[b]Just after[/b]
We gathered in Berlin in the last week of May, with summer storms raging in the background. We gathered under the aegis of »Non Aligned Initiatives in Education Culture«¹ bringing together a wide range of those involved in differing notions of education; academics, activists, students, artists, curators, union organisers and many others. We gathered in the name of no one, unauthorised and un-sponsored by any given educational institution and motivated largely by an emergent understanding that within the concept of »education« was the potential to think forwards, a potential that is largely blocked in other discussions. It was fairly clear to us that those who would gather together were largely propelled by curiosity, a curiosity not just about who would be there and what they would say but also about what a gathering of very different thought and investment might bring us in its interstices. Lurking somewhere in the background to the project was also a question; if a space was signalled around »education«, who would it draw towards it, and would this manifest some form of a »politics to »come«?

For some time we have been aware that much of our work goes into producing the subjects for our work. The already-agreed-upon subjects that circulate in our various intellectual and professional worlds work largely to reproduce existing thought in slightly varied formats. But subjects are not just the content of an argument; they are also those who are drawn to them, those who think that these subjects will in turn also draw something out of them.

Our gathering took the form of a summit, and a summit of the non-aligned at that. It borrows from the historical moment in which various Third World countries made their collective presence felt on the global stage by refusing the binary polarisation of the world map dictated by the super powers. Frankly it would hardly be reasonable to make such claims for our relatively modest project, but nevertheless »non-alignment« does hold out some form of promise. It is important that it be seen not as the abandonment of a position but rather as the coming together of irreconcilable differences. This movement of differences towards one another, this sharing of a momentary platform is not aimed at resolution, or at finding common ground or at a series of compromised sub-positions. Instead it functions as a set of mutual recognitions; those who are self-organised and self-authorised, whose lives are marked by the freedom to invent their positions and by the risks of precarity and ephemerality, encounter those who struggle to free up the working of institutions and make them function productively beyond their limits and without allowing them to be imprisoned by regulated self-enclosure and self-reference. While learning from the gesture of politicians like Nehru, Nasser and Tito who forged the political language of »non-alignment«, our form of »non-alignment« is not programmatic and it does not aim at producing a power coalition. The gesture itself is what is at stake. Giorgio Agamben has said; »What characterises gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted, but rather something is being endured and supported. The gesture, in other words, opens the sphere of ethos as the more proper sphere of that which is human«². It seemed really important at this moment, this moment of complaint and disappointed resignation, to make a gesture and open up an ethos.

[b]Just Before[/b]
I want to start with a story – I teach at a university in London in a department of Visual Cultures, which is a non-field and so our guest lectures often reference kind of non-subjects. A few weeks ago we had a talk by a performance theorist named Joe Kelleher who described a performance he attended at a festival by a trans-gendered Norwegian performer, Ane Lang, which one could only describe as clunky; with lanky hair and clad in brown, the performer emerged from a bower of sad autumn leaves and sang a few low-key bars, accompanied by two other equally inward musicians; the whole thing was unspectacular, not entertaining, not uplifting, not rewardingly melancholy and introverted, just clunky and a bit puzzling. Kelleher said that it made him think of what kind of spectator position it put you in, to be the recipient of a weak performance, probably a calculatedly weak performance, though he did not know this for sure. After we had a conversation he sent me the following sentences: »The performance fails to live up to itself. This gentle and persistent attempt to be good leaks into the dramatic situation, issuing in a slow compassion on my part, a compassion which, almost inexplicably, alights upon the characters, those anachronistic figures of the theatre, whom this particular theatre, in its feebleness, never looked capable of summoning to life«(Nicholas Ridout).³

Joe Kelleher’s notion of »weak performance« immediately made me think of the possibilities of a »weak education«. When so much of education rhetoric is expressed in terms of being a corrective and a compensation; society is racist and sexist and unjust and globally ignorant and whatever else ails our societies, and education is forever positioned as the antidote to all of this – through it we will become better; better thinkers, better people etc. Such is a strong education; it rouses our spirits and points out a better way.

In a sense we came together in this summit in the name of »weak education«, a discourse of education that is not reactive, does not want to engage in everything that we know full well to be wrong with education; its reproduction of capitalist logics, its drive towards dominant coherences, its constant commoditisation, its over bureaucratisation, its ever increasing emphasis on predictable outcomes etc. Because that places education as forever reactively addressing the woes of the world, and we would want to say education is in and of the world, it is not a response to crisis but part of its ongoing complexities, it produces realities rather than reacting to them, and many of these are low-key and uncategorisable and non-heroic and certainly not uplifting but nevertheless immensely creative. Above all else the creativity of education takes the form of providing the spaces and discourses of being able to live out complex contradictions in neither acceptance nor rejection, but as constant lived realities.

[b]Why education and why now?[/b]
To begin with as a way of countering the eternal lament of how bad things are; how bureaucratised, how homogenised, how understaffed and under-funded, how awful the demands of the Bologna Accord with its homogenising drive, how sad the loss of local traditions it is dictating, how impossible it is to exit knowledge as a capitalist mode of production. This eternal lament, not without its justifications, this voice of endless complaint serves to box education within the confines of a small community of students and education professionals. So how, to paraphrase Roger Buergel, can education become more? How can it be more than the site of shrinkage and disappointment?

And why now? Because this moment of the Bologna Accord and all its obvious discontents is also the moment when we see an unprecedented number of self-organised forums outside institutions and self-empowered departures inside institutions. Not since the late 1960s have we experienced this duality of inside/outside with such a productive force and it becomes one of the defining characteristics of our cultural and political moment that these seemingly opposite modes reference and signal one another constantly. One could read the exposition of self-organised critical collectives within contemporary art exhibitions, or the emulation of self-generated learning models within established institutions, or the mutual uses of open source technologies as yet another instance in the eternal appropriation and commoditisation of art and of education. But one could also see it as the inevitable slippery movement of knowledge and the impossibility of fixing or locating it.

