Critical Perspectives on Personality and Subjectivity 205Branney’s argument recalls Martin and Sugarman’s (2003) focus on
culturally and linguistically mediated “reasons and intentions” (p. 79) as
central to human motivation and action. Branney (2008) notes that while
any discourse may offer a number of objective ‘subject positions’ (p. 575)
which one might occupy, this leaves open questions about how and why
people come to identify with the particular subject positions provided by a
discourse. Thus, Branney (2008) asks: “Subject positions are constructed
through discourses but how do subject positions come to constitute a
particular individual or individuals?” (p. 576). Branney’s emphasis on
subjectivity as a function of subject-positions inherent in discourses can be
supplemented by Lacanian Discourse Analysis that considers not only how
each discourse is structured via the variety of its enumerated subject
positions, but also by the mistakes, accidents, and unexpected
contingencies that occur in speech acts, indicating how subjects are “in the
world of language, but not of it” (Malone & Roberts, 2010, emphasis
original). Such parapraxes reveal a real dimension of subjectivity that is
simultaneously conditioned by language and yet nonetheless escapes
language, something impossible to say that is both structured by and
structures a discursive field and its elements. As David Pavón-Cuéllar
(2015) notes, “There are always errors in discourse, irregularities in its
structural regularity, through which we can glimpse the enunciating
subject, as well as the inaccessible object that is followed by the
enunciator” (p. 422).
REFERENCES
Allport, Gordon W. (1961). Pattern and growth in personality. Holt,
Rinehart and Winston.
Branney, P. (2008). Subjectivity, not personality: Combining discourse
analysis and psychoanalysis. Social and Personality Psychology
Compass, 2 (2), 574-590.