On a lovely sunny morning in UK I opened the Hammersley paper from Brian. As
I began reading it something strange happened....the skies darkened as I
imagined the mala'ik (Arabic for angel) that is guardian of the spirit of
all that is postpositivistic wept for us all.

"Applied consistently as an ontological doctrine, constructionism amounts to
an abandonment of inquiry in favour of writing propaganda or imaginative
literature.[6]"

Reading the above extract brought back memories of AERA 1999 Montreal
Conference with Howard Gardner (on behalf of the warriors of positivism) and
Elliot Eisner (championing the underdogs of representational plenitude and
diverse creativity) slugging it out in a conference room with Rishma Dunlop
of UBC offered up as the sacrificial ewe on the epistemological altar of
their professorial reputations in the American academy. Rishma was being
supervised by Eisner and my mate Warren Linds was a doctoral research
associate of Rishma at UBC, whose award-winning first novel 'Boundary Bay',
a pleasingly pokey parable of academic Pharisee's and their hypocrisies (I
recall), was being presented as her doctoral thesis. 

Gardner punched within his weight for the 'it's a great novel but a novel
can't be anything more than a creative and imaginative fiction and never a
doctoral thesis' crowd. While Eisner, choosing an ironic southpaw approach,
caught Gardner off guard by pointing to Gardner's apparent abandonment of
his own 'multiple intelligence' for a more conformist and convergent way of
knowing and representation. 

I didn't much care for Gardner's tone of reasoned rectitude as having such
rectal reach it seemed to insinuate into my imagination an evocation of
frostbite where I'd never imagined frostbite occurring before. 

What I am doing is representing that memory of how I felt 'back then' in the
'here and now' as a form of 'imaginative literature' (of dubious quality to
be sure) or perhaps this is a propaganda polemic. What imaginative often
allows, to be sure, is a 'proper gander' through a critical lens into the
orifice of complacency.  

But after that brief encounter with frosty fecal fear I never really took to
Gardner's project. And as strange as this may sound Hammersley's writing
evokes that memory of Gardner with the same arresting immediacy that
Rumsfeld grips my imagination...So I'm especially grateful for the 'writing
of propaganda' and 'imaginative literature' as both forms of representation
of social reality seem to be influencing the education of resistance in the
Western world to totalizing specters of all hues and pews. And this seems to
be more influence for 'good' than Hammersley's doleful writing is achieving.


Yaakub Murray