Introduction: The Art of Collaborative Networks and Autonomous Systems as an Educational Praxis
12.30.05Initial Paper Draft and Writen Experiments
A first draft of a certificational paper that I have been working on. This paper is by far complete. I am not even sure I indend to finish it! But in a way am more interested in workinng out some of my ideas in writen form rather than, at this moment, creating a finished product.
20th century education fell victim to the dominant organizational ideology of the time by allowing itself to over-institutionalize, over-specialize and over-homogenize its system in order to fulfill the goals of national power and authority (Freire 1970, Illich 1971, Aronowitz 2000). As McKenzie Wark (2004) illustrated, power “seeks to privatize knowledge as a resource, just as it privatizes science and culture, in order to guarantee their scarcity and their value.” (Paragraph 066)
Education became a term that soon defined an institutional environment proctored by the economically powerful and ideologically driven capital class of the western state whose interest subsists in the indoctrination of state residents with teleological and ideological stances on all issues and subject-matters (from history to science to the arts) that in almost all cases facilitates a re-empowerment of the dominant class; a social stratification technique that keeps the layers of hierarchies intact (Collins 1971). The school system itself - a hierarchically administered organization that provides elevation to those that play the game and punish those - economically, socially - that do not. The educational climate that had been created responded to the necessary conditions of the state while leaving the necessary conditions of the individual behind.
This paper is NOT about this type of education or understanding education through a traditional (Frankfurt School) critical analysis. It is not about working within the given educational system in order to try to bring about some type of recognizable change form the ‘inside’. It is not about separating children and adults by age in order to gage what type of understanding of a given subject matter they might have at the moment. It is not about placing people in a bizarre architectural disaster 'box' (or ‘parlor’ as Ray Bradbury called it in ‘Farenheit 451’) that we call a classroom, making them look forward at some higher power (teacher) and sucking in information with the sole purpose of regurgitation - a byproduct (or even symptom) of the television and televised individual “incapable of finding a meaning outside of itself” (Baudrillard 2002 p. 187).
This paper is about, as Mark Twain said, never letting "school interfere with your education". This paper is about understanding education as something that happens throughout an individual person, a family or a group’s life – complex adaptive systems that are constantly forming, reforming and morphing to fits individual and group needs (Taylor 2001). This paper is about leaving the classroom in order to understand working class struggles as an autonomy that bypasses capitalized institutional states in network societies while at the same time trying to understand and recognize their power and “orchestrating radical intercultural exchanges” that are outside of closed loop monocultures (Lovink 2002 p.34). It is about an education that creates collaborative networks of individuals with common interests in order to educate each other for the pure enjoyment of educating each other – cooperation as a fact of life (Shultz 2005). It is about the youth learning to share both ideas and materials, give things away and leave the profit index behind – a Do-It-Yourself education in the Fluxus tradition (see Friedman 1998) using the network and ‘new media’ as a binding, common tool.
‘Freecycle ’[1] networks [2], barter systems [3] , and time-banks are resource centers that the networks provide. "What beautiful and priceless potlatches the affluent society will see -- whether it likes it or not! -- when the exuberance of the younger generation discovers the pure gift; a growing passion for stealing books, clothes, food, weapons or jewelry simply for the pleasure of giving them away" (Vaneigem.& Nicholson-Smith, 2001, p.81) An educational tool in networked societies?
This paper is – at its core - about simple things that we do, see, and say everyday that can push smaller, local and networked systems to expand with the side effects of larger systems (Global, State, Homogenous Supersystems) to begin to collapse and/or destabilize and divide. This is where the diversity of ‘eco’ politics begins and homogeny is forced to re-conceptualize itself within the networked system. This is a type of education where resources are created from scratch and/or recycled in specific localities or traded fairly in equal labor, as opposed to the ‘corporate’ hierarchy model or ‘anti-market ’ [4] that Manuel Delanda so eloquently described (see Delanda 1996). The idea is to allow new smaller more dynamical systems of thought to emerge as a ‘bottom-up’ dynamic in opposition to our current ‘top-down’ model while at the same time repressing those large antiquated sluggish systems that cant keep up with the basic needs of a healthy humanity.
