Dockray, Pasquinelli, Smith & Waldorf
There is Nothing Less Passive than the Act of Fleeing
2010
# There is Nothing Less Passive than the Act of Fleeing
[The Public School](/web/20170523052416/http://journalment.org/author/public-
school)
What follows is a condensed and edited version of a text for a panel that was
presented at UCIRA’s _Future Tense: Alternative Arts and Economies in the
University_ conference held in San Diego, California on November 18, 2010.
The panel shared the same name as a 13-day itinerant seminar in Berlin
organized by Dockray, Waldorf, and Fiona Whitton earlier that year, in July.
The seminar began with an excerpt from Tiqqun’s _Introduction to Civil War_ ,
which was co-translated into English by Smith; and later read a chapter from
Pasquinelli’s _Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons_. Both authors have
also participated in meetings at The Public School in Los Angeles and Berlin.
Both the panel and the seminar developed out of longer conversations at The
Public School in Los Angeles, which began in late 2007 under Telic Arts
Exchange. The Public School is a school with no curriculum, where classes are
proposed and organized by the public.
## The Education Factory
The University as I understand it, has been a threshold between youth and the
labor market. Or it has been a threshold between a general education and a
more specialized one. In its more progressive form, it’s been a zone of
transition into an expanding middle class. But does this form still exist? I’m
inclined to think just the opposite, that the University is becoming a mean
for filtering people out of the middle class via student loan debt, which now
exceeds credit card debt. The point of the questions for me is simply what is
the point of the University? What are we fighting for or defending?
The next question might be, do students work? The University is a crucial site
in the reproduction of class relations; we know that students are consumers;
we know the student is a future worker who will be compelled to work, and work
in a specific way, because she/he is crushed by debt contracted during her/his
tenure as a student; we know that students work while attending school, and
that for many students school and work eerily begin to resemble one another.
But asking whether students work is to ask something more specific: do
students produce value and, therefore surplus-value? If we can assume, for the
moment, that students are a factor in the “knowledge production” that takes
place in the University, is this production of knowledge also the production
of value? We confront, maybe, a paradox: all social activity has become
“productive”—captured, absorbed—at the very moment value becomes unmeasurable.
What does this have to do with students, and their work? The thesis of the
social factory was supplemented by the assumption that knowledge had become a
central mode in the production of value in post-Fordist environments. Wouldn’t
this mean that the university could become an increasingly important
flashpoint in social struggles, now that it has become not simply the site of
the reproduction of the capital relation, but involved in the immediate
production process, directly productive of value? Would we have to understand
students themselves as, if not knowledge producers, an irreplaceable moment or
function within that process? None of this remains clear. The question is not
only a sociological one, it is also a political one. The strategy of
reconceptualizing students as workers is rooted in the classical Marxist
identification of revolt with the point of production, that is, exploitation.
To declare all social activity to be productive is another way of saying that
social war can be triggered at any site within society, even among the
precarious, the unemployed, and students.
_Knowledge is tied to struggle. To truly know is to hate truly. This is why
the working class can know and possess everything of capital, as it is enemy
to itself as capital._
—Tronti, 1966
That form of “hate” mentioned by Tronti is suggesting something interesting
form of political passion and a new modus operandi. The relation between hate
and knowledge, suggested by Tronti, is the opposite of the cynical detachment
of the new social figure of the entrepreneur-artist but it’s a joyful hate of
our condition. In order to educate ourselves we should hate our very own
environment and social network in which we were educated—the university. The
position of the artist in their work and the performance of themselves (often
no different) can take are manyfold. There are histories for all of these
postures that can be referenced and adopted. They are all acceptable tactics
as long as we keep doing and churning out more. But where does this get us,
both within the confines of the arts and the larger social structure? We are
taught that the artist is always working, thinking, observing. We have learned
the tricks of communication, performance and adaptability. We can go anywhere,
react to anything, respond in a thoughtful and creative way to all problems.
