The wonder of method

Abstract

Postmodern and deconstructionist approaches are necessarily concerned with ‘making visible’ and working with marginalized ‘others’. This article explores how theory as method might enable us to revisit methodological approaches that have conventionally relied upon semantic readings of the text. Deconstruction clears the way for such approaches without necessarily providing an optimistic or hopeful way forward. This article seeks to explore how we might offer some new ways of thinking ‘human’ ‘agency’ ‘subject’ in a creative assemblage of mind, body, world, and where encounters with the ‘unthought’ ‘unknown’ ‘uncertain’, and ‘unclear’ need not be paralyzing but a call towards a wonder of methodology itself.

Keywords:

• theory
• subjectivity
• methodology
• inquiry
• educational research

Notes

1. By theorizing we mean a generative process. Deleuze suggests that we need to create concepts, open them up, find new possibilities rather than adopt reductionist strategies that would see concepts pinned down or defined. We share Derrida’s perspectives in unsettling assumptions about humanist metaphysics. Glendinning (1998, 35) points out that Derrida rejects any ‘ideal of exactness’ as well as any conceptuality of the human into a naturalistic setting. Both Derrida and Deleuze have an affinity that philosophy must help us to invent.

2. Michael Peters (2004, 62–63) makes this point arguing that poststructuralism never ‘liquidated’ the subject but rather rehabilitated it, decentred it and repositioned it in all its historic–cultural complexity. He argues that Derrida has ‘never disowned the subject or its relevance either to philosophical or scientific discourse’.

3. As a collection of objects, however, cabinets of curiosities can reinscribe the exotic, the alienated, and the socially deviant or compliant.

4. Drafted between 1927 and 1940, the Arcades Project was published in Germany in 1982, over four decades after its author’s death. The English version was published in 1999.

5. Deleuze and Guattari (1984/1988) use the term haeccity to invoke a sense of movement that has no specific beginning or ending. Rather it is a movement that starts in the middle and travels horizontally rather than vertically or in a linear way.