In January 2010 we organized three seminars about knowledge, how to make it more attractive and living. Those seminars have been followed up by tutorials in which the participating students developed some of the ideas mentioned in the seminars before.

Seminars and tutorials were meant to realize a bit more of freedom and space to develop and test our own ideas. However, we did not want our work to be completely marginal. On the contrary, we wanted it to be a viable alternative to the official curriculum that, we felt, is deteriorating more and more; deteriorating in terms of quality and social atmosphere. So we have organized the tutorials such that credit points could be obtained.

On June 15th we want to present the results of the tutorials in public. They will be about how to construct knowledge in a more stimulating and attractive way. Four students will – stimulated by their reading of Spinoza- briefly present their tutorial products. Teacher of the tutorial, Fabiola Jara Gomez (UU), will give a preface to this with a talk about respectively ‘Why is it so difficult to organize academic education in an attractive way’ and ‘What can be done for improvement.’

After the fore mentioned talks we will invite everyone to participate freely in a sort of teach in – were we teach ourselves – about anything that needs to be discussed in the context of the present university and its crisis.

The Common Seminar and Kritische Studenten Utrecht

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Conversation and presentation of the book
TOWARD A GLOBAL AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY

Cognitive Labor, The Production of Knowledge and Exodus from the Education Factory
(New York: Autonomedia, 2009) edited by the Edu-factory collective [publisher's website]

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Edu-Factory is a transnational collective engaged with the transformations of the global university and conflicts in knowledge
production. The website of the global network (www.edu-factory.org) connects investigations and reports from university struggles.

Jos Scheren will interview:

• Amit Basole, University of Massachussets, Vidya Ashram, Varanasi
• Aetzel Griffioen, Erasmus Universiteit, Economics on the Border, Rotterdam
• Wessel de Boer, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Universitaire Activisten
• Kyra Weaver, Universiteit Utrecht, Kritische Studenten Utrecht

Many voices have risen to defend the integrity of the University from the recent interventions of the European governments. They say that universities are threatened by public expenditures cuttings, the privatization of education and the commoditization of knowledge. The implementation of the ‘Bologna Process’ is taken as one of the most dangerous threats to the university as we are used to know it.

But should the university ‘as we are used to know it’ become the object of a rescue operation?

The time has come to question the very concept of University, as the factory of universally valid and authoritative knowledge. It is clear that the university, which is said to be at risk in Europe, has being an instrument of destruction rather than of production of knowledge in Asia, Africa and the Americas.

This university is about to be destroyed. The only question is: who will destroy this university? Those academic managers who under the disguise of ‘necessary cuts’ and ‘efficiency targets’ are basically enlarging their own profitable/parasitical positions? Or those who are seeking to construct common knowledge: those capable of inventing different ways of learning, using different languages, inside and outside the academia?

The old university as an ivory tower is about to disappear. Will it all end in an ecological disaster where no knowledge can ever be developed or will it be something different that we do not yet fully know but that for sure has to be constructed in common?

Further reading

• Amit Basole, ‘Eurocentrism, the University and multiplicity of knowledge production sites‘, in Edu-factory mailing list, April 2007
• Amit Basole, ‘Some reflections on knowledge hierarchies and the autonomous university‘, in Edu-factory mailing list, January 2008
• The Double Crisis, zero issue of the Edu-factory web journal

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This event is organised by The Common Seminar.

To join or get information about future events, please subscribe our mailing list.

Date: January 13, 20 and 27  (2010)
Time: 19.00 – 21.30

Place: Room B - Ruppert Gebouw
Street: Heidelberglaan 2 de Uithof, Utrecht
Directions: bus 12 or 11 from Central Station.

The Ruppert building is best reached through
the entrance of the Van Unnik building .

Producing something new is a joyful event, which comes from a continuous composition of ideas between brains. This living knowledge escapes somewhere and somehow measurement and control. But despite its nature, knowledge in universities is today trapped into the rigid organization of curricula, measured through multiple-choice question exams and study points, and research subordinated to immediate application and profitability. This seminar will provide the tools to understand how knowledge is produced in common and how – and to what extend – it can be captured by controlling powers. Furthermore, the seminar itself will be an attempt to observe living knowledge in action. Think of the word ‘brainstorm’. If you try to understand and change the situation you are in and you need to invent something new, it will always be storming in your body. This continuing storm is what makes knowledge live. The seminar is an effort to organize, to construct the storm.

