Unglamorous Tasks: What Can Education Learn from its Political Traditions?

Extracted from e-flux

by  Nora Sternfeld

2. THE UNGLAMOROUS IN EDUCATION

In 1989, the volume Remaking History was published as part of the Dia Art Foundation’s series “Discussions in Contemporary Culture.” It discussed the question of how to address the canon in the field of art and exhibitions. In her now famous essay “Who Claims Alterity?” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak refers back to the attribution of the “other speaker” and the “native informant” and rejects the Western need for another representation of the Other. She particularly warns against narrating the refusal of rights in a way that covers up counter-narratives and counter-representations. She mistrusts the power of institutions of representation and instead proposes working on an unglamorous pedagogy of the seminar room:

In a sense our task is to make people ready to listen, and that is not determined by argument. Indirect and maddeningly slow, forever running the risk of demagogy and coercion mingled with the credulous vanity and class interest of teacher and student, it is still only institutionalized education in the human sciences that is a long-term and collective method for making people want to listen. As far as I can see, remaking (the discipline of) history has its only chance on this unglamorous and often tedious register. Therefore I propose the persistent establishment and re-establishment, the repeated consolidating in undoing, of a strategy of education and classroom pedagogy. . . . Such a strategy must speak from within the emancipatory master narratives even while taking a distance from them.15

Spivak consciously abandons both the field of representation and rapid changes in the speaker’s position to instead make her way over the slow terrain of educational processes, where one should work on what can be heard, on changing what can be said, seen, and done. This seems to me to be an opportunity to address the canon without immediately closing the resulting openings, precisely because it is neither heroic nor glamorous.

Starting from Spivak’s discussions, I would like to address here the educational aspects that are part of the experiences and practices of mediation work. I will do so using examples from the actual practice of trafo.K, an office for cultural mediation and education in Vienna, where Renate Höllwart, Elke Smodics, and I have for the past ten years worked on collaborative projects at the intersection between education and the production of knowledge.16

It is the “unglamorous,” which I position as a counter to the trend towards the fashionable and representative in the curatorial, that the following approaches share.

                                  photo: trafo.K.

The Tedious

Schooling and education take place daily. Usually, they are not so interesting. In our projects, we repeatedly ask the question “Is that so?” in an effort to trigger a process of unlearning the things we take for granted, as well as those that our audience does. In the process, we create contexts and ask questions of ourselves, of the institutions in which and with which we work, and of society. Sometimes these questions do not seem very rebellious. Sometimes they provoke our audience, sometimes the institutions. They are not very spectacular, they do not always lead to images that can be shown, and often they are not sexy and need time to develop. We cannot even be sure of whether they really have a lasting effect. And yet it is precisely this tedious aspect of the educational that seems to reach the place of everyday life, where battles over understanding and hegemony take place just as much as they do in the spectacular.

The Disagreeable

In educational projects that cross social fields, for example, we respond to circumstances and create spaces in which many things that we would rather not hear about are discussed. Far from creating spaces for disagreement, in Jacques Rancière’s sense (as politics of dissent that are challenging the logics of power), we intend them primarily as spaces of non-unity, of the heterogeneity of views, positions, and approaches. It is a place where forms of taste, opinions, and worldviews that transgress an individual’s habitual boundaries can encounter one another. Here people often say things that seem totally impossible to us. For example, we encounter racism, anti-Semitism, and sexism that are not legitimized by the attitudes of polite bourgeois society and that seem to scare us far more than long-standing racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic structures, which have become part of our habitual way of seeing ourselves. How can we deal with this? How can one reveal the structures of racism, heteronormativity, and social distinction within which these things can be said and, conversely, within which they seem unacceptable? We try to create a space in which it is possible to come to terms with these things together. There are several traps and types of failure we encounter. I will mention only two in the form of a paradox:

1. We sometimes use our bourgeois, authoritative right to speak from a position of power in order to prevent this sort of thing from legitimately becoming present in the room.

