just been doing the process workshop in the states ... the questions of how to conduct our process research remain vexed .. this is something we might really investigate for the next year's stream
a rough argot of techniques?
1. following things ... we move from investigating what is the case outside of time, to 'the how' of how events arise over time (traditional process work), to concern for what things do, their potential ... recognising how things satabilize into spatial settings of rest that can be intellectualised through observation and measurement is not all there is, that things also demur from rest, engrafted with indeterminancy in process of differentiation and division ... following the life of things ... a bit like the DM boots, morphing in use and meaning without regulation, inexhaustible, until suffering the blandishments of strategic impress, where they are forced to spatialise, loosing their redundancy
2. telling stories from different aspects, under the aegis of different conceptual schemas ... splintered tales the meaning of which arises from the relations between them rather than within them. Like Altman's film 12 shorts maybe
will be thinking of more
ethnograhpic tales...from site to site....traditional snowballing sampling magnified
ReplyDeleteI have been thinking, with Peter, about the nature of management and it is a quite similar point, it seems to me. The ability to hold varying perspectives at the same time, without the need to choose one over the other, appears to be quite undervalued as a management ethos. Communication therefore becomes paramount. Constantly dissolving convictions of what 'is the case', unfixing sights, while assuring and calming the urge to provide solutions. It is the antithesis of 'management' as in having clear visions and 'marshaling' the environment.
ReplyDelete"The Rose is without 'why'; she blooms, because she blooms.” Silesius, 1624-1677
I like the idea of kaleidoscopes of 'whys' (e.g. via different stories) which, in their totality, render any 'one' dominant 'why' nonsensible. STS people do that, I think (at least in John Law's work of story collections) without claiming priority of text or stories (as in discourse studies).
McCloskey (Bourgeois Virtues: 148) says: "It's the cleris's job to provide articulations that illuminate our lives. Artists and intellectuals provide the images and theories articulating a transcendent. For a century and a half a good part of the clerisy has been of duty, standing in the street outside the factory or office or movie studio hurling insults at the varied workers there"
Creating problems, ellipses, not answers.
ReplyDeleteAnswers and problems; neither as a plateu, an place of equilibria to rest, but platform for imagination, departure.
ReplyDeleteTours of spaces, academic or otherwise, humanizations of mapped contexts.
"What the critic wants, or needs, is a possession of data and descriptions and diagnoses so clear and common that apart from them neither agreement nor disagreement would be possible - not as if the problem is for opposed positions to be reconciled, but for the halves of the mind to go back together".
ReplyDeleteCavell 2003: 241
Simples.