Please subscribe our discussion list at: http://lists.factoryofthecommon.org

Literature As introduction for the whole seminar, see: HARDT, M. ‘The Common in Communism’ (2009) [online]
Materials for ‘The Art of Living Knowledge’ [download]

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January 13
THE ART OF LIVING KNOWLEDGE: COMMON NOTIONS
Dr Fabiola Jara, Department of Cultural Anthropology Utrecht University

It’s an art to combine an idea that you made for a particular situation with a new idea that also may come up. You have to improvise because you are getting into new land and you have to improvise consistently. This consistent improvisation is needed to protect yourself against what is threatening you and what you have made in common with others. How to protect yourself and at the same time how to create, that is an art. And it is an art that can help you to free yourself from the deadly quantified knowledge production of the academic world. So the first workshop will be about how to become an artist, a craftsman in the art of living knowledge. A partial suggestion how to get there, will come from one the greatest and sweetest philosophers of the world, Spinoza. Fabiola Jara will try to provide answers to the rest of the questions.

Literature
DELEUZE, G. ‘Letter to Reda Bensmaia’, in Negotiations. 1972-1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
HARDT, M. Gilles Deleuze. An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 95-111.

For an introduction to Spinoza
JARA, F. and SCHEREN, J. Het Vrije Denken en Handelen volgens Benedictus de Spinoza [download]

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January 20
THE POSSIBILITIES AND THE IMPOSSIBILITIES OF CAPTURING LIVING KNOWLDGE
Dr. Jos Scheren, non academic philosopher.

There is always something like living knowledge active, you may not even know. But almost as active as the living knowledge is its capturing by powers that do not produce but want to own. They – and they that is all kinds of academic bureaucracies- limit, interrupt, quantify, steal the stream of living knowledge. So this workshop is about our adversaries, how they work, how they organize their power, how they dispossess. In other words, the workshop is about something frightening. It is about capital. We will try to construct in this workshop a useful concept of capital that might help us to develop a better understanding of our actual situation. Partly will that bring us to an old comrade by the name of Marx. We will borrow from him whatever we need and we will use him selfishly. And for the rest, we have to go beyond him.

Literature
HARDT, M. & NEGRI, A. Multitude. War and Democracy in the age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), pp. 140-153.
MARX, K. The Grundrisse, chapter ‘Production, Consumption, Distribution, Exchange (Circulation)’. [online]

Seminar audio (ogg): part 1 | part 2
Notes for seminar ii [download]

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January 27
NOT PRIVATE, NOT PUBLIC. TOWARDS A COMMON MODE OF PRODUCTION
Amir Djalali, Berlage Institute, Rotterdam.

The idea of private property seems natural to us. But in fact the history of its creation was written in “letters of blood and fire”. The project of the public – indeed not in a very good shape nowadays – was an attempt to discipline and concentrate this violence, not to erase it. Beyond the false alternatives between private and public, we will try to trace the history of the common mode of production, and to show its power today.

Literature
MARX, K. Capital, Volume I (New York: The Modern Library, 1906), chapters 26-27, pp. 784-804. [online]
DE ANGELIS, M. ’Separating the Doing and the Deed: Capital and the Continuous Character of Enclosures’, Historical Materialism, vol. 12, no. 2 (2004). [online]
CAFFENTZIS, G. ‘A Tale of Two Conferences: Globalization, the Crisis of Neoliberalism and Question of the Commons’ (2004). [online]

“As was the factory, so now is the university. Where once the factory was a paradigmatic site of struggle between workers and capitalists, so now the university is a key space of conflict, where the ownership of knowledge, the reproduction of the labour force, and the creation of social and cultural stratifications are all at stake.” A few years ago, in its manifesto, the Edu-factory collective underlined the productive and conflictive dimension of the contemporary university.

But in fact the university does not at all function like a factory, and we are not nostalgic for the struggles of the past. This statement was rather the indication of a political problem. If we begin with the incommensurable spatio-temporal differences between the actual functions of the university and those of the factory, what are the political stakes of their comparison? In other words: how can the problem of organization be rethought in the aftermath of the demise of its traditional forms such as the union and the political party?

