deschooling.classroom(o^o)

Translated by Aileen Derieg

“Welcome to the Machine!” This was the way the university welcomed students in a satiric drawing by the German artist and writer Gerhard Seyfried in the 1970s.[1] Taking a closer look at the drawing, however, the “machine” turns out to be more of a factory, because it arranges the automated mass production of the specific commodity of knowledge in the universities. Seyfried’s knowledge factory also has elements of a ghost train (with all kinds of horrifying surprises for those riding it), a flipper device (the students as flipper balls being launched and propelled), a three-tier Nuremberg funnel (although knowledge here is funneled in – as it should be in a factory – in masses and anonymized). These kinds of illustrative transfers of central components of the factory as fordist core institution to other institutions have always been widespread. Yet what does it mean, when even at the transition to post-fordist modes of production the metaphor of the factory still continues to be applied to the university? Read the rest of this entry »

Production of knowledge is a complex process of creating and organizing information in society. It is a time and money consuming process and because of that production of new knowledge is usually done by persons who work for government agencies, universities, large non-profit organizations, or large corporations.

Dominant model of knowledge production consists of:

1. Educational system, research institutions and research facilities, supported by the Government and private grants (knowledge governance)

2. High-level research personnel that are to carry out social science and humanities research projects (human resources development)

3. Access to locally available social science and humanities knowledge (local knowledge)

4. Access to globally available social science and humanities knowledge (global knowledge)

5. Gatekeepers that are to evaluate research output, e.g. in the form of peer reviews (authorization)

6. Publishing research results in local print media (local documents)

7. Publishing research results in internationally recognized print media (global documents)

We can make distinction between two regimes that allocate resources for the creation of new knowledge: one is the system of granting intellectual property rights, as exemplified by modern patent and copyright systems; the other is the “open science” regime, as often found in the realm of “pure” scientific research (references and quotations). Today we also encounter this kind of system, to a certain extent, in the production of free and open source software.

The first system assigns clear property rights to newly created knowledge that allow the exclusion of others from using that knowledge, as well as the trading and licensing it. As it is well-known such a system provides powerful incentives for the creation of knowledge, at the cost of creating temporary monopolies that will tend to restrict output and raise price.

The second system relies to some extent on the fact that individuals often invent or create for non-pecuniary reasons like curiosity. Dissemination of research results and knowledge is achieved at a relatively low cost, because assigning the “moral rights” to the first publisher of an addition to the body of knowledge gives creators an incentive to disseminate it rapidly and broadly. Therefore, in this system the use of others’ output is encouraged and relatively cheap, with the cost being appropriate citation and possibly some reciprocity in sharing knowledge.

That is why the system of open science is often used as a regime of contemporary knowledge production in many critical and independent educational projects in culture and art.

According to: Bronwyn H. Hall, “Incentives For Knowledge Production with Many Producers”, ESRC Centre for Business Research, University of Cambridge, Working Paper no. 292

University of California at Berkeley and NBER, Department of Economics

http://lib.northern.edu/infolit/tablesversion/lessons/lesson1/production.htm

With paradigmatic switch toward immaterial production and digital technologies, when every copy is identical to original, and every information potentially gift, which doesn’t deprive the one who is giving, proprietary is emerging as a point on which the power of the ruling class is reviling and demonstrating its position in the hierarchical class order. Intellectual property is one of the most controversial issues of this complex mechanism, and it has become very problematic in the domain of ICT, Internet and www, because the protocols and procedures of sharing and open access to the information are already inscribed in the materiality of these media.

Critics of intellectual property in the domain of digital technologies, and even broader, contemporary culture and society (e.g. Richard Stallman, McKenzie Wark) point out that the property in the most cases doesn’t even belong to the producers/workers (writers, programmers, artists), but to agents like publishers, software companies, galleries, museums, theater houses, etc.[1] At this point we are coming to the question of the “symbolic proprietary”, which I consider crucial for the context of actual knowledge production. Today, in the context of post-Fordist production the most influential regulative system is proprietary over concepts, notions, information, paradigms, and history. In this way they are being commodified and thus they are maintaining vertical, hierarchical order between “the one who knows and the one who doesn’t know”, “the one who is audible and the one who is inaudible”, “the one who is visible and the one who is invisible”.

