A NOTE ON THIS PAGE
This page continues the discussion thread from weeks 1-9 of the “NEW SCHOOLS” graduate seminar taught at Princeton in the Spring Term of 2023 (taught by D. Graham Burnett and Jeff Dolven; launch syllabus here). The last four weeks of the class centered on student presentations of “case studies”: specific experiments in pedagogy and political/social imagination. Entries below offer weekly readings and pre-class “think pieces” by the presenting students (three per week).
DGB & JD
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CLASS 9
Readings
From NB: The London Mechanics’ Institute
J.C. Robertson and Thomas Hodgskin, “Institutions for Instruction of Mechanics. Proposals for a London Mechanics’ Institute,” Mechanic’s Magazine, Museum, Register, Journal, and Gazette no. 7 (October 11, 1823): 99-103.
“Public Meeting, for the Establishment of the London Mechanics’ Institute,” Mechanic’s Magazine, Museum, Register, Journal, and Gazette no. 12 (November 15, 1823): 177-182.
Thomas Hodgskin, Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital; or, the Unproductiveness of Capital Proved with Reference to the Present Combinations amongst Journeymen. By A Labourer (London: Knight and Lacey, 1825), 13-19 and 26-33.
Henry Brougham, Practical Observations Upon the Education of the People, Addressed to the Working Classes and Their Employers (London: Richard Taylor, 1825): 1-12, 15-22, and 27-33.
Charles Dickens, Hard Times Chapter I, Household Words IX, no. 210 (April 1, 1854): 141-145.
Nick also proposes a cornucopia of background sources, not required: Antonio Gramsci, “On Education,” Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971 [1926]), 162-191; David Lloyd and Paul Thomas, Culture and the State (New York and London: Routledge, 1998); Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Dorothy Thompson, Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984); E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1963), 235-253.
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From NI: International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, Education Department
Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism (New York: Basic Books, 1977 / Verso, 2020), pp. 3-9. (Complete book here.)
Arthur Gleason, Workers’ Education: American Experiments (with a few foreign examples), revised edition (New York: Bureau of Industrial Research, 1921), Chapter 1, pp. 5-17; + “Summary,” p. 60. (Complete book here.)
Fannia M. Cohn, “The Educational Work of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union,” in Report of Proceedings: Second National Conference on Workers’ Education in the United States (New York: Workers’ Education Bureau of America, 1922), pp. 52-66.
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From AK: New Bauhaus/Institute of Design
László Moholy Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: Paul Theobald and Company, 1969, 1st ed. 1947. Two excerpts: on photography (required) and the foreword, introduction, and first chapter (optional: they give a more general picture of the pedagogical philosophy at the New Bauhaus/Institute of Design). (Complete book here.)
PRE-CLASS THINK PIECES (NB & NI & AK)
[NI starts here]
For my New School, I wanted to explore an example of workers’ education in the US labor movement. In part this came from a desire to see how the “Progressive Education” movement that we have discussed around John Dewey interacted with social reform efforts in the “Progressive Era” more generally. Among the objects of reform in this period, the question of labor, and economic inequality, were of course central. Yet, so far in our course, many of the schools we have considered have demonstrated the application of progressive education on more middle-class or elite milieus: the Ivies with Veysey; CalArts with Womanhouse; Hampshire with the New College Plan; and Black Mountain College, for all its bohemianism, was populated largely by black sheep or dropouts of well-to-do families. Duberman points out that the unaccredited cloister of Black Mountain failed to attract black students partly, or precisely, because it rejected the promise of upward mobility that many black students sought from education, then and now:
“Not only was the artist at Black Mountain elevated ‘as a holy person,’ but the rest of the world was put down as ‘utterly corrupt,’ unclean. That cluster of attitudes made the community all at once cruel to and protective of its own – and monkishly indifferent to the world outside. […] Until she left in 1954, Flola Shepard remained active politically, but her only legacy (derived from ads she’d put in the local Negro press to locate black students) was the occasional appearance of two frightened black girls (apparently sponsored by a black lawyer in Asheville) who were driven back and forth to the college to take a few classes. It would have been amazing if anything more had resulted, since Black Mountain – unaccredited, and with a local reputation as a hideaway for freaks and subversives – was hardly likely to attract blacks anxious for entree into a middle class world.” (Duberman, 423-424)
While this passage underscores the particularities of black education, in the South in particular, I also see the “anxiety” Duberman identifies here as a broad motive that most underprivileged groups tend to ascribe to education: the promise of social mobility. The ideals of higher education are not lost on people who have to think pragmatically, but for those coming from precarious situations, so many things can get in the way of those ideals – time being a major one, and money being another.
The readings I assigned for tomorrow are organized around this question: what can education look like when working life cannot be fully suspended? And building upon that, how might we think of the space of education as *interrelating* with work, family, and political action, rather than being a place autonomous from “the everyday”? How could education not just reproduce, but reconfigure the social? If we want to pursue Gramsci’s claim (quoted by Hirschhorn) that “Every Human Being Is An Intellectual,” I think we’ll have to consider how the Intellectual might operate in everyday space – or at least, how one might not leave the everyday behind.
