was incompatible with her own, on questions such as the boundaries of the disciplinary field, interdisciplinary work, the definition of 'core areas' within the discipline, choice of methodological approach, teaching curricula, etc.

She saw that the other kind of disciplinary practice was linked to special opportunities for support. She recognized that those who adhered to this practice held central positions in the formal decision-making structures of the department. But in her view, this latter aspect was less important than that relating to the content of academic work. She thought it important to enter into the dialogues of the department in order to promote her own academic desires as relevant for the development of the discipline. It seemed both necessary and obvious to her to do this, among other things, in the interest of the students, to provide a platform for collaboration with and support from certain colleagues and to act in accordance with international developments within the discipline.

However, Linda's aspirations were regarded as too incompatible with the desire trajectories of the powerful colleagues at her department. They could not accept further advancement of her particular endeavours. This was not simply due to the alternative view of how the content of the discipline should be defined that characterized Linda's academic desire trajectory, or because her efforts to create space for the development of the trajectories were regarded as oppositional. A combination of both of these factors played a role plus the kind of forces that would confirm their legitimacy. By means of the support of external financial sources, the students' appreciation, the good international contacts and the backing of some colleagues, the desire trajectory that Linda represented had become a competing factor of unacceptable dimensions.

An understanding of the dynamics and interactions between the many, conflicting, discourses in a field will, in this sense, also involve an understanding of the positions from which the representatives of these discourses may be able to speak and act. The hegemonic status of certain discourses is not only about expansion; it is also about representation in positions to which institutional authority is attached. Status of this kind may be materialized in its representatives achieving particularly prestigious posts and academic degrees, but especially through their obtaining central positions in the formal management structure (director of studies, head of department, chair of research management committees, positions on selection committees, etc.), which can be used to regulate the access of others to institutional positions (see also Bourdieu, 1990aBourdieu, , 1990b)). As a crucial aspect, the struggles between the various forms of discourses will in that way involve the opportunity to restrain and promote the processes of integration of other discursive positions in the institutional context, and thereby restrain and promote the movement of other desire trajectories and subjects [START_REF] Søndergaard | Orientering og Desorientering i Akademia[END_REF][START_REF] Søndergaard | Making Sense of Gender, Age, Power and Disciplinary Position: Intersecting Discourses in the Academy[END_REF].

A number of complex and interacting discursive patterns appear here. One set of patterns is concerned with the precondition for the individualized professional desire investment (psy-scientifically founded following [START_REF] Rose | Inventing our Selves: Psychology, Power and Personhood[END_REF][START_REF] Rose | Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self[END_REF]) and with the movements and scatterings that differences and similarities, affirmations and conflicts between the investments show in relation to the notion of academic merit. Another pattern emerges when the 'political' element is seen as part of the spectrum and as an integral part of the disciplinary competency and of the participants' reciprocal interactions. In the first instance, I deal with the political element. 4 One should, thus, keep in mind that desire investment may be attached to 'political' enactments in the university field. As mentioned earlier, Linda's desire for a specific form of disciplinary practice and a specific form of professional interaction with colleagues and students was pursued and refined through many years of studying, teaching, research and networking. This is one type of desire trajectory that will open gates into the academic field. But there are other types of trajectories that may act as gate-openers for academic participants. These trajectories carry, as a prominent feature, a passionate commitment to current processes of integration and to manoeuvrings between various discourses that characterize the participants' respective inclusive and exclusive interactions with one another. This is where we find yet another basis for the discrepancy between Linda and some of her colleagues, one that concerns the fundamental premises of legitimacy in the academic field. 5 It concerns a type of desire trajectory that over and above academic research, theoretical and methodological investment and pleasure also, and sometimes especially, emphasizes the political game. Politically invested desire, too, has its own history and concrete contexts of affirmation. This, too, articulates itself through discursive practices that are (more or less) accessible and may be taken up in the process of subjectification by participants in the field.