And we do this because while there is opportunity, we should take it. “We
shouldn’t complain, others have it much worse.” But it doesn’t mean that we
shouldn’t imagine something else. To begin thinking this way, it means a
refusal to deliver an event, to perform on demand. Maybe we need a kind of
inflexibility, of obstruction, of non-conductivity. After all, what exactly
are we producing and performing for? Can we try to think about these talents
of performance, of communication? If so, could this be the basis for an
intimacy, a friendship… another institution?
## Alternative pedagogical models
Let’s consider briefly the desire for “new pedagogical models” and “new forms
of knowledge production”. When articulated by the University, this simply
means new forms of instruction and new forms of research. Liberal faculty and
neoliberal politicians or administrators find themselves joined in this hunt
for future models and forms. On the one hand, faculty imagines that these new
techniques can provide space for continuing the good. On the other hand,
investors, politicians, and administrators look for any means to make the
University profitable; use unpaid labour, eliminate non-productive physical
spaces, and create new markets. Symptomatically, there is very little
resistance to this search for new forms and new models for the simple reason
that there is a consensus that the University should and will continue.
It’s also important to note that many of the so-called new forms and new
models being considered lie beyond the walls and payroll of the institution,
therefore both low-cost and low-risk. It is now a familiar story: the
institution attempts to renew itself by importing its own critique. The Public
School is not a new model and it’s not going to save the University. It is not
even a critique of the University any more or less than it is a critique of
the field of art or of capitalist society. It is not “the next university”
because it is a practice of leaving the University to the side. It would be a
mistake to think that this means isolation or total detachment.
Today, the forms of university governance cannot allow themselves to uproot
self-education. To the contrary, self-education constitutes a vital sap for
the survival of the institutional ruins, snatched up and rendered valuable in
the form of revenue. Governance is the trap, hasty and flexible, of the
common. Instead of countering us frontally, the enemy follows us. We must
immediately reject any weak interpretation of the theme of autonomous
institutions, according to which the institution is a self-governed structure
that lives between the folds of capitalism, without excessively bothering it.
The institutionalisation of self-education doesn’t mean being recognized as
one actor among many within the education market, but the capacity to organize
living knowledge’s autonomy and resistance.
One of the most important “new pedagogical models” that emerged over the past
year in the struggles around the implosion of the “public” university are the
occupations that took place in the Fall of 2009. Unlike other forms of action,
which tend to follow the timetable and cadence of the administration, to the
point of mirroring it, these actions had their own temporality, their own
initiative, their own internal logic. They were not at all concerned with
saving a university that was already in ruins, but rather with creating a
space at the heart of the University within which something else, some future,
could be risked, elaborated, prefigured. Everything had to be improvised, from
moment to moment, and in these improvisations new knowledges were developed
and shared. This improvisation was demanded by the aleatory quality of the
types of relations that emerged within these spaces, relations no longer
regulated by the social alibis that assigns everyone her/his place. When
students occupy university buildings—here in California, in NYC, in Puerto
Rico, in Europe and the UK, everywhere—they do so not because they want to
save their universities. They do so because they know the university for what
it is, as something to be at once seized and abandoned. They know that they
can only rely on and learn from one another.
## The Common and The Public
What is really so disconcerting about this antinomy between the logic of the
common and the logic of the social or the public? For Jacotot, it means the
development of a communist politics that is neither reformist nor seditious2.
It proposes the formation of common spaces at a distance from—if not outside
of—the public sphere and its communicative reason: “whoever forsakes the
workings of the social machine has the opportunity to make the electrical
energy of the emancipation machine.”
What does it mean to forsake the social machine? That is the major political
question facing us today. Such a forsaking would require that our political
energies organize themselves around spaces of experimentation at a distance
not only from the university and what is likely its slow-motion, or sudden,
collapse, but also from an entire imaginary inherited from the workers
movement: the task of a future social emancipation and vectors and forms of
struggle such a task implies. Perhaps what is required is not to put off
equality for the future, but presuppose the common, to affirm that commons as
a fact, a given, which must nevertheless be verified, created, not by a social
body, not by a collective force, but a power of the common, now.
