deschooling.classroom(o^o)

The workshop will be held at Thursday, December 3^rd and Friday, December 4^th in Cultural centre Tocka in Skopje, Macedonia. The workshop is organized as a part of the regional self-educational project Deschooling Classroom by NGO Kontrapunkt (Skopje) and TkH platform (Belgrade). This workshop explores the art of shortening and giving multi-sensory easy to understand form for terms and concepts. The aim of the workshop is to enhance already produced Deschooling Classroom materials in artistic way and try to find new ways to create, frame, finalize and present “encyclopedias”. Participants will have an opportunity to present their actual research and interest developed within the project as well as to learn about other similar initiatives and new skills for dealing with notions and their structuring.

PROGRAMME

THU, December 3, 2009

12:00-12:30

Short introduction of the concept of Deschooling Classroom project, as well as of Kalle Hamm and the participants of the workshop

12:30-14:00

Presentation of the School of Mobile Studies and other term based artworks by Kalle Hamm

14:00-14:30 Discussion

14:30-15:30 Lunch break

15:30-18:30

Art of Shortening and Multi-sensory Point of View – working with Deschooling Classroom materials

FRI, December 4, 2009

12:00-14:30

Multi-sensory Semantic Mycelium – working with Deschooling Classroom materials

14:30-15:30 Lunch Break

15:30-18:30

Discussion and brainstorming on various possibilities and new ideas toward final product of the “Notions” working group.

ENCYCLOPAEDIA

Why we are writing encyclopaedias, dictionaries, term lists…? How and why we are using them? What kind of encyclopaedias we have? Are we satisfied with them? What kind of entities they should be?

This workshop explores the art of shortening and giving multi-sensory easy to understand form for terms and concepts. The aim of the workshop is to enhance already produced Deschooling material in artistic way and try to find new ways to create, frame, finalize and present “encyclopedias”.

The workshop is dedicated to the participants of the “Notions” working group of the Deschooling Classroom project, but it is open for other working groups within the project, as well as other actors of the independent scenes in Macedonia, Serbia and Region.

Among the many didactic and pedagogic demands from ‘art’ was the role performed by ‘verbal’, ‘visual’, ‘acoustic’ or ’scenic’ in upbringing, education and, certainly, entertainment of the free citizen of Europe from the Renaissance to the late Enlightenment and early Romanticism. Nevertheless, the XVIII century age of Enlightenment was fixated on devising complex practices of upbringing, education and entertainment addressing the young and the aging by way of models which are, naturally, liable to Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘biotechnology’[1]. Rationalization of practices of management – namely, of shaping human lives – was effective in converging upbringing (discipline), education (appropriation of knowledge and identification with particular lores or skills), and entertainment (regulation of life in regimes of leisure by way of anticipated, desired or sanctioned freedom). For instance, the XVIII century visual didactics (upbringing, education, entertainment) was not aimed at exclusive tutoring of artists or intellectuals, but at upbringing, education and entertainment of the common citizen who found himself in between contradictions of the private and public ‘employment’[2] of reason. In other words, during the age of Enlightenment ‘education through art’, or education in aesthetic regimes of representation of optimal social reality, had become a means of effective instruction on modes of human life in its ordinary form, as a new and fundamental cosmogony of modernity. Various ‘visual products’ (paintings, engravings) efficiently (this is the rhetorical component of the archi-matrix of mass media education) mediated different aesthetic situations: human dialog, dress codes, difference in public and private behavior, private closeness or public distance, age divides, casting of gender roles in private and public, or sexual modes of behavior etc. In fact, ethical and political rhetoric – rendered as spiritual and institutional visuality – lead the ‘exodus’ of mankind[3] from its ‘immaturity’. But this ‘exodus’ was devised on cunning instruction to follow orders obediently (‘Don’t think, just follow the orders’ – coming from family, father, master, teacher, commander, employer), emerging as aesthetized practice of education for the sake of tutoring through entertainment in leisure time – during the ‘empty intervals’ reserved for relaxation from the ‘full intervals’ of public deeds.

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I would like to give you some insight into the activity and context

of the our workgroup and collective practices that I am part of….

I am speaking here as an artist

who is mostly involved into different type of collective projects.

So at my talk I will try to explain how our group

was formed in a particular historical moment

and under which condition we operate,

why we choose that particular type of activities and not other ones;

and give your some examples and insights into our

political, theoretical and aethetic background

and local context that stands behind our activity.

Chto delat/What is to be done? is a group of artists, philosophers,

and writers from Petersburg and Moscow.

Chto delat was initiated in spring 2003 in Petersburg.

The core member of the future group were participants

in organizing an action called “The Re-foundation of Petersburg.”

It was one of collective protest action to the process

that had happened in real political life -

namely the celebration of the 300 Anniversary of the Petersburg.

In the days of those official and pompous celebration,

that actuallly I can say NOW opened the age of new

repressive admistration of everyday in a new Putin’s Russia

the small group of about 30 people

decided to leave the center of the city by train from a main station,

and then symbolically found a new center of the city on its outskirt.

So it was a public gesture of exodus and attempt

to imagine the basis for cultural life anew.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> video

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In the first part of my lecture in Belgrade (http://www.tkh-generator.net/sr/openedsource/from-biopolitics-to-necropolitics), January 2009, I introduced two concepts, de-linking and de-coloniality, implicating a certain cut with contemporary processes of capitalist institutionalization, control and subjugation. I can say that my proposal was and is a proposal for the intensification of a re-politicization of life. This re-politicization of life is a critical intervention capable of providing means, goals and forces for dealing with the present reality of global capitalism. Today, capitalism is clearly biopolitics, a radical institutionalization, control and subjugation of life, that needs, I argue, to be re-politicized, intensified, by changes brought with modes of management of life outside the First capitalist world, which is necropolitics.

Biopolitics is a horizon of articulating contemporary capitalist societies from the so-called politics of life, where life (it does not matter anymore, via Giorgio Agamben, if bare/naked life or life with forms) is seen as the zero degree of intervention of each and every politics into contemporary societies. But today capital’s surplus value is based on the capitalization of death (Latin necro) worlds. In the text “Necropolitics,” (2003) Achille Mbembe discusses this new logic of capital and its processes of geopolitical demarcation of world zones based on the mobilization of the war machine. Mbembe claims that the concept of biopolitics, due to the war machine and the state of exception being one of the major logics of contemporary societies, should be replaced with necropolitics. Necropolitics is connected to the concept of necrocapitalism, i.e., contemporary capitalism, which organizes its forms of capital accumulation that involve dispossession and the subjugation of life to the power of death. The necrocapitalist capturing of the social implies new modes of governmentality that are informed by the norms of corporate intensified rationality and deployed in managing violence, social conflicts, fear and the Multitude. No conflict that challenges the supreme requirements of capitalist rationalization is tolerable – economic growth, profit maximization, productivity, efficiency and the like. I argued that with this move Mbembe gave us a possibility to re-politicize biopolitics, saying that it is a time for its intensification as well as its historization.

In this second part of my lecture, I want to go on rearticulating, resuming, rewriting Santiago López Petit’s book, entitled Global Mobilization. Brief Treatise to Attack the Reality (La movilización global. Breve tratado para atacar la realidad) published in Spanish by Editorial Traficantes de Sueños, Barcelona in June 2009. Santiago López Petit is one of the key Spanish contemporary philosophical figures who was involved in workers’ struggles in the 1970s. Today, he participates in several political initiatives along with the groups Oficina 2004 and Espai en Blanc.

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