I now turn to the question of the interference among the different patterns of discursive practices and the (gendered) cultural codes that are involved in the interaction, and thereby in the formation of academic desire. At the end of the article, I discuss the question of biography.

GENDERED ACCESS TO THE MULTIPLE DISCURSIVE CONDITIONS

We will never arrive at a definitive understanding of how desire trajectories are taken up and made someone's own in specific contexts with their many conflicting and intersecting discourses. But it may be possible to indicate some patterns of interest when taking the gendered processes of segregation into account.

In an academic context, woman or rather femininity constitutes 'the other'. This has been repeatedly argued in literature from Fox [START_REF] Keller | Reflections on Gender and Science[END_REF] to [START_REF] Haraway | Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature[END_REF][START_REF] Haraway | Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. Femaleman© Meets Oncomouse™: Feminism and Technoscience[END_REF] and [START_REF] Bourdieu | Den maskuline dominans[END_REF]; in a Scandinavian context by, for example, [START_REF] Hasse | Køn og Magt i Akademia[END_REF] and [START_REF] Søndergaard | Making Sense of Gender, Age, Power and Disciplinary Position: Intersecting Discourses in the Academy[END_REF]. Man-academic-rational-scientific-professional, form a chain of reference that marginalizes what is connoted as feminine from academic relevance. Simultaneously, the masculinely connoted individuals tend to appear as neutral and unmarked.

Since femininity, currently, is not necessarily totally merging with woman (as well as masculinity is not simply coinciding with man), female-marked individuals have the possibility of appropriating these chains of reference as relevant discourses for themselves as academic subjects. Current discourses do, however, still tend to link 'femininity' to the female-marked body, which means that subjects coming into existence through female-marked bodies, to a slightly higher degree, than those coming into existence through male-marked ones, will have to continually convince their surroundings of their academic relevance. Because of the cultural codes through which they are read and understood, femalemarked subjects will in other words be suspected of representing whatever is constructed as femininity, and they are continuously referred to and expected to subjectify as 'feminine' and to develop desires containing primarily femininely connoted goals and expressions (for a detailed and empirically based analysis, see [START_REF] Søndergaard | Tegnet på Kroppen[END_REF]. To achieve legitimacy as academic participants, it becomes necessary for female-marked individuals now and again to contradict these expectations.

The position as 'other' is, however, continuously negotiated through the varying responses of concrete subjects. It is negotiated through the ways in which they take up the potentials for reiterating, challenging or reshaping gendered subject positions in their own everyday life conduct [START_REF] Søndergaard | Tegnet på Kroppen[END_REF]. This again has to do with their access to competing or confirming discourses with which to work and synthesize the array of available positionings in specific contexts. In relation to this it is interesting to consider how the position as 'other', the gradually takenfor-granted participating 'other', but nevertheless the 'other', intersects with other discourses -how, for instance, individuals' gender-specific subjectification also makes possible alternative trajectories into discourses of science and politics in academia.

The professional discourses of academia concerned with scholarship and academic standards constitute what are externally presented as the legitimate, central discourses of university institutions. What, in this sense, is defined as 'academic', is constituted through exclusion of a number of elements; 'political', 'personal' and 'gendered' dimensions are, among others, excluded from the definition [START_REF] Petersen | Academic Boundary Work: The Discursive Constitution of "Scientificity" amongst Researchers within the Social Sciences and Humanities[END_REF]. 'Political', 'personal' and 'gendered' discourses do, however, operate in the everyday life of academia, but in a less legitimate form.

Well-subjectified participants in the field will master 'translations' that are sensitive to the context. They will know how to move between types of discourses in ways that best hamper or promote the interests they might deem it most appropriate to hamper or promote. This mastery is not necessarily done reflectively. The more well subjectified the participant, the more 'natural' and given the premises appear to be, the less attention and visibility will be attached to them.

