ABSTRACT
Although I was the keynote speaker at Richard Smith’s invited conference, my talk was not at all a keynote for the conference. It was an insider’s meeting, not because it was Australian, but because it was a generic, high-level, inhouse conversation among theoretically oriented, politically interested educationists arguing between critical theory and poststructuralism (and/or postmodernism). These are media I have worked in, but what I was attempting to do, at least in my paper, was to move outside both of those languages, to reinterpret and uncover traditions that would enable social understanding for what I hope are anticipatory fragments of an emergent civilization, or at least its as yet uncollected sparks.
