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Dear Dave, Teena, Colleen, Klause and all, I woke about an hour ago (middle of the night here) worried about my mobile phone. I could not find it before going to bed and I was concerned that I may have dropped it in my allotment yesterday afternoon while planting kale and picking brussels sprouts. I started reading emails and felt compelled to respond to the list, doing so in my head I then realised that I was not going to go back to sleep until I did some writing. So I got up and dressed to sit at my desk. On dressing, I found my mobile in my trouser pocket! So here I am, and now that I am, I want to see if we can look at our conversations in a slightly different way. I think Foucaulte is a great writer and artist, an extraordinary builder of plausible fictions in the tradition of Luis Borges and George Orwell. He does so through the medium of abstract linguistic historical analysis. He offers us a compellingly bleak linguistic view of our place in society and history. And he uses a limited number of tropes to sustain his persuasive prose. We are, he tells us, positioned by what he takes to be the dominant discourses in our society. We are trapped in the prison house of language in which we are constructed. It’s compelling stuff, but it is, in the end a council of despair. There is no escape and no hope. Whether or not it is an accurate account of our world, I do not know. But it has a plausibility that cannot be discounted. From where I see it, Dave is reacting to this bleak view—the feeling of being trapped—by using logic: the very tool—the mansplaining—that so clearly is being used on this list as a marker of male purfidity and dominance. There is no escape from the accusation! It is true! I’m reminded of the Monty Python sketch about dunking a women to demonstrate that she is a witch, or, to use a different analogy: it’s like locking someone in a box because they are too noisy. Their screams to be let out proves the point. I have just used some different tropes to those found in the ‘dominant discourse' argument. They are the familiar tropes of dissent and resistance: irony, satire, and parody. They point to absurdity and false pomposity. Ways of breaking out of a prison that is built out of the languages we use. Nobody likes being trapped and feeling helpless, even if they are men. Could we (this list) take this into account? David -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design -----------------------------------------------------------------