This is very much a new praxis of thought and action that has emerged in theoretical and artistic discourse in the past several years. We have been witnessing this transition in the physical and everyday, in the networks as well as in the surfacing of theoretical texts beginning with the theoretical text of Deleuze and Guitarri but also having its historical foundations in the autonomist Marxists, the Situationists, the Fluxists, Critical Theorists, etc as well as some historians such as William McNeil an Fernand Braudel - and the list goes on. This paper will address many of the current theories involved with these convergences and divergences of theory and thinking as well as relate to some of my own personal work in the subject. - artworks that no longer resemble something that can be hung on a wall but instead have become something that brings back the role of the builder as opposed to the commentator, an art in the fashion of Bertolt Brecht and his famous - maybe even overused – quote, "Art is not a mirror to reflect reality, but a hammer in which to shape it." (Brecht 2002)
This paper is also NOT about bloated overly rhetorical and complicated academic theories such as ‘post-structuralism’ or ‘postmodernism’. Although we do reside in the ‘postmodern era’ whatever that might mean in certain disciplines and academic circles, my language will hopefully tend to sway toward the materialistic sciences as opposed to the psychological and semiotic ones that have been so prominent in postmodernist thought for the past few decades. I will also back many of my statements up with extended quotations assuming that the original authors say many of these ideas far better than I ever could hope to do.
This paper is about simple things, simple actions, simple practices and simple methods of the everyday that can be easily taught, learned and practiced in commonality with each other - a giving-and-sharing method of trading ideas, forms, aesthetics and materials. The Situationists writer Raul Vaneigem is of particular interest and influence to me in the writing of this paper as well as the materialistic philosophies of Deleuze and Guitarri, the articulation of Manuel Delanda (an articulation that in my wildest dreams I could never hope to achieve!) and many of the young writers and theoreticians that are currently writing and discussing there ideas on the internet through lists such as Nettime.org and Rhizome.org.
For me it was Raul Vaneigem’s text “The Revolution of Everyday Life” that provided an example to begin this type of discourse and research into practical implications for personal expression and how practices as art-forms can be revolutionary acts if taught and learned appropriately and in the context of alternative based cooperatives and systems of knowledge and knowledge transformations. This paper draws much from his ideas as well as the rest of the Situationists which I will discuss as I proceed.
Although the language of this paper may fall into at time the language of the academic its over all theme hopefully does not. It is a theme of aversion, sustainability and autonomy. When the system is broken just build a new one, and that is what we are doing - building a new system.
Also to note – for the most part I privilege the organizational traits of the “network” over that of the hierarchy. I would like to say first that the hierarchy as an organizational model is not always a “bad” thing and when reading my paper one might come to believe that I think this is true. Instead I am trying to give some weight to a new system of thinking, one that is relatively recent – at least in a theoretical sense. The hierarchy has been our dominant organizational body for the past 200 years. We are now just starting to understand things in terms of the network and this paper gives privilege to that network organizational system because it is new and because it needs its chance to flourish as the hierarchy has done for far too long. (DeLanda 1997)
This paper is divided into two parts. The first part addresses the theoretical concerns and the historical framing that I have been researching and studying in order to inform my own artistic endeavors. This paper is about other views and the other views that shape new emergent organization in contemporary societies. Therefore, given the standardization of the historical processes of acquiring knowledge, how have theorists and practitioners offered other views that advocate personally relevant and critically focused perspectives?
The second part is my own artwork as it has unfolded over the past few years and how it is theoretically and aesthetically based as a contemporary art form. Therefore, given that the standardization of the process of acquiring knowledge is the dominant ideological identity of institutional systems, what opportunities emerge for re-conceptualizing knowledge creation though projects that counter-resist these standardizations through a tactical resistance artistic practice.
1. Freecycle.org is a Yahoo Groups collaborative where local residents give away free material objects – from clothing to automobiles – that they do not need anymore. Participants pick these things up from private residences. The idea is that instead of throwing what we do no need out (consume and discard culture) we offer the item for free to anyone who might want it. Most offerings are taken.
2. Barter systems have recently been springing up on the internet. Craigslist.org is one example of many.
3. A “time-bank” is the idea of bartering labor or time. In Italy this practice, mediated by public institutions is called 'La Banca del Tempo (the Bank of Time)'. See Nettime.org posting at http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0409/msg00030.html Further details of this sytem to be described later in this paper.
4. To simplify and ‘anti-market’ as Delanda described it -an anti-market is large scale enterprises, with several layers of managerial strata, in which prices are set not taken. This is in direct conflict to a ‘market’ economy which is much more collaborative in nature and where individuals and groups rely on eachother rather than impose their ‘will’ upon a population such as ‘anti-markets’ often do.
No trackback:
Trackback link:
Please enable javascript to generate a trackback url