School is not University. Neither is it Academy or College or even Institute.
We are all familiar with the common meaning of the word: it is a place for
learning. In another sense, it also refers to organized education in general,
which is made most clear by the decision to leave, to “drop out of school”.
Alongside these two stable, almost architectural definitions, the word
gestures to composition and movement—the school of bodies, moving
independently, together; the school only exists as long as that collective
movement does. The school takes shape in this oscillation between form and
formlessness, not through the act of constructing a wall but by the process of
realizing its boundary through practice.
Perhaps this is a way to think of how to develop what Felix Guattari called
“the associative sector” in 1982: “everything that isn’t the state, or private
capital, or even cooperatives”3. At first gloss, the associative sector is
only a name for the remainder, the already outside; but, in the language of a
school, it is a constellation of relationships, affinities, new
subjectivities, and movements, flickering into existence through life and use,
An “engaged withdrawal” that simultaneously creates an exit and institutes in
the act of passing through. Which itself might bring us back to school, to the
Greek etymology of school, skhole, “a holding back”, a “keeping clear” of
space for reflective distance. On the one hand, perhaps this reflective space
simply allows theoretical knowledge to shape or affect performative action;
but on the other hand, the production of this “clearing” is not given,
certainly not now and certainly not by the institutions that claim to give it.
Reflective space is not the precondition for performative action. On the
contrary; performative action is the precondition for reflective space—or,
more appropriately, space and action must be coproduced.
Is the University even worth “saving”? We are right to respond with
indignation, or better, with an array of tactics—some procedural, some more
“direct”—against these incursions, which always seem to authorize themselves
by appeals to economic austerity, budget shortfalls, and tightened belts.
Perhaps what is being destroyed in this process is the very notion of the
public sphere itself, a notion that. It is easy to succumb to the illusion
that the only possible result of this destruction of the figure of the public
is privatization. But what if the figure of the public was to be set off
against not only the private and property relations, but against a figure of
the “common” as well? What if, in other words, the notion of the public has
always been an unstable, mediating term between privatization and
communization, and what if the withering of this mediation left these two
process openly at odds with each other? Perhaps, then, it is not simply a
question of saving a university and, more broadly, a public space that is
already withering away; maybe our energies and our intelligence, our
collective or common intellectual forces, should be devoted to organizing and
articulating just this sort of counter-transition, at a distance from the
public and the private.
## Authorship and new forms of knowledge
For decades we have spoken about the “death of the author”. The most sustained
critiques of authorship have been made from the spheres of art and education,
but not coincidentally, these spheres have the most invested in the notion.
Credit and accreditation are the mechanisms for attaching symbolic capital to
individuals via degrees and other lines on CVs. The curriculum vitæ is an
inverted credit report, evidence of underpaid work, kept orderly with an
expectation of some future return.
All of this work, this self-documentation, this fidelity between ourselves and
our papers, is for what, for whom? And what is the consequence of a world
where every person is armed with their vitæ, other than “the war of all
against all?” It’s that sensation that there are no teams but everyone has got
their own jersey.
The idea behind the project The Public School is to teach each other in a very
horizontal way. No curriculum, no hierarchy. But is The Public School able to
produce new knowledge and new content by itself? Can the The Public School
become a sort of autonomous collective author? Or, is The Public School just
about exchanges and social networking?
In the recent history of university struggles, some collectives started to
refresh the idea of coresearch; a form of knowledge that can produce new
subjectivities by researching. New subjectivities that produce new knowledge
and new knowledge that produces new subjectivities If knowledge comes only
from conflict, knowledge goes back to conflict in order to produce new
autonomy and subjectivities.