As a critical reaction to these categorizations I consider independent collective self-learning and implementation of open source procedures in learning process as one of the possible modes for hacking the information, and its actualization as knowledge. It enables cracking the codes of institutional education and freely taking over the methodologies, their re-appropriation and implementation in our own procedures directed beyond actual proprietorship toward knowledge that will not take the position of the commodity and close its code.

The term Open Source originally comes from the Free Software movement. Free Software – as an opposition to proprietary software – implies four essential freedoms. Freedom 0 is the freedom to run the program; 1 is the freedom to study and modify the program, and the ability to access the Source Code is prerequisite for this freedom; 2 is the freedom to redistribute copies; and 3 is the freedom to improve the program and distribute the improvements for the benefit of others.[2] What I would like to emphasize is that the term Free Software addresses the freedom of equal access to the information, and open source is methodology through which this principle can be achieved. This distinction is what makes open source procedures applicable in different contexts, like art and education.

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt (in Empire) open the copyleft issue with the assumption that today is much easier to re-configure proprietary relations, in difference to former capitalistic systems. That is because the crucial proprietary now is not the proprietary over the material means of production: machines, but over immaterial means: human mind, thought, imagination, creativity, intellect. And this is the potentiality, which makes implementation of open source procedures in artistic education the crucial element in the (class) struggle for free information.

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[1] McKenzie Wark (2006), Hakerski manifest (A Hacker Manifesto), Zagreb: Multimedijalni institut

[2] See Tomislav Medak, “Open Source Paradigm in the Arts” http://www.gnupauk.org/FlossTxt012

Production and management of knowledge (the way information is created, presented, archived, transmitted, shared, judged) is subjected to the material conditions of a given historical moment and specificity of cultural educational practices. The very object of knowledge is rapidly changing in postindustrial societies due to growing speed of technological development and the resulting ubiquitousness of information. The logic of capital has penetrated contemporary field of education, changing the concept of knowledge from “an organized body of information” to “informational commodity”. As Louis Althusser warned, “the ideological State apparatus which has been installed in the dominant position in mature capitalist social formations as a result of a violent political and ideological class struggle against the old dominant ideological State apparatus is the educational ideological apparatus”.[1] Late capitalism regulates the learning process in such a manner, whereas the “dominant ideology” is not mere implementation of a State hegemonic principle, but more profound change at the very core of educational systems. Knowledge is commercialized, the relevance and amount of information is rapidly growing, new technologies are conditio sine qua non of any learning process. Thus Jean François Lyotard states, that “[k]nowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange”.[2] This also affects the role of learning: today, it is not to know for “one’s own purposes”, but to utilize the knowledge in the educational market, to make the most of one’s abilities and imagination. Knowledge as a commodity-for-sale is the hallmark of late capitalism’s hegemonic know-how approach, where quick grappling the information (having right speed and location) is more important then pursuing individual creativity outside conventional institutional framework. The value of immaterial labor, creativity and innovation, on the other hand, is recognized by the market resulting in emergent “parasitic exploitation of the immaterial domain by the material one”[3].

Commodification of knowledge, then, is a process of transformation taking place at the basis of educational system and also a present dominant condition of knowledge. The call for counteraction in the sense of various forms of critique and counterhegemony, aims towards both theory and practice. The question is how to think the value of knowledge today and how to develop open and self-reflective means of education differing from conventional teaching and learning. These strategies must take in account both global and local circumstances such as digital divide and societal inequalities, in order to trace particular needs and build context-specific tactics of combating the ruling logic of today’s cognitive capitalism.

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[1] Louis Althusser (1971), “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New York and London: Monthly Review Press, pp. 127-187, 152.

[2] Jean François Lyotard (1984), The Postmodern Condition: A report on knowledge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 4.

[3] Matteo Pasquinelli, “Immaterial Civil War: Prototypes of Conflicts Within Cognitive Capitalism”, Barcelona, September 2006, p. 8 http://www.rekombinant.org/ImmCivilWar.pdf

Deschooling Classroom [Self-education in the arts and culture] is a project that addresses the contemporary independent cultural scenes in the region, researching and offering an alternative to the hierarchical models of education in the art and culture. Methodologically, the project moves away from the concepts of individual authorship and expertise, and advocates open collective educational structures where self-organised communities facilitate horizontal production, exchange and distribution of knowledge.

