Over the last few monsoons I lived with the dread that the rain would
eventually find its ways through my leaky terrace roof and destroy my books.
Last August my fears came true when I woke up in the middle of the night to
see my room flooded and water leaking from the roof and through the walls.
Much of the night was spent rescuing the books and shifting them to a dry
room. While timing and speed were essential to the task at hand they were also
the key hazards navigating a slippery floor with books perched till one’s
neck. At the end of the rescue mission, I sat alone, exhausted amongst a
mountain of books assessing the damage that had been done, but also having
found books I had forgotten or had not seen in years; books which I had
thought had been permanently borrowed by others or misplaced found their way
back as I set many aside in a kind of ritual of renewed commitment.
Sorting the badly damaged from the mildly wet, I could not help but think
about the fragile histories of books from the library of Alexandria to the
great Florence flood of 1966. It may have seemed presumptuous to move from the
precarity of one’s small library and collection to these larger events, but is
there any other way in which one experiences earth-shattering events if not
via a microcosmic filtering through one’s own experiences? I sent a distressed
email to a friend Sandeep a committed bibliophile and book collector with a
fantastic personal library, who had also been responsible for many of my new
acquisitions. He wrote back on August 17, and I quote an extract of the email:
> Dear Lawrence
>
> I hope your books are fine. I feel for you very deeply, since my nightmares
about the future all contain as a key image my books rotting away under a
steady drip of grey water. Where was this leak, in the old house or in the
new? I spent some time looking at the books themselves: many of them I greeted
like old friends. I see you have Lewis Hyde’s _Trickster Makes the World_ and
Edward Rice’s _Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton_ in the pile: both top-class
books. (Burton is a bit of an obsession with me. The man did and saw
everything there was to do and see, and thought about it all, and wrote it all
down in a massive pile of notes and manuscripts. He squirrelled a fraction of
his scholarship into the tremendous footnotes to the Thousand and One Nights,
but most of it he could not publish without scandalising the Victorians, and
then he died, and his widow made a bonfire in the backyard, and burnt
everything because she disapproved of these products of a lifetime’s labors,
and of a lifetime such as few have ever had, and no one can ever have again. I
almost hope there is a special hell for Isabel Burton to burn in.)
Moving from one’s personal pile to the burning of the work of one of the
greatest autodidacts of the nineteenth century and back it was strangely
comforting to be reminded that libraries—the greatest of time machines
invented—were testimonies to both the grandeur and the fragility of
civilizations. Whenever I enter huge libraries it is with a tingling sense of
excitement normally reserved for horror movies, but at the same time this same
sense of awe is often accompanied by an almost debilitating sense of what it
means to encounter finitude as it is dwarfed by centuries of words and
scholarship. Yet strangely when I think of libraries it is rarely the New York
public library that comes to mind even as I wish that we could have similar
institutions in India. I think instead of much smaller collections—sometimes
of institutions but often just those of friends and acquaintances. I enjoy
browsing through people’s bookshelves, not just to discern their reading
preferences or to discover for myself unknown treasures, but also to take
delight in the local logic of their library, their spatial preferences and to
understand the order of things not as a global knowledge project but as a
personal, often quirky rationale.
[ ](//images.e-flux-systems.com/2012_09_library-of-congress.jpg,2000 "Machine
room for book transportation at the Library of Congress, early 20th century.")
Machine room for book transportation at the Library of Congress, early 20th
century.
Like romantic love, bibliophilia is perhaps shaped by one’s first love. The
first library that I knew intimately was a little six by eight foot shop
hidden in a by-lane off one of the busiest roads in Bangalore, Commercial
street. From its name to what it contained, Mecca stores could well have been
transported out of an Arabian nights tale. One side of the store was lined
with plastic ware and kitchen utensils of every shape and size while the other
wall was piled with books, comics, and magazines. From my eight-year-old
perspective it seemed large enough to contain all the knowledge of the world.
I earned a weekly stipend packing noodles for an hour every day after school
in the home shop that my parents ran, which I used to either borrow or buy
second hand books from the store. I was usually done with them by Sunday and
would have them reread by Wednesday. The real anguish came in waiting from
Wednesday to Friday for the next set. After finally acquiring a small
collection of books and comics myself I decided—spurred on by a fatal
combination of entrepreneurial enthusiasm and a pedantic desire to educate
others—to start a small library myself. Packing my books into a small aluminum
case and armed with a makeshift ledger, I went from house to house convincing
children in the neighborhood to forgo twenty-five paisa in exchange for a book
or comic with an additional caveat that they were not to share them with any
of their friends. While the enterprise got off to a reasonable start it soon
met its end when I realized that despite my instructions, my friends were
generously sharing the comics after they were done with them, which thereby
ended my biblioempire ambitions.
