countercampus

Counter-Campuses within the Universal University by Chris Gilbert

Today perhaps nothing could be more clear – if undertheorized or only beginning to be theorized – than that we live in a period of “general intellect.” That is to say, a period in which the bulk of labor – of production and reproduction – is of the immaterial or intellectual variety. This condition alone, which may be associated in general with post-Fordism, was brought to quantum new heights with the service and information economies of the 1980s and 1990s, and it has explosive effects on the university, on its social position and even on the internal disciplinary divisions that it both relies on and enforces.

Consider the following thesis: whereas the university, as a site of knowledge production in a culture that produced materials or produced via materials – paradigmatically in the factory – was once a determinate space in the productive field, at present (in the Global North) we could all be said to live and operate within the expanded field of the university. It would follow that this “universal university” would be the emergent paradigm for (knowledge) production. This thought immediately raises the question of what happens to the institution of the university – call it the non-universal university – within this larger field of knowledge production. Does it become defunct? Does it persist as state of obsolescence? Or does it, perhaps along with obsolescence and various forms of dereliction, reinscribe knowledge within a community – a community that can be, on the one hand, either restrictive and class-driven or on the other hand inclusive, provisional, and emancipatory?

In this light it may be useful to consider the now vast number of artists and artists groups that have, within the field of general intellect, of immaterial production, chosen to create communities of learners. Often these learning communities operate in ways that are in marked contrast – hence in a way “counter” to – the class-based, hierarchical, arborescent communities of what is left of an increasingly corporatized (non-universal) university. They are likewise distinguished by their promoting non-heirachical, non-instumentalized, or peer-to peer learning, while at the same time engaging with broader issues concerning knowledge production, ownership, and circulation.

The following random topics may serve as useful beginning points for a discussion:

1. The expanded space of the university, which has occurred with the expansion of immaterial labor, can been understood through one of its seemingly privileged sites: information technology and especially the internet, which is both the site of much immaterial production and of open knowledge sharing among peers (such as that which sometimes occurs at hacklabs and more often on wiki pages). (Unfortunately this privileged site is often turned into fetish, that is to say, as the site rather than a site of such work). By the same token, the library, which was historically the topographic focus of the university – as is evident from looking in university campus maps such as those assembled in the Christian Phillip Mueller’s project Branding the Campus – now has at best that role symbolically. It has been replaced by the internet archive, a “library” of users that are both “inside” and “outside” the university, and learning today suffers from this displacement to the extent that the internet has become regulated by commercial, consumerist forms of knowledge and dissemination (advertising).

2. Artist-run self-institutions seem to have important points of contact with Antonio Negri’s “soviets of mass intellectuality.” In Empire Negri writes, “The first of these conditions derives from the tendential hegemony of immaterial labor and thus from the increasingly profound reappropriation of technico-scientific knowledge by the proletariat [italics mine]. On this basis, technico-scientific knowledge can no longer be posed as a mystified function of command, separate from the body of mass intellectuality (p252).” Negri goes on: “The destruction of the state can be envisaged only via a concept of the reappropriation of the social essence of production, of the instruments of comprehension of social and production cooperation.” Both of the above seem quite applicable the new self-institutions. Negri concludes: “Here, therefore, is where the Soviets of mass intellectuality are born.”

3. The role of art today in the architectonic of the university may be compared, somewhat problematically, to the historical role of philosophy. First, it is important to note that both art and philosophy are often seen as privileged sites of pedagogy. Kant, writing more than two centuries ago about the proper architecture of the university, described philosophy as a lower faculty whose role it was nevertheless to monitor the higher faculties of law and theology. In this role, philosophy’s independence was intimately related to its powerlessness. Is it possibly that art occupies a similar relation to other “higher” discourse such as politics, economics, sociology – that it is, at once their handmaiden and queen (to use Kant’s terms).

5. Today, there are many signs (albeit quite non-isomorphic) of rupture with the liberal idea of the autonomous university. For example, Venezeulan president Hugo Chaves has recently embarked on an initiative to create his own “counter-campuses,” university level programs that would counter the capitalist orientation of most university trained intellectuals. By contrast, in the U.S, misnamed groups operating under the banner of “academic freedom” have laid out programs to review and curtail university curicula around the country (and have promoted their cause through means that are reminiscent of 1950s blacklisting). These initiatives, the one creative – opening a new field – and the other constricting, are hardly symmetrical. The one says in effect that “another world is possible” while the other works to undermine even the ability to arrive at such an enunciation.

Stephan Dillemuth/Nils Norman By Chris Gilbert

In a fictional interview with Werner von Delmont set in 2033 – occasioned by the aging educator’s overdosing on ginkgo pills – Dillemuth’s professorial persona makes numerous direct assaults on the stranglehold of corporate power. Yet equally telling are his asides that reflect critically on his own involvement. At one point, his interviewee and son Hans-Dieter has just described how at school, under the influence of corporate power, courses on “Enterprise Strategies,” “Team Abilities,” and “Individual Initiatives” have replaced other topics; he then recalls how his father “freaked out” when they were supposed to set up its own private company during the summer holidays instead of making a trip to Italy. Von Delmont replies: “Indeed taking a holiday from Neo-liberalism, just did not seem possible any more…”

Von Delmont’s words, which might be taken as an offhand remark, are in fact doubly reflective (insofar as the “holiday” mind-set may be seen as integral to neoliberal thinking), and they ring true of Dillemuth’s and Nils Norman’s practices both individually and working together. Operating within the condition of pervasive neo-liberalism – the inability to take leave from the reign of COINAGE (to use a favorite term of von Delmont) – provides the foundation for their intersecting investigations into the academy and its dubious relation to a corporate public. The idea signals, for one, how the moebius strip-like character of the neoliberal world is properly an occasion for much ambivalence. This is a world in which one’s own self-initiative, autonomous reading club, or learning center is just as likely to end up generating a new counter public with attendant forms of counter-knowledge, as it is to end up inspiring new enterprise strategies, generating profit for capital, and additionally – perhaps on a tertiary level of capitulation – bringing in real estate developers to recoup its value through processes of gentrification. Such a closed circuit situation rightly, of course, brings with it not just ambivalence but also vigilance – a range of strategies that exceed the flatfootedness of most critical art which is so easily assimilated to profit.

