Dr Cary Siress
MArch, PhD
Lecturer in Architectural Design

Architecture: School of Arts, Culture and Environment (ACE)
The University of Edinburgh
Room 2.54
Minto House
20 Chambers Street
EH1 1JZ
Edinburgh, Scotland
United Kingdon

Tel: +44 (0)131 650 2319
Fax: +44 (0) 131 650 8019
email: cary.siress@ed.ac.uk

Profile

If our role as educators is still to motivate thought beyond indoctrinated limits, then the aptitude of education must come to bear precisely on those limits that make up operative knowledge. Such limits circumscribe images that govern what it means to learn, to teach, to know. For their part, these images keep learning, teaching, and knowing in place by providing the variable center for modes of reasoning which in turn authorize what is befitting to thought. Although extensive by design, knowledge is interminably delimited by its own self-evidencing province, in effect, amounting to a tautological ruse. Consequently, thinking is domesticated from the outset, relegated to production within already established parameters and contracted toward already identifiable objectives.

The stakes of education, however, can be raised to the level of collective risk by considering that thinking is neither necessary nor a given faculty. We might instead consider that thinking is constituted in the encounters with the potentiality of what thought has yet to become. Since such encounters can never be determined in advance, the precariousness of thinking is accentuated; our fragile distance to and emergence from what remains unthought or unthinkable is disclosed. Education is thus reconfigured as a borderline task. To effect any movement respective of known limits is to operate upon the very images of knowledge that position us. And yet, to think in accordance with knowledge will at most produce new contours in that province of the same. To think through knowledge, on the other hand, is to perhaps risk the peril of becoming something other than thought. For once hazarded by thinking, it is too late for knowledge.