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no more theory without practice, no more practice without theory! 
11.14.2005, 5:52 PM
First off, here's that photo I promised:
Bob and I (and others here at the institute) are still sifting through notes and thoughts from Friday -- should have something substantial up here in the next couple of days. In the meantime, here are some provocative nuggets from a presentation I saw last spring at a new media education conference at CUNY called "Share, Share Widely." This is from McKenzie Wark, who teaches at The New School and last year published A Hacker Manifesto. I was mulling this over leading up to the meeting and it seems even more dead-on now:
"This tension between dialogue and discourse might not be unrelated to that between education and knowledge. Certainly what the new media technologies offer is a way of constructing new possibilities for the dialogic, ones which escape the boundaries of discipline, even of the university itself. New media is not interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary. It is antidisciplinary -- although one might be careful where and to whom we break this news. Its acid with which to eat away at the ossified structure of discourse -- with the aim of constructing a new structure of discourse. One that might bring closer together the university with its outside. Not to erase the precious interiority of the university, but to make it porous. To actually apply all that 'theory' we learned to our own institutions.""We need to do a 'history of the present' as Foucault would say, and recover the institutional aspect of knowledge as an object of critique. But of more than critique as well. Let's not just talk about the 'public sphere'. Let's build some! We have the tools. We know wiki and blogging and podcasting. Let's build new relations between theory and practice. No more theory without practice -- but no more practice without theory either. Let's work at slight angle of difference from the institution. Not against it -- that won't get you tenure -- but not capitulating to it either. That won't make any difference or be interesting to anybody."
We've talked with McKenzie about some of these ideas. I expect we'll be talking more.
Posted by ben vershbow at November 14, 2005 5:52 PM