It is not there is anything necessarily wrong with what I call high theory, which is critical thought that is created within spaces such as the university. It is just that it is created within the space of a given game. There is a game—you write books that get noticed and then you get promoted and so on. This is completely independent of the politics and social concerns of the everyday.
I am interested in low theory, which comprise those somewhat rarer moments when, coming out of everyday life, you get a certain milieu that can think itself. It happens when there is a mixing of the classes (another thing higher education doesn’t do). It happens in certain spaces that we used to call bohemia. Low theory is the attempt to think everyday life within practices created in and of and for everyday life, using or misusing high theory to other ends. It happens in collaborative practices that invent their own economies of knowledge.
Interview with McKenzie Wark, author of the 2011 book The Beach Beneath the Street which revists the Situationists and their legacy. (via hautepop)