Misc
Here are various references, resouces, quotes and quips that people have found interesting and useful.
Pete Mellett offered a list of quotes that he has found useful along his research journey.
From Lyotard…
Lyotard, F. (1986) The Postmodern Condition: A report on Knowledge. Manchester; Manchester University Press.
‘A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by pre-established rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgement, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done.’ (Lyotard, p. 81, 1986)
You might enjoy - find useful the following quote whose validity certainly resonates in my own experience…..
'Countless scientists have seen their ‘move’ ignored or repressed, sometimes for decades, because it too abruptly destabilized the accepted positions, not only in the university and scientific hierarchy, but also in the problematic. The stronger the ‘move’ the more likely it is to be denied the minimum consensus, precisely because it changes the rules of the game upon which the consensus has been based. But when the institution of knowledge functions in this manner, it is acting like an ordinary power center whose behaviour is governed by a principle of homeostasis.
Such behaviour is terrorist…. By terror I mean the efficiency gained by eliminating, or threatening to eliminate a player from the language game one shares with him. He is silenced or consents, not because he has been refuted, but because his ability to participate has been threatened (there are many ways to prevent someone from playing). The decision makers’ arrogance, which in principle has no equivalent in the sciences, consists of the exercise of terror. It says: “Adapt your aspirations to our ends – or else”'. p. 64.
See page 283 of the Maggie MacLure paper in the British Educational Research Journal for the quote on 'smooth stories of self':
‘Couture (1994) suggests, playfully but nonetheless seriously, that action research within the academy might be just such an enterprise. He imagines the university as Dracula, feeding off the virgin souls (selves) of teachers who offer themselves up in the name of reflective practice. Couture fears that action research works by consuming the ungovernable alterity of the 'client', producing a state of amnesia, and leaving in its place 'this dead, smelly thing called teacher identity' (p. 130)-a simulacrum that silences resistance and erases the memory of other, fractured and conflicting possibilities of identity. If he is right, what must we have forgotten in order to tell these smooth stories of the self? For instance, about the impossibility and the necessity of leaving the 'island', or the Garden, of teaching, and the discomforts of being 'haunted' thereafter by the spectre of practice; about the way in which the poles of the 'inside'-'outside' dualism reverse themselves, valorising first one term, then the other, in a movement which is never fully or finally arrested.' (MacLure, 1996, p. 283)
A point from the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin on the importance of singularity and responsibility. Bakhtin was a literary theorist writing in the Soviet Union. Quote from:
Morson, G. S. and Emerson, C. (Ed.) (1989) Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP.
‘As Bakhtin explains “I” do not fit into theory - neither in the psychology of consciousness, not the history of some science, nor in the chronological ordering of my day, not in my scholarly duties.... these problems derive from the fundamental error of “rationalist” philosophy... The fatal flaw is the denial of responsibility - which is to say, the crisis is at base an ethical one. It can be overcome only by an understanding of the act as a category into which cognition enters but which is radically singular and “responsible’. (Rethinking Bakhtin p. 13.)
Here's the quote from Lyotard that serves to stress the importance of our own creativity in finding out own 'pathways of desire' from
Lyotard, F. (1986) The Postmodern Condition: A report on Knowledge. Manchester; Manchester University Press.
‘A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by pre-established rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgement, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done.‘ (Lyotard, p. 81, 1986)
