ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the role of language in social organisation and control. To return to an abiding theme, fantasies of the kind also serve to undermine reflexivity – or at least to place obstacles in the way of teacher's approach to it. Individual reflexivity might help teachers come to terms with and manage this situation as individuals – but it is unlikely to make the problem itself, or the conditions from and within which the problem emerges, go away. Language, in short, both empowers and emprisons. Mari Ruti suggests that the way to use language counter-discursively, even when operating within dominant discourses, is to use it poetically. Poetic language may be subversive and 'disobedient', but teachers should not overlook the fact that poetic language is still language, and subversive discourse is still discourse – in either case, subject to the affordances and constraints that language and discourse inescapably bring.