Over the past few years the explosion of ebook readers and consequent rise in
the availability of pirated books have opened new worlds to my booklust.
[Library.nu](library.nu), which began as gigapedia, suddenly made the idea of
the universal library seem like reality. By the time it shut down in February
2012 the library had close to a million books and over half a million active
users. Bibliophiles across the world were distraught when the site was shut
down and if it were ever possible to experience what the burning of the
library of Alexandria must have felt it was that collective ache of seeing the
closure of [library.nu.](library.nu)
What brings together something as monumental as the New York public library, a
collective enterprise like [library.nu](library.nu) and Mecca stores if not
the word library? As spaces they may have little in common but as virtual
spaces they speak as equals even if the scale of their imagination may differ.
All of them partake of their share in the world of logotopias. In an
exhibition designed to celebrate the place of the library in art, architecture
and imagination the curator Sascha Hastings coined the term logotopia to
designate “word places”—a happy coincidence of architecture and language.
There is however a risk of flattening the differences between these spaces by
classifying them all under a single utopian ideal of the library. Imagination
after all has a geography and physiology and requires our alertness to these
distinctions. Lets think instead of an entire pantheon (both of spaces as well
as practices) that we can designate as shadow libraries (or shadow logotopias
if you like) which exist in the shadows cast by the long history of monumental
libraries. While they are often dwarfed by the idea of the library, like the
shadows cast by our bodies, sometimes these shadows surge ahead of the body.
[ ](//images.e-flux-systems.com/2012_09_london-blitz-WEB.jpg,2000 "The London
Library after the Blitz, c. 1940.")
The London Library after the Blitz, c. 1940.
At the heart of all libraries lies a myth—that of the burning of the library
of Alexandria. No one knows what the library of Alexandria looked like or
possesses an accurate list of its contents. What we have long known though is
a sense of loss. But a loss of what? Of all the forms of knowledge in the
world in a particular time. Because that was precisely what the library of
Alexandria sought to collect under its roofs. It is believed that in order to
succeed in assembling a universal library, King Ptolemy I wrote “to all the
sovereigns and governors on earth” begging them to send to him every kind of
book by every kind of author, “poets and prose-writers, rhetoricians and
sophists, doctors and soothsayers, historians, and all others too.” The king’s
scholars had calculated that five hundred thousand scrolls would be required
if they were to collect in Alexandria “all the books of all the peoples of the
world.”1
What was special about the Library of Alexandria was the fact that until then
the libraries of the ancient world were either private collections of an
individual or government storehouses where legal and literary documents were
kept for official reference. By imagining a space where the public could have
access to all the knowledge of the world, the library also expressed a new
idea of the human itself. While the library of Alexandria is rightfully
celebrated, what is often forgotten in the mourning of its demise is another
library—one that existed in the shadows of the grand library but whose
whereabouts ensured that it survived Caesar’s papyrus destroying flames.
According to the Sicilian historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first
century BC, Alexandria boasted a second library, the so-called daughter
library, intended for the use of scholars not affiliated with the Museion. It
was situated in the south-western neighborhood of Alexandria, close to the
temple of Serapis, and was stocked with duplicate copies of the Museion
library’s holdings. This shadow library survived the fire that destroyed the
primary library of Alexandria but has since been eclipsed by the latter’s
myth.
