A short, rambling note on what I want to do here, and what I don’t.
Can we agree on one thing before we start?
That we all live in contradictories.
It is something we have to bracket out from time to time, like making a statement “I’m more than anything that can define me” while the statement itself becomes what defines us. In other words, the intended message contradicts how it is delivered in an absolute way.
Yet when we open up to the contradictions, the act makes the contradictions transcend. One who comes to see the difference between meaning intended for infinity and meaning falling within finitude implicitly grasps the negative that unifies those two — a developmental movement towards a more expanded understanding of infinity in its grounding place.
In ‘academia,’ and by academia I mean the living space people endorse and accordingly identify themselves as part of,
I experience way less opening up than bracketing out when facing these contradictions.
When…
A theory stays stuck in a place where its enabling process is conditioned by certain contradictions.
A positionality statement acknowledges the contradictory elements in its content but not what structures the contradictions in providing such a statement.
A methodological claim applied to people, communities, and (sub)cultures being studied but not people, communities, and (sub)cultures studying.
In this shared place, I want to experience self-formative knowing which is what I address in writing about theories, methodologies, and concepts.
As self-formative knowing is intersubjectivity-grounded knowing, knowing as being, and emancipation-oriented… (These are put in small letters intentionally so that we don’t need to be bothered by the words for now.)
I express a lot in an absolute tone and toward absolute conclusions. And I wish to do less and less in such a way.
And you tell me whether I hold true to my statement, in and through the following pieces.