The official discourses (i.e. the discourses into which all types of interests, also political investments in their official versions will be translated) are presented to people positioned as 'other', e.g. the female-marked individuals, as the available discourses: the ones which they can use in their efforts to understand the workings and conditions of academic culture. The illegitimate discourses will to the same extent be invisible and inaccessible to these particular participants. In my material, it is typically the female-marked subjects at the bottom of the hierarchical ladder who state, 'It's the academic work I'm here for, that's what I love. I'd rather steer clear of all the other trouble. It has nothing to do with the academic side of things.' Or in a different version, 'If it wasn't for the academic work I wouldn't be here anyway.' These subjects do not, as a rule, see and acknowledge the necessity of engaging with other discourses than the officially offered 'academic' ones. Or to put it differently, these subjects act along the officially demarcated lines that it is possible to develop their academic desire within the framework of 'purely academic' discourses. 6 The invisible, inaccessible and illegitimate discourses are by these potentially 'othered' individuals sensed as 'other forces' (trouble), but are considered and treated as not worth wasting time on. Sharon [START_REF] Traweek | Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists[END_REF] concept of an academic 'culture of no culture' becomes relevant here as the self-presentation that the university offers in official settings, but also as the discourse offered to new participants, and especially the rather more inappropriate(d) ones, to take up as their means of navigation and subjectification [START_REF] Haraway | The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others[END_REF]. It is this self-representation that newcomers take up as 'the truth' about the workings and conditions of academia. Well-subjectified, experienced and well-integrated participants, on the other hand, only recognize this to be the legitimate discourse working among a much more complex set of multilayered discourses to be mastered as a condition for integration.

In other words, to be 'other' means something for the ability to find a way around these complex, multilayered discursive conditions. It is interesting to see how those in 'othered' positions, in a certain sense, come to share the blindness towards the non-academic, illegitimate political discourses, the 'other forces', with the well-subjectified individuals. However, the 'others' only vaguely sense these forces, without receiving/demanding access to them, whereas the well-subjectified individuals actually master them, but master them as the unmentioned obviousnesses; or in other words, the powerful individuals master the complex and multilayered spectrum of discourses in a way that implies a relative blindness to the composition of their own mastery. This is one of the ways in which gender acquires significance, through a relative difference in orientation towards the discourses of the place. Being 'other' gives access to the discourses that are held up as legitimate and central, and individuals who are positioned as 'other' are linked to these discourses in particular ways. To Linda, who clearly invested a lot of academic desire in her work at the department, and who possibly saw but did not wish to participate in the manoeuvrings of political discourse, the conditions for integration appeared to be highly ambivalent. In the following, she talks with hindsight about what went wrong:

Of course, I didn't choose the right strategy for me -that strategy would have been to suck up to the professor of that place, then you'll be safe, yes . . . That's what my colleague said to me, 'You should have gone after him, the professor -not after the weak one.' But it would have been out of character for me to do that.

To Linda, the academic and the political desire trajectories became mutually exclusive, and Linda's (academic) desire is 'herself' in the sense that it is a central part and expression of her subjectification. Therefore, to consider whether she should renounce developing and pursuing her particular desires in order to achieve inclusion does not simply make up a tactical option for her. It threatens her existence as a subject in the university arena. In the interview, Linda fluctuates between insisting that her (academically invested) desire was important, realizing that it led to exclusion, considering whether it could have been removed in favour of a politically strategic navigation, rejecting that possibility because it would threaten her existence as a subject, realizing that it led to exclusion, considering whether it could have been removed, etc. Her reflection does not lead to any solution. Her desire is too much a part of 'herself', for 'her' to be able to renounce it without at the same time renouncing her 'self'. At the same time, the opportunity to develop her desire is dependent on inclusion. But inclusion demands the renunciation of . . . and so on.

