The bone in the throat: some uncertain thoughts on baroque method

Abstract

The paper conjures some possibilities for a baroque method in qualitative educational research. It draws on work across a range of disciplines that has detected a recurrence of the baroque in the philosophical and literary texts of modernity. A baroque method would resist clarity, mastery and the single point of view, be radically uncertain about scale, boundaries and coherence, and favour movement and tension over structure and composure. It would open up strange spaces for difference, wonder and otherness to emerge. The paper uses baroque exemplars such as trompe l’oeil painting and the cabinet of curiosities to pose methodological questions about analysis, representation and meaning. The obstructive potential of the baroque might, it is argued, help post‐foundational research resist the bureaucratic reason that animates education policy and research. As the ‘bone in the throat’ of closure‐seeking systems, the baroque offers a hopeful figure for a productively irritating method.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Ian Stronach and Cathie Pearce for conversations around the topic of this paper; to her colleagues on the ‘Touchlines’ project, Heather Piper, Ian Stronach, Helen Lawson, Helen Perry and John Powell, and to doctoral students at the University of East Anglia and Manchester Metropolitan University who obligingly ‘handled’ and added to the contents of the cabinets of curiosity.

Notes

1. Authors associated with such trouble‐words include: disconcertion‐Taussig (1993); bafflement‐Krauss (1993); failure‐Visweswaran (1994), Cohen (2004); entanglement‐Bal (1999); ruin‐St.Pierre & Pillow (2000); trouble‐Butler (1990); disappointment‐Stronach & MacLure (1997); stuck places‐Lather (1998); haunting‐Derrida (1994), amongst many other writers.

2. The quoted phrase comes from Buck‐Morss (1991, p. x) who described Walter Benjamin’s project as aiming to fracture ‘the mythic immediacy of the present’.

3. There are, however, notable, ongoing attempts to engage in conversation with antagonists: cf. St.Pierre’s (2000) dialogue with leading figures in the movement for science‐based research (SBR) in the US.

4. This is a modified version of a list presented in MacLure (2006b).

5. See Turner (1994) for a discussion of postmodernism’s relation to modernity.

6. There is now a solid tradition of such writing in qualitative method (e.g. Richardson, 1994; Lather & Smithies, 1997 ; Scheurich, 2000). But it is still hard to bring off (cf. MacLure, 2003).

7. See Cohen (2004) on the phantasmagoria as a figure of anti‐enlightenment critique in Benjamin’s work.

8. ‘Touchlines: the problematic of “touching” between children and professionals’, Director: Heather Piper. ESRC, Award No. RES‐000‐22–0815. The other members of the research team were Helen Lawson, Maggie MacLure, Helen Perry, John Powell and Ian Stronach. See Piper et al. (2005).

9. Lambert (2004. p. 145).