Alberto Manguel says that if the library of Alexandria stood tall as an
expression of universal ambitions, there is another structure that haunts our
imagination: the tower of Babel. If the library attempted to conquer time, the
tower sought to vanquish space. He says “The Tower of Babel in space and the
Library of Alexandria in time are the twin symbols of these ambitions. In
their shadow, my small library is a reminder of both impossible yearnings—the
desire to contain all the tongues of Babel and the longing to possess all the
volumes of Alexandria.”2 Writing about the two failed projects Manguel adds
that when seen within the limiting frame of the real, the one exists only as
nebulous reality and the other as an unsuccessful if ambitious real estate
enterprise. But seen as myths, and in the imagination at night, the solidity
of both buildings for him is unimpeachable.3
The utopian ideal of the universal library was more than a question of built
up form or space or even the possibility of storing all of the knowledge of
the world; its real aspiration was in the illusion of order that it could
impose on a chaotic world where the lines drawn by a fine hairbrush
distinguished the world of animals from men, fairies from ghosts, science from
magic, and Europe from Japan. In some cases even after the physical structure
that housed the books had crumbled and the books had been reduced to dust the
ideal remained in the form of the order imagined for the library. One such
residual evidence comes to us by way of the _Pandectae_ —a comprehensive
bibliography created by Conrad Gesner in 1545 when he feared that the Ottoman
conquerors would destroy all the books in Europe. He created a bibliography
from which the library could be built again—an all embracing index which
contained a systematic organization of twenty principal groups with a matrix
like structure that contained 30,000 concepts.4
It is not surprising that Alberto Manguel would attempt write a literary,
historical and personal history of the library. As a seventeen-year-old man in
Buenos Aries, Manguel read for the blind seer Jorge Luis Borges who once
imagined in his appropriately named story—The Tower of Babel—paradise as a
kind of library. Modifying his mentor’s statement in what can be understood as
a gesture to the inevitable demands of the real and yet acknowledging the
possible pleasures of living in shadows, Manguel asserts that sometimes
paradise must adapt itself to suit circumstantial requirements. Similarly
Jacques Rancière writing about the libraries of the working class in the
eighteenth century tells us about Gauny a joiner and a boy in love with
vagrancy and botany who decides to build a library for himself. For the sons
of the poor proletarians living in Saint Marcel district, libraries were built
only a page at a time. He learnt to read by tracing the pages on which his
mother bought her lentils and would be disappointed whenever he came to the
end of a page and the next page was not available, even though he urged his
mother to buy her lentils from the same grocer. 5
[ ](//images.e-flux-systems.com/2012_09_DGF-D-Tropics-detail-hi-res-
WEB.jpg,2000 "Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Chronotopes & Dioramas , 2009.
Diorama installation at The Hispanic Society of America, New York.")
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, _Chronotopes & Dioramas_, 2009. Diorama
installation at The Hispanic Society of America, New York.
Is the utopian ideal of the universal library as exemplified by the library of
Alexandria or modernist pedagogic institutions of the twentieth century
adequate to the task of describing the space of the shadow library, or do we
need a different account of these other spaces? In an era of the ebook reader
where the line between a book and a library is blurred, the very idea of a
library is up for grabs. It has taken me well over two decades to build a
collection of a few thousand books while around two hundred thousand books
exist as bits and bytes on my computer. Admittedly hard drives crash and data
is lost, but is that the same threat as those of rain or fire? Which then is
my library and which its shadow? Or in the spirit of logotopias would it be
more appropriate to ask the spatial question: where is the library?
If the possibility of having 200,000 books on one’s computer feels staggering
here is an even more startling statistic. The Library of Congress which is the
largest library in the world with holdings of approximately thirty million
books, which would—if they were piled on the floor—cover 364 kilometers could
potentially fit into an SD card. It is estimated that by 2030 an ordinary SD
card will have the capacity of storing up to 64 TB and assuming each book were
digitized at an average size of 1MB it would technically be possible to fit
two Libraries of Congress in one’s pocket.
It sounds like science fiction, but isn’t it the case that much of the science
fiction of a decade ago finds itself comfortably within the weaves of everyday
life. How do we make sense of the future of the library? While it may be
tempting to throw our hands up in boggled perplexity about what it means to be
able to have thirty million books lets face it: the point of libraries have
never been that you will finish what’s there. Anyone with even a modest book
collection will testify to the impossibility of ever finishing their library
and if anything at all the library stands precisely at the cusp of our
finitude and our infinity. Perhaps that is what Borges—the consummate mixer of
time and space—meant when he described paradise as a library, not as a spatial
idea but a temporal one: that it was only within the confines of infinity that
one imagine finishing reading one’s library. It would therefore be more
interesting to think of the shadow library as a way of thinking about what it
means to dwell in knowledge. While all our aspirations for a habitat should
have a utopian element to them, lets face it, utopias have always been
difficult spaces to live in.
