Research and (w)riting: PhD passage and theorising between the posts Paper presented at the Australian Association for Research in Education Annual Conference, November 1994 University of Newcastle, NSW AUSTRALIA. Jeanette Rhedding-Jones School of Language, Culture and Arts Faculty of Education Deakin University Warrnambool 3280 Vic. RESEARCH AND (W)RITING: PHD PASSAGE AND THEORISING BETWEEN THE POSTS This year I can enjoy the luxury of not having to read for the PhD thesis. It's done. Not just done, it has passed very well, straight away. Because of my geographical and intellectual isolation I eventually re-discover the company of others by reading. What I choose to read strengthens my links to some theorists I really didn't want to be following: Derrida, Cixous and Irigaray are highly intellectual, litist and French. Although I relied on their work quite heavily in my thesis's "methodologies" and theories, I was (as an Australian woman who is employed to lecture in an Education Faculty) diluting their work with large doses of pragmatism, Foucault and Aoteoroan/Australian feminisms. My research is about shifts, play and multiplicity. My PhD is research into lived experience: my own and that of a small group of girls aged from four to twelve. In particular it's about written language and being a subject yourself. It's also about change, which includes changing some of the ways of going about, and then presenting, research. To do it involved creating and interpreting a series of texts, and working discursively. I tried to be theoretically adventurous and, accordingly, to demonstrate a different way of writing a thesis. This paper is about a PhD thesis and today's theorisings. (In the middle of the paper I present my recipe.) Further, the paper considers the rites of passage related to changes of status associated with PhD progress in Education. The rituals of a PhD are not usually written about, and sometimes, for a student, very little happens. I have decided to graduate by procession, never having done so for any of my three other degrees. The graduation will be in two years time, as I will be away next year. All of my degrees have been gained through distance education study, by working through the post . Going to the letter box, before I acquired a pigeon-hole, was my way of finding out what I needed to do in order to get the next qualification. Even for the PhD, my supervisors were an eight hour return trip away. Getting their posted scribble on what I had most recently sent them became the sign for yet another stint of locking myself away to write. Between the posts I got on with the rest of my work and my life: surviving being non-urban. The Australian postal system was not what I had in mind when I titled this paper, however. I had in mind the football match I had just been to. (This match was my second attendance at a football game. The other was in 1955.) Managing to get the desired object through the goalposts is what I have just managed to do: this meant judging the research times accurately, and playing according to rules of scoring. The two posts I kicked my thesis between were poststructuralist theories and postmodernism. Although I managed to avoid men supervisors and men examiners with this degree, the game itself was set up by them. Would I be able to conform sufficiently? The irony is that the result is the eradication of my gendered title: a Ms becomes a Dr. One of my examiners wrote: "This is a courageous piece of writing ... However, the risk she has taken in both satisfying and challenging the conventions of academic writing has paid off because 'medium and message', form and content, are consistant.". Another examiner wrote "really a work of art" and "a genuine masterpiece". I present this information partly because it doesn't feel real, and partly because I want to look at genre boundaries in relation to academia. Excellence, I think, is sometimes very close to awfulness. I will explore in this paper what some of the implications of these comments can be for poststructuralist research. At the start of this paper I said that I had been re-discovering Derrida. In particular, I became engaged in Geoffrey Bennington's (1993) book written with Derrida in concert, and also in The Post Card (1987), which I had glanced at earlier and forgotten about. In The Post Card Derrida considers "the movement of the posts" (p5), playing "the post card against literature" (p9). He says: the "library" and the "history" themselves are precisely but "posts", sites of passage or of relay among others. (p27) This is what a thesis is. It is the location of its writer's passage, and it can be read: it gets into a library as a piece of social history. Further, it contains ideas that may be simply not seen. It is tight writing. Like the post card it has particular boundaries and constraints. Derrida says: I am somewhat hung up on postcards: so modest, anonymous, offered, stereotyped, "retro" - and absolutely indecipherable, the interior safe itself that the mailmen, the readers, the collectors, the professors finally pass from hand to hand with their eyes, yes, bound. (p47) Is this what happens with a thesis? I wrote (modestly) in mine "I will try" and "I suggest", rather than "I will show" and "I know". Stereotypically I structured my (contentually radical) writing as introduction/theories/methods/findings/conclusions. I used the big words, and sometimes the complex syntax. I critically analysed other people's work in relation to mine. But I allowed my interior thinking to be exposed; and my examining professors saw. This is what academic writing can now, with postmodernism, allow for. In this paper, the metaphor of the post will function, I hope, to signal a philosophical