Therefore, Linda reverts to a type of thinking that resolves the conflicts through a self-characterization as naive vis-a-vis the premises within which she was acting. Yet, she defines these premises as unacceptable, in the light of the discursive practice and primacy given to scholarship by which she had previously orientated herself.

Linda: I have really lost my innocence, now . . . it's rotten, rotten, that is, in a way that I didn't . . . no, I damned well hadn't . . . that is, I'm naive . . .

Interviewer: . . . because you believed what?

Linda: I believed that it went according to merit. That is, I'm no genius but I can hold my own in the field, that is, I feel that I am just as good as the others. But I didn't think there was anything like that. Well, yes. I'm not very good at making . . . that is, it probably also has something to do with making . . . or it probably also has something to do with being a proper politician in a way. But that's not meant in a negative way, I perhaps also mean it in a slightly positive sense as well. Because it's right that when you're in a workplace, you can say. . . . That is I look after my own things -I really do, I never let anyone down, I'm never ill and anything like that, you know, and I write too and all that, and I really work my socks off and almost can't fit it all in. But even so, I'm probably a bad politician in the sense that I'm not very good at selling myself to the institution, if you understand what I mean.

Interviewer: How could you have done it?

Linda: Well, how could I have done that? Well we're back to all that about making the right alliances . . .

THE QUESTION OF BIOGRAPHY

How may we include Linda's biographical experiences in these reflections? Until now the text has focused on current discourses, on their contradictory and fragmented nature, on the importance of gender as shown in the ways in which gendered codes open up specific repertoires of interpretation (making 'other', femininely connoted practices) and thereby, to a higher degree, open up access to some discursive practices rather than others. We have thus thought of all these things in concert as complex forces that interact with, and are mediated by, each other in the movements of the context and in Linda's syntheses. But the past, and experience, also interact with these complex dynamics.

It is impossible to identify experience trajectories back in time. A 'journey back' will always be a 'journey' with the perspectives and optical instruments of the present as the mediating tools of information (see also [START_REF] Butler | Bracha's Eurydice[END_REF]. Should anyone put forward the hypothesis that Linda might at some point have integrated and developed a state of readiness for 'opposition', we would not be able to trace this feature in her process of subjectification backwards in time, with real and certain knowledge. Nor would we ever be able to state, with any finality, what its status might be in her current state of preparedness, let alone to what extent this, rather than the position in which circumstances had placed her, made it emerge as a theme in this particular university context.

Linda did not see herself as particularly oppositional in this process; not until the end, when she had to admit that a small circle of people in positions of authority had the final word in relation to her exclusion. At this point, she was forced to see herself and her practices through their eyes. It was only then that the less visible, but very active, political discourses of the place actually became evident to her as powerful, reality-constructing forces. Her contribution to the preceding interactions, seen through the eyes of the opposite parties and understood in terms of the political discourses, only then emerged as oppositional and threatening. It is this change of perspective and the clash with her own perspective that made her say that she had not believed things happened in that way, that 'anything like that existed'. To her, access to the political discourse signified loss of innocence. Until then, she had confined herself to the academic discourse and its exhortations to produce original research results, to be true to her own academic professionalism and disciplinarity, to the belief that inclusion would take place 'on merit', etc.

-this discourse of merit that exists side by side and usually integrated with the political one, which, in return, operates on rules of loyalty, networks, alliances, etc.

If we understand Linda's 'opposition' in this way, however, as an insufficient reading of the extent and importance of the conflicting discourses, partly brought about through her particular perspectives as gendered 'other', we are directed back to the dynamics of the present. This, again, will be a different narrative to the one that aims to trace the biographical source of an oppositional state of psychological readiness.

