Nicholas Knouf on Sun, 6 May 2012 21:54:10 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Why I say the things I say |
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Brian, and others, Admire is a strong word. Admiration is for me something that happens only rarely. No, Brian, and others who might agree with his characterization of me, I do not admire Carnegie, Mellon, Rockefeller, Koch, Olin, or others. Their actions are, as I said before, repugnant in almost every way. I am quite familiar with the Koch funding of conservative groups. Let's take John M. Olin. Every time I walk through the doors of the Olin Library on my campus I curse John Olin and the Olin Foundation for their support of conservative groups, support that was occasioned, supposedly, by a building takeover on the campus of my university. Yet I know firsthand that the Olin Library contains a lot of radical material that, given Olin's support of the Powell memo, Olin would himself find morally reprehensible. Let's continue with universities. The situation of the UC system is an absolute travesty, it's a blight on the state, it's a reneging on promises made long ago. The fact that universities continue to hike tuition in order to pay for more athletic facilities or shinier buildings is also extremely problematic. (Unfortunately cutting tuition will do nothing to stem the funding towards military research on campuses; that change has to come from decreasing government appropriations.) I also find the continued intrusion of corporate monies to be highly problematic as well, something I'm intimately familiar with given where I am in the university, and something I've explored in some projects and writing of my own as well. We also know from the important work going on analyzing the UC system that the humanities and many of the social sciences actually bring in _more_ money than they cost, if we wanted to measure things on such a rubric. Endowment monies that might change the decrease in state appropriations are tied up by donor restrictions; it's too bad the "financial exigencies" that allow schools to cut staff don't also apply to these restrictions. Graeber and Shukaitis, in their introduction to _Constituent Imagination_, suggest something that I think we ought to consider: what if the radical activity of universities starting in the mid-sixties was itself a blip on a much longer history? That it was only an anomaly within an extensive history of acquiescence to power? Whither universities then? Does this mean those of us who have gone through the system must withdraw our tacit support that comes by being inside it? Here, Brian, I think we disagree. If I read you right, in this message and other recent ones, you would suggest that people in my position do so, pull our labor away from the university or college in order to not contribute to the furthering of an unjust system, of one that, as you suggest, "enslaves" the students. How does one explain, then, the fact that I have been able to teach courses on radical art and activism for the past three years to first-year students? That we've had them reading about TM, EDT, CAE, subRosa, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, afrofuturism, Hakim Bey, Victor Papanek, Radical Software, the Public School, pirate radio, and Brecht? (And that's just from this year's syllabus.) That is the rare situation where you can work with people for sixteen weeks going deep into concepts they've never encountered before. This of course does take place outside of universities, as you've done, Brian, at the Mess Hall or 16 Beaver, and as others on this list have done at the Public School and innumerable other places. But there is something special about the pedagogical situation of the university, once you begin to break down the hierarchies between the professor/student, once you begin to shape the course more in terms of a discussion rather than a lecture, once you begin to _listen_ to the texts you've been reading for so many years and apply it in practice. This is what I try to do in the courses I teach. I know that others within universities do not have this freedom in their classrooms; that they are watched over as if by cameras; that they must teach as if to a script. Those bureaucratic processes must be fought against as much as is possible. Of course perhaps I'm being deluded, deluded in my belief that this small opening into an otherwise behemoth of a system will do _absolutely nothing other than further the production and accumulation of the system_. But then again I've never been a believer in false consciousness. Museums are a complex (there's that word again!) beast, in my understanding always existing in a complicated relationship with the state and private enterprise in the US. Yet there's a lot of radical art hanging in our oligarch-funded museums, and I sure hope that one day we can recapture it and place it in the cafes as the Situationists suggested. But we won't be able to do that if the museums fall apart, if the artwork gets sold in order to keep the museum or related institution running (as has been happening with university museums recently). No, no, I do not admire the "oligarchs". Their actions deserve to be denounced. I disagree, however, that the oligarchs are "quaking", as Armin Medosch just posted; worried, perhaps, but they've seen worse actions against their power. Nor do I want to see things in terms of the friend/enemy distinction; Schmitt's never been my thing. I'm more afraid of what that distinction _does to us_, _says about us_, than anything the oligarchs do. Histories show us what happens when sectarian divisions take hold, when ideological purges take place. What confuses me is this: whatever happened to tactical re-appropriation of these resources as part of larger strategies of struggle? Perhaps it's because I'm being "naive", that I still might believe in some of the things said on this list over a decade ago. That one of the strengths of the position we are in is _precisely_ the fact that we try to understand the complex dynamics of things. It might just enable us to find the places where we can insert ourselves and exert some pressure. Now is not the time, IMHO, to be reducing systems to binaries. To do so is to fall into a trap, to repeat the mistakes of the past activities, to replicate the positions of exactly those whom we oppose. Purity in thought and action has never been my thing either, and I prefer to see its lack as potential. Best, nick -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAk+msYUACgkQoHDFiKQ8nMl7BQCeLoTe1QKMcKbMdRWEyAs6ESzu DrAAoI8UKPzSnF1wvi0tqtvrG2fyKBZs =DHCR -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org