thinking that challenges logocentrics by close and personal engagement with language. Further, I hope that it exemplifies the lack of fixedness in meanings, and the possibilities in taking a range of positionings at once. Mixing feminism with a Derridean poststructuralist practice, I suggest, extends academic writing into a different kind of narrative, a different autobiography and a differently plain language text. 1 Derrida's The Post Card becomes, amongst other things, a series of re-readings of a particular postcard: that of Plato standing behind Socrates as Socrates writes. Derrida is so intent on his reader facing the possibilities in multi-readings that his book reproduces the same exemplary post card three times. In much the same way, my thesis re-reads over and over again the same fragments of "data" from the one-teacher rural school where I worked as a researcher. As a rule-breaking thesis it turns back on itself to look again, to laugh and to play. It does so to theorise power, agency and resistance. ***** All of the foregoing is intoductory to the theories I have tackled and to the writing practices I have developed as my thesis. Working from within Education (but being resistant to much that it offers) means that we can be adventurous as interdisciplinary theorists, in ways that psychologists, literary researchers, even sociologists and certainly linguists, cannot be. For my PhD I was able, by being located in Education, to borrow and reconstruct bits of methodologies and bits of theorizings from a range of disciplines. For example, I applied literary theories of deconstruction to a data collection acquired as a pseudo-anthropologist. My rejection of the linguistics I had studied earlier became, in turn, an enquiry into anti-humanism, structuralism and phallocentric research practices. This led me to exploring possibilities in various poststructuralist theories, feminist and otherwise. Eventually, I speculated on psychoanalytic theories regarding desire, fantasy and culture. I did so by going back, over and over again to the same fragments of data I had gathered at the primary school; and by experimenting with what could be written about it. Being able to work with ideas developed outside Education was for me made easier by the fact that I had taught Women's Studies in another Faculty. My first degree, which was not in Education, contains a major in literature and a major in psychology. Although I am now highly critical of the content of the majors in this degree, they meant that by the time I got to the PhD I was ready to make some independent use of the work of Gayatri Spivak, Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Grosz, Hlne Cixous, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Ann Game, Julia Kristeva, Barbara Johnson etc. I could also lean towards the work of feminist theorists known for their work in Education: Patti Lather, Valerie Walkerdine, Sue Middleton, Bronwyn Davies, Carolyn Steedman, Pam GIlbert; and I wanted to read non-feminist theorists such as Michel Foucault and Mikhail Bakhtin. What I ended up producing as the PhD was a reversal of what research usually is. Instead of theorizing from the data, I used the data just as examples of the different theories I worked with. Hence my thesis title meant what its punctuation indicated. "Girls, Subjectivity and Language: From Four to Twelve in a Rural School" (Rhedding-Jones 1994a) really is about girls (including me), our subjectivities and our language. The fact that my examples were located in a very small rural school was additional; but the examples from the school and outside of it allowed me to extend my meanings (into multiplications). The written products of my first three years as a PhD student were my chronological research journal written at the school, the collection of photocopies the girls and boys made for me of their writing, and my transcriptions of a series of conversational interviews. These products then served as the data from which I theorized. Other products were conference papers, publications and changes to my teaching. The presentation of my theorizings, which is my thesis, breaks a number of "rules". Trying to theorize within the dual posts that have followed structuralism and modernism is highly problematic for the PhD student. She or he must cope with acute intellectual stress caused by ever increasing complexity, death of the known, shifting use of terms, rapid theoretical change of house, divorce or separation from previous methodological proficiencies and lack of accumulated academic wealth that might have been used for the production of the thesis. Rejecting modernism and structuralism, for a PhD student, and for a supervisor, is a series of nightmares. 2 Writing rules I decided to break led me to using the personal pronouns (for myself), interjecting frequently, introducing the data into the first chapter, integrating a range of voices constantly, never settling on one particular theory as an answer, introducing new theoretical material at almost the end of the thesis, presenting a plain English preface, interlude and epilogue, writing metaphorically, writing about the body, having no hypothesis, admitting deficiencies as a theorist, making examplary my own autobiography, playing with words, enjoying the writing, having no footnotes or endnotes, producing a text that needs poststructuralist readings. An examiner I have not yet quoted wrote that my thesis "makes a substantial contribution to the knowledge of how girls' writing might be read and produced in terms of gendered subjectivity." I hope that she meant girls' "academic" writing as well as the writing I studied primarly: that of the seven schoolgirls aged from four to twelve as they progressed