Hi all. Here's an article I wrote for our newly released journal from the UCSD visual arts department. Hopefully, it'll continue some of the conversations on this list and start new ones...<br><br>Occupy the University: Reconsidering the Local<br>
<br>Online with images at<br><a href="http://bang.calit2.net/pros/?page_id=11">http://bang.calit2.net/pros/?page_id=11</a><br>
<a href="http://pros.ucsd.edu">http://pros.ucsd.edu</a><br>
<br><div id="post-11" class="hentry p1 page publish author-admin category-uncategorized untagged comments-open pings-open y2009 m09 d21 h18 slug-occupy-the-university">
<div class="entry-content">
<p><em>Micha Cárdenas</em></p>
<p><em>Author’s Note<br>
As this article goes to publication, the University of California is
erupting as a site of political conflict over the recent budget cuts,
tuition increases and furloughs. A UC wide strike and walkout of
faculty, staff and students has been called for on August 24th, 2009,
the first day of instruction. It seems that the UC’s disregard for the
health and wellbeing of their employees, as well as for the quality of
education, has reached an intolerable point for many. Many academics
have taken this opportunity to turn their research back to the
university itself, which is exemplified by UC Berkeley’s colloquium
event entitled “<a href="http://events.berkeley.edu/index.php/?event_ID=22324&date=2009-09-14&tab=all_events">The University in Crisis</a>: The Dismantling and Destruction of the University of California.”<a href="http://bang.calit2.net/pros/?page_id=11#footnote-1">[1]</a></em></p>
<br>
<p>In a conversation recorded for <em>pros</em>* journal, Teddy Cruz
and Rick Lowe agree that socially engaged art has the ability to
actually change the material conditions under which art is made and in
which people’s lives occur. They seem to agree that the best way to
change housing conditions is to engage at the level of local
legislation, housing associations and city governments. I would like to
intervene on this point. While I agree that socially engaged art can
change people’s lives, my intervention, to be simple, is to say that
the decision about how to intervene is not so simple. Cruz and Lowe
urge artists to engage in local city politics, yet I argue that perhaps
an even more local focus may be more beneficial. In her book <em>When Species Meet</em>,
Donna Haraway describes a feminist approach to political ethics, which
accepts our finitude, contingency and historical situatedness. Her
approach acknowledges that from a position of a lack of certainty,
“there is no outside from which to answer that mandatory question”<a href="http://bang.calit2.net/pros/?page_id=11#footnote-2">[2]</a>
of what political action to take. Refusing to take a political action
is still a political action, and so we are faced with “bearing the
mortal consequences” of our choices of where to put our artistic
energies in this expanded field where any artistic practice is
apparently acceptable. My own affinity with a feminist ethics of
uncertainty grew out of my work with Avital Ronell at the European
Graduate School where I asked, “But how can we sit and discuss the deep
meaning of this punctuation mark while bombs are being dropped on
people?” Her response was, to paraphrase, that by introducing doubt
into commonly accepted definitions of ideas and political strategies,
that the decisions about dropping those bombs, or imprisoning people,
may be stalled, changed or ended.</p>
<p>By considering the university institution in which this discussion
takes place, with its framework of research and knowledge production,
we can find ourselves implicated and complicit on a new level. While
the rhetoric of humanist charities or of helping the poor children of
the world may sound convincing as a call to involve artists in
questions of social engagement, it also serves the institution to
appear engaged in the communities. In fact, one could argue that
reproducing this dialogue serves to entrench the existing conditions
instead of changing them. I propose that a wide section of contemporary
artists are concerned with shifting, altering, rethinking and
recreating the material conditions of society and choosing very
different approaches from Cruz and Lowe, a few of which I will outline
here. These artists and activists question the structures that create
and enable political and economic conditions, and structures of
knowledge production, such as scientific dogma and medical definitions.
