ABSTRACT
Laying a mathematical grid o ver the uni verse enables tra vellers to get from specif ed places to specif ed places, measure distances, time arri vals, coordinate activities. It is an image of perfect control. Mastery . Everyone and e verything is countable, measurable, locatable, trackable. Ev eryone kno ws where the y’ve come from and where the y’re going. The ambition to locate and manipulate is central to technology and the scientif c mind, engineered during that intellectually and politically re volutionary time by such contrib utors to the emer gence of contemporary science as Bacon, Descartes, Galileo and Ne wton and to the emergence of contemporary politics and governance such as Hobbes, Machiavelli, Spinoza and Hegel. Right away there is a tension that methodology has to get to grips with: the coolness of scientif c reason, and the heat of politics as dif ferent worlds make claims about what is right, wrong, included, excluded. Methodology is not nai vely about kno wledge but about lo ve, death and subjection. It is there in the birth of the modernist mind and its multiple implications for the political, the social, the personal. It w on’t go a way. And research methodology needs to contend with it.