through three years of their lives. This examiner, however, explained some of the problems she had with what I wrote: "The recursiveness of the text is not easy to deal with from within academic reading practices. The length of the PhD thesis text, its function within the Academy, and the examination it must inevitably undergo from external readers, provide for a set of contextual factors that obviously impact upon textual construction. I did not find this thesis easy to read from within such a context, although I can respect the candidate's desire to attempt to produce this unease and discomfort in the reader." One of my three examiners, then, although she wrote that she had "no hesitation in recommending that it be passed" had some problems with my writing "outside the symbolic order" and "within the domains of criture feminine", as she put it. 3 Taking on a culturally related form of philosophy, such as the French, which is other to us, brings new problems. Australian borders between literary theories, verbal demonstrations and philosophies are not as blurred as they are in parts of Europe.4 Further, it takes almost a decade for English language translations from the French to reach their market (Irigaray 1993, Cixous 1993). When they do, and because they appear to lack an explicit politics of pragmatics, they will most likely be admired only by readers whose work is with more literary texts, rather than with the texts and discourses of life events, such as I have attempted to theorise. I am saying that in researching texts that are constructed from ethnographic research practice, and from our own self-reflexive writing, there is a place for such (French) theories. In social research we can apply, as our deconstructions of sites, events and our own texts, some of the writing strategies and analyses of Derrida, Irigaray and Cixous. In producing this paper, I am trying to show how this can be done. It means different writing, disrupting old ways to initiate new ones, revealing what the work of the past has left unsaid, claiming positions within philosophy for women, enabling other forms of theory to be spoken, focussing on the saying as much as on its content, establishing an exchange between feminists and men. Now maybe this is fine for postgraduate writers who can write. But many have great difficulties with producing even traditional academic writing. What will happen if we let them loose on writing about themselves, telling stories, breaking rules, addressing the markers of their work as people outside academia as well as within it? I suggest that what we must do is what we always have done: we must give access to particular forms of power. Show them how to do it, let them into the worlds of different writing, work on the writing with them. The implications for undergraduates are similar: the personal is acceptable, skilled writers can produce a hugely different range of writing genres; objectivity and objectives are not imperative; being brilliant is not about sitting in the cinders of some past decade's dead wood. EXEMPLIFICATION The last section has commented on and described some processes and positionings following a1994 PhD in Education. What follows will exemplify some of my thesis writing and attempt to show what subjectivity and inter-generic writing might be able to do for knowledge-making. I call my work "empirical". This means that I see it as theories evolving from practices. The practices I focus on in my thesis are writing practices: my own and those of the girls I worked with as a researcher. I see writing and spoken language and non-spoken language as sometimes inseparable. In this section of the paper I shall exemplify some of the links between the form and the content of my work. In doing so, I shall also be demonstating how genre boundaries in academic writing can be challenged. I can't really do this properly here, because I tried to construct my thesis as a seamless garment, and this means it can't just be taken apart and judged by a bit of its sleeves or its facing. What follows are examples from the thesis. I begin now with the Epilogue, which is constructed as a comment on the theories explored, and as a non-academic piece of writing. Page references for this section all relate to the (1994) thesis. Extracts are given alphabetical identifications for this paper. ***** A.(11.1.94, 2.45pm) I answer the phone in my office. A friend is calling me from her studio. She works in the main street of the town five minutes by car from where I have done my research. She used to be a primary school teacher before she became an artist. Together we have laughed and cried over deaths, divorces and disasters. Friend: I just thought you'd like to know. The Ruralsville school's just gone by. The whole town came out of its shops and stood on the footpath to watch. Yes, very slowly, on the back of a truck. Took up the whole road. Off to its new resting-place as a portable classroom. I think it's illegal. There's no police escort. Yes, they should have chopped it in half. But it's much cheaper to shift it in one piece if you can get away with it. I go and get a cup of coffee, imagining the violation of the newly exposed ground. For five years I have written to disrupt oppositions between theories and narratives. In one afternoon a truck shifts a school from sight/site. Carnival and archaeology combined. Femininity at this moment is a shared and tangible knowledge of mobility: a non-resistance of change. Writing is its record, and subjectivity a re-location between. The binary split? Bypassed by the Ministry of Education. Cultural sign? The school as self. The fantasy and the real? Sometimes there is no dividing line. (1994, 263) Here, then, are some signs