The following is Part One of a text that will likely be included in the Sense and Reason zine. It may also inform a voiceover for the 3D space (although I remain in two minds about the space in general as anything other than a developmental tool for the planned zine).
Part One
Some years ago I taught drama in Further Education colleges in and around South London. Many of the students in my classes had difficult lives. Some had parents who were in prison. Or had caring duties for elderly or sick relatives. Or, were simply growing up in families under constant financial strain. One class in particular was hard to manage. During a conversation with a group of BTEC students about a play we might work on, they told me they were sick and tired of being made to focus on texts about young people living in difficult, urban, inner city landscapes, often addressing knife crime. The trend, understandably driven by empathetic reasoning, was to assign texts that adults assumed students could relate to easily. This was the mid-nineties, before social media amplified identity politics, turning the landscape both off and online into a never-ending screaming match between tribes, and presumably prior to more rigid curriculum management. Perhaps the play choices were an early warning sign. Perhaps the approach, choosing what we adults imagined to be recognisable scenarios, was considered simpler for tutors to deliver. However, during my conversation with those students, they made it abundantly clear they felt patronised by such choices. And they yearned to engage with Shakespeare or early to mid-twentieth-century works, perhaps not instead of but as well as the texts tutors guessed would be most welcome. I can’t help feeling there were unfortunate biases embedded in the decision to preclude other texts at that college; it seemed to rest on the basis that the kind of young people we taught were not up to the necessary thinking, reasoning, or imagination that would be required to explore King Lear or that Accidental Death of Anarchist was outside their horizon of expectation. It’s odd because when I did my A-levels in the early 90s, I recall being introduced to a wide range of material, as are students I know doing drama A-levels today.
Several writers have informed this project [see previous post], including Amanda Beech, Vilém Flusser, and lately Anna Kornbluh and Jonathan Haidt. A common theme across their writing is a question around thought, the capacity for reason and a contemporary paradigm that makes thinking not only difficult but unfashionable. Beech (2021; 1, 2) in particular addresses the false but understandable dichotomy between practice and theory in Art’s Intolerable Knowledge. Understandable, as she begins acknowledging that reason has a problematic history: “Both critical theory and postmodern critiques have pressed home the connection between reason, emancipation and mastery, with inequality, violence, and a brutal human exceptionalism that is synonymous with Colonial and Imperial capitalism. Such critiques thoroughly underscore the pitfalls of knowledge as a social project.” In other words, it’s all very well for theorists, often ‘bourgeois’, to write about the wrongs of Capital and to suggest models that aim to overcome its violence. But – referencing Marx himself, and later writers such as “Adorno, Foucault and Lyotard” (1) – unless they are doing something to change the issues at stake, abstract theory potentially does more harm than good. Instead, what really matters is revolution; what matters is workers becoming conscious of how they are being exploited. What matters is an end to economic dominance, an end to power for the haves, while the have-nots continue to suffer. These changes take place in everyday praxis rather than theory, so the argument goes.
Today, there is an unquestioned split between theory and practice that results in the promotion of ‘practice-led’ research/art/teaching. However, Beech goes on to argue that the rejection of theory in favour of practice, especially in the arts, is a flawed response to the problem of bourgeois theory vs proletarian praxis. Because the split not only fails to solve the very problem it claims to address, it’s fallacious. Precisely because a “defense of artistic research as a deteritorizalized, non-programmatic, anti-formal, antifoundationalist, and non-instrumentalized landscape of inquiry” is evidently underpinned very much by ‘reason’. What’s more, “…written through this is the grand idea of art as ‘resistance’”, which is exactly that – a grand idea. Beech tells us we might “ask if its [Arts] critique of reason is simply incorrect especially when this critique is forced to obfuscate the reason that underwrites its claim, which in itself indicates a bottom-line theism or dogmatism.” In other words, Art (and I do mean the capital A here, i.e. the kind of institutional art that not everyone has access to) quite often dresses itself up as a proletarian fighting for a good Marxist cause. It pretends not to be fueled by reason, when in fact the reason is specific and can be more than a little rigid. It can be as dogmatic as any theory such a stance might have originally aimed to undermine. Ultimately, Art’s “deteritorizalized, non-programmatic, anti-formal, antifoundationalist, and non-instrumentalized landscape of inquiry” could never be as effective as it promises, and what’s worse, such reasoning is thoroughly and irrevocably bourgeois. At which point, let’s do away with the disguise of Art and Art education as a non-reasoning thing. It’s misguided at best, if not downright dishonest.
Furthermore, this theory-practice split creates a false dichotomy enacted through class-informed linguistic categories. This misinterpretation recalls how theatre practitioners very often misunderstand Brecht, creating dry, didactic productions while believing they’re faithfully applying his theories – when in fact, Brecht sought a dialectical relationship between emotional engagement and critical distance. Similarly, those who insist on practice divorced from theory misinterpret the very thinkers they claim to follow, creating a contradiction that remains deeply problematic despite evolution in class structures (still deeply problematic but very different) and artistic methodologies since these original concepts were developed.
