<CPOV> Beyond the Legacy of the Enlightenment?

[Jon Awbrey]

Nate & All,

It may be Monday before I can get back to this,
but just one thought off the cuff comes to mind:

I think we need to examine the very deep divide between
post*modern reflections on Weber's ''stahlhartes Gehäuse''
and the Ayn Rand brand of "objectivism" that underlies the
Sanger-Wales model of a modern major 'pedia.

Cheers,

Jon

nathaniel tkacz wrote:
> hi all - i read that article awhile back. i'm writing on the back of
> thirty-odd hours in transit from melbourne to hull, but here goes...
> 
> from memory, what i liked about that article was that it was one of the few
> that took the concept of the encyclopedia seriously. it gave it some
> attention, which doesn't happen all that often. however, i thought the link
> to heterotopias wasn't very interesting and i didn't agree with it. it
> wasn't very interesting because (from memory) it didn't DO anything to the
> concept. it just applied it. this kind of theorisation isn't very
> interesting for me. moreover, heterotopias are those "really existing"
> spaces of difference, those spaces on the margins. while some parts of (the
> english) wikipedia are novel, other parts are not. in particular, the
> aspects of wikipedia that align with the Enlightenment seem very
> conservative and not in any way marginal. many wikipedians that i have come
> across have a very naive understanding of what knowledge is - a very
> positivistic understanding. from this perspective i find it hard to frame
> wikipedia as a heterotopia. the other question is: what do you get out of
> this "move" anyway? does calling it a heterotopia do anything to wikipedia?
> does it force us to rethink anything?
> 
> best
> 
> 
> Nate Tkacz
> 
> Research Fellow,
> RMIT University
> 
> Twitter: http://twitter.com/__nate__
> Homepage: www.nathanieltkacz.net
> Current project: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/about-2/

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