Temporal Drag: Transdisciplinarity and the ‘Case’ of Psychosocial Studies

Abstract

Psychosocial studies is a putatively ‘new’ or emerging field concerned with the irreducible relation between psychic and social life. Genealogically, it attempts to re-suture a tentative relation between mind and social world, individual and mass, internality and externality, norm and subject, and the human and non-human, through gathering up and re-animating largely forgotten debates that have played out across a range of other disciplinary spaces. If, as I argue, the central tenets, concepts and questions for psychosocial studies emerge out of a re-appropriation of what have become anachronistic or ‘useless’ concepts in other fields – ‘the unconscious’, for instance, in the discipline of psychology – then we need to think about transdisciplinarity not just in spatial terms (that is, in terms of the movement across disciplinary borders) but also in temporal terms. This may involve engaging with theoretical ‘embarrassments’, one of which – the notion of ‘psychic reality’ – I explore here.