Re: <nettime> personal life, impersonal writing

[John Hopkins <jhopkins@neoscenes.net>]

>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




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