The Electronic Disturbance Theater’s notion of Science of the Oppressed
will serve as a useful guide for understanding practices which seek to
re-imagine knowledge production in the service of social movements and
oppressed peoples. The practices presented here seek to intervene in
society at the level of the causes of social inequity, of the
underlying knowledge structures, instead of working through local
legislation, which could be seen as merely a symptom.</p>
<p>One trajectory of contemporary politically engaged art is centered
around the notion of community research initiatives, ways of conducting
research, which are based in the concerns of oppressed or politically
active communities. The *particle group*, a nanopoetic art collective,<a href="http://bang.calit2.net/pros/?page_id=11#footnote-3">[3]</a> and Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT)<a href="http://bang.calit2.net/pros/?page_id=11#footnote-4">[4]</a>
have proposed and developed this idea of the Science of the Oppressed.
Science of the Oppressed describes a form of knowledge production which
is based in and arises from a social need, and whose contours are
shaped by the community from which it arises. A Science of the
Oppressed, as I read it, is an invitation to re-imagine knowledge
production and the way in which it could improve the lives of oppressed
communities by empowering the people of those communities and existing
social movements. Implementing this science, the *particle group*
describe their work as “combin[ing] digital technology, investigative
research, and multimedia formats in works that forge subversive
relationships with the twenty-first century’s frontiers of nano-science
and the para/literary.”<a href="http://bang.calit2.net/pros/?page_id=11#footnote-5">[5]</a>
In “nano_Garage(s): Speculations about (Open Fabbing),” a performance
at Medialab Prado, the *particle group* refers to a number of research
oriented gestures, saying:</p>
<blockquote><p>We can imagine Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed,
Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed, Critical Art Ensemble’s
tactical science, Natalie Jeremijenko’s public experiments and what the
Electronic Disturbance Theater has framed today as the “science of the
oppressed” – each of these parts of a wide area call for a re-framed
relationalilty between spectator, poesis, praxis, experimentation and
Sandoval’s differential consciousness of the “la conciencia de la
mestiza.” Each gesture diagrams alternative social forms of life and
art that fall between the known and unknown, between fiction and the
real, between clean science and dirty science – each a part of a long
history of an epistemology of social production which privileges the
standpoint of the proletariat, the multitude, the open hacks of the DIY
moments, and of autonomous investigators who stage test zones of
cognitive styles-as/and out of – concrete practices as speculation and
speculation as concrete practices – at the speed of dreams.<a href="http://bang.calit2.net/pros/?page_id=11#footnote-6">[6]</a></p></blockquote>
<p>Here we see a wide selection of practices concerned with research
itself, with knowledge production as a method of political action,
concerned with addressing questions about technologies and their
effects on the public. The *particle group*’s own work engages in
Science of the Oppressed by researching current nanotechnology and
creating their own transperversal responses based on this research.
Similarly, the Electronic Disturbance Theater is currently engaged in
research into the effects of access to GPS technology for
post-contemporary border geographies with the project The Transborder
Immigrant Tool, working with immigrant rights movements to prefigure
the changing nature of virtual geographies.</p>
<p>One approach, which could be seen in dialogue with Science of the
Oppressed, involves the development of tools to aid social movements.
Situation Room is a project by Hackitectura.net, which focuses directly
on the issue of providing information to social actors in order to
facilitate informed decisions about what action to take, consisting of
a room sized installation including a number of mapping and
communications technologies. The work comes out of their experiences
“in the design and implementation of several temporary media-labs.”<a href="http://bang.calit2.net/pros/?page_id=11#footnote-7">[7]</a>
These labs are actually a common feature of major mobilizations against
corporate globalization. I have participated in a few of these kinds of
Situation Rooms, which often involve a map of the city, lots of
computers and phones and a flurry of activity as people in the street
send in information about what actions are happening, where arrests are
being made, and what police activity is being taken. They serve as a
valuable part of facilitating distributed political action, in which
small affinity groups engage in their own direct action instead of
simply joining a publicly announced mass action. Due to the increasing
militarization of these events, this strategy, a particular instance of
distributed creativity, is increasingly common and necessary. For
example, at the Republican National Convention in New York City in
2004, the police literally swept up masses of people in orange
construction netting, arresting bystanders and protesters alike. Due to
actions like this, distributed political action is critical as an