### The Public School
Sean Dockray, Matteo Pasquinelli, Jason Smith and Caleb Waldorf are founding
members of and collaborators at The Public School. Initiated in 2007 under
Telic Arts Exchange (literally in the basement) in Los Angeles, The Public
School is a school with no curriculum. At the moment, it operates as follows:
first, classes are proposed by the public; then, people have the opportunity
to sign up for the classes; finally, when enough people have expressed
interest, the school finds a teacher and offers the class to those who signed
up. The Public School is not accredited, it does not give out degrees, and it
has no affiliation with the public school system. It is a framework that
supports autodidactic activities, operating under the assumption that
everything is in everything. The Public School currently exists in Los
Angeles, New York, Berlin, Brussels, Helsinki, Philadelphia, Durham, San Juan,
and is still expanding.
Barok
Communing Texts
2014
Communing Texts
_A talk given on the second day of the conference_ [Off the
Press](http://digitalpublishingtoolkit.org/22-23-may-2014/program/) _held at
WORM, Rotterdam, on May 23, 2014. Also available
in[PDF](/images/2/28/Barok_2014_Communing_Texts.pdf "Barok 2014 Communing
Texts.pdf")._
I am going to talk about publishing in the humanities, including scanning
culture, and its unrealised potentials online. For this I will treat the
internet not only as a platform for storage and distribution but also as a
medium with its own specific means for reading and writing, and consider the
relevance of plain text and its various rendering formats, such as HTML, XML,
markdown, wikitext and TeX.
One of the main reasons why books today are downloaded and bookmarked but
hardly read is the fact that they may contain something relevant but they
begin at the beginning and end at the end; or at least we are used to treat
them in this way. E-book readers and browsers are equipped with fulltext
search functionality but the search for "how does the internet change the way
we read" doesn't yield anything interesting but the diversion of attention.
Whilst there are dozens of books written on this issue. When being insistent,
one easily ends up with a folder with dozens of other books, stucked with how
to read them. There is a plethora of books online, yet there are indeed mostly
machines reading them.
It is surely tempting to celebrate or to despise the age of artificial
intelligence, flat ontology and narrowing down the differences between humans
and machines, and to write books as if only for machines or return to the
analogue, but we may as well look back and reconsider the beauty of simple
linear reading of the age of print, not for nostalgia but for what we can
learn from it.
This perspective implies treating texts in their context, and particularly in
the way they commute, how they are brought in relations with one another, into
a community, by the mere act of writing, through a technique that have
developed over time into what we have came to call _referencing_. While in the
early days referring to texts was practised simply as verbal description of a
referred writing, over millenia it evolved into a technique with standardised
practices and styles, and accordingly: it gained _precision_. This precision
is however nothing machinic, since referring to particular passages in other
texts instead of texts as wholes is an act of comradeship because it spares
the reader time when locating the passage. It also makes apparent that it is
through contexts that the web of printed books has been woven. But even though
referencing in its precision has been meant to be very concrete, particularly
the advent of the web made apparent that it is instead _virtual_. And for the
reader, laborous to follow. The web has shown and taught us that a reference
from one document to another can be plastic. To follow a reference from a
printed book the reader has to stand up, walk down the street to a library,
pick up the referred volume, flip through its pages until the referred one is
found and then follow the text until the passage most probably implied in the
text is identified, while on the web the reader, _ideally_ , merely moves her
finger a few milimeters. To click or tap; the difference between the long way
and the short way is obviously the hyperlink. Of course, in the absence of the
short way, even scholars are used to follow the reference the long way only as
an exception: there was established an unwritten rule to write for readers who
are familiar with literature in the respective field (what in turn reproduces
disciplinarity of the reader and writer), while in the case of unfamiliarity
with referred passage the reader inducts its content by interpreting its
interpretation of the writer. The beauty of reading across references was
never fully realised. But now our question is, can we be so certain that this
practice is still necessary today?
The web silently brought about a way to _implement_ the plasticity of this
pointing although it has not been realised as the legacy of referencing as we
know it from print. Today, when linking a text and having a particular passage
in mind, and even describing it in detail, the majority of links physically
point merely to the beginning of the text. Hyperlinks are linking documents as
wholes by default and the use of anchors in texts has been hardly thought of
as a _requirement_ to enable precise linking.