Today the economic crisis has opened new spaces to rethink the function of the university and the production of knowledge itself on a global scale. In other words, we have the chance to rethink the raise of the global university, as well as its crisis. Within Edu-factory, we refer to this as the double crisis. On the one hand it is an acceleration of the crisis specific to the university that marks its end, the inevitable result of its eroded epistemological status; on the other hand it is also the crisis of postfordist conditions of labor and value, many of which are circulaited through the university.

“We won’t pay for your crisis”: this was the slogan of Italian “Anomalous Wave”, that is, the refusal to pay the cost of economic crisis and the crisis of university itself. The slogan was translated in other struggles, in different forms but with a common goal. Starting from this point, we want to outline this double crisis from a global perspective. From India to Brazil, from US to Europe, we want to focusing on different experiences to think about the production of a transnational common space of debate and action.

PROGRAM

Venue: Rome, Università ‘La Sapienza’, Facoltà di Lettere, Aula 1 [Map]
Date: Thursday, 11 June 2009

The Rise of the Global  University and its Crisis

Morning session: 14.00-16.30 hr
Introduction: Claudia Bernardi, Edufactory collective

• Andrew Ross, New York University
• Stefano Harney, Queen Mary University of London
• Morgan Adamson, University of Minnesota
• Discussion

The Global Struggles within the Crisis

Afternoon session: 16.30-19.30 hr
Introduction: Isabella Pinto - Lettere in onda

• Dillip  Kumar Dash, University of Hyderabad
  
• Pedro Barbosa Mendes, Uninomade Brazil
  
• Christopher Newfield, University of California Santa Barbara
• Final discussion

BIOGRAPHIES

Andrew Ross [webpage] is the chair of the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. He is also the author of numerous books, such as No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and its Hidden Costs (2002), Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade-Lessons from Shanghai (2006) and Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Time (2009).

Stefano Harney [webpage] teaches Strategy at Queen Mary University of London where he is Director of Global Learning for the School of Business and Management. He published State Work: Public Administration and Mass Intellectuality (2006).

Morgan Adamson is a PhD student at the department of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature of the University of Minnesota. She wrote the essay “The Financialization of Student Life: Five Propositions on Student Debt” (Polygraph journal, forthcoming).

Dillip Kumar Dash is a researcher at the University of Hyderabad and he works with the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group directed by Ranabir Samaddar. He is involved in the local social movements and his research is focusing on the Indian university system.

Pedro Barbosa Mendes is a researcher involved in the project Uninomade Brazil. He is working together with the Ministry of Education of Brazil on a project of social inclusion and access to university education.

Christopher Newfield [webpage] is a Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He wrote Unmaking the Public University: The Forty Year Assault on the Middle Class (2008) and Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University (2003).

INSTITUTIONAL PARTNERS:

• Global Learning project, School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London

RESEARCH PARTNERS

• Edu-factory (trasnational network)
• Anomalous wave - Faculty of Humanities (Rome)
• Esc Atelier (Rome)

Audio archive on www.uniriot.org

The proceedings of this seminar have been collected in the book Crisi dell’economia globale.

With: Marco Baravalle, Chiara Bersi Serlini, Antonella Corsani, Anna Daneri, Alberto De Nicola, Claire Fontaine, Brian Holmes, Maurizio Lazzarato, Antonio Negri, Pascal Nicolas-Le Strat, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Osfa, Matteo Pasquinelli, Judith Revel, Gigi Roggero, Devi Sacchetto, Pier Luigi Sacco, Marco Scotini, Marko Stamenkovic, Javier Toret Medina, Angela Vettese, Giovanna Zapperi.

The event “Multiversity, or the Art of Subversion” is the fruit of a  joint effort between Uni.Nomade and S.a.L.E. (Signs and Lyrics Emporium), between a trans-territorial network of militants and researchers carrying out a critical analysis of the themes of contemporaneity and a self-managed space, called S.a.L.E. docks, born  a few months ago in Venice so as to intervene on a practical level in the world of cultural production. A world which, not only in Venice, has affirmed itself as preferred area for current capital valorisation processes.