intervention in events like the Republican National Convention or any
of the meetings of international financial institutions such as the
World Trade Organization (WTO), Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA),
or the International Monetary Fund (IMF).</p>
<p>The installation by Hackitectura, presented at LABoral in Gijon,
Spain, sought to “advance in the design of a situation room that could
be actually used in the context of social movements, for special events
or for daily research, strategic planning and organizing.”<a href="http://bang.calit2.net/pros/?page_id=11#footnote-8">[8]</a>
To accomplish this, Hackitectura created a large Situation Room in the
gallery space including projections of maps, computers and phones and
engaged in a series of discussions and hacking sessions. For example,
they developed an interactive map that users of the Situation Room
could dynamically add content to and see related independent news
stories about. While they see the gallery installation “more as a
simulation,” because it was not attached to a particular event, it
demonstrates the way in which art practice can be used to empower
social movements by developing tools and strategies in collaboration
with these movements.</p>
<p>Many of these movements are inspired by a notion of direct action,
which is closely linked to the idea of Civil Disobedience, but also to
Cruz and Lowe’s ideas about art practice. Direct Action is the idea
that political actors can directly create change instead of asking
legislators to do so. In the case of Situation Room, Hackitectura are
supporting networks of social actors who are engaging in Direct Action,
in actions such as Fadaiat, a previous event held on the
Spanish-Moroccan border where they set up a communication network,
autonomous from the state, across a highly militarized border. The
tools and techniques used in Situation Room may empower social actors
at future gatherings.</p>
<p>Many of the examples mentioned by the *particle group* are concerned
with biotechnology and health. Aids Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP)
is one early example of activists and artists who were directly engaged
with research as a form of social struggle. In “Make it Work For You:
Academia and Political Organizing in Lesbian and Gay Communities,”
Maxine Wolfe describes some of the research process of ACT UP:</p>
<blockquote><p>In the four year ACT UP campaign that changed the
Centers for Disease Control (CDC) definition of AIDS, ACT UP women,
working with others, wrote lots of critiques of the existing system and
continual critiques everytime the CDC made one of its inadequate
proposals… But the basis for the campaign had come from working with
infected women who described the infections they had but were never
mentioned by the CDC.<a href="http://bang.calit2.net/pros/?page_id=11#footnote-9">[9]</a></p></blockquote>
<p>Here we can see a clear example of how research-based activism can
address the needs of the community of HIV positive people. ACT UP had
access to knowledge arising from their connections with the community
of HIV positive people and their work challenged and eventually changed
the official CDC definitions of AIDS. This can be seen as an example of
the kind of hybrid political action/artistic practice/research the
*particle group* describes in their call for a Science of the
Oppressed. Wolfe goes on to describe the way that the Direct Action
movement of ACT UP acted as a kind of laboratory, generating new
hypotheses and then experimenting with them in the streets:</p>
<blockquote><p>People who do grassroots, unpaid political work talk
about and discuss political issues and world ideas continually, as we
are acting to change a world that would like to see us die or
disappear. We have to have an analysis to do what we do. And, we have
to know a lot —from how government operates to how long traffic will be
backed up if we block it; from constitutional rights to the politics of
the Irish community; from how institutions operate to how to make a
chant people will remember; from where to buy an air horn to how to
design research trials; from right-wing theory to left-wing theory. We
are constantly analyzing our successes and failures and having to come
up with something based on the outcome — something we can act on again.
It is intellectually challenging work of the most creative sort.<a href="http://bang.calit2.net/pros/?page_id=11#footnote-10">[10]</a></p></blockquote>
<p>Wolfe describes here the complex feedback loop involved in social
struggle. Political struggles are in themselves a form of knowledge
production where social actors form ideas about contemporary society,
power, and social change and then test those ideas out in the street.
ACT UP is one example, which included a complex interweaving of
strategies including art, politics and knowledge production. Their
mission statement says, “We protest and demonstrate; we meet with
government officials and public health officials; we research and
distribute the latest medical information; we are not silent.”<a href="http://bang.calit2.net/pros/?page_id=11#footnote-11">[11]</a></p>
<p>While ACT UP is an art and activism group concerned with changing
the way that bureaucracies such as the CDC work to distribute AIDS
medication, their strategy for doing so is one of direct action and
knowledge production, questioning the structures of medical authority
and science itself by engaging in their own medical research.