In contrast to the idea of utopia is heterotopia—a term with its origins in
medicine (referring to an organ of the body that had been dislodged from its
usual space) and popularized by Michel Foucault both in terms of language as
well as a spatial metaphor. If utopia exists as a nowhere or imaginary space
with no connection to any existing social spaces, then heterotopias in
contrast are realities that exist and are even foundational, but in which all
other spaces are potentially inverted and contested. A mirror for instance is
simultaneously a utopia (placeless place) even as it exists in reality. But
from the standpoint of the mirror you discover your absence as well. Foucault
remarks, “The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this
place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once
absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and
absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this
virtual point which is over there.”6
In _The Order of Things_ Foucault sought to investigate the conceptual space
which makes the order of knowledge possible; in his famed reading of Borges’s
Chinese encyclopedia he argues that the impossibility involved in the
encyclopedia consists less in the fantastical status of the animals and their
coexistence with real animals such as (d) sucking pigs and (e) sirens, but in
where they coexist and what “transgresses the boundaries of all imagination,
of all possible thought, is simply that alphabetical series (a, b, c, d) which
links each of those categories to all the others.” 7 Heterotopias destabilize
the ground from which we build order and in doing so reframe the very
epistemic basis of how we know.
Foucault later developed a greater spatial understanding of heterotopias in
which he uses specific examples such as the cemetery (at once the space of the
familiar since everyone has someone in the cemetery and at the heart of the
city but also over a period of time the other city, where each family
possesses its dark resting place).8 Indeed, the paradox of heterotopias is
that they are both separate from yet connected to all other spaces. This
connectedness is precisely what builds contestation into heterotopias.
Imaginary spaces such as utopias exist completely outside of order.
Heteretopias by virtue of their connectedness become sites in which epistemes
collide and overlap. They bring together heterogeneous collections of unusual
things without allowing them a unity or order established through resemblance.
Instead, their ordering is derived from a process of similitude that produces,
in an almost magical, uncertain space, monstrous combinations that unsettle
the flow of discourse.
If the utopian ideal of the library was to bring together everything that we
know of the world then the length of its bookshelves was coterminous with the
breadth of the world. But like its predecessors in Alexandria and Babel the
project is destined to be incomplete haunted by what it necessarily leaves out
and misses. The library as heterotopia reveals itself only through the
interstices and lays bare the fiction of any possibility of a coherent ground
on which a knowledge project can be built. Finally there is the question of
where we stand once the grounds that we stand on itself has been dislodged.
The answer from my first foray into the tiny six by eight foot Mecca store to
the innumerable hours spent on [ library.nu]( library.nu) remains the same:
the heterotopic pleasure of our finite selves in infinity.
×
This essay is a part of a work I am doing for an exhibition curated by Raqs
Media Collective, Sarai Reader 09. The show began on August 19, 2012, with a
deceptively empty space containing only the proposal, with ideas for the
artworks to come over a period of nine months. See .
**Lawrence Liang** is a researcher and writer based at the Alternative Law
Forum, Bangalore. His work lies at the intersection of law and cultural
politics, and has in recent years been looking at question of media piracy. He
is currently finish a book on law and justice in Hindi cinema.
It is hard to avoid the feeling these days that the future is behind us. It’s
not so much that time has stopped, but rather that the sense of promise and
purpose that once drove historical progress has become impossible to sustain.
On the one hand, the faith in modernist, nationalist, or universalist utopias
continues to retreat, while on the other, a more immediate crisis of faith has
accompanied the widespread sense of diminishing economic prospects felt in so
many places. Not to mention...
Over the last few monsoons I lived with the dread that the rain would
eventually find its ways through my leaky terrace roof and destroy my books.
Last August my fears came true when I woke up in the middle of the night to
see my room flooded and water leaking from the roof and through the walls.
Much of the night was spent rescuing the books and shifting them to a dry
room. While timing and speed were essential to the task at hand they were also
the key hazards navigating a slippery floor...
Metahaven
## [Captives of the Cloud: Part I](/journal/37/61232/captives-of-the-cloud-
part-i/)
We are the voluntary prisoners of the cloud; we are being watched over by
governments we did not elect. Wael Ghonim, Google's Egyptian executive, said:
“If you want to liberate a society just give them the internet.” 1 But how
does one liberate a society that already has the internet? In a society
permanently connected through pervasive broadband networks, the shared
internet is, bit by bit and piece by piece, overshadowed by the “cloud.” The
Coming of the Cloud The cloud,...
Amelia Groom
## [There’s Nothing to See Here: Erasing the
Monochrome](/journal/37/61233/there-s-nothing-to-see-here-erasing-the-
monochrome/)
There was once a typist from Texas named Bette Nesmith Graham, who wasn’t very
good at her job. In 1951 she started erasing her typing mistakes with a white
tempera paint solution she mixed in her kitchen blender. She called her
invention Mistake Out and began distributing small green bottles of it to her
coworkers. In 1956 she founded the delectably named Mistake Out Company.
Shortly after, she was apparently fired from her typist job because she made a
“mistake” that she failed to cover...
