“It’s the day that the governor of the Bank of England has announced a decade of sobriety and they’re there, having a drink in the Plough in Central London. It’s the day of the big cutbacks announced by the ConLib coalition as part of the British Government’s annual spending review. Maybe they should begin with the cuts to education? Does it have any bearing on what they’ve been doing together over the last few years; particularly with projects linked to the School of Walls and Space Department? It could be said that what they’ve been up to points more towards what might be called post-capitalist forms of educational engagement… insofar as they’ve not set themselves in ‘opposition’ to cuts, or to the educational system as it currently presents itself.
The only word they’ve got is ‘curriculum’. That is why they’re here – to formalise something? But one of them finds herself in a strange situation: having not been to university and not really being enamoured of higher education. She offers how un-historically minded people can be when they claim that any initiative that’s not backed by the state is somehow free-market or neo-liberal and how this seems to neglect the historical example of a Workers Movement that was replete with non-state funded autodidact initiatives.
Is this what is being hijacked at the moment?The idea of the Big Society, of free schools, is another example of how neo-liberalism has been very adept at consuming these initiatives and regurgitating them as a distorted market variant. It’s very close to what they’ve been working on. Aren’t they themselves in danger of carrying out a programme that the State now wants? How do theydifferentiate between what the state demands and what they regard as politically necessary?
But one says that what is touted as ‘Free School’ today is a more smoothly functioning formal education, a more or less professional aping of what already exists as instituted. He points to the diagram: the State wants to focus solely on the ‘form-funnel’ structure so as to improve the end result of product and knowledge. So, for this one the ‘Big Society’ is just another form of concept-management, a way to inveigle surplus value out of people. Maybe they better think of the content of a free school initiative? How the content can be de-forming.
They fall to wondering whether what’s being talked up is another form of primitive accumulation. A situation in which the last vestiges of communal activity are taken away, to be re-politicised ideologically and given another value, another meaning. Maybe this is something that their proposed curriculum might have to spell out in a different language: a different form of reproduction which is not complicit with this idea of the ‘Big Society’.
The question might be at the level of formal content? The work that they’ve been doing over the last few years, the role of improvisation in challenging ‘specialised’ knowledge enclosures, the formal transfer of knowledge, knowledge that can be placed in the market, knowledge that can be quantified, measured, assessed. They’ve tried to work on a different set of relations – to hone in on the knowledge that’s generated between people, in social relations: the general intellect. This, it is offered, is the opposite of the neo-liberal deadzone of ‘The Big Society’. But where does this leave experimental pedagogy?
A respondent says that it leaves it having to deal with an education system that’s forming human capital. The generalised state of produced subjectivity today – as human capital; an investment in the self that institutes conformity to the tropes of capitalism. So, is the experimental in the ‘small society’? Is it with an improvisatory element and a sense of each ones immeasureable experience; the micro situations that challenge ‘pedagogy’? Is the experimental with desire? What vector does desire want to lead itself along? Or is it informed of where to go? Is it dictated to? Is it seduced? Is it down here (the respondent gestures to diagram), the form funnel? Or is it drawn towards value and knowledge/power? Or is it meandering (“as it says here on the diagram”) or generating its own process? Is it moving towards an ‘unformed’ type of zone?
An interjection puts it that the ‘unformed’ zone is what they were trying to do with the ‘Going Fragile’ week with the School of Walls and Space in Berlin. Improvisation, then, was linked-in to that element which was almost group therapeutic during the week: an encouragement of not just intellectual rational development, but collective emotional development.
One of them summarises that they have an institution-funnel which is made up of what might be called measurable ‘standards’ which coalesce around Knowledge/Power. Then they have the immeasurable, improvisation, a free-form desire. The question they pose, then, of the pending curriculum, is how they create or set the conditions in which it’s possible to move into the immeasurable. What is it, on the other hand, that encouragesor forcesus all to move into the measurable; to go to University to gain degrees, to get jobs, to get homes, to get pensions, to gain a semblance of security? But how, it’s said, is this process to be disrupted, where is it challenged? In what place, in what time, in what relation is that challenged?
A third pipes up: “it’s almost an unanswerable question. Is it in the points of transition in human social awareness that there’s moments of trauma, for example at adolescence?” Maybe this one is being schematic it’s said, but is desire more raw at this time? This third guesses that it’s at the moment of seduction of Knowledge/Power and the moment of seduction of identity linked to life-purpose that the educational institution comes in to ‘save’ us? It’s a pressurised moment. A career, a profession. It demands the decision. But what else is unveiled at this moment?
This is what’s interesting about the measurable/immeasurable dichotomy they noted earlier. How does this relate back to what they were doing with the School of Walls and Space? They certainly worked with a programme which was immeasureable. In fact The Reader, the curriculum that was put out on the first day, was rejected… suspended indefinitely, replaced by a blank wall.
