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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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]