Similarly, the later projects by Critical Art Ensemble bring the public
into the practice of science through public demonstrations and
performances in both GenTerra and Free Range Grain.<a href="http://bang.calit2.net/pros/?page_id=11#footnote-12">[12]</a>
GenTerra was a series of public performances involving a machine, which
would release a harmless genetically modified bacteria, aimed at
informing the public about genetic engineering.<a href="http://bang.calit2.net/pros/?page_id=11#footnote-13">[13]</a>
Free Range Grain also involved public demonstrations in which food
could be tested for genetic modification in a mobile laboratory. These
projects attempt to shift the public understanding of genetic
engineering by inviting the public into a realm of knowledge production
from which it has been excluded. They attempt to shift the conditions
in which scientific knowledge is presented to the public by the public
relations division of corporations, such as Monsanto. I see Science of
the Oppressed in this trajectory, of questioning and reinventing the
very conditions of knowledge production and science, asking under what
logics it should operate.</p>
<p>Our own university is a good example of the need for such a Science
of the Oppressed. Currently a heated debate is occurring between the
administration of the University of California, San Diego and the
students and faculty over evidence of an on-campus “cancer cluster.”
More than eight cases of breast cancer, two resulting in deaths,
occurred in women working in UCSD’s literature building. A study was
commissioned by the Chancellor’s office in response to Literature
faculty requests. The study by UCSD epidemiologist Dr. Cedric Garland
found that “women who worked in the Literature building had a roughly
four- to five-times greater chance of developing breast cancer than if
they didn’t work in the building.”<a href="http://bang.calit2.net/pros/?page_id=11#footnote-14">[14]</a>
The report ruled out potential causes, such as the domestic water
supply, radioactive chemicals, mold and exposure to carcinogens.
Garland did, however, suggest that there could be a link between the
cancer cluster and the building’s electrical and elevator systems.<a href="http://bang.calit2.net/pros/?page_id=11#footnote-15">[15]</a>
As a result, the only response from the administration has been to shut
down the elevator in the building. Students and faculty want to be
moved into a new building. However, the university has commissioned a
new study and is waiting on results from this study before taking
action. The crux of the issue is a question of knowledge—knowing what
the cause of the cancer is—and the university’s reluctance to accept
blame and to act. In this case, a community research initiative seems
necessary. Discussions online have claimed that there were four more
cases in the late nineties.<a href="http://bang.calit2.net/pros/?page_id=11#footnote-16">[16]</a>
This is clearly a situation where the institution conducting the
research is heavily invested in a particular outcome and a community
based fact-finding project could be incredibly valuable. In the short
term, it is clear to me that no one should have to work in this
building. Yet in the long term, a feminist community based research
project could help to overcome the university’s bias in the case as
well as to consider the fact that the cancer has only affected women.</p>
<p>The cancer cluster leads me to ask why the UCSD Visual Arts department’s discussions about <em>Public Culture</em>
are not focused on a more local context and on considering the issue of
building construction at UCSD, its health effects and the
accountability for such decisions. In a recent issue of e-flux, Tom
Holert critiques university institutional structures, which shape art
into a type of knowledge production, pointing out that “for
applications and project proposals to be steered through university
research committees, they have to be upgraded and shaped in such a way
that their claims to the originality of knowledge (and thus their
academic legitimacy) become transparent, accountable, and justified.”<a href="http://bang.calit2.net/pros/?page_id=11#footnote-17">[17]</a> Holert quotes Simon Sheikh as saying:</p>
<blockquote><p>The notion of knowledge production implies a certain
placement of thinking, of ideas, within the present knowledge economy,
i.e. the dematerialized production of current post-Fordist capitalism;
and goes on to add that the repercussions of such a placement within
art and art education can be described as an increase in
‘standardization,’ ‘measurability,’ and ‘the molding of artistic work
into the formats of learning and research.’<a href="http://bang.calit2.net/pros/?page_id=11#footnote-18">[18]</a></p></blockquote>