So, a part of this that’s important is the idea of the curriculum as contract because, in their view, it’s about understanding “what you’re actually doing together”. It can have a free-form component to it, but it’s still about the fact that you’re doing something together that has no discernible outcome and that you’re in agreement that your working together and that something might happen. With a curriculum you’re agreeing to a ‘social relationship’ and for the curriculum as a contract in the more free form, spontaneous, improvisatory and emotionally collective way, it’s about… trust…
Then it’s mentioned in relation to the diagram that the relationships inside the institution could be akin to the sado-masochistic contract, a negotiation of power. “In a way”, one says, “it’s what may have been missing during the ‘Going Fragile’ week. We jumped in thinking we could just go to here (points to ‘free-form’ element of diagram) with trust because of the Reader we’d compiled beforehand and what the students knew about us… But, the people who were unknown to us, didn’t have proof of this sense of trust or practical evidence of our awareness-of and devolution-of power relations; that it wasn’t at all our intention to be measuring anybody – hence we had the issue of some students thinking ‘are we being manipulated’”. It’s offered that this again falls back into the projection and transference of the S&M contract, and how the group therapy element takes this on too; maybe made it less unspoken.
From the mouth of a rebel poet came a seemingly haphazard slogan: “Perversion is the curriculum.”
“So”, she says in response to the inattentive poet, “are we here to create a perverse curriculum that meets the criteria! Whose criteria!” It’s then added by a historian that the introduction of music into the curriculum at Portsmouth Polytechnic in the early 1970s was part of a perverse practice that may have been critically aligned to a more general and quiet process of structural change. He adds “clearly for some working within educational institutions at the time – adjusting, tweaking the curriculum under cover, in the fog of bureaucracy – the conditions were set in which the revolutionary subject or a jolt to the system might be brought into play”. With Portsmouth, where improvisation and free-form were mixed-in, it is recounted by the historian that this was precisely what happened: the longest British art school occupation of the 1970’s. As with their Going Fragile Reader did they not too factor-in a void, a deep hole in which radically different social relations might emerge.
“That’s ok”, pipes-up another, “but this is clearly not where we’re coming from as none of us have ever talked about the idea of adjusting, tweaking, working within existing institutional structures…”
So, chimes-up the poet, “outside these structures the ‘peversion’ can become more indulged, less surreptitious. Liberating desire!” But without this background, the curriculum as a contract of trust, what they’re non-intending can be experienced differently. So, it was said, some just attacked them and claimed that it’s just a bunch of blokes doing something with young people. One of those assembled found that very much a problem. But his thoughts behind the curriculum were that it could take them into another school, another place, into a free school, another Summerhill. That was his idea of the criteria. He understood it more as a test site or springboard to take this experience and knowledge of a curriculum-in-formation to what might be called a shared practice. Maybe the contract that they were talking about is the filter that sidesteps that state-funded/free-market bind. But, on this it was added that it could be quite bourgeois to think that they had to set up a contract to build trust!
“That’s as maybe” comes an interjection, “but it’s the ‘new form’ we were talking about: the contract becomes null and void. As with sado-masochism the examination of where the power relations are, how they can be ‘played with’, can give rise to a growing sense of trust and emotional collectivity?”
The historian adds that this has resonance with developments in the early British Art School system of the 1960s and the formation of the first curriculum. In the case of St. Martins School of Art in London, for example, students were invited to respond to the educational ‘contract’ and this resulted in a challenge to a perceived abuse of power; the privileging and stifling limits of middle class, middle aged white culture. And it’s important to acknowledge that this ‘right’ to dissent and contestation was inscribed in the contract so to speak, it was encouraged as part of the process. “So” the historian adds, “when we consider the ‘development’ of art education over the last 40 odd years it’s clearly moved away from the ‘contract’ and down this form funnel, hauled into this zone” (refers to diagram) … “and”, interjects another, with a hint of despair, “that funnel has become so tight, that funnel is becoming like a needlepoint”.
The poet wants to run another fantasy: “If the institution is a funnel-anus shitting out students, pedagogues and academics as units of human capital, then we get back into the question of the actual benefit of an S&M discipline/punishment vibe, and now maybe is the time to run shock tactics on human capital, on the clean surfaces and conceptual aesthetics, on the aseptics of ‘intelligence’ that bowel-out from this factory!”
There’s laughter, but they return to a serious attentiveness when it’s offered that the shock maybe comes when students leave the institution, when they suddenly realise that they can’t do very much with the measured and packaged learning they’ve received; that human capital isn’t worth too much … particularly now in this climate of austerity and cutbacks, where there’s no safety-net of the welfare system. He continues: “Maybe this curriculum should be built as a ‘welfare’ system after people leave school, the art school? Only after students have left is it possible to engage and set up a free school”.
So they now seemed to be talking about a post-educational positioning and not a curriculum as such. They would work off shock, and factor-in this traumatic yet liberating moment and divert it towards a collaborative and communising type practice because, for them, this is clearly the point where human capital is shat out of the institutional funnel, has nowhere to go and that this could feed into Marie Langer’s notion of “building your own Centres of Psycho-Social Attention”. By the end it was clear that none of those who’d gathered as the ‘Movement of the 20th October’ were talking about ‘intervening’ in primary, secondary, further or higher education at the point where the ‘promise’ of the system, the institution is at it’s persuasive, coercive peak; but more at the precise moment where the ‘promise’, the contract, the guarantee turns to dust – the day that ‘students’ (staff, other workers) leave the building… with nothing.
Are they saying that it’s not really worth developing a curriculum now that they’ve identified this as the source of the problem: the machine that produces human capital? Are they saying instead that they’ll move into the night? Was this, as one of them said,……was this particular exchange in itself a divergence from a goal; the result of a process that overrides the need for a curriculum?
Anthony Davies, Nils Norman, Howard Slater. The Second World Congress of Free Artists. Aarhus, Denmark 20/10/10
The Second World Congress of Free Artists full publication pdf can be found HERE
Leave a Reply