In fact, if we concentrate on contemporary art, this undoubted importance can be seen on at least three levels. The first is the central role which immaterial assets and knowledge, creativity and affections, relational and communicational talents assume for contemporary forms of production: artistic production cannot get away from this centrality.

The second is the relationship between cultural production and the metropolis where the interlacing between town-planning and architecture, fashion and design, art and literature, in that productive social space par excellence – the urban basins – becomes on the one side a crucial element in the process of subjectification through which are built the multiplicity of forms of life which inhabit it, to the other decisive factor for defining the strategic positioning of each metropolitan area in the economic competition between global cities.

The third is the relationship between the art market and the financial capital: at a global level, banks and multinationals are the among the main investors in a sector which today seems to be the only one to have not been even slightly touched by the crisis which has overrun the world system of money circulation.

What we are now seeing is a complex capturing system, which capital has brought into play in the multiple flow of informal cultural production, from the appropriation of the ability to cooperate of individual intelligences and individual ways of life, to ensure the valorisation of what has been defined as the “symbolic collective  capital”.

The complexity of these dynamics depends on a double mechanism of exploitation, where the first aspect is made up of the barriers of intellectual property and from each further moment of private appropriation of general social knowledge, while the second is the parasitic rapport which is established towards the creative production by those speculative interventions occurring in the body  of the metropolis, there where state and private institutions, large events and art fairs, and cultural zones and meta-zones are established.

Where S.a.L.E.’s experience wants to immerse itself critically, what the Multiversity event has decided to face, is called “culture factory”, that is the place of valuation of cognitive capitalism, but it is only so in the measure in which it, before anything else, the place of creative subjectivity, of the expression of the multitudes, and consequently, the space of a face-to-face between creative freedom and autonomy of cooperation on the one hand, and the system of dominion and exploitation of this productive force on the other.

In this light, Multiversity, will present, discuss and compare, with the most advanced European and global experiences, the first results, although partial, of an enquiry on the city’s job insecurity linked  to contemporary art and intangible work. Here the main question is to  understand widespread behaviours and the methods of intervention  which could change a social composition, already central in the forms  of contemporary production, in a political composition. Examined also  will be the core issues of the role of university training on the one  side, and the communication network on the other side, played within  the most complex organisation of the work of the “culture factory”.

An indispensable requisite for this discussion is the comparison  around contemporary art understood as a “wider social institution”: from the historical-artistic events which drove art in the post-war  period from the transcendental space of medial specificity to the  social space with its relationships of strength, to the relationships  established between art, social movements and cultural activism outside of any avant-garde rhetoric, to the methods of capture by the  institutional artistic system and by the financial ciruits of a vast  heritage of critical thought and conflicting ways of life. For these  reason, the Multiversity event will be organised into four seminar sessions:

1. Art and activism

This means problematizing historical events and contemporary forms in  the interlacing between art and activism. Some of the questions to start off the discussion will be: Which road was travelled to reach the conception of the work as   transcendental to a conception of the same as object, process or  dynamic able to intervene within man’s space-time and subsequently,   within social processes? How did we go from a judgement of the work based on a topography of  its material characteristics to one based, instead, on the analysis   of its function, or even its efficiency in social terms? How does it function today, in this post-Ford era, activist art? What, once all avant-garde rhetoric is abandoned, is the position of  art and artists with respect to movements?

2. Art and the market: between creative freedom and financial capture

This second point must necessarily move from gathering date on the  size of the art market and its relationship with financial capital. Art is taken here as an example of paradigmatic value because of the  extreme paradox which affects it: if artistic work expresses a  maximum level of creative freedom, at the same time it is subject to  maximum fixation within the financial capital.

3. Art and metropolis

This session will deal with the theme of the return of efficiency of   artistic paradigm on social institutions. Naturally, it will be   necessary to widen the spectrum of research to spheres such as   design, fashion, graphics and architecture. We know how contemporary metropolises, defined by the important   concentration of Knowledge and creative workers, feed the   entertainment industry through a consistent substratum of informal,   continually renewed, cultural production. On the other hand, a   multiplicity of elements worked and re-worked by contemporary   artistic-creative production establishes metropolitan life and its   subjective forms. Using a formula, we could say that “art designs its own factory”. And it is this continuous and irreversible cycle which we are   interested in looking into.

