This project experiments with the blog as a medium for applied theory-writing.
The history of philosophy is filled with examples of "applied theorizing": Aristotle's notion of entelechy was developed from his observations of growth in the natural world, Hegel's penned his famous master-slave dialectic as he was closely following newspaper accounts of the Haitian revolution, Deleuze and Guattari appropriated their concept of the rhizome by revisiting plant growth in species different from Aristotle's. The list could go on and on.
Taking these figures as models for applied theory, I am aiming to think from a contemporary event: the proliferation of standardized testing in Florida public schools. In this case, technics -- the ontological development of specific technologies and techniques -- stands in for the natural world in Aristotle's case. Now that we are "the engineers of our own becoming," the public policy debates surrounding state-wide adoption of a universal curriculum (based on shared standardized tests) becomes an urgent position from which to interrogate the intersections of humans and technics.