of poststructuralist shift, and some allusions to Bakhtin and to Foucault. They function at the end of the thesis as a coda At the start, there is a plain language Preface of four pages. Here is a sample of it. At this point I discuss my academic progress as a writer presenting her first AARE paper, in 1991: B.Constantly selecting which way to go, as a field worker and as a theorist, became a feature of the research. Deciding that many ways were possible at once was a major step I took in my third year of candidacy. This happened as I was writing a conference paper. My way of dealing with a research problem was to face it by sending an abstract off to a conference committee of whatever discipline my current problem seemed to be based in. In this way I forced myself to present my dilemmas about language research to applied linguists, my dilemmas about feminist theories to feminist scholars, my dilemmas about data reading to other post-graduate students. This particular paper towards the end of my third year targeted a national audience of researchers in education, and it concerned my lack of understanding of the term 'poststructuralism'. The writing of this paper occupied me for three months before the conference, and for more than a year afterwards as I re-wrote it for publication. (1994,3) In the next extract from the thesis, which is taken from Chapter One, I begin to introduce the data from the one-teacher school. This is so that a reader will have this in mind from the beginning, as I did. Giving a small sample from the research journal, right at the start, allows me then to return to what has been quoted earlier. By that time I intend the reader to have a different view of it. Here is the extract: C.Mr B: (after some time, to the visiting man) Thanks Kev, catch you later. Mr ?: Right-O mate. (he leaves without getting beyond the door of the classroom or meeting me) Mr B: (to the children) Right-O, we've had a bit of an interruption. (Troy and Donna scuttle back to their desks without being told. They know the routine, and it's way past time to begin story-writing. As soon as Mr B announces it, two of the boys make a dive for the computers. Jane goes over and helps the younger one with what he is writing.) (1994,8) A little further into Chapter One the thesis is presented as an enquiry into particular questions; and not into others. D.A consideration of sexist discourses, therefore, was not what I set out to research. This, I believe, can be researched more than adequately by linguistic frameworks (Poynton 1985, Pauwels 1987). The construction of femininity, though related to the presence or absence of sexism in language, is in many ways much more difficult to see. Paradoxically, this is because it includes the body. It also involves the complex nature of the interactions and misconnections between what is said and what is heard, what is written and what is read, what is done and what is not. (1994,16) This part of Chaper One begins to introduce the thesis as an exploration of a range of theoretical issues. These are presented along side of the study of the rural schoolgirls and their writing events. As parallel writing, Chapter One is rather messy, I think now. By Chapter Two I have left the case of the school behind, and concentrate on defining and exemplifying my key terms. I highlight their semantic instability and the changing nature of theoretical discourses. At all times what I write is a preparation for my own theoretical developments, which will not be evident until Chapters Four and Five. Hence my process of writing Chapter Two required the most drafting. Here is an example of it: E. The links I have just made between Davies' and Steedman's feminist research and Foucault's and Derrida's non-feminist theories highlight one of the problems for feminist scholarship. The problem is to what extent bondings to theoretical fathers must be made (Grosz 1988). Feminism can argue that there is a redundance of theory if we must describe the roots of non-feminist poststructuralism whenever we theorize. However, as ways of developing analyses of data I hope to show (in Chapter 4) how re-considering Derrida's and Foucault's deconstructions can inform feminist practice. According to Weedon (1987:12), poststructuralist theory may help to explain why women and girls tolerate 'social relations which subordinate their interests to those of men'. The deconstructings I shall make of the Ruralsville data (Chapter 4) will function as a series of searches into the mechanisms used by the girls as they discursively take up various positions regarding femininity. (1994, 32) In Chapters One and Two, then, I roughly follow a standard PhD structure. This, I decided, was necessary even though I was proposing a beyond-structuralist thesis. Chapter Three similarly presents my "methodologies". These were, initially, a micro-ethnography; and later a series of deconstructions. Chapter Three presents explanations of each, in terms of my particular thesis. It does so by exemplifying the research practices of others, in some detail. What follows now is my reflection on one of these research practices. F.I make this detailed description of Walkerdine's work not because the psychoanalysis I shall explore is anything like the point she is making here. I make it because I want to show how deconstructions can leap from consistently returning to read particular texts or discourses to producing new theory. There is a shock function in this that traditional analysis of data does not have. Walkerdine connects fantasy engagements of comic readers with fantasy engagements in life (1984:180).