Shameful indeed. Keith has become an internet troll -- or perhaps he's been
one all along.
As most of you should know by now, don't feed the trolls, just don't.
On Wed, Feb 13, 2019 at 10:19 PM Keith Russell <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> Dear Nigel,
>
> It’s not the attempt to ground Design Research, as such, that leads to the
> feminization of universities. The attempt to formalise a process which is
> intrinsically amorphous will always lead to feminising outcomes. The
> Idiot’s Guide to Life would be one such feminizing project if it were
> conducted non-ironically.
>
> The Socratic Method is not a feminizing method. Socrates spends much of his
> time requiring his listeners to explicate the forms of meaning behind their
> assertions of specific knowledge (what is truth, for example). When they
> get tangled up, Socrates is illustrating the failure of the students to
> show mastery of their own discourse. If you attend to Plato’s later,
> so-called critical dialogues, in particular Parmenides and Theaetetus, you
> will for once, witness a truly masterful account of knowledge. So, yes, you
> can become wise to the shapeless shape of masculine inquiry.
>
> The Sophistic Method, learning how to make the weaker argument the
> stronger, so one might beat opponents, in political stoushes, is a feminine
> process. You learn distinct things so you can muck with your opponent.
> Playing the victim is a case in point with currency. How to defeat an
> assertive man? Pretend you are a wounded female child. Show him cute wet
> childish eyes and he will fall apart. Do this is court and the man will go
> to jail for life.
>
> If we use the binary set that Jordan Peterson uses, then we can separate
> these two approaches according to the masculine principle of order
> (Apollo?) and the feminine principle of chaos (Dionysus?). But wait. Surely
> this in an inversion of the model I have just espoused? The Sophists are
> offering a formal rhetorical structure (order) while Socrates is offering
> the ill-defined, chaotic and amorphous confusion of endless questioning
> (ever more chaos)?
>
> Ah ha. The tricks, the tricks. We need to look more closely. The shapeless
> shape of knowledge, won out of chaos, but never made fully explicit, is the
> Dionysian masculine principle (Right Brain). The formalised and rational
> account of the world is but chaos covered over by resolved but inadequate
> knowledge (Left Brain). It is feminised Apollonian chaos. As such, it is
> very useful but always in need of radical questioning. Do my presumptions
> explain or cover over what still needs explaining?
>
> Do we need and use both approaches? Of course we do. Do we need more of the
> Dionysian at this present moment in history? My answer is obviously, yes.
> Do we need to be less confident of our feminised Apollonian givens? My
> answer is obviously, yes.
>
> University learning, for me, presumes a command of the feminine Apollonian
> knowledge available in the culture. Beyond that presumption, university
> learning requires an active engagement with the masculine process of
> deriving order out of chaos. Universities are, in essence, masculine
> institutions.
>
> (This extended account of Order and Chaos is not offered by Peterson – I am
> merely using his binary set as a culturally available set for my own
> purposes. He might or he might not agree that my distinctions are useful to
> his arguments about order and chaos. I wouldn’t know.)
>
> Two thirds of my university teaching (20 years out of 30) took place in the
> area of Communication Studies. Attempts in this area to ground their
> community of concern with the status of a Discipline, with the
> certification of a distinctive “way of thinking about things”
> (Communication Thinking?) and with a formalised individual Research
> Methodology, have also failed.
>
> This same kind of failure has also taken place in areas such as Cultural
> Studies, Womens Studies, and Gender Studies. The root causes of these
> failures are the same. I do not treat these failures as trivial, but I do
> consider that they were inevitable.
>
> Just as an aside, it is quite comical that Communication Studies has mostly
> spent its intellectual wealth in proving it is not Cultural Studies. The
> secret aim was always to piggyback on Cultural Studies which might have
> seemed to have secured its status as a discipline simply by virtue of
> attracting lots of students. There must be a discipline here somewhere
> because we earn buckets and buckets of money. So, if Cultural Studies has
> won the day and got triple gold (actual discipline, individual ways of
> thinking, distinct and original research methods) then Communication
> Studies, which is a direct off spring, must also now be ok. Make me a
> chair, crown me princeling.
>
> So, yes, I have laboured in fields of concern that I presumed were always
> doomed to fail in their larger and grand projects of institutional
> ratification and elevation and just acceptance. In my labour I did not set
> out to bring things down, to subvert the endeavours of others. Indeed, much
> of my research in Design has been offered as a way of clarifying issues. I
> have had minimal success in raising the intellectual expectations of the
> field. Mostly I have been marginalised and tolerated as a funny fellow.
>
> What are the root causes of the failure of these fields of concern?
>
> keith
>
> --
> Luis Arthur Vasconcelos
> +55 81 98252 1987
>
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