John Hopkins on Fri, 24 Aug 2007 16:14:13 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> personal life, impersonal writing |
>I agree with this as well, and I'd add that in ruling out the >personal, we rule out being able to question the terms or frame of a >scholar's argument. For example, feminism challenged science on the >grounds that the questions being explored and recognized as worthwhile >were very much shaped by personal and perhaps unexamined assumptions >or biases. And we have slid backwards here as well as in other areas; >in the US, many more drug companies are working on Viagra-type drugs >for men than are working on contraceptives (for either sex). Yet not >many people question this, from what I can tell. > >I think we could all come up with lots of examples, but what shall we >do about it? I think the first step is to give value (attention, life-time, focus) to the personal, the immediate, to those who are expressing themselves outside the canon; to refuse the stilted expressions of the canon; to create new languages and pathways for language to pass; to leave behind comfort and normalcy and look for difference... "The Academy," like any other social institution, survives on sameness, order, control, and the dominance of the pathways the exist between the participants in that social system. By creating new pathways, this depowers those systems, they cannot tap into If you can sustain yourself by existing outside the comfortable zone of stability that the institution offers so convincingly, do so. One foot in, one foot out? The institution does not reward this usually unless you have your own 'fame quotient'. There are local situations with more or less space for creating new pathways, but these can be unstable in themselves (they can snap open, snap closed at short notice). Being flexible and open to idiosyncratic expressions around you, and be unafraid to make those same expressions from your be-ing and you will have done all that is possible to do. cheers, JOhn # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@kein.org and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org