Nato Thompson
## [The Last Pictures: Interview with Trevor Paglen](/journal/37/61238/the-
last-pictures-interview-with-trevor-paglen/)
In 1963 NASA launched the first communications satellite, Syncom 2, into a
geosynchronous orbit over the Atlantic Ocean. Since then, humans have slowly
and methodically added to this space-based communications infrastructure.
Currently, more than 800 spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit form a man-made
ring of satellites around Earth at an altitude of 36,000 kilometers. Most of
these spacecraft powered down long ago, yet continue to float aimlessly around
the planet. Geostationary satellites...
Claire Tancons
## [Carnival to Commons: Pussy Riot, Punk Protest, and the Exercise of
Democratic Culture](/journal/37/61239/carnival-to-commons-pussy-riot-punk-
protest-and-the-exercise-of-democratic-culture/)
Once again, the press has dismissed a popular movement as carnival—this time
not Occupy Wall Street, but the anti-Putin protests. On March 1, 2012, in a
Financial Times article titled “Carnival spirit is not enough to change
Russia,” Konstantin von Eggert wrote, “One cannot sustain [the movement] on
carnival spirit alone.” 1 A little over a week later, Reuters sought to close
the debate with an article by Alissa de Carbonnel, in which she announced,
“The carnival is over for Russia’s...
Anton Vidokle and Brian Kuan Wood
## [Breaking the Contract](/journal/37/61241/breaking-the-contract/)
1\. The Contract The Duchampian revolution leads not to the liberation of the
artist from work, but to his or her proletarization via alienated construction
and transportation work. In fact, contemporary art institutions no longer need
an artist as a traditional producer. Rather, today the artist is more often
hired for a certain period of time as a worker to realize this or that
institutional project. — Boris Groys 1 When his readymades entered the space
of art, Duchamp...
Shadow Libraries
There is nothing related.
Conversations - Shadow Libraries
Conversations
[Join the Conversation](http://conversations.e-flux.com/t/5546)
e-flux conversations is a discussion platform for e-flux readers. Click to
start a discussion of the article above.
Start the Conversation
Notes - Shadow Libraries
1
Esther Shipman and Sascha Hastings eds., _Logotopia: The Library in
Architecture Art and the Imagination,_ (Cambridge Galleries: Abc Art Books
Canada, 2008).
Go to Text
2
Alberto Manguel, “My Library” in Hastings and Shipman eds. _Logotopia, The
Library in Art and Architecture and the Imagination, (Cambridge Galleries: ABC
Art Books Canada, 2008)._
Go to Text
3
Alberto Manguel, _The Library at Night_ , (Yale University Press 2009).
Go to Text
4
Ray Hastings and Esther Shipman, eds. _Logotopia: The Library in Architecture
Art and the Imagination_. Cambridge Galleries / ABC Art Books Canada, 2008.
Go to Text
5
Jacques Rancière, _The Nights of Labour: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth
Century France,_ (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
Go to Text
6
Michel Foucault, “Different Spaces,” in _Aesthetics, Method, Epistemology_ ,
ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), 179; For Foucault on
language and heterotopias see _The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences,_ (New York: Pantheon, 1970).
Go to Text
7
Ibid, xv.
Go to Text
8
In Foucault, “Different Spaces,” which was presented as a lecture to the
_Architecture Studies Circle_ in 1967, a few years after the writing of _The
Order of Things_.
Go to Text
Esther Shipman and Sascha Hastings eds., _Logotopia: The Library in
Architecture Art and the Imagination,_ (Cambridge Galleries: Abc Art Books
Canada, 2008).
Alberto Manguel, “My Library” in Hastings and Shipman eds. _Logotopia, The
Library in Art and Architecture and the Imagination, (Cambridge Galleries: ABC
Art Books Canada, 2008)._
Alberto Manguel, _The Library at Night_ , (Yale University Press 2009).
Ray Hastings and Esther Shipman, eds. _Logotopia: The Library in Architecture
Art and the Imagination_. Cambridge Galleries / ABC Art Books Canada, 2008.
Jacques Rancière, _The Nights of Labour: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth
Century France,_ (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
Michel Foucault, “Different Spaces,” in _Aesthetics, Method, Epistemology_ ,
ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), 179; For Foucault on
language and heterotopias see _The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences,_ (New York: Pantheon, 1970).
Ibid, xv.
In Foucault, “Different Spaces,” which was presented as a lecture to the
_Architecture Studies Circle_ in 1967, a few years after the writing of _The
Order of Things_.
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.