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Learning Truth Telling Beyond Neoliberal Education > Radical Notes

[..] It not uncommon to hear in academic seminars, policy meetings and debates that the theoretical is anti-practical and theoretical discussions slow down the completion of projects. There is a tacit agreement that when a discussion gets into a deadlock on account of theory a decision can be taken on the basis of the practical. Often at meetings one hears “too much of democracy is not going to lead anywhere”. In other words, there is no time for discussion. Time constraints are imposed by financial considerations – ‘the work needs to be one within the time-frame for which the money has been sanctioned’.

There is a conflict between financial time and discussion time. In this conflict the discussion time shrinks and this obviously implies a shrinking of theoretical space.

Such conflict and shrinking has filtered down to other fields of social and political life. Debates on policy are short and snappy, what with political activists being averse to theory. They want action and have no time for reflection. In universities there are fewer students who opt for the social sciences for they do not get one a job. Such pressure has compelled the re-invention of more market-friendly syllabi in the social sciences.

The meaning of theory itself has changed. A good example is ‘theory for computer programs’ taught in schools and institutes. It refers to a list of terms and procedures to run the program and there is no space for asking the why how and what. Here theory itself has become the instrument.

In social sciences, theory is more often than not envisaged as the lens or the frame (legal, conceptual, experiential, religious…) through and within which we see the world. In the first instance, the world appears either smaller (as if viewed through a convex lens) or larger (seen through the concave) than what it is. In the case of theory being the frame, the world is viewed with the terms of reference specified by the task to be accomplished. In both instances, theory is the ally of fragmentation and encourages the exclusion of critical voices of people from diverse experiences and plural cultures.

The neoliberal economy has converted theory into an instrumentality for manufacturing consent. [..] ###

via @mosabou

“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is “mere”. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part… What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”

— Richard Feynman

via wildcat2030 + nihilnoetia + booklover + lastchatwithphontaine

my @sixwordstories

• Fearful, we stooped sudating.. then flinched.

• Hoarse, I trade drops for hammers.

• “You’re strange yourself,” she said. “Fine.”

• She looked at him. He misunderstood.

• Chapter I “Dialing remodeled geocities, altering their vistas” Chapter II “Depopulated, home changed with the cursory” Chapter III “Sans serf, sans master, L’Aventurier understood.” Chapter IV “Someday, he’ll touch the maximal. Maybe.”

• Adventured in the Wilderness. Hence, parched.

Labor and Monopoly Capital. The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, by Harry Braverman

“The novelty of this development during the past century lies not in the separate existence of hand and brain, conception and execution, but the rigor with which they are divided from one another, and then increasingly subdivided, so that conception is concentrated, insofar as possible, in ever more limited groups within management or closely associated with it. Thus, in the setting of antagonistic social relations, of alienated labour, hand and brain become not just separated, but divided and hostile, and the human unity of hand and brain turns into its opposite, something less than human.

The paper replica of production, the shadow form which corresponds to the physical, calls into existence a variety of new occupations, the hallmark of which is that they are found not in the flow of things but in the flow of paper” (pp. 125-6)

via the next layer + @submedina