2. We sometimes allow something we deplore to stand in the room in order to prevent it from undermining the discussion we have managed to achieve, thereby performing a paradox inherent within educational practice.

                                       photo: trafo.K.

This can be illustrated by the example of a wall of posters we developed with apprentices in a public space in front of the exhibition “Gastarbajteri” (Immigrant Labor) at the Wien Museum in 2004. Our discourse concerns the questions of the apprentices. Creating a common space for the un-learning of powerful foregone conclusions sometimes worked well, and sometimes not so well—we realized that the apprentices often did not agree with our position. We tried to discuss it in some moments and we silenced it in others. The work in the public space that we did together was a result of this process: on one hand it refers to an art discourse in the public space featuring critical reflections on Austrian racism and media; on the other hand it is a testimonial of the simultaneous, successful negotiations with our interlocutors in the group and a failure to arrive at an acceptable “position”; and the process as a whole runs the risk of a certain instrumentalization of these young people.

The Compromised

Both working with people who do not necessarily share our opinion and working with socially relevant themes often put us on uncertain ground. The important thing here seems to be to constantly come to terms with our own outside involvements. By doing so, our approaches, the research that results from collaborating with different parties, and their questions, constantly raise new questions. The tedious work consists in tolerating the fact that shared critical processes can never be brought to a conclusion.

The “Versteinerte Feindschaften” (Petrified Enmities) youth project organized by trafo.K (Renate Höllwart, Charlotte Martinz-Turek, and Claudia Ehgartner) together with the artists Alexander Jöchl and Hermann Lohninger and students from the Handelsakademie Lambach (Lambach Business Academy), as part of the 2003 Festival der Regionen (Festival of Regions), took a war memorial in Lambach, in Upper Austria, as the point of departure for grappling with the history of the place, its Nazi past, and current debates on coming to terms with the past and constructions of history. The project took as its theme hidden and open enmities and how they are inscribed in public spaces. The young participants developed, in cooperation with the artists, interventions in public space that offered alternative perspectives to official history.

A great deal of discussion took place over the course of the project, throughout which the young participants began to ask more questions, and in turn became increasingly critical. Nevertheless, some of their questions remained problematic. Some things they took away with them: in information sheets on the history of Nazi crimes, they reproduced the language by which a post-Nazi society preserves itself, in which its narratives of the death marches emphasized the Jewish capos rather than the Nazi criminals. We tried to reflect on these aspects of the project, and realized that regardless of the actual outcomes, it was the very ability to take part in such uncomfortable discussions—that is, through the process rather than the result—that underpinned the project.

To the extent that educational projects are always located in social circumstances, they are also determined by them. The goal is to create distance, attack the canon, the dominant school of thought, or history, but it can never succeed completely—these elements cannot be replaced, but they can be engaged with. This feeling is sometimes uncomfortably palpable. In a certain sense, the educational has a lot to do with being prepared to allow oneself to engage with the impossibility of remaining “clean” in the process of doing so (as if one was ever clean to begin with).

The Unsound

trafo.K was invited to do a site-specific education project at the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Genève. Together with the curators—the Swiss mediation collective microsillons—we decided to work with a group of thirty thirteen-year-old schoolchildren from the German school in Geneva. The opening was in November 2009; the exhibition was extended and will continue to run until February 14, 2010. Whereas we represented an approach that was both open and conceptual, and wanted to treat the students as education experts in order to develop possible forms of action based on their perspectives, the students themselves preferred to tinker and build. We tried, as best we could, to bring the exhibition and its critical questions concerning education into our discussion. On the basis of our collaboration, the children developed various models based on exhibition works and themes. The results were neither very reflexive nor very conceptual. But they did suggest some imprecise and wild forms for addressing critical themes of the exhibition in sometimes open, sometimes uncritical ways. The pupils reacted to the artworks in the exhibition by rebuilding their ideas in their own way, and we called this a form of “wild translation.”

more and source here: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/14/61302/unglamorous-tasks-what-can-education-learn-from-its-political-traditions/

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