Thank you, Verina, for inviting me, and pardon for joining so very very
late. I am late for the usual reasons (here’s a link to the public
workshop Tom Holert+ others + myself organized that just finished
yesterday night
http://emp.akbild.ac.at/Portal/aktuell/regime/?backurl=http://emp.akbild.ac.at/Portal/aktuell/aktuell-1/atct_topic_view?set_language=de)
– plus, I was having troubles to connect, from the places where I have
been thinking and working from these last days, to what people have been
discussing. That might be due to the fact that “education” within our
discussion has remained a rather open and undefined term.
This is where my thinking as a teacher and a student of learning
processes starts: I often teach classes on queer-feminist antiracist
visual politics, and I teach them in Austria – currently at the Academy
of Fine Arts Vienna (where, with Tom Holert, I am part of the team that
coordinates the phd in practice program). Teaching such topics in
post-NS-Austria means teaching in a geohistorical setting defined by
state Catholicism, rampant institutional racism, anti-semitism and homo-
and transphobia, a context usually utterly ignorant about its
institutionally supported structures of violence.
That has first of all meant, for me, confronting immense amounts of
ignorance on these issues in many students – and in myself. It has meant
developing tools that enable people to see how language and speech – our
own speech in each actual situation – is an agent of violence, while
supporting those who know this as a daily fact in protecting and
defending themselves.
How then do I, in a setting of institutional education as a figure
invested with authority and a potential figure of transference, set up a
space of discussion that enables those present in this space to
communicate at all – around such highly conflictual issues? How do I
help minimize aggression, violence, pain? How do I entice, challenge and
explicitly seduce people into communicating in a manner that is
reflexive, non-discriminatory and orientated toward mutual support – and
solidarity?
I have been looking at Anti-Bias pedagogics:
“Achieving the goal of a multicultural, non-racist, non-sexist,
non-classist and democratic society involves a process of unlearning and
relearning … .” (Shifting paradigms, p. 7)
What is the form, the shape, the setting, what are the arrangements and
agreements necessary for such processes of unlearning and relearning –
processes attentive to the structures and articulations of epistemic
violences, as they shape us as targets and non-targets of oppression?
Might hierarchical settings (of Academic education) help – or at least
be used supportively?
Is there such a thing as a non-violent paedagogics? How to initiate
educational processes that resist a disciplining of thinking? How to
create spaces of thinking that are encouraging dissent? (Castro Varela,
p.230)
Back to Anti-Bias work:
“To start with ‘self’ is a principle essential to all anti-bias work. It
is important that we are aware of our own biases and the ways in which
we intentionally and unintentionally feed into the oppression of others
and ourselves. It is this awareness which enables us to move beyond a
position in which we blame others and allows us to take responsibility
for our own actions and feelings.” (Shifting paradigms. p. 7)
Feelings? How do you talk about feelings in an academic educational
setting – feelings as resources of knowledge? In a context that comes
into being by denouncing the dimension of feelings and intuitions etc as
anything but knowledge, as anti-intellectual?
How can you not talk about feelings when you talk about racism, homo-
and transphobia, sexism, classism, able-bodyism, ageism. And their effects?
How do you develop a paedagogics, a didactics that takes into account
ignorance as a fundamental passion (via Lacan)? How can I turn ignorance
in an instrument of teaching?
“Where does it resist? Where does a text... precisely make no sense,
that is, resist interpretation? Where does what I see and what I read
resist my understanding? Where is the ignorance – the resistance to
knowledge - located? And what can I learn from the locus of that
ignorance? How can I interpret /out of /the dynamic ignorance I
analytically encounter, both in others and in myself? How can I turn
ignorance into an instrument of teaching?" (Felman, 1987,p. 80)
And finally, Felman again, a thought I find heartlifting and inspiring,
with an emphatic good night wave to sceptics, romantics, everyone
mixedly involved and invested in institutional processes of education:
Analytic (textual) knowledge cannot be exchanged, it has to be used—and
used in each case differently, according to the singularity of the case,
according to the specificity of the text. Textual or analytic knowledge
is, in other words, that peculiar knowledge which, unlike any commodity,
is subsumed by its /use /value, having no exchange value whatsoever.
(Felman, 1987, p. 81)
Johanna
Ps: Have I been doing some late night stichting and knitting and
embroidering while you guys were doing the hardware stuff?
--------
Felman, Shoshana (1987): Jacques Lacan and the adventure of insight:
Psychoanalysis in contemporary culture./ /Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press.//
_Shifting
<http://gso.gbv.de/DB=2.1/SET=2/TTL=1/MAT=/NOMAT=T/CLK?IKT=4&TRM=Shifting>
Paradigms
<http://gso.gbv.de/DB=2.1/SET=2/TTL=1/MAT=/NOMAT=T/CLK?IKT=4&TRM=paradigms>__:_
using an anti-bias strategy to challenge oppression and assist
transformation in the South African context. Written by Arabella Koopman
in consultation with Helen Robb. Lansdowne, South Africa: Early Learning
Resource Unit (ELRU), 1997
Castro Varela, María do Mar (2010): Failure as success. Education in and
learning from the process of decolonization. In: Agnes Achola, Carla
Bobadilla, Petja Dimitrova, Nilbar Güres, Stefania Del Sordo (ed.):
Sketches of Migration. Postcolonial Enmeshments. Antiracist Construction
Work. Wien: Löcker Verlag. (in print)
--
johanna schaffer
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http://emp.akbild.ac.at
]a[ academy of fine arts vienna
institute for art theory and cultural studies
// epistemology and methodology of art production
// phd in practice
schillerplatz 3
a - 1010 vienna
T + 43 (1) 588 16 - 8115
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