If we look at popular online journalism and its use of hyperlinks within the
text body we may claim that rarely someone can afford to read all those linked
articles, not even talking about hundreds of pages long reports and the like
and if something is wrong, it would get corrected via comments anyway. On the
internet, the writer is meant to be in more immediate feedback with the
reader. But not always readers are keen to comment and not always they are
allowed to. We may be easily driven to forget that quoting half of the
sentence is never quoting a full sentence, and if there ought to be the entire
quote, its source text in its whole length would need to be quoted. Think of
the quote _information wants to be free_ , which is rarely quoted with its
wider context taken into account. Even factoids, numbers, can be carbon-quoted
but if taken out of the context their meaning can be shaped significantly. The
reason for aversion to follow a reference may well be that we are usually
pointed to begin reading another text from its beginning.
While this is exactly where the practices of linking as on the web and
referencing as in scholarly work may benefit from one another. The question is
_how_ to bring them closer together.
An approach I am going to propose requires a conceptual leap to something we
have not been taught.
For centuries, the primary format of the text has been the page, a vessel, a
medium, a frame containing text embedded between straight, less or more
explicit, horizontal and vertical borders. Even before the material of the
page such as papyrus and paper appeared, the text was already contained in
lines and columns, a structure which we have learnt to perceive as a grid. The
idea of the grid allows us to view text as being structured in lines and
pages, that are in turn in hand if something is to be referred to. Pages are
counted as the distance from the beginning of the book, and lines as the
distance from the beginning of the page. It is not surprising because it is in
accord with inherent quality of its material medium -- a sheet of paper has a
shape which in turn shapes a body of a text. This tradition goes as far as to
the Ancient times and the bookroll in which we indeed find textual grids.
[](/File:Papyrus_of_Plato_Phaedrus.jpg)
A crucial difference between print and digital is that text files such as HTML
documents nor markdown documents nor database-driven texts did inherit this
quality. Their containers are simply not structured into pages, precisely
because of the nature of their materiality as media. Files are written on
memory drives in scattered chunks, beginning at point A and ending at point B
of a drive, continuing from C until D, and so on. Where does each of these
chunks start is ultimately independent from what it contains.
Forensic archaeologists would confirm that when a portion of a text survives,
in the case of ASCII documents it is not a page here and page there, or the
first half of the book, but textual blocks from completely arbitrary places of
the document.
This may sound unrelated to how we, humans, structure our writing in HTML
documents, emails, Office documents, even computer code, but it is a reminder
that we structure them for habitual (interfaces are rectangular) and cultural
(human-readability) reasons rather then for a technical necessity that would
stem from material properties of the medium. This distinction is apparent for
example in HTML, XML, wikitext and TeX documents with their content being both
stored on the physical drive and treated when rendered for reading interfaces
as single flow of text, and the same goes for other texts when treated with
automatic line-break setting turned off. Because line-breaks and spaces and
everything else is merely a number corresponding to a symbol in character set.
So how to address a section in this kind of document? An option offers itself
-- how computers do, or rather how we made them do it -- as a position of the
beginning of the section in the array, in one long line. It would mean to
treat the text document not in its grid-like format but as line, which merely
adapts to properties of its display when rendered. As it is nicely implied in
the animated logo of this event and as we know it from EPUBs for example.
In the case of 'reference-linking' we can refer to a passage by including the
information about its beginning and length determined by the character
position within the text (in analogy to _pp._ operator used for printed
publications) as well as the text version information (in printed texts served
by edition and date of publication). So what is common in printed text as the
page information is here replaced by the character position range and version.
Such a reference-link is more precise while addressing particular section of a
particular version of a document regardless of how it is rendered on an
interface.
It is a relatively simple idea and its implementation does not be seem to be
very hard, although I wonder why it has not been implemented already. I
discussed it with several people yesterday to find out there were indeed
already attempts in this direction. Adam Hyde pointed me to a proposal for
_fuzzy anchors_ presented on the blog of the Hypothes.is initiative last year,
which in order to overcome the need for versioning employs diff algorithms to
locate the referred section, although it is too complicated to be explained in
this setting.[1] Aaaarg has recently implemented in its PDF reader an option
to generate URLs for a particular point in the scanned document which itself
is a great improvement although it treats texts as images, thus being specific
to a particular scan of a book, and generated links are not public URLs.
