Dear all,

Many thanks to everyone for a rich and dynamic discussion.

Despite the substantial degree to which my thoughts have been sharpened by Tom Holert's writing about the politics of knowledge production on other platforms, I would like to push back or evade somewhat the dichotomy established in his message, where discussion of complicity and ambivalence in relation to the educational setting is characterised as a "given", perhaps of less importance than the "larger" political-economic concerns he then goes on to accurately outline. There is a more subtle repetition of Edgar's previous diagnosis of two kinds of discourse - one "productive", about new movements and opportunities for dissent; versus a more "sclerotic" account of the torque applied by the institution to the individual practitioner.

These strike me as being firstly and foremostly, a kind of "unhappy performative", a move to characterise certain kinds of discourse as "productive" and a certain kind not; in other words, an attempt to suppress some kinds of discourse in the name of "action", which is still, in the end, only talk. It seems to me that whatever ethics we might bring to this remarkable forum for dialogue and reflection, it should first of all seek to recognise plurality of participation if we seek to enable space for diverse practices against bureaucratisation and institutionalisation.

Secondly, the terms put into the "unhelpful" side of the debate (complicity, entanglement, ambivalence: the politics of the subject) are, from my perspective, quite clearly those deeply explored in a Western feminist intellectual tradition that seems pertinent if we are to understand the mechanisms by which the "subjectivizing logic" of capital gains a hold on our practices. As a good Marxist, I certainly would not deny that there is a logic; that crisis in that logic is endemic; and that we must seek to evade the logic where possible. However, given the quite radically diverse relationship to institutions shared by participants on the list, I do believe that the nature of our subjective entanglement is not only important to surface, it might also be the mechanism by which we come to understand the possibilities for action in the places where we are.

Finally, I am  slightly uncomfortable with the way accurate, if limited, political-economic analyses of the contemporary University and museum take on a teleological character that sees in the past only the beginnings of corporatisation and accumulation. A more thorough political economy of, for example, 1950s cold war US education discourse, would from my pov open up some significant questions about the colonial basis of European self-knowledge; the gendered division of labour in the West; and the radically expanded nature of the German research university as a "European idea." 

In this terrain, the Bologna process (for example) can be situated as less of an unproblematic marker of a logic to be resisted, but rather the most visible instantiation of the Protestant Humboldtian bargain of linking science and research to state goals of modernisation in attempts to break the monopoly of the clerisy. Along these lines, we can certainly see an ambivalent function for the incorporation of the visual arts into the university system, enabling a break in specific racist, patriarchal, and class-bound modes of accumulation in art worlds, but at the cost of incorporation into the techno-state-capitalist schemes that Holert diagnoses accurately.

Sorry if these notes don't lead anywhere, all I am really saying is that I would like our subjectivities to be a field for discussion rather than a given.

Regards,

Danny

--
http://www.dannybutt.net
+64 21 456 379



On 25/05/2010, at 5:52 AM, Tom Holert wrote:

> Dear all,
> 
> As much as I would like to understand the various proposals made with relation to the alleged educational/pedagogical turn in contemporary art (curating, teaching, ‘producing’ etc.), this “turn” should be less of an occasion to confessing one’s own entanglement in educational processes and institutional politics that have led to differing degrees of formalization and format-alization, or to presenting one’s ambivalent stance towards the peculiar push and pull experiences that are engendered by a critical stance vis-à-vis the disciplining forces that govern the institution of art. Instead, I sense the necessity of exploring the specifics of the current “shift” which, I think, is to be considered in the very context of Edgar’s “crisis as default backdrop from and within which to work”; the delusion of the Bologna process, the budget cuts due to the financial collapses, the re-discovery of authoritarianism and bureaucracy in neoliberal administration etc. have sat the stage. This exploration should be based from the start on the predicament that it is pursued by more or less active proponents of (art) education as well as ‘production’ and its current reconfigurations and dispersions. For a certain critical awareness of the There-is-no-outside-of-the-institution/the ISAs-A priori may be expected from participants in this debate. 
> 
> The socially and culturally expanded education (mentioned by David at the beginning) and the increasing spill-overs of pedagogy in the art field are tendencies which are closely intertwined with the systemic production of uncertainty and insecurity in the frameworks of neoliberal governmentality and the more specific need to compensate for the de-skilling (i.e. re-skilling) in contemporary art c. since the inception of the neo-avantgarde. The normativity of the lifelong learning (LL) conceit doesn’t need much legitimation as every citizen in the neoliberal West and beyond has been instructed early on to stay interested in increasing her/his knowledge and skills; the LL paradigm, introduced in the 1950s by cold war ideologues of the ‘knowledge industry’ such as UC Berkeley’s Clark Kerr, counted on the national economy’s demand for a workforce that constantly updates itself in terms of human and intellectual capital. 
> 
> I’d argue that the current educational turns are effectuated, more or less directly, by organization and knowledge management to optimize the development and usability of human capital. While Tate Modern and similar sites of public-corporate cultural neo-education are buying advice from managerial consulting firms to improve their economical performance, the more ‘alternative’ urge to transform traditional institutions of archive and display, of education and interpretation into networked spaces of knowledge production and the distributed academy of LL follows a comparable logic, a subjectivizing logic of capitalizing on the command/desire to push the limits of each individual’s cultural competence.  
> 
> To speak of the educational “as an embryonic force, a kind of prerequisite, which enables the emergence of and adaptation to practices of knowledge production and dissemination” (Axel), is the less deterministic version of the idea of an underlying (or all-encompassing) logic of LL which entails the administrative and industrial logistics and technologies of education that has become so blatantly dominant. 
> 
> At the same time, and quite fittingly, digital communication has enormously enhanced the speed in which ‘advanced’ models and programs of education are becoming critically outmoded. The very reflexivity and criticality - intensified by an increased exchange between practitioners e.g. on mailing lists such as this one –, and that has led to the expansion of ideas and concepts of reconfiguring the production of and encounter with art, from participation to collaboration, also entails the ongoing contestation of every ‘fresh’ proposal to re-structure the field. Time not only is an issue when it comes to the temporariness of “performed dissent” (Edgar) or the precariousness of project-based teaching, learning and research; it also figures as an important factor regarding the ever-shortened life-time of commonly accepted models of going about the acquisition and transmission of knowledge, as well as of modes of un-knowing or of the “refinement of ignorance” (Shudda Sengupta, with a hint to theories of mathematics, during last Thursday’s discussion on “knowledge production” at MMK in Frankfurt).
> 
> As much as I understand that strong and justified claims for interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity, such as Maria’s, are far from being supported (or even demanded) everywhere, at different institutional localities (and while rather old-school ideas of how knowledge and education are supposed to be ordered, keep flourishing across the entire spectrum), I would nevertheless suggest to strategically and polemically widen the gap between the rhetoric of education/research policy that advises the use of interdisciplinary/collaborative modalities on the one hand and the (micro) politics of the “productive matrix” (Edgar) of educational dissent – a dissent which angrily and inappropriately appropriate the once disappropriated concepts of empowerment through education. 
> 
> All best,  
> Tom