Over recent years, we’ve witnessed a celebration of ignorance across digital spaces and beyond. While this complex phenomenon deserves deeper analysis than possible here, its manifestations range from reductive meme culture to Michael Gove’s notorious Brexit campaign claim that “we’ve all had enough of experts” (when in truth, we’ve had enough of politics via focus groups and outlandish deception and corruption). Cory Doctorow captures a related dimension with his term “enshittification” – the gradual degradation of online platforms as they sacrifice quality for profit through relentless promotion of advertisements and sponsored content. There is a feedback loop between the plethora of advertising and personal content, the demands and manipulation of the algorithm, and our desires that turns individuals into brands – indeed, marketing oneself as a brand has become entirely normalised. Unless we are content to embark on symbolic suicide by avoiding social media altogether, many of us have accepted that we must be products online. As products, we must be easily digestible and salable. That means avoiding anything too complex. We can be witty and funny (who doesn’t love funny?); we can be cute; we can be outrageous; we can be rude as fuck; but above of all, we must be bite-sized and easy.
I have wondered about an unconscious connection between, on the one hand, the reification of practice in the Arts – that is an insistence on leading with practice rather than allowing the work itself to lead, at which point, practice and theory intermingle through and with one another, each leading as and when required – while downplaying the value of theory; and on the other hand, the trend for ease, and even the celebration of ignorance, which we have witnessed take hold via the internet over the last two decades. We are all pretty certain, for instance, that the internet, specifically social media, is designed to interrupt thought. Instead of thinking, we are drawn into a mindless scrolling. If we’re not ‘on’ all the time, we risk punishment via inevitable ‘shadow banning’ – the more you interact, the more likely anything you have to say is noticed. Social media wants us engaged all the time; scrolling, liking and reacting symbolically. It does not want us thinking. (As an aside, I should make clear, some of the writers I draw on address space and time for escaping thought, or at least allowing thought to settle, for moments of meditation/non-thinking. Dorothea E. Olkowski (2003) in Time Lost, Instantaneity and The Image, for instance, asks questions about the complete lack of time we have nowadays for any respite from the relentlessness of the image economy, which not only interrupts thought but diminishes opportunities for meditation. Without that respite, both mediation and meditation are rendered more and more difficult. Here, however, I am focusing on active ‘thinking’, on reasoning and mediation rather than meditation, although they are linked.) Thinking, however, matters. It really matters today. And since anyone using social media is required, ideally, to resist “disinformation, memetic plagues, and neuroactive media […] we have no choice but to mobilise Reason” as theorised by Peter Wolfendale (2025), (or whoever wrote the blurb for his forthcoming book, The Revenge of Reason.) Yet, we are not quite so sure that Art education’s continued reification of practice over theory may also be flawed. And perhaps even related to the trend we have seen online.
Life today feels fraught. Disinformation and information overload lead to confusion and a sense of impotence; the slide towards authoritarianism across the entire globe is more than depressing, not to mention genuinely tragic and terrifying. And especially when considered in connection with the multiple wars taking place, it’s not out of the bounds of possibility that World War Three has already begun. Added to this is the threat of AI and ‘cognitive offloading’ – allowing AI to do all our problem-solving for us, thereby reducing opportunities for critical neuronal ‘exercises’ required to maintain good enough critical-thinking health.
Thinking today has become difficult, precisely when we need our thinking selves more than ever. Each of the authors I mentioned earlier argues this point from different perspectives – even Haidt (2024) in The Anxious Generation, who recommends returning our children to a play-based childhood rather than a phone-based one dominated by social media. According to Haidt, offline play provides children space and time to develop social and cognitive skills that are necessary for wellbeing and complex problem solving; and that while online games may help develop useful and transferable skills, when their lives are too heavily filled with online activity at the expense of an offline life, they lose important developmental and experiential steps. A childhood dominated by phones and other devices limits our capacity to learn how to navigate complexity, pick up subtle cues about timing and turn-taking or keep ourselves safe. However, Haidt and other social scientists who warn the public about phone usage and online games have been accused of moral panic. Annah Kornbluh (2024) in Immediacy, the Style of Too Late Capitalism, might suggest that we are better off relying on critical economic theory or “Psychoanalysis [which] enjoins us to theorize with a lens other than moral panic—one that elucidates the historical and cultural conditions for the overvaluation of the imaginary” (71). In other words, we need to think more deeply about our children and their relationship to digital devices and the highly visual paradigm in which images seamlessly flash before them in a never-ending stream. What does unconscious and systemic feedback tell us about ourselves? While Kornbluh might be critical of some of Haidt’s thesis, it would be a mistake to dismiss either of them, or to say we can only trust one or the other. Not only could we take both on board, but we might also think about where they connect or diverge. By doing so, we will find that in many ways, they are concerned with related themes; Haidt with the digital colonisation of children’s lives, Kornbluh with the way our economic system’s demand for immediacy, mediated through digital devices, colonises our capacity for thinking very much at all. We, our media and our devices exist in a feedback loop with cultural production that generates material which is easy to read, along with quick emotional responses, rather than works which require interpretation, critical thinking, and intellectual mediation, as Kornbluh tells us. Meanwhile, Haidt offers strategies to overcome over-reliance on phones/devices in childhood. What I find most worrying in all of this, is that creative work which asks for interpretation, critical thinking and intellectual mediation seems to trigger outrage, if not imperious conviction and condemnation, even and especially within Art academia, where an insistence for ‘practice-led practice’ over theory is ever present, as if that in itself will somehow solve problems of class-based educational inequalities and historical white-male hegemonic dominance (not to mention all the other interrelated crisis we face today).
