thank you for your post, Alex, and in response another question then,
from a similar space between severe scepticism and the hopelessly
romantic (the pertinence of the discussion seems to come to a large
extent out of the mixed involvements and investments a lot of us have
in these processes and procedures):

isn't it interesting and maybe of at least tactical (if not strategic)
value that these zones of emergence, the moments of excessive
knowledge production occur in close proximity to and often under the
umbrella (but not under the terms) of the dominant regime of
institutionalised knowledge economy (the lateral space at Middlesex,
the situations in Vienna you describe).

That precisely that kind of proximity seems to produce intensities and
excessive/ differently structured outcomes can be read in two
directions: a straight one which insists on and re-enforces the
separation between regulatory frameworks and unofficial productions;
this reading accounts for the conjunctions produced in occupied
university buildings, teach-ins and provocative re-framings of
education as challenges to the hegemonic regime.

But there is another reading possibility too, which allows to shift
the debate from the oppositionality of the formal/ informal binary
toward a more pragmatic appropriation of situations as effect-based.
In order to bypass the largely consensual passing of judgement on
official structures as sclerotic etc, it may make sense to account for
these conjunctions instead. That something is produced here out of
various component parts (an institution, a set of desires, some space,
some bodies, a crisis, some threats etc), and that that may be more
important than whether it was intended, inevitable or simply happened.
The occupations, protests and all the other forms of performed dissent
we will see much more off soon may become (and are already in the
process of becoming) a productive matrix.

And to account for them as productive may also allow to treat them
simply as the more visible articulation of one of the underlying
dynamics of the 'educational': that it does not entertain a linear
relationship to 'education', that it also and most often occurs
against the odds, that it happens and/ or takes place, whether there
is a place for it already or whether that space needs to be claimed.
(The pragmatics of those claims should be developed, the range is vast
from escapism to staged revolt etc). And this is not meant as a
romantic proposition. Rather as a way of positing crisis as default
backdrop from and within which to work…

more soon, edgar





On 19 May 2010 10:09, Axel Stockburger <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
> I'd like to thank Verina for inviting me to the discussion and want to apologize for the late entry. First i will give you a short intro and then try to add a few comments to the interesting discussion that has been going on so far.
>
>
> I did my MA at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna at Peter Weibel's
> Visual Media Arts Class, where the discussion of the importance of research for and within artistic practices was a key element of the educational approach.
> Between 1999 and 2001 i conceived and initiated the artist run cable TV-channel TIV with a group of artists and media activists. It had a strong focus on education both regarding the content of the different TV formats (to give just one example -  we introduced a format where a penguin puppet explained complex economical issues - mimicking aspects of kids TV) and also in terms of teaching people the necessary skills to produce for TV (For a period of two years we offered free courses in camera/sound/editing to everybody who wanted to contribute to the program - many of the people who started in this way are now working professionally for other TV stations).
> I then moved to London and completed a practice based PhD thesis on "spatiality in digital games in relation to fine art practice" at LCC (funded by the London Institute). During this time I had the opportunity to teach in different Art Schools around London. Since 2006 I work at the department for Digital Art and Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where I was involved in the process of planning the Artistic PhD program that is currently headed by Tom Holert and Renate Lorenz. In this sense I have experienced art education in Austria and the UK as a student and teacher, artist and writer.
>
> My views of education, especially in the arts, are thus strongly informed by my artistic/teaching practice. Following the discussion so far I would like to take up Edgar's point, namely the question to which extent a discussion of the formats, frameworks and paradigmatic aspects of educational approaches might lead to a naturalization of "the increasingly scripted formalisation of education as paradigm for expanded practice?".
>
> This cautionary stance also seems to reverberate with Kate's thoughts regarding the inception of Bruno Latour's School of Political Arts, when she writes:
> "I am torn between thinking of all the amazing ways to
> articulate (some) of the 'qualities and methodologies of the arts'
> sufficiently well for them to register on the radar of social scientists or
> private sector professionals, and the realisation that the process of making
> them [more] explicit and accessible in this way would be one of the
> mechanisms by which they would be incorporated into the aggregating and
> instrumentalising logic of (contemporary) capitalism."
>
> In this sense it might be fruitful to attempt to briefly sketch out some of the potentially dangerous pitfalls that accompany the discourse surrounding the educational turn, especially in the current climate of financial crisis, where states withdraw from education on a massive scale (yesterday the Austrian Government announced a long term freeze of the education budgets that amounts to a net cut if one factors in inflation, this pattern can be observed throughout the EU).
> (macro level)
>
> What has been termed the educational turn cannot be separated from the shift towards the tertiary sectors of production and immaterial labor. In many ways, educational strategies within the field of the arts have become blueprints for the preparation of what Lazzarato calls the "basin of immaterial labor". While it might be just a few steps from what Sarat Maharaj refers to as "grey matter environs" towards this basin of potential labor power, what clearly interconnects them is their dependence on what we might call "the educational", to take up Tom's suggestion. In this context the educational could be thought of as an embryonic force, a kind of prerequisite, which enables the emergence of and adaptation to practices of knowledge production and dissemination. I am convinced that this force of the educational has it's source in the common. And it is precisely at this point that the critical stance towards formalization (of languages, approaches, codes) as well as different forms of evaluation, becomes necessary in order to distinguish between the myriad forms of encapsulated elitism maintained by education as business and the immense emancipatory potential of shared knowledge.
>
> (micro level)
> In this respect I could witness a very interesting development in conjunction with the student protests in autumn 2009 that were partially sparked by students of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. For example, the "Squatting Teachers" movement that emerged from the protests opened their teaching and seminars to audiences beyond the confines of their Institutions. All the different offerings were accessible via a calendar/blog and it was a great experience for me to officially open my seminar to people outside of the Academy (which, due to the fact that there exist entrance exams is often regarded as a slightly elitist institution). Although this kind of programming only took place during the hot phase of the protests, for about one semester, the realization of the immense potential of such an opening was shared by a large group of people.
>
> My teaching practice leads me to the conclusion that the raw energy of the educational materializes itself in the form of a hub/pivot (often a questionmark?) around which different forms of knowledge and practices are allowed to gather and interact leading to the "eruption of knowledge", the kind of excessive overflow, that
> we continually seek because we quite simply enjoy to participate in it's emergence.
>
> In this sense all tendencies towards efficiency, evaluation and ultimately institutionalization will severely curb the potential because they aim to generate measurable equivalents (not only in an economical sense). The necessary intensity we all share a knowledge of simply cannot be packaged and compartmentalized. To put it very simply a key factor here is the availability and use of time (which reminds me of Ruth's observation of the underlying temporal structure of the artschool project).
>
> In order to spare you from rambling on (mood oscillating between severe skepticism and hopeless romanticism) i will leave it at that for now and hope to add something to the discussion in the coming days.
>
> allthebest
>
> axel
>