<p>Perhaps, though, this university based knowledge production can be
utilized and turned around in the mode of Science of the Oppressed to
use the university’s own structures to investigate and undermine it, as
in the case of the UCSD literature building. Other university
occupations provide interesting examples of such a strategy. Holert
cites the 1968 student occupation of the Hornsey College of Art as an
early inspiration of the introduction of knowledge production into art
education. The documents from the occupation state that “research
activity must also deal with the educational process itself… it must be
the critical self-consciousness of the system, continuing permanently
the work started here in the last weeks [June, July 1968]. Nothing
condemns the old regime more radically than the minor, precarious part
research played in it. It is intolerable that research should be seen
as a luxury, or a rare privilege.”<a href="http://bang.calit2.net/pros/?page_id=11#footnote-19">[19]</a>
Perhaps these drives for critical research can be realized by combining
a drive for knowledge production with a concern for socially
responsible art, at times referred to as Public Culture. Perhaps an
occupation of the UCSD campus is precisely the gesture, which could
create the space for such a public laboratory of knowledge production
to occur, as in the case of Hornsey, and could illuminate the types of
local engagement brought forth in this discussion in order to produce
some answers about the literature building.</p>
<p>Looking closely at the wave of recent student occupations, from the
Athens Polytechnic University in Greece to the New School for Social
Research to NYU [New York University] to Helsinki University, one can
see a deep reconsideration of local action and social engagement in a
university setting. In the essay “Preoccupied – The Logic of
Occupation,” written and distributed as a photocopied zine, the
occupiers of the New School wrote:</p>
<blockquote><p>The university shall never again be merely the lukewarm
appendage to civil society that our (hypo)critical theorists so highly
acclaim; rather, as our friends in Greece have shown, the university
can also be an appendage to civil war, a space in which impenetrable
bodies and inflammable knowledges can conspire towards the dissolution
of their very condition, that is, separation. Yet it is exactly that
sharing between life and thought that is preemptively banned from the
territories marked under the sign “university”. Such territories betray
their innocence not only in their concrete unfolding, but in their very
name. There is nothing “universal” about the university anymore except
the universality of emptiness. Students and professors spend their
waking lives covering up this void with paltry declarations and
predictable nonactions. The void should no longer be avoided; it should
be unleashed. Seceding from the university is no longer enough. One
must bring it down as well.<a href="http://bang.calit2.net/pros/?page_id=11#footnote-20">[20]</a></p></blockquote>
<p>To even write this academic article for a journal about the need for
an occupation of our school seems futile, or somehow cowardly to me. To
invoke the names of the brave students of NYU or of Greece in such an
article feels to me somehow hypocritical, yet the very argument I am
trying to make here is that knowledge production itself can be a
transformative act, and that one must examine and acknowledge the
structures in which we place ourselves, and our own complicity with the
neoliberal economic system which is robbing the university of its
possibility to be a space for transformation of self and of society. My
hope is that the movement for action in response to the cancer cluster
will grow and that this article may in some small way help that
momentum, add to the resonance of discontent.</p>
<p>In this paper I have described projects by artists which engage in
knowledge production, direct action and questioning the structure of
science, in collaboration with oppressed communities and existing
social movements. I claim that by considering a more local form of
action in the university, by more ardently striving to change the
conditions under which we ourselves live, learn and create art, we
might find many more strategies for local political engagement outside
of local laws and housing associations. Yet doing so may endanger our
very positions within the institutions that we are attempting to
subvert, so one’s course of action must be carefully considered. Still,
the urgency of the current issues being faced, such as the UCSD cancer
cluster, the deaths of our own colleagues and friends, illustrate the
