Retrospective

Abstract

By concentrating on the dynamic energy of working-class subjectivity this work has sought to deconstruct the bourgeois nature of social reality and the way in which this reality describes itself to itself. Utilizing my own experience as an individual and co-operating employee of the training state I focused on a particular form of dynamic subjectivity with which I was associated through my work — ‘youth’, and an objectifying process within which ‘youth’ is constructed: training. This attachment to subjectivity includes my own subjectivity as a researcher. I became what I was: an immanent part of the social reality I was trying to explain. This incursion denied the detached perspective of social science and demanded a critique of its methodology which I supported with reference to painterly and scientific theories of relativity.