Helene Uppin

“Indeed, what says more: the few lines of a tightly written poem or a volume of analytical comments on it? The communicative ability of artifacts depends on how the work of negotiating meaning is distributed between reification and participation.”
― Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity

“The exhaustion and pollution of earth's resource is, above all, the result of man's self-image, of a regression in his consciousness. Some would like to speak about a mutation of collective consciousness which leads to a conception of a man as an organism dependent not on nature and individuals, but rather on institutions. This institutionalization of substantive values, this belief that a planned process of treatment ultimately gives results desired by the recipient, this consumer ethos, is at the heart of the Promethean fallacy.
Efforts to find a new balance in the global milieu depend on the deinstitutionalization of values.”
― Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

“Our knowing - even of the most unexceptional kind - is always too big, too rich, too an cient, and too connected for us to be the source of it individually. At the same time, our knowing - even of the most elevated kind - is too en gaged, too precise, too tailored, too active, and too experiential for it to be just of a generic size. The experience of knowing is no less unique, no less creative, and no less extraordinary for being one of participa tion. As a matter of fact, on the face of it, it would probably not amount to much otherwise.”
― Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity

“The opposite of fragmentation is not homogenization, which is a suspicious form of unity. Who wants blending, anyway? And for what purpose? Blending, somehow, always ends up privileging the perspective of the blade.”
― Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity