Following Foucault: Tall stories of mapping and inhabiting Pierre Rivière's landscapes as a 21st century inquiry

This paper documents the research methods adopted in a series of workshops on Pierre Rivière that took place at the University of Bristol. A group of scholars from Europe and Australia used philosophical, narrative, performative and artful approaches to re-examine the life of Pierre Rivière and family as documented by Michel Foucault (1975) and his team. They watched the film of the book (Allio, 1976) listened to emerging papers and wrote themselves into pivotal moments within the narratives they heard. They conducted narrative family therapy sessions with the ‘Rivière family’ and wrote themselves into the ensuing moments of evocation and connection. They made dolls, and wrote themselves into the voices of those dolls, and they gave presentations about how Pierre Rivière might be positioned within contemporary therapeutic, educational and media discourses. They wanted to find out if different kinds of knowledge might emerge from these ways of doing research differently. And yet it seemed that whatever form of inquiry they undertook, other subliminal, imaginary, fantasy and folk and fairy tale narratives seeped under efforts to produce rational, coherent academic texts. This paper explores this dual process of investigation in real time accompanied by eruptions into imaginary folklore and fairy story times, with segues into contemporary, fantastical stories of horror and murder. Each step the research team took became a doubled step, involving doubled listening and doubled knowing. To this end they have represented their research process (after Lather, 2007) as a doubled text and yet they have still not fully captured the emotional space of the workshops they inhabited. It was as if they were, for the short, intense period of time they were working together, collectively emotionally disassociated.