Techne I use in sense of being knowledge that is ready to hand at any particular time (not as some ahistorical always present thing in the fashion of the dreaded Herr H)
Imagine this. You're revolting. Not in a niffy, Brooks saddle kind of way, but in a revolutiony kind of way. To be precise the Aurora is shelling the Winter Palace. Where is your leader, Mr. V.I. Ulyanov. At a barricade? Darning a red flag? Not a bit of it. He's reading Hegel. Tell the truth, Trotsky thought that was a bit....effete, but he (Trotsky) had a nice white horse, and Lenin, methinks, only a gentleman's upright with Sturmey Archer gears. But I digress.
My point is this. Supposing that you are charged with charting the Way Forward. How do you know what is forward? Especially if you don't know where you are and where you've come from. And more to the point, especially if you're not sure if your journey is neccessarily conducted in the company of others, or whether the others are just coincidental.
If the latter, then there isn't much to say. If the former then it might be possible to work out what binds and moves, what enlarges and what unfolds. Do we have a theory of cycling as a cultural endeavour, that is, nonetheless, a physical exercise? Why does one person ride down the Embankment, moved by the lights and the smell of the river, and another person, unmoved, hope only for the money to buy a car?
Let's accept that we share a perfectly straightforward ambition. Cycling should be for the many and not the few, and people should not be put in harms way by cycling. What amongst us, the cyclists, do we bring from our past (by which I mean the past of of Major Taylor, of our grandparents, of Fausto Coppi as well as our own experience) that we can build a future on?
I'm relying on you. I'm relying on you because a lot of people detest us, and because some of our number just drift to the front at red lights and park athwart three front wheels, and because I don't believe that we cyclists are so seperate from one another that we have to simply accept it.
So let's start with an agenda for thinking, for inquiry and for research - once again, I'm perfectly serious. I really am relying on you.