4. Art and multitude:

for the enquiry into social composition, conflicts and organisation of live work in the “culture factory”

This session will examine the core of the relationship between   singularity and multitude, and between individual production and   construction of the common. There are two research plans which will proceed in parallel. The first is historical-artistic and concerns the attempts which,   starting in the 60s, were developed by artists in response to the   rhetoric of the individual genius, up to the current platforms of   collective production tied to the affirmation and diffusion of social   hacking. The second plan concerns the survey into social composition of   precarious workers which has grown around the culture industry’s   drive. From the students in the training circuits to temporary   workers in the cooperatives for logistics and stage design, trainees,   networkers, project consultants, freelancers, to that global class of   artists and professionals intent on becoming an integral part of the   international art system. In all this wide social galaxy, we will need to investigate the   material conditions of life and work, needs and aspirations, desires   and possible assertions. All this to get to the key point: how to transform this social   composition into a political composition?

Speakers: Marco Baravalle, Chiara Bersi Serlini, Antonella Corsani, Anna Daneri, Alberto De Nicola, Claire Fontaine, Brian Holmes, Maurizio Lazzarato, Antonio Negri, Pascal Nicolas-Le Strat, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Osfa, Matteo Pasquinelli, Judith Revel, Gigi Roggero,  Devi Sacchetto, Pier Luigi Sacco, Marco Scotini, Marko Stamenkovic,  Javier Toret Medina, Angela Vettese, Giovanna Zapperi.

PROGRAM

Venue: Sale Docks, 187-188 Punta della Dogana. Venezia
Website: www.sale-docks.org

Audio archive: www.globalproject.info/art-16007.html

1) Friday 16
17:00 - Art and Activism
21:00 - Performance: Margine Operativo

2) Saturday 17
09:30 - Art and Activism (second session)
14:00 - Art and Market
17:30 - Art and Metropolis
21:00 - Performance

3) Sunday 18
09:30- Art and moltitude

As part of an ongoing collective project, the organisers of this  seminar series seek to promote a discussion on the rise of rent as a form of capitalist appropriation and the way that new levels of association in the arts and culture, in information and communication have made this rise possible, and from the perspective of private accumulation, necessary.  To this end, the seminar brings together various perspectives on the Art of Rent taking in analysis of cognitive capitalism, of the financialisation of the quotidian and the bodily, of gentrification, of new international division of labour and of governance.

Behind this series is the sense that the Art of Rent is a reaction to a new collective power among bodies assembled to labour and a capacity for ensemble in the social individual, all provoked by the migrations of work into culture, language, and affect and the work of migrations into these registers of life.  For those who work in the university, in the arts, and in politics long seeking to subvert the relationship between innovation and wage, the rise of the relationship between innovation and rent calls not for subversion but sabotage of the creative process.

Seminars will feature presentation from the speakers followed by structured discussion and questions and answers.

All the seminars are free and all are welcome. All seminars (except for February 29th) 16:00-18:00 Room 4.08 FrancisBancroft Building, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End.

Download: Audio files
Dowloadd: Texts and resources

1. The Art of Rent

Friday February 29th, 2008

Carlo Vercellone, University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne

• “From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism”, Historical Materialism 15 (2007) 13–36. [PDF]
• “The New Articulation of Wages, Rent Profit in Cognitive Capitalism”, trans. by Arianna Bove. Orig.: “La nuova articolazione salario, rendita, profitto nel capitalismo cognitivo”, in Posse ‘Potere Precario’, 2006. [PDF]

Matteo Pasquinelli, Queen Mary University of London

• “The Ideology of Free Culture and the Grammar of Sabotage”, Amsterdam, January 2008. [PDF]

2. Crisis and Financialization

Friday March 28th, 2008

Christian Marazzi, University of Southern Switzerland

• “Rules for the Incommensurable”, Substance (Volume 36, Number 1), 2007. [PDF]

Randy Martin, New York University
Costas Lapavitsas, SOAS London

3. New international division of labour

Thursday May 15th, 2008
• Sandro Mezzadra, University of Bologna
• Xiang Biao, Oxford University

4/ Governance, resistance, production of common

Thursday June 5th, 2008
• Judith Revel, Sorbonne University, Paris
• Stefano Harney, Queen Mary University