Disavowing theory in favour of practice is often presented as a way to democratise higher education and the arts, opening doors to those traditionally excluded from universities. This includes people who weren’t blessed with private education and/or classes of aesthetics or economic philosophy, as well as those who struggled in any educational setting due to dyslexia or neurodivergence. While this inclusive impulse was both understandable and necessary, it fails to address these issues and creates new ones. By maintaining and pursuing this ‘split’ between theory and practice, we risk significant losses. Ironically, even in academic spaces where concepts like “entanglement” and “New Materialism” are celebrated, a stubborn dualism persists. One versus the other. It reinforces either/or thinking rather than the more generative “and/and/and” approach that might better serve both education and art, and even Art. And while a preference for practice over theory may once have seemed radical and unconventional, it has, as Beech suggests, become the dogma such a preference once sought to overcome. What’s more, the rejection of theory in favour of practice feels rather like the desire to find approachable and relevant texts for late teens who grew up in difficult circumstances; well-meaning, understandable, but premised on a reasoning that pretends not to be reason. And which in the end is limiting and patronising.
I often think of those drama students. I failed one of them for not completing her work. The student was angry and lost. I have regretted that decision ever since. Life was not easy for either of us at the time, and I didn’t cope well with her frustrations. Yet she was the very student who had first expressed an interest in Shakespeare. She wanted to be challenged intellectually, but faced numerous barriers to learning, and on top of that, existed in a world that constantly assumed she wasn’t capable because of where she came from; a world that wanted her to fit into an identity that may have been easily recognisable and quantifiable. Sometimes, I literally see in the eyes of young people the confusion this type of situation triggers: “The world demands something from me but makes it impossible to access… why?” This paradox directly connects to how art and art education often claim to reject theory while secretly depending on it, how education systems proclaim inclusivity, while perpetuating exclusionary practices.
In this way, reason that pretends not to be reason becomes a tool that maintains rather than dismantles hierarchies of access and opportunity.
To be addressed in Part Two and possibly Part Three – AI and Sense and Reason, and the Image
References
Barnett, D. ‘Aims of the Theory’, Brecht in Practice. Available at: https://www.brechtinpractice.net/theory/aims-of-the-theory (Accessed: 12 May 2025).
Beech, A. (2021) ‘Art’s Intolerable Knowledge’, in The PostResearch Condition: EARN Working Groups. Metropolis M Books, p. 2021. Available at: http://amandabeech.com/writing/art-intolerable-knowledge/ (Accessed: 18 December 2024).
Doctorow, C. (2023) ‘The “Enshittification” of TikTok’, Wired. Available at: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ (Accessed: 11 May 2025).
Haidt, J. (2024) The Anxious Generation London: Penguin Press.
Kornbluh, A. (2023) Immediacy, or The style of too late capitalism. London New York: Verso.
Loveless, N. (2019) How to make art at the end of the world: a manifesto for research-creation. Durham: Duke University Press.
Olkowski, D.E. (2003) ‘Time Lost, Instantaneity and The Image’, Parallax, 9(1), pp. 28–38. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/1353464032000047972.
Wolfendale, P. (Forthcoming – 2025) Urbanomic The Revenge of Reason, Urbanonomic. Available at: https://www.urbanomic.com/book/the-revenge-of-reason/ (Accessed: 31 December 2024).
Edit: I will likely add a brief sentence about Natalie’s Loveless’ (2019) ‘research creation’, which, while related to the practice-led environment, nevertheless seems capable of holding theory, reasoning, and the intellect in the same space as “deteritorizalized, non-programmatic, anti-formal, antifoundationalist, and non-instrumentalized” (Beech, 2021) inquiry.