I’ve been wondering recently about disavowal, in the Lacanian sense of recognising yet rejecting a feature of reality, as a scholarly habit which shapes intellectual outputs. When I used to spend time following data scientists in the early 2010s, who were really keen on Twitter data at that point, you would often see a recognition of how particular the demographics of Twitter users were alongside interpretations of findings which failed to recognise this point. This would be an example of disavowal as a practical aspect of intellectual work i.e. recognising something to interlocutors but not taking it into account in your work.
I suspect it often reflects an unacknowledged condition of dependence in scholarship, doing things in a certain way because of the incentives or in response to the encouragement of glaring affordances, which cannot be justified in terms of the final output. In other words disavowal goes on between the context of discovery and the context of justification. This would be a reason for social media being psychically charges for academics because it tends to blur the boundaries between the two, as the work/output distinction breaks down into a continuous stream of micro-publications. If I’m right that disavowal is a psychic mechanism rather than simply an effect of genres of intellectual writing, this would be experienced as a slightly unsettling shift when it comes to certain contested phenomena which sit at the interface between them.
Mark Carrigan 