Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

14 Calling to Account 213
Fifth, statistics and the kinds of accounting that go with it need to be understood
not just as reflections or recordings of how the world is but as modes of writing
the world. The poetry to which the new Fibbs responds comes from an excess
in language that simultaneously projects a new possibility of being, for better or
worse. To recognise that the world is written in this way is to begin to understand
the libidinal excess with which our language is necessarily charged (never merely
representing, always at the same time producing the world)—where ‘language’ is
understood to extend through these technologies and the cyberpractices they engender.
The savouring of the names in the Pinter sketch, their quickfire repetition and
their sexual connotations accentuate this libidinal excess.
It may be thought that the line of argument presented here is tantamount to a call
for ‘social accounting’, where it is accepted that it is not just the ‘bottom line’ of
finance that can accurately reflect the way things are or how they should be. 9 Many
of the practices that social accounting advocates have in recent years been adopted,
but to some extent these are taken up in the way that hotels have environmental
policies with regard to the washing of towels; and to some extent they formalise the
kinds of things that decent managers have always considered anyway. In my view
social accounting just scratches the surface. It is a different economy of living that
is needed, and to understand this we need to take account of the kinds of changes
that Heidegger and Thoreau—much better than, and before, Heidegger—draw to
our attention.
Notes
1. Online, accessed on 25 February 2010, at http://www.touchdown-online.nl/.../Example%
20discussion%20of%20a%20play.doc
2. See Stephanie ‘Merritt, Harold Pinter, king of comedy’, The Observer. Online at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2007/jan/14/theatre.comedy (Accessed on 25 February
2010).
3. For a fuller discussion of Heidegger and technology, see Blake, Smeyers, Smith, and Standish
(2000, Chapter 1) and Standish (1997, 1999, 2000).
4. An ironic footnote to this history is the distraction that was caused in education by the advent,
during the 1980s, of computing into the curriculum in schools and colleges. Computer study
was then the flagship subject that schools earnestly introduced, and that increasing numbers
of parents came to expect. Students took their first, very basic steps in computer programming
and, in applications, became adept in the use of such commands as Control-KD—the way to
open a new document in Wordstar, circa 1985. The comparative irrelevance of the former to
the way that computing actually developed in society and the sheer obsolescence of the latter
did not prevent them from distracting attention from where the most significant changes were
happening—precisely in those modifications in ways of seeing and experiencing the world that
are here at issue.
5. Exit Fibbs, enter David Brent. A very distant relation of Fibbs, David Brent is regional manager
at the Slough offices of Wernham Hogg, manufacturers of office supplies. In contrast to the factory
background implicit in the Pinter sketch, the television series, The Office, presents a listless
office environment where, in place of background images of men in overalls at machine lathes
and the noise of the production line, we see men and women gazing dully at their monitors
and hear the soporific hum of the of the photocopier. Managers are focused not on the ‘beauty’