If we were to address the biographical interest that we have developed via our partly psychoanalytic subjectification as late modern, western subjects [START_REF] Parker | Psychoanalytic Culture: Psychoanalytic Discourse in Western Society[END_REF], we may possibly try to guess what Linda's biographical trajectories might be. At the same time, we would have to realize that our guesswork serves a current meaning-making purpose. A guess might take the following form: the possibilities of directing energy and commitment into a great effort on behalf of a particular interest and of doing so with such intensity that one does not immediately read the danger signals in the form of possible opposition from other subjects, have probably been introduced and produced, in some form or other, as elements in Linda's subjectification processes, as they have occurred in the course of her life up until now. From these possibilities and their implementation, particular trajectories of experience and patterns of navigation have emerged that Linda will be able to draw on and that she will be able to specify in different contexts. But the fact that it is exactly these patterns that are brought to interact in that particular context is linked to conditions for interaction to be found in a situated present.

Once more our curiosity and guesswork will, in that sense, fail to produce what we want, since we have to realize that Linda's present 'oppositional' ways of navigation are effects of a mutually constituting process between past and present, and that this mutually constituting process will render the envisaged patterns of navigation unrecognizable as what it is believed to originally have been. This discloses the biographical quest as a completely different project from the reality-revealing odyssey that many consider it possible to undertake. The biographical element searched for, Linda's potential for being 'oppositional' based on a fusion of commitment and insensitivity to danger signals, is hidden in the complex network of elements from present and past that are mixed and synthesized into current agency and meaning-making.

We may ultimately have to confine our ambitions of biographical reconstruction to this reading: the discursive offers of the past have been many, varying, intersecting and conflicting, just like those of the present. The subjectification that Linda has brought into existence by taking up discursive practices and by processing and synthesizing them with other and earlier discursive offers, is represented in fragmented and conflicting experience trajectories. The trajectories, and with them the 'unique' states of readiness too, have been created through Linda's synthesis and processing of whatever 'tracks and materials' were available. The experience trajectories and patterns of navigation must in this sense be maintained as multiple, ambiguous, flexible and in a state of constant processing -subject to constant movements of synthesis.

Linda's biographical trajectories must be regarded as very comprehensive. 7 If she had been treated in different ways in a given university context, or had had other opportunities for employment and connections, other parts of her repertoire would have been activated, other syntheses made. If, for example, the students had not supported her and she had not received national and international support -if the local authorities had integrated her in a positive way through invitations, conversations, explanations of how things work, through hailing in central fora, and by allocating her a prominent role in particular tasks -things would have turned out very differently: Linda would in a sense have become a different person. She would have been situated differently, have encountered different subjectification invitations and developed other forms of practice. Given the effects that such an encounter between her and the context would have constituted, nobody would have felt a need to look for an oppositional personality structure as an explanation of her situation.

In other words, it seems very appropriate to be sceptical about a biographical quest for stable, personality structures and unambiguous trajectories of experience. Insofar as our current discourses seem to take us in that direction, we must very seriously regard this quest as an endeavour mediated by the discourses of the present and we need to ask what endeavours at legitimizing current discourses such an interest actually serves.

POSTLUDE

It seems that a concept of desire trajectories as maintained and affirmed, changed and reshaped in situated relational practices, together with a concept of subjectification taken from Foucauldian traditions emphasizing the simultaneous subjection and coming to agency through discursive power, make up a promising, theoretical starting point. On this basis, more fluid and flexible analytical categories that may open understandings of the complexities and contradictions in an empirical field, can be articulated.

An adequate understanding of the subtle dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in academia seems to demand these types of thinking technologies. The categories and subsequent analyses must, as the basic perspective implies, be regarded as accessible for development and further negotiation. But this text has offered a provisional suggestion of one way of thinking of the complexities and multilayered discursive conditions. The interacting forces highlighted in this text were:

•

Contradicting disciplinary discourses taken up in various kinds of desire trajectories among academic participants; • Contradicting political discourses similarly taken up in various kinds of desire trajectories among the participants, here integrated in various ways with other academic discourses; • Gendered codes with their relative assignment of specifically marked individuals to different kinds of repertoires of agency and performance; and • Biographical trajectories of experience, emphasized as endlessly multitudinous and potentially accessible as multifaceted links of synthesis.