Using the character position in references requires an agreement on how to
count. There are at least two options. One is to include all source code in
positioning, which means measuring the distance from the anchor such as the
beginning of the text, the beginning of the chapter, or the beginning of the
paragraph. The second option is to make a distinction between operators and
operands, and count only in operands. Here there are further options where to
make the line between them. We can consider as operands only characters with
phonetic properties -- letters, numbers and symbols, stripping the text from
operators that are there to shape sonic and visual rendering of the text such
as whitespaces, commas, periods, HTML and markdown and other tags so that we
are left with the body of the text to count in. This would mean to render
operators unreferrable and count as in _scriptio continua_.
_Scriptio continua_ is a very old example of the linear onedimensional
treatment of the text. Let's look again at the bookroll with Plato's writing.
Even though it is 'designed' into grids on a closer look it reveals the lack
of any other structural elements -- there are no spaces, commas, periods or
line-breaks, the text is merely one flow, one long line.
_Phaedrus_ was written in the fourth century BC (this copy comes from the
second century AD). Word and paragraph separators were reintroduced much
later, between the second and sixth century AD when rolls were gradually
transcribed into codices that were bound as pages and numbered (a dramatic
change in publishing comparable to digital changes today).[2]
'Reference-linking' has not been prominent in discussions about sharing books
online and I only came to realise its significance during my preparations for
this event. There is a tremendous amount of very old, recent and new texts
online but we haven't done much in opening them up to contextual reading. In
this there are publishers of all 'grounds' together.
We are equipped to treat the internet not only as repository and library but
to take into account its potentials of reading that have been hiding in front
of our very eyes. To expand the notion of hyperlink by taking into account
techniques of referencing and to expand the notion of referencing by realising
its plasticity which has always been imagined as if it is there. To mesh texts
with public URLs to enable entaglement of referencing and hyperlinks. Here,
open access gains its further relevance and importance.
Dušan Barok
_Written May 21-23, 2014, in Vienna and Rotterdam. Revised May 28, 2014._
Notes
1. ↑ Proposals for paragraph-based hyperlinking can be traced back to the work of Douglas Engelbart, and today there is a number of related ideas, some of which were implemented on a small scale: fuzzy anchoring, 1(http://hypothes.is/blog/fuzzy-anchoring/); purple numbers, 2(http://project.cim3.net/wiki/PMWX_White_Paper_2008); robust anchors, 3(http://github.com/hypothesis/h/wiki/robust-anchors); _Emphasis_ , 4(http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/emphasis-update-and-source); and others 5(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragment_identifier#Proposals). The dependence on structural elements such as paragraphs is one of their shortcoming making them not suitable for texts with longer paragraphs (e.g. Adorno's _Aesthetic Theory_ ), visual poetry or computer code; another is the requirement to store anchors along the text.
2. ↑ Works which happened not to be of interest at the time ceased to be copied and mostly disappeared. On the book roll and its gradual replacement by the codex see William A. Johnson, "The Ancient Book", in _The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology_ , ed. Roger S. Bagnall, Oxford, 2009, pp 256-281, 6(http://google.com/books?id=6GRcLuc124oC&pg=PA256).
Addendum (June 9)
Arie Altena wrote a [report from the
panel](http://digitalpublishingtoolkit.org/2014/05/off-the-press-report-day-
ii/) published on the website of Digital Publishing Toolkit initiative,
followed by another [summary of the
talk](http://digitalpublishingtoolkit.org/2014/05/dusan-barok-digital-imprint-
the-motion-of-publishing/) by Irina Enache.
The online repository Aaaaarg [has
introduced](http://twitter.com/aaaarg/status/474717492808413184) the
reference-link function in its document viewer, see [an
example](http://aaaaarg.fail/ref/60090008362c07ed5a312cda7d26ecb8#0.102).