Another reason for »education« now is that education is by definition processual – involving a low-key transformative process, it embodies duration, and a working-out of a contested common ground. And yet one of the great contributions that »education« can make to our social and political lives lies in the ability for that contested ground to remain unresolved in the classical sense of one position dominating another. As in the world of artistic practices, so elsewhere, the demise of an object-based culture has required the articulation of processes that are not outcome-based, that do converge, yet not to a single entity as their unified conclusion. Within education as a model for a cultural practice, the possibility of both taking time and ending elsewhere or in another mode than that expected is built into the proceedings.

Propelled from within rather than boxed in from the outside, education becomes the site of odd and unexpected coming-togethers – shared curiosities, shared subjectivities, shared sufferings, shared passions - congregate around the promise of a subject, of an insight, of a creative possibility.

At its best, education forms collectivities, many fleeting collectivities that ebb and flow, converge and fall apart. Small ontological communities that are propelled by desire and curiosity, cemented together by the kind of empowerment that comes from intellectual challenge, from political challenge or from social challenge. The point about coming together in curiosity is that we then don’t have to come together in identity; we the readers of J. L. Nancy, encounter we the migrant or we the culturally displaced or we the sexually dissenting, all of them being one and the same »we«. So at this moment in which we are so preoccupied with how to participate, how to take part, in the limited ground that remains open to us for participating, education signals rich possibilities of coming together and participating in an arena not yet marked.

[b]Needing Another Vocabulary[/b]
Having liberated myself from the arena of strong, redemptive, missionary education, I want to create a new terminological framework in this field with the following terms:
To begin with, by replacing the drive towards a reorganisation of education for better distribution, with notions of potentiality and actualisation; the idea that there might already be within us endless possibility that we might never be able to bring to successful fruition. Instead of successful fruition, »education« becomes the site of this duality, of an understanding of »I can« as always, already yoked to an eternal »I can’t«⁴. One of the most interesting aspects of potentiality is that it is as much the potential for not doing as it is for doing. If this duality is not paralysing, which I do not think it is, then it has possibilities for an understanding of what it is about »education« that can actually become a model for »being in the world«. It means dismissing much of the instrumentalisation that seems to go hand-in-hand with education, much of the managerialism that is associated with a notion of »training« for this or that profession or market. Letting go of many of the »understandings of education« as a training ground whose only permitted outcome is a set of concrete objects or practices. It allows for the inclusion of notions of both fallibility and actualisation into a practice of teaching and learning, which seems to me to be an interesting entry point into thinking creativity in relation to different moments of coming into being.

Perhaps there is an excitement in shifting our perception away from an educational and training ground which is not pure preparation, pure resolution. Instead it might encompass fallibility, understand it as a form of knowledge production rather than of its disappointment.

Equally I would like »education« to be the grounds for a shift from emergency culture to one of urgency – emergency is always reactive to a set of state imperatives which produce an endless chain of crises, mostly of our own making. So many of us have taken part in miserable panels about »the crisis in education« during which all the deplorable conditions under which we work are produced as an emergency to which we must react, presumably by providing some form of »emergency relief«. Instead urgency is the possibility of producing for ourselves an understanding of what the crucial issues are, so that they become driving forces. The morning after GW Bush was re-elected president, my classroom moved swiftly from amazement to a discussion of why electoral forums were not the arena of political participation and what these might actually be. Herein lies a move from an emergency to an urgency, not just the specifics of what happened but an understanding that such crises confront us with questions of how to enter the arena of participation differently.

Perhaps most importantly I want to think about education not through the endless demands that are foisted on both culture and education to be accessible; i.e. to give a quick and easy entry point to whatever complexity we might talk about, Tate Modern as an entertainment machine celebrating critique–lite comes to mind here. Instead I want to think of education as all of the places in which we have access. And access as I understand it is the ability to formulate your own questions as opposed to those that are posed to you in the name of an open and participatory democratic process, for it is clear that those who formulate the questions produce the playing field. More than anything else, education equips us with the possibility of access; not to jobs and status etc. but to the processes of informed engagement. This access of which I am trying to speak is not a point of entry, but rather an understanding of how the presumed simplicity of transparent knowledge actually masks the extreme difficulty of gaining points of engagement.

And finally, to think education as the arena in which »challenge« is written into our daily activity, where we learn and perform critically informed challenges that don’t aim at undermining or contradicting or taking over. When political parties, or law courts or any other authority challenges something, it is with the aim of delegitimising and offering another solution or position, of establishing absolute rights and absolute wrongs. In education, when we challenge we are saying there is room for imagining another way of thinking, of doing so in a non-conflictual way so we don’t expend our energies in pure opposition and reserve some for imagining another way. This is not to dismiss the necessary »agonism« of any political community, to use Chantal Mouffe’s term, but rather to understand challenge not as a reactive mode but as part of the habit of thought. At a conference I attended a couple of years ago, Jaad Isaac, a Palestinian geographer, produced transportation maps of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank that had an almost mind-blowing clarity to them. It made me think of what gargantuan energies had to be put into turning the evil chaos of that occupation into the crystalline clarity of those maps. Energies that were needed far more urgently in order to invent Palestine, to help in the process of not just fighting for it but actually making it come into being - but in their pristine clarity the maps performed exactly that function, a challenge to the expenditure of energies rather than simply a response to an awful situation.

If education can be the release of our energies from what needs to be opposed to what can be imagined, or at least some kind of negotiation of that, then perhaps we have an education that is more.

 

 

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