(1994, 97) The next page of the thesis introduces reseach practices, or "methodologies", from outside of Education. Here I begin to discuss the work of four additional theorists: G.Further to the deconstructive practices of Gilbert, Davies and Walkerdine, which deal specifically with girls and learning, I now present additional information about deconstruction from Spivak, [Barbara] Johnson, Opie and Gavey. This information, although sometimes in conflict with research from education, also informs my research. Opie and Gavey, whose work is respectively based in sociology and in psychology, give me directions for how to find particular datum points in discourses where deconstructive readings might have particular potential for research findings. In Spivak's and in Johnson's cases, their deconstructive methodology/critique is a literary one, and I have already argued that reading the Chronology (Appendix B) almost as a novel is a possible practice for its re-search. Similarly, the narrative writings of the girls (Appendix A) may differ qualitatively very little from (literary) writing (of adults) that is published. It follows, then, that employing literature-based research models may be appropriate. Particularly when deconstruction has its own history of literary applications, and has perhaps been appropriated by social researchers, it would seem to be a good idea to go back to its applications by literary critics and see what it is that they do. In studying subjectivity and writing I have pitched my research theoretically between a social study, a psychoanalytic study and a (literary?) language study. By the methodology I have devised I hope to stay there.(1994, 98) I conclude Chapter Three with a quotation about writing. Here the two researchers named are recorded in conversation: H.Spivak in dialogue with Grosz, says: When one says "writing" it means this kind of structuring of the limits of the power of practice, knowing that what is beyond practice is always organizing practice. (Spivak, 1990:2) This begs a definition of writing not shown in traditional academic writing. The structuring of limits that Spivak theorizes are far removed from the signs of structuralism. The desires that Spivak has for her own work are those of discontinuity and lack of elegant coherence (Spivak 1990:15). This is a total turn-about from the theorizing, writing and logic we are used to. Spivak (1988:84) calls it the 'reversal-displacement morphology of deconstruction'. In her writing such reversal-displacements are uniquely her own. (1994, 109) The next extract is from the plain language centre-piece of the thesis. This is written so that the schoolgirls and schoolboys (and my mother) can understand it. It gives a picture of the Ruralsville school where I conducted the research; and it presents the key events and the key writing produced by the girls and some of the boys. I have called this "insert", between the two academic halves of the thesis, an Interlude. This is a further indication that I see my writing as performance. The Interlude carries much of the contents of traditional appendices. I typed it all in bold: I.The Town Ruralsville is tiny. There is a pub, a fire brigade, a public phone in its box and a primary school. Apart from some scattered houses and paddocks of cows, that is all. It takes five minutes to drive to a town a bit bigger and twenty minutes to drive to a city of 25,000 people. The School The primary school is in a side street. It has a driveway like a farm except that the gate is open. There are about ten small bikes in the corrugated iron bike shed which is beside a row of drinking taps. The school building itself is a wooden one-room classroom with a little entrance porch up a couple of steps. At the end of the entrance porch is a sink and a fridge and behind the wall is a tiny storeroom where the girls and boys sometimes read or talk. On the other side of the schoolroom is a locked-up shelter shed, a water tank, some climbing bars, a free-standing brick wall, a vegetable garden and a double set of toilets. (1994, 111) After this presentation of expository and descriptive writing, which included pieces written by the girls and the boys, the thesis begins to open up. Chapter Four is twice the length of the other chapters. When I was writing it, it seemed I was constructing a flight of fantasy. By the time I had finished crafting it, I hoped I had constructed a complex fugue. In the extract that follows, I consider the effect of time on understanding. More than this I consider the unfixedness and incompleteness of meaning: J.Three years later I came back to this piece of writing in my file. I asked Kylie, then aged eight, what she thought of it (1.6.92). This discussion that she and I had took place on the floor of her bedroom, and she recorded it with my little casette player. She spent a long time playing it back afterwards listening to what had been said. Me: That's actually the very first one I got from you. I look at the dates on them. K: Oh yeah. Me: So it's two weeks before (before she wrote the piece we have just discussed), It's the very first thing that you did (in my file). K: Oh yeah. (Reads it aloud.) And I draw a kangaroo. And Mr B wrote 'It's cute.' Me: Did he decide to put that? K: Yeah. Me: What did YOU think? K: I think it was fairly dumb....it's got a pouch. Can we go back and do them again? (she replays the taped discussion and looks at her writing file again) Here we see Kylie either recalling her silent reactions to Mr B's scribings of three years earlier or renaming the feelings the moment brings up for her. Whatever her awareness was earlier, she certainly is critical now, at the age of eight, of teacher-labelling and teacher-wording. Discussing her writing (1.6.92) titled 'Mr B is a good teacher' (1989) she says: K: This one, I wrote 'I hate Mr B' (She's