Helene Cixous

Helene Cixous talks about 'structural unfaithfulness'. Unfaithfulness for me is both a direction and a withholding. As with a faithlessness in modernism with Latour, I have lost my faith in structures (and in structuralism, the high church of structures) if adherence to structure means the devaluing of the individual - of their polyvocality, of their meaningful/less-ness, of their ignorance or deification of structure. For instance, the study of networks - long since ossified in the unquestioned rites and rituals of structuralism - by an un/non/dis-believer would become lost in the minute details of the tracery (the 'tracings' of Deleuze & Guattarri), carvings and tapestry of the church. Losing one's way implies there is a way to go. For 'loss of direction' read 'close reading', in the Derridian sense: or, cheekily, the devil is in the detail. The cost of ignorning such close readings is a monological structuration of detail. I'd rather get lost.

Working in the Twilight of Foundationalism

Pick up any good postfeminist treatise (St Pierre & Pillow, (2000), 'Working the Ruins', Routledge) and you'll find the authors waving farewell to foundationalism and girding themselves to working through the crisis of representation and legitimation. Such texts bite a half-moon clean out of centred, signifying and stable nomotheses. Like a wood struggling through a wood, the loin-girding of these texts gives me hope that there is a cause left to fight which is the cause of unpacking: of margins, of self, of the triumph of narrative cohesion, of modernism and progress, of technonarcicism, of uncritical pedagogy, of management orthodoxy: and, importantly, of the elitist discourse of the poststructuralism itself. The engines of deconstruction are set. Fighting talk indeed!

Setting the Scene

This (crude) matrix gives an indication of the territory of my investigation. The vertical axis represents an epistemological bipolarity of how one can know: and the horizontal axis represents our attitude to what there is to know, and whether this is from an essentialist (certainty) or non-essentialist (uncertainty) perspective. For the sake of situating a hypothesis (see below), the scope of study is concentrated in the upper right quadrant.

Hypotheses

I thought it about time that I attempted some hypotheses for a tentative thesis. It came to me in the bath that the tension that existed in my MA thesis was between a structured/structural approach to networked learning and a more rhizomatic approach a la D&G. The following hypotheses were based on a recent reading of Bruno Latour's 'We Have Never Been Modern.'

So a possible hypothesis could be:
What is the link between the work of structured networked learning and the work of rhizomatic networked learning? In particular:

• structuration only makes sense (gains meaning) in the light of rhizomation
• that b-school & management development or executive education concentrates on structured networked learning
• that rhizomised networked learning is the future of networked learning for leaders