Anyway, regarding the title. I get the ‘always already’ urge – the desire to mark that as we experience it and then think it and then write it, it becomes something new. That the beyond always is something else by the time we attend to it. But the title still humors and annoys me. In part because it is so self congratulatory (oh, look at me, I’m the clever one aren’t I??) and in part because some of the work that allows for this stuff is really important and smart and titles like this make lots of people refuse to attend to it.

Via Savage Minds, I came across this article from the July 2008 edition of Qualitative Inquiry: I know everyone wants to cry Sokal and loose the hounds of sense, but the title is what the title is. I’m more curious……

Scott Kaufman blogs at acephalous.typepad.com. It’s a hoot.

What’s the big problem? Don’t like it? Don’t read it… I admit, it’s a little hokey and old-fashioned, like bell hooks and e.e. cummings and all the other formal innovators (which seems to me less pomo than high modern), but that’s their thing that they’re doing. Why should it irritate you so?

Do ethnographers always have to cite compliments?

(Ethnographer Corrine Glesne) explored ways in which her research could be represented in nontraditional forms. As a poet, she became interested in ways in which poetry could be used as a representational mode for her research, developing a style that she called “poetic transcription” (Glesne, 1997, 2004).

Informed by her work and thinking, I adopted a poetic transcription style in some of my own writing (Smith,2000a,2001a,2004). Later, I extended and transcended this poetic in other work, borrowing from approaches used by conceptual, postmodernist, and other post-poets (Smith, 1999a, 2000b, 2001b, in press; Smith & Godfrey, 2002).

Here, I will outline what I would call a poetics of representation, arising out of what others have referred to as a dismodernist perspective (Davis, 2002). This poetics is almost literally a moving target—it changes as fast as I write it down, for the act of writing it influences the poetic (which influences the writing, which influences the poetic: it is, literally, a writhing writing). This writing about research is seeking to become,as Lather (2003) says, “the other/outside of the logic of noncontradiction”(p. 4).