got 'I A' written at the top of the page I see now) and so he made me write 'Mr B is a good teacher' (This is written below the 'I A'. She laughs) And I did this stupid picture of him deliberately. (1994,156) What I have just exemplified is a combination of elementary ethnography and beginning deconstructions. As a way of presenting a series of poststructuralist readings, Chapter Four is experimental. In the next extract I introduce historical data to the research process: K.I shall begin to discuss culture by bringing in two sets of threads not worked with before. These are the threads of the past and the threads of the future, (Appendix D: Extra Descriptions). Ruralsville Primary School has a very long history by Australian standards. Girls and women have been working at this school for one hundred and thirty years. At the end of this year, (1993), the school will be closed 'for good' (by the State Government, because Ruralsville is 'too small'). The published history of the school, which I cannot for ethical reasons publicize, names three of the girls in my study as school attenders in 1987. This jolts me into seeing the past as important. (1994, 221) From this jumping off point, the thesis links the then-current sites and events of the constuction of "the subject" to what was historically recorded. Following this, it employs some literary contrivances to jolt its readers into a shared past with a (writing) "me". By this stage, the thesis is into Chapter Five. L.Girlhood is not a fixed positioning but a time of trying on. Looking at herself in the (1940's triple?) mirror of her own writing, a girl can see multiple views of the subject she temporarily assumes. (My mother has one with winged sides, so that as I sit in its centre I go off into infinity from the left, the right and the back.) Writing allows for not only reflection of realities and of desires; it allows for their constructions. For this reason, what gets written is most important, and far exceedes notions of literacy as a skills-based entry point into the world of the literate. It also serves as an entry point into forms of femininity for girls. (1994, 233) Here the thesis engages theoretically by playing with genre and with the non-academic. It works itself to theorising a girl-culture: M.As is Johnson, (1993:34), I am interested in 'forms of identification culturally available to and socially desirable for women'. Seeing what transpired for girls at primary school was not as easy as it seemed. Analysis of static photographs, such as the Ruralsville debutants' ball or the school's annual official photograph, at least meant that the protagonists stayed still for long enough for me to make some kind of assessment of what was happening. Dealing with life events which necessarily engaged my own (encultured) subjectivity, both at the time and in retrospect, was by some calculations an unwise methodology. From its feminist poststructuralist framing, my ethnographic representation of a culture (The Chronology) reads as a highly selective description of sites and events constructing girlhood. As such, it is highly particular, and, I hope, hauntingly personal (Van Maanen 1988:ix). Focussing on all of the girls in a school, as a group and as individuals/subjects, allows for the investigation of the impacts they have on each other. By looking at girlhood as a whole and not only at a series of biographies, femininity and its constructs can be seen as patterns. Reading the three primary sets of data following feminist psychoanalytic theories (Barrett 1992:459) introduces the social construction of meaning to theories of subjectivity. (1994, 243) Here I begin to give away my theory of culture. I do so via a synopsis of my research methods, and via my references to the three researchers. Six pages later the thesis is more specific: N.What I try to do is dependent on my understanding of what knowledge is considered legitimate in/from an historically specific place (Ruralsville) and in an historically specific time (now). This follows Bakhtin (1986), who believed that all thought is not necessarily arbitrary. In trying to ground my theory of the subject, that is, by locating it within a tiny primary school, I seek to relocate theory in the world of the everyday. As I explained in Chapter 3, this has been my ethnographic and deconstructive task. My thesis is in these ways an attempt to provide appropriate poststructuralist theories of subjectivity. What I have tried to do represents a shift in cultural theory to include the theorization of a discursively constructed unconscious. This may explain why lived or rational experience cannot explain self-identity. The Ruralsville girls' writing indicates that subjects are continually displaced/replaced, as the writers come across new discourses and possibilities for them to be themselves. This results not in some kind of fractured, schizoid subject but in a writer's attempts at coherence. The ways that language writes the girls represents their sense-making from their worlds of contradictions, in much the same way as this thesis represents mine. Interrogating discourses by moving back and forth amongst them (Spivak, Johnson) orders one discourse to interrupt the other. Postmodernism is a seductive practice for someone who likes writing. But in allowing us 'to escape the patriarchal paradigms of Western thought' (Moi 1986:5) it privileges the verbal fluencies only available to a Euro-centric intellectual, and risks a narcissistic going-nowhere. (1994, 249) ***** I expect that my presentation of so many extracts from a complex thesis will have left my readers quite confused. I hope that I have produced something useful, though it may take a fair bit of re-reading for it to make much