serious need for a reconsideration of the stakes of local action and
the effectiveness of current strategies.</p>
<p>Notes:</p>
<p id="footnote-1">[1] More information is at
<a href="http://ucfacultywalkout.com/">http://ucfacultywalkout.com/</a> and
<a href="http://option4.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-university-in-crises">http://option4.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-university-in-crises</a>
[Accessed September 10, 2009].</p>
<p id="footnote-2">[2] Donna Haraway, <em>When Species Meet</em> (Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 88.</p>
<p id="footnote-3">[3] Ricardo Dominguez and Amy Sara Carroll, “Nanosferica,” Hermispheric Institute, <a href="http://www.hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/particle-group-intro">http://www.hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/particle-group-intro</a> [Accessed March, 19, 2009].</p>
<p id="footnote-4">[4] The *particle group* consists of Ricardo
Dominguez, Amy Sara Carroll, Diane Ludin, Nina Waisman, Marius
Schebella, and a number of other collaborators. Electronic Disturbance
Theater includes myself, Ricardo Dominguez, Brett Stalbaum, Carmin
Karasic, Stefan Wray, Amy Sara Carrol and a number of other
collaborators.</p>
<p id="footnote-5">[5] “Particle group opens at CAL NanoSystems Institute (CN(S)I) – Jan. 14th, 2009,” Particles of Interest, <a href="http://bang.calit2.net/pitmm/?p=120">http://bang.calit2.net/pitmm/?p=120</a> [Accessed March 19, 2009].</p>
<p id="footnote-6">[6] Ricardo Dominquez, “[-empyre-] nanoGeoPolitica/Poetica/Pelicula – fabricating with minor scales,” <a href="https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2009-February/001216.html">https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2009-February/001216.html</a> [Accessed March 19, 2009].</p>
<p id="footnote-7">[7] Regine, “Situation Room,” <em>We Make Money Not Art Blog</em>, <a href="http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2008/02/i-actually-discovered-your-wor.php">http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2008/02/i-actually-discovered-your-wor.php</a> [Accessed March 19, 2009].</p>
<p id="footnote-8">[8] Ibid.</p>
<p id="footnote-9">[9] Maxine Wolfe, “Make it Work For You: Academia and Political Organizing in Lesbian and Gay Communities,” <a href="http://www.actupny.org/documents/academia.html">http://www.actupny.org/documents/academia.html</a> [Accessed March 19, 2009].</p>
<p id="footnote-10">[10] Ibid.</p>
<p id="footnote-11">[11] Mark Harrington, “AIDS Activists and People with AIDS,” <em>Tactical Biopolitics Art Activisim and Technoscience</em>, ed. Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, c2008) 326.</p>
<p id="footnote-12">[12] “Critical Art Ensemble,” <a href="http://www.critical-art.net/">http://www.critical-art.net</a> [Accessed March 19, 2009].</p>
<p id="footnote-13">[13] Critical Art Ensemble, “Project Links,” <a href="http://www.critical-art.net/Biotech.html">http://www.critical-art.net/Biotech.html</a> [Accessed March 19, 2009].</p>
<p id="footnote-14">[14] Amanda Ripley, “Cancer cluster at UCSD,” San Diego CityBeat, <a href="http://www.sdcitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/cancer_cluster_at_ucsd/7774/">http://www.sdcitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/cancer_cluster_at_ucsd/7774/</a> [Accessed March 19, 2009].</p>
<p id="footnote-15">[15] Ibid.</p>
<p id="footnote-16">[16] David Harvey, “Lit. Community Reacts to Cancer Cluster, Calls for Action,” The Guardian, <a href="http://www.ucsdguardian.org/news/1.1486588-1.1486588">http://www.ucsdguardian.org/news/1.1486588-1.1486588</a> [Accessed March 19, 2009].</p>
<p id="footnote-17">[17] Tom Holert, “Art in the Knowledge-based Polis,” <em>e-flux Journal</em>, <a href="http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/40#_ednref9">http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/40#_ednref9</a> [Accessed March 19, 2009].</p>
<p id="footnote-18">[18] Ibid.</p>
<p id="footnote-19">[19] Ibid.</p>
<p id="footnote-20">[20] “Pre-occu-pied: The Logic of Occupation,” <a href="http://www.ucsdguardian.org/news/1.1486588-1.1486588">http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/files/preoccupied-reading.pdf</a></p><p id="footnote-20"><br>
</p>
</div>
</div>-- <br>micha cárdenas / azdel slade<br><br>Lecturer, Visual Arts Department, University of California, San Diego<br>Artist/Researcher, Experimental Game Lab, <a href="http://experimentalgamelab.net">http://experimentalgamelab.net</a><br>
Calit2 Researcher, <a href="http://bang.calit2.net">http://bang.calit2.net</a><br><br>blog: <a href="http://transreal.org">http://transreal.org</a><br><br><br>