FacViAbout

From UoWiki

One of the things we're learning as we bring this vortex into being is the critical importance of form. Yes, OK, it's something they tell you from Eng Lit 101, but that isn't even a step in the right direction. Imagine you're the Vatican's top Thomist, you have all the answers, you know the Summa Theologica better than your mother's face and can write articles that only half a dozen of your peers are capable of following and even they've no chance of overtaking you... and then one day you feel a tap on the shoulder, look round, and there's God and She'd like a word.

That's approximately the difference between what they can teach you about form in university and the learning we're engaged in. It's not that what you learn there isn't useful: without some such learning, much of this would be impossible or at least impoverished. But you can pursue such learning to the greatest heights it offers and have gone nowhere in these terms. (Questions go begging here: what should we say about a society whose mode of transmission of knowledge takes place in such a hermetically-sealed environment? And what can we detect of the possibility of alternatives in other societies?)

So, form. We were struggling to explain ourselves and the process by which we were attempting to do so was beginning to reinforce our doubts about our whole enterprise. And then the form of the wiki came along and it was as if the energy we brought to the project was re-routed. The effect was non-linear, and as startling as being tapped on the shoulder by an entity that had previously remained comfortably theoretical.

The wiki is right for what we are doing - not right in the totalitarian sense of 'formulated completely for everyone and everything and all time', but right in the sense of 'appropriate', working with the grain of... whatever. It is right because it not only serves the content effectively but acts as a demonstration of it. The wiki crashes the discourse . According to the way the world is meant to work - the official version, the one mediated through the TV adverts - the wiki ought not to work. But it does .

In this sense it is analogous to the decision making processes of the Quakers...

(tbc)

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