As it turns out, many experiments in American workers’ education formed all over the country in the first two decades of the 20th century, each addressing with these very questions in their own way (the TOC of the Cohn reading enumerates many other “experiments”). Some traditional colleges and universities attempted workers’ education initiatives, such as The Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers. New, independent labor colleges were also formed. In another version of this assignment, I could have pointed us to Brookwood Labor College, in Katonah, New York, often called “The Harvard of Labor,” which was the first and longest-lasting residential college started by the labor movement, of which Dewey was a friend, visitor, and advocate. Brookwood functioned basically like an upstate liberal arts college with co-operative elements and a specialized curriculum, and produced many leading figures in the post-WW2 labor movement.
But instead, in order to draw a greater contrast to the models we’ve seen so far, I decided to focus on the International Ladies Garment Workers Union’s Education Department, established 1916 in New York, which was the most elaborate and visionary example of the most common type of labor school model: union-based education which occurred on weekends and evenings.
ILGWU was a fairly radical trade union, comprised of Jewish and Eastern European immigrants with socialist leanings, and many of its most radical leaders and rank-and-file were women. Its Education Department was envisioned and founded by Juliet Stewart Poyntz in 1916, and it was elaborated by her successor, Fannia Mary Cohn, starting in 1918. As you’ll see in the readings, the Education Department developed different modalities of education according to different degrees of engagement, commitment, and availability, as well as different ways of finding and identifying potential students (Cohn was also a co-founder of Brookwood and ILGWU regularly sent the most dedicated students there, on scholarship). English lessons were the main attraction for this generation of workers (we could talk about literacy education, recalling Freire), but from there a range of resources were available, including humanities courses and social sciences, but also less time-demanding social events, open lectures, and outings to museums and theatres. Health education was also a high priority, and something that my “experiment” will riff on.
For the readings, 3 short things: The Gornick, while a bit anachronistic to the ILGWU’s heyday (she is describing her childhood in the mid-30’s, long after the Socialist-Communist split), is the most vivid account I’ve read of the affective “inner life” of the working-class immigrant left in this period. I think it is helpful for peeling back the dogmatic rhetoric of many of this movement’s documents, and unsettling our post-Cold-War preconceptions of the old-left socialists as propagandized zombies. While most of the book is oral histories, Gornick opens autobiographically, setting up self-education as a transformative, humanizing aspect of the US Communists’ political project:
“I would point to one or another at the table and whisper to [Mother]: Who is this one? Who is that one? My mother would reply in Yiddish: ‘He is a writer. She is a poet. He is a thinker.’ Oh, I would nod, perfectly satisfied with these identifications, and return to my place on the bench. He, of course, drove a bakery truck. She was a sewing machine operator. […] But Rouben was right. Ideas were everything. So powerful was the life inside their minds that sitting there, drinking tea and talking issues, these people ceased to be what they objectively were – immigrant Jews, disenfranchised workers – and, indeed, they became thinkers, writers, poets.” [6-7]
The labor colleges were attempts at bringing this educative impulse out from domestic space into social space – to build institutions for and around it.
The other two readings are more procedural pedagogy documents: the Gleason outlines the overall philosophy, methodology, and problems of the Workers’ Education movement in this period (and uses ILGWU as an example); and Fannia Cohn’s report elaborates the specifics of the program of the Department as of 1922. In both, a question I’d like for us to consider: how do these documents rethink the idea of education entailing class ascension? How do they attempt to separate education from assimilation into polite society (which would entail estrangement from the workers’ movement)? To put it another way: how could Gornick’s parents’ friends become “thinkers, writers, poets,” yet remain workers?
Further reading, in case it’s helpful for anyone:
Richard J. Altenbaugh, Education for Struggle: The American Labor Colleges of the 1920s and 1930s (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990)
Susan Stone Wong, “From Soul to Strawberries: The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and Workers’ Education, 1914-1950,” in Kornbluh & Fredericton, eds., Sisterhood and Solidarity: Workers’ Education for Women, 1914-1984 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984)
Radical Approaches to Adult Education: A Reader, ed. Tom Lovett (London: Routledge, 1988)
The Re-Education of the American Working Class, eds. Steven H. London, Elvira R. Tarr, and Joseph F. Wilson (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990)
Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, ed. Robert H. Haworth (Oakland: PM Press, 2012)
Studies in Socialist Pedagogy, eds. Theodore Mills Norton and Bertell Ollman (New York/London: Monthly Review Press, 1978)
[a slideshow of images of the ILGWU ED and its environments can be found here. – NI]
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[AK starts here]
Nathan Lerner’s “Light Box” Exercise at the Chicago Bauhaus
The New Bauhaus, founded in Chicago in 1937, was the brainchild of the Association of Arts and Industries, an organization composed primarily of leaders from the Chicago business community. Since its inception in 1922, the Association’s stated aim had been “impressing upon the industries of the central west the great importance of improved artistic design as a national asset in world competition,” through, among other means, the establishment of a design school that would supply local industry with professional designers. The Association’s board determined to found a school on the Bauhaus model and, after an unsuccessful attempt to lure Walter Gropius away from Harvard, engaged former Bauhaus instructor László