These elements may be described as some of the many aspects that are included in the discursive conditions that each individual has to interweave and elaborate in a constant interaction with parallel processes of other individuals.

NOTES

1.

In 1999-2000 18 men and women were interviewed on their everyday experiences as full professors, associate and assistant professors in the social sciences and the humanities at five Danish universities. The material was collected in context of a research project, 'Gender in the Academic Organization', financed by the Danish Research Councils. In the Danish university system, after completing a master's degree (five years), a typical career pattern would involve a three-year grant to write a PhD thesis, followed by an assistant professorship that includes three years of research and teaching. The next step will be an application for a permanent/tenured associate professorship. Finally, there is the opportunity at a later stage to apply for one of the few full professorships. There is open competition at every passage from PhD and onwards. Usually an associate professorship will, however, be advertised for an assistant professor to apply when the assistant professorship has run its course. 2.

Interpellation: [START_REF] Althusser | Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays[END_REF].

3.

Please note (with Haraway in mind) the retooling strategy: although I play down the differentiation between individual and context, and foreground the categories for mutual processing between the two elements, individual and context still appear as necessary categories for the meaning-making process.

They cannot be done away with. That would be an example of too alien a discursive offer for us to be able to use it against the background that has been our discursive conditions for subjectification (Søndergaard, 2002a(Søndergaard, , 2002b)). Also note that whenever the individual's contribution to the processing is being considered, there is an assumption of a general, human individual capacity to synthesize and manoeuvre discursively. This means that the individual is conceptualized as having the capacity to expose the contradictions among discursive offers (that exist historically and as trajectories of biographical experience) to integrating and elaborating processes. The term synthesizing, however, is maintained at an unspecific level in its general definition. 4.

Politics is employed in this text as a broad definition of collective or collectively contributory endeavours to promote and restrain particular interests, whether institutional, personal or group interests, through formal or informal initiatives within the field of practice of an organization or institution. In an academic context, politics is hardly distinguishable from 'administration' or from 'scientific work', since the aspect concerned with promoting and restraining particular interests is also realized through administrative, teaching, research-related activities as well as through many other kinds of enactments. This is a point argued very convincingly in, for instance, [START_REF] Latour | Science in Action[END_REF] and [START_REF] Traweek | Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists[END_REF]. Nevertheless, there may in this context be an analytic point in reserving a concept for a particular focus on the strategies and kinds of discursive agency that are concerned with the representation, position and opportunities for development of particular interests in a given context. 5.

Bourdieu would talk about academic and scientific capital as the basis of authority in the field (Bourdieu, 1990a(Bourdieu, , 1990b). 6.

Current neoliberal discursive practices form yet another set of premises interacting with the more 'classic' academic and 'political' discourses mentioned -they may prove to transform the whole setting. For a critical discussion see, for instance, [START_REF] Davies | Intellectual Workers (Un)Doing Neoliberal Discourse[END_REF], [START_REF] Shore | Coercive Accountability: The Rise of Audit Culture in Higher Education[END_REF] and [START_REF] Wright | Enhancing the Quality of Teaching in Universities: Through Coercive Managerialism or Organisational Democracy?[END_REF].

7.

It may be here that one of the misunderstandings between, on the one hand, the more constructionist and, on the other hand, the more traditionally psychologizing forms of thinking arises. When constructionist thinking is accused of asserting that individuals can be constructed at random between changing contexts, it is perhaps more a question of a constructionist idea of much bigger repertoires of experience with which to make contextually mediated syntheses, than of regarding each individual as randomly open to the contextual flow of discursive material.

Power acts on the subject in at least two ways: first, as what makes the subject possible, the condition of its possibility and its formative occasion, European Journal ofWomen's Studies 12(3)

European Journal ofWomen's Studies 12(3)