Re: <nettime> Evgeny Morozov and the Perils of "Highbrow Journalism"

[d.garcia <d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk>]

The Morozov article is indeed very misleading. There is nothing in the
New Yorker headline to indicate that this is anything other that an
article full of the ideas and research by Morozov himself. His passing
reference to the book, The Planning Machine, does little to allay this
inference. By most standards (inside or outside academia) to take credit
for someone else's work in this way is unethical.  

It is also true that obsessive bureaucratic procedures to avoid any
inference of plagerism in academia frequently have the effect of
strangling good writing at birth, turning so called rigour into rigor
mortis in all the ways that Ted has described. His -accountancy model-
and its relationship to the well known political economy of academia,
feels spot on. 

But at the risk of pedantry its worth remembering what is at stake,
alongside questions of reputation, fairness and plagerism (important
though all these issues are).  And that is the long standing principle
of maximising open access to sources just like good  documentation in
the other fields of know how with a strong preference for openness. 

>From a narrow perspective (sorry), waving a flag for the value of
referencing protocols is relevant for anyone championing the cause of
practice led research model being taken seriously in art schools (ie
going beyond a league table ensuring continued funding streams).  One
tool in this process is to emphasise how conscientious referencing
protocols can part of the paradigm of artist as researcher. This can be
part of a radical critique of the art and design worlds in they are
currently set up. 

  
On 16 Oct 2014, at 21:21, Keith Hart wrote:

> Hi Ted,
> 
> Thanks for the best contribution to this thread. I am sure you are right to
> emphasise the contradiction between scholasticism and reaching a broader
> public. I am convinced that a lot of it was envy of Morozov's public reach
> and I too wonder if his apparently perverse career move into the academic
> ghetto was also a factor. The idea of baroque commitment to increasingly
> involuted forms surely does speak to the deathknell for late academia. My
> favourite example is bureaucratic insistence on including ISBN numbers in
> lists of our publications when two words in Google gets the reference for
> anything. The dialectic feeds itself. You mention the 80s as a watershed,
> but footnotes are almost completely absent from anything written before the
> 40s. Check out Keynes's A Treatise of Money (two volumes), maybe a handful
> of notes in the whole thing.
 <...>

------------------------

d a v i d  g a r c i a
new-tactical-research.co.uk






#  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: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org