ABSTRACT
R-encountering these Disciplined inscriptions by earlier selves, I strain to recall the sub-texts and the dead ends, recuperate elisions and allusions, and hear the echoes in the silences-a sobering reminder of the leaps of inference and faith which underwrite any textual exegesis. "Knowing there are gaps in one's thoughts", warns Marilyn Strathern, "becomes at once a pointer to and a cover for what is to be no longer recalled ... [P] eople in general know where they are because they know that they (their ideas) have come from somewhere else now necessarily 'forgotten'" (1991: 55). The "journey" metaphor for a life or a career or a mind appeals as a strategy for selective recuperation of "forgotten" ideas which have left textual sediments. It is how I think about and experience my own life, work and intellectual history. A journey, of course, is usually not endlessly linear-one may return to the starting point or to points along the way. But even then journeys are always recursive: a start or a waypoint revisited is never the same time and place. Indeed, recursion permeates this book, as both autobiographic and analytic motif:! its subterranean theme, which surfaces in Chapter Four and Part Three, is the ways in which ideas, interests and practices recur in new guise and new circumstances, and are deployed to novel ends and to encompass the novel. The ideas and imperatives which first moved me were not systematically conceptualised, but some later re-emerged, along with new ones, under a variety of theoretical umbrellas or in different methodological settings.