The project is organised by TkH (Walking Theory) platform for performing arts theory and practice from Belgrade (http://tkh-generator.net) in partnership with Kontrapunkt, from Skopje (http://kontrapunkt-mk.org).

Its specific objectives are:

• to raise the awareness of potentialities of self-education, and to develop methodologies for alternative education in contemporary art and culture;
• to offer studying new and hybrid fields of contemporary culture and art and to help sharing the critical knowledge among art and cultural practitioners;
• to stimulate collaboration among those who aim to intervene in the existing cultural system;
• to challenge the conceptual and infra-structural set-up of cultural institutions; and
• to create new supporting infrastructures for the independent cultural scenes.

The project builds upon international trends of alternative educational culture that appeared in late 20^th century in the context of post-Fordist capitalist societies. The wide ranging initiatives try to critically reflect the mainstream education and to find various alternatives, more appropriate to the new social conditions and increased importance of the service industry. Our project is concentrated on independent cultural scenes in the age of transition in the Balkans, where self-organisation and self-education are necessary for the actors to act critically and to be socially relevant and engaged. Its theoretical background is contemporary critical theory, and some of the main references are: Jacques Rancier’s reflections from Ignorant Schoolmaster, Jean-Luc Nancy’s theses on collaboration and belonging, and Ivan Illich’s radical thoughts from Deschooling Society.

Programme of the project runs through two “vectors”:

1. Content – the programme is orientated toward critical, inter-disciplinary, hybrid knowledge in the field of contemporary art and culture; wherein possible topics include: Curatorial practices in visual and non-visual arts, Interdisciplinary dramaturgy; Free software and digital technology; Inter-medial artistic production, etc;
2. Methodology – various forms of research and learning about skills and principles of self-organisation and self-education will be organised, e.g. workshops about facilitation, practical advices for running an NGO, discussions about models of decision making processes and about non-hierarchical group work, etc.

In terms of activities, the project is organised in two cycles through which each “generation” will go through the process of collective self-education. Each generation consists of 3-4 working groups gathered around common themes in the above mentioned fields. All the groups have regional character and include 6-8 members from both Belgrade and Skopje. They will participate in following programmes:

• Open Week is 3-day event, consisting of workshops, lectures and presentations, whose aim is to attract attention and raise awareness about self-education – therefore these will be open to the general public. The open weeks will be organised in Belgrade in 2009 and in Skopje in 2010, and they are departing points for each generation.
• Incubator comprises a long-term (6 months) collaborative work of the working groups. Their curricula will be designed by the participants, and include a continual self-educational process of the groups in Belgrade and Skopje via video link, and programmes facilitated by invited guest lecturers every month.
• Summer School is intense one-week educational event, held once per cycle/year. It is created by the participants of all groups from one generation, for themselves and also for the others interested in the topics, especially those from the region. The summer schools will be organised in Ohrid in 2009 and in 2010 probably in Montenegro (will be decided afterwards).
• Timeshare Campus is accommodation/work structure that facilitates the collaboration between the participants during the time of preparing collective cultural productions with which each cycle is finalised. Two apartments in Skopje and Belgrade will be rented and made available to the groups in the period of two months. The collaborative products can be e.g. video, fanzine, installation, web site, etc. They will be publicly presented in the region afterwards.
• The project will end with the production of a Toolbox. It includes a Handbook on self-education, written by the participants, organisers, and guests/lecturers. Also, we will make a documentary film, which presents the project and its potential for application in other contexts. The Toolbox will be publicly presented locally and regionally, aiming to obtain visibility and to impact other regional scenes.

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I.e. the context of dominancy of immaterial labour, so called “cognitive capitalism”. See more in: Paolo Virno, Grammar of the Multitude; For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (2004), New York: Semiotext(e).

Jacques Ranciere: The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (1991), Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Illich, Deschooling Society (1971), London: Marion Boyars, available at http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/intro.html.