The Tautegory Project emerged from earlier work, by Leroy Searle and colleagues and associates in an extended progression of activities, including the founding of The Society for Critical Exchange (1975), and numerous meetings designed to experiment with, and as far as possible, to change the scope and format of scholarly and critical communication. These activities corresponded with the broader growth of interest in critical theory and its complex history, including the publication with Hazard Adams of Critical Theory Since 1965 (1986) and Critical Theory Since Plato 3rd Edition (2004).
These, however, are very different and more urgent times, demanding a thoughtful and expansive response to growing intellectual and institutional challenges that scholars, thinkers, and especially students are facing in the present moment. Though they remain spaces of real possibility, academic institutions are plagued by financial and bureaucratic pressures that have had radical and dangerous intellectual and cultural consequences.
One danger of our immediate cultural situation is that we have lost —both physically and imaginatively —sustaining meeting places. This is due not only to technological and economic disruption but a cancerous accumulation of commonplaces, shortcuts, and theoretical misrecognitions that have made conversations between scholars nearly impossible. No theoretical turn or novel methodology is commensurate to our difficulties. Critical inquiry is crippled when students and scholars seem only to share a sharp sense of loneliness and frustration. Even so, the need for meaningful careers in education requires more than ever the kind of refocusing that only sustained—and sustaining—conversations can bring to light.