sense. What I sent off to my examiners was 100,000 words of densely presented text (plus appendices and bibliography). My thesis is but one way of doing subjective and unreasonable research. The PhD (birth) passage is a dark, lonely tunnel into difference. Of course, a PhD thesis isn't a baby or a post card. It's a ticket. POSTSCRIPT The dominant form of metaphysics in Western thought is based on logocentricism. This is a conceptial order which cannot accept theories of difference and methodologies of deconstruction (Grosz, 1989; xix). A singular logic of presence seeks out the real and the true, which philosophies of multiple presences and ideas do not. If we are not searching for the real and the true, then we can look instead at possibilities, signs, representations and non-singularity. A philosophy of difference, with a research focus on deconstruction, accepts that the world does not divide into binaries: such as true and false, right and wrong, good and bad. The problem is that researching signs, representations and multiple meanings in events and sites cannot then be judged according to previous ways of judging research. And once we open up research to such complexities, we have moved further away from the traditional sciences and closer to the arts. A PhD thesis cannot be presented as a novel, however much its examiners and its writer may understand of postmodernism. Nonetheless, the shift in the social sciences towards the arts, and away from the sciences, is being reflected by book and journal publications that resemble, in parts, poetry, drama scripts and amazingly personal diaries (Ellis and Flaherty 1992). Further, if we take the writing of deconstructive master and theorist of differance Jacques Derrida, we see that his is not a model of writing we can emulate. This is because, amongst other things, Derrida's sentences sometimes take up half a page (Bennington and Derrida 1993). As with all writing, audience must be constantly kept in mind, and an audience of French (or French-loving) philosophers is not the same as an audience of examiners reading an Australian PhD thesis in Education. Confronting one's examiners with too much difference will result in guaranteed failure. At the same time, today's candidate is aware that "another direction is in the offing, or that it is necessary to change destinations" (Derrida 1992, 14). What I tried to do was present a PhD that was theoretically different in that it challenged logocentric philosophy in different ways. It did so by putting its philosophies into practice in terms of its research methodologies, as well as through its literary styles. This is not to say that my research could not have been produced as a novel or an anthology of poetry: I wanted to pass. I therefore selected my particular academic genres carefully, with a close eye to what might be possible now it is the mid nineties. In my Preface and in my Epilogue I allowed a different voice to come through, which is not such a radical practice. However, I also inserted various voices throughout the thesis at odd moments. In order to employ the writing strategies I did, it was necessary to thoroughly discuss and exemplify ways other researchers had gone about putting their particular theories into practices. Through the research practices I exemplified, I was able to go some steps further. This is standard PhD justification. The difference was that I was trying to mix together very widely differing theories and disciplines, and to take from each only what I found useful for my particular set of data. This led me to read published and unpublished research from outside Education as well as within it, to feminist and non-feminist work, to linguistics, literary theory, sociology, psychoanalysis and history. Throughout, I linked what I wrote to the writing of the seven girls in my study. As a PhD about writing, which included the writing of a PhD, I could not produce too much of what I would call "literary" text. This is because, although the line between the humanities and the social sciences is getting more and more blurred, we cannot produce a PhD entirely by representation. There are still elements of philosophy that must be developed by argument, exposition and substantiation. Irrationalism is not so frightening these days, but boundaries still exist (Bennington and Derrida 1992, 120), and we must respect them if we are to value more than vision and insight. This is not to say that vision, insight, even wisdom, must be eliminated from academic writing. They can be there, but (mostly) between the lines. Because the girls whose writing I studied produced what I chose to read as metaphor, I therefore produced metaphoric writing myself, occasionally. As a literary technique, within academic text, this can be quite clumsy. My own MEd research paper (1984) contains some appalling examples of my early attempts. In the Epilogue to the PhD (1994), metaphor is managed with more sophistication; although the examples I am most pleased with are those interwoven with theoretical discussions of the research data. It is not only French feminist theorists who see "the identification of prevailing intellectual norms and categories of knowledge as masculine" (Grosz,1989,233). My feeling is that there are differences in the ways that women want to do research. Although I know that there are also men crafting academic writing differently, it does seem that this is more a women's prerogative. Following a theory of "sexual difference" (Irigaray 1993) is not an easy positioning for an Australian, though. It may mean going against theories of the social construction of gender, for one thing, and I am not sure that this is a position I want. Irigaray (1985, 78) believes that "women do not aspire simply to be men's equals in knowledge"; and here I agree. This theory of difference is not something I have taken up as an argument in my thesis, although I see now that I may have demonstrated it. (I would like men's opinions here.) Providing a binary division of feminine/masculine research is certainly not my intention; but in many instances the practice is firmly entrenched. One way of getting rid of the trench is to make sure that men editors, supervisors and examiners become more aware of possibilities in working against logocentric thought and always-modernist ways of working. This is not to say that the postmodern is the realm of women. On the contrary, it seems to be the men who claim postmodernism, and the women who claim poststructuralism. I cannot discuss here why this may be so, and there are political and territorial explanations also, I suspect. Irigaray's theory of an ethics of sexual difference (1993) is about respect between men and feminists for their different life histories as they effect their research and their writing. I think it is time that men began to read feminist philosophy, and to stop focussing only on the Derridas and the Foucaults etc. For the women who choose a feminist framing, there is now a huge range of possibilities in research methodologies and resultant writing practices (Reinhartz (1992).The number of women Education students engaged in undergraduate and postgraduate topics of research and study to do with feminist thought is growing. This is part of the intellectual movement, amongst women, to refuse the position of the "philosopher's wife" (Irigaray 1985, 152) constantly studying the works of "great men". Grosz says such a position "silences woman and precludes her from knowledge except through him, for it covers her with his projections, needs and fantasies" (Grosz,1989, 137). For many women students this has been their experience. In my case I selected my PhD supervisors before I selected a topic or a university to enrol in. This was not for the motherly support a woman supervisor might give me, but for me to develop a writing, a research and a set of theories that were more appropriate to myself. Exemplifying myself as I have done throughout this paper is not intended as showing off. Neither is it particularly feminist. Pragmatically, one's own case is often the clearest example that can be found of whatever points one decides to make. But in written language, and especially in academic written language, this has not been the convention. I have acted on the premise that the case presented by first-hand telling may have greatest impact for its audience (Ellis and Bochner, in Ellis and Flaherty 1992); and hence it has the greatest chance of causing radical change. If we want radical change in research practices, we have to consider writing differently. Why we decide to read what we do, how we do, is determined by our discursive access, or its lack. When we research lived experience (which is what education is about) then our own lived experiences must come into our research. The acceptance of writing, by its examiners or its publishers, does not mean the end of the writing for the writer. The de-scribing of post-PhD experiences seems to me to be a natural follow-through of events and locations of theory building. As subversions of "received or malestream notions of subjectivity, representation, knowledge and power" (Grosz 1989, 230), feminist poststructuralist research opens doors for different ways of writing a thesis and going about theorizing. But feminisms and poststructuralisms are not alone here. Education is opening itself up to a range of other theoretical influences: critical, narrative, cultural and semiotic. No longer must we select one, or perhaps two, as "ours". Pluralist and diversified theorizings are now appropriate. But they have their own dangers. 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Art network. Winter, 20-27. Spivak, G. (1987) In other worlds: essays into cultural politics. New York, Methuen. Spivak, G. (1990) The post-colonial critic: interviews, strategies, dialogues. S. Harasym, ed. London, Routledge. Van Maanen, J. (1988) Tales of the field: on writing ethnography. Chicago, Chicago University Press. Walkerdine, V. (1984) '"Some day my prince will come": young girls and the preparation for adolescent sexuality'. In A. McRobbie and A. Nava, eds. Gender and generation. London, Macmillan. Walkerdine (1990) Schoolgirl fictions. London, Verso. Weedon, C. (1987) Feminist practice and poststructuralist theory. Oxford, Basil Blackwell. 1 Whilst Irigaray and Cixous also theorise in these directions, I have been trying to apply such practices to explain everyday events and sites (Foucault). 2 There are no models to go by. You can't take yourself off to a University library (or send through the post) and expect to see a demonstration of what your thesis might eventually look like. There may have been organizational, generic and formatted examples for PhD students of your pre-post past; but unless you give up this whole radically different enterprise, you will have to devise the recipe yourself. More than that, you will have to convince your supervisors and your examiners that what you are doing is appropriate. If you are a PhD student, reading journal articles and published books will not help you write. It is another PhD thesis you need. 3 French theorists do not see criture feminine as only for women. They include Jean Gnet amongst such writers. But then, he wrote novels. 4 What will happen if we open up our research writing practices to take in those of a range of philosophies from cultures other to own? Does the Ph in PhD really mean philosophy or does it mean something else?