The artists’ critical self-vigilance comes fully into view in the manner and methodology of their current project, which grows out of a dialogue that the two carried out in 1997. That exchange, which took place over the internet, parodied key artworld figures. Unpublishable for that reason, it has had a long afterlife, resulting in a series of satirical drawings, an array of plaster sculptures, and most recently Brecht & Cruickshank Shnitzelshank, a life-sized model of a bohemian café said to be from “London's murky pre-culture-regen-boho zone of the outer reaches of East London… where the remains of the day mingle and mosh.” Insofar as much of Baltimore is not unlike East London – meaning that in both sites’ bohemian mingling is likely to include real-estate speculators or at least their plans – it is appropriate that their current project, a Bohemian Research Garrett, picks up on the Cruickshank project and its double-edged approach to bohemia. Posited as both a site of meaningful self-determination and probable cooptatation, the somewhat absurdist bohemia of the research garret alludes to a lineage of romantic depictions of the artsy life from Spitzweg to Puccini, even as it connects aptly to its location in a city where newly dubbed art districts lure youth and well-meaningly radical artists into top-down development schemes.

As is illustrated by the garret, Dillemuth and Norman’s strategies for confronting the threat of cooptation, though clearly in the service of a critical project, often call into play strategies that fly under the flag of the playful. In Dillemuth’s case, his practice is considered research, a process which he scrupulously distinguishes from investigation by claiming that research makes advances in the very field one is researching. Hence artistic research would make a contribution to the arts and would as well be itself artistic. His decision to frame his work as ‘artistic research’ – and locating it within the field of arts – not only distinguishes it from a host of artist practicing investigations into other fields yet not making contributions to those fields, but also allows him to favor artistic or literary means that privilege a host of framing devices, performance strategies, and fictional personae over the more usual information aesthetic of research-oriented artists. The result is a practice that is happily irregular, often amateur in appearance, and with its build-in self-criticality is quite resistant to being picked up by the normalizing flows of capital and of affirmative professionalized art.

In a comparable way, Norman’s work, which often involves utopian projections that he calls ‘Proposals” framed as blue prints for better K-marts, schools, redesigned parks, or info hubs employs a complex “ironic” delivery mechanism. The utopian aspiration which these proposals wear on their sleeve is employed critically as lever against the present, while the project most often remains clearly unrealizable. Norman’s visual gambits in these works are made more complicated by texts that seem to offer more direct, even first person critique of the manipulation of the urban environment. Despite both artists' sophisticated gamesmanship, their work is hardly of the artworld parlor game variety. In different ways for each, an allegorical or referential mechanism operates allowing their work to reach far beyond itself and the artistic sphere. Norman manipulates schematic signs – blue prints and diagrams – whereas Dillemuth engages in a process called dramatization, which proposes to address the world within the theatrum mundi of the stage. Both the humor and referential capacities of the work operate in tandem in their practices: if humor especially in the guise of satire allows one to poke holes through capital, referentiality extends its reach. Hence, while as von Delmont rightly maintains, it may not be possible to take a holiday from capital, it may be possible to create a holiday in it. Further, insofar as this holiday reaches beyond itself through the referential capacities of drama or schematization, the critique’s scope is enhanced considerably.

- Werner von Delmont, Corporate Rokoko and the End of the Civic Project (Copenhagen: Pork Salad Press, n.d.), p.15. From a wall text in the exhibition “Now and 10 Years After” at Kunstwerke, Berlin, 2004. This group exhibition addressed the relation of the artworld to processes of gentrification. Dillemuth views bohemia as a matrix that can be interprested in two ways: as offering the possibly of self-determined life on the one hand, and on the other bringing in problems such as cooptation. From a telephone interview with the author August 5, 2005. Telephone interview, August 5, 2005. TJ Demos points out that if the work is not realizable, this is not for technical or economic reasons. “The Cruel Dialectic: on the Work of Nils Norman” Grey Room 13 (Fall 2003) pp 33-50. Demos’s principal concern in this article is the complex, ironic delivery mechanism of Norman’s work. He observes that the work “distances itself from the very forms of criticality it evokes” and points out “this art attacks not only its targeted object… but also reflexively revisits its own form, self-consciously complicating its own mode of transmission.” Another, related account of irony is given by Dillemuth who traces the contemporary understanding of irony to a misunderstanding of Romantic irony by Hegel. The earlier mode of irony, which is the one that Dillemuth attempts to deploy, referred to self-critical “moment” built into one’s assertions. Dillemuth locates in Hegel the solidification of this concept into its contemporary usage, which removes the self from criticism.

Pressetext

countercampus - bma - baltimore / Cram Session4 29
Kurator: Chris Gilbert

mit Nils Norman, Stephan Dillemuth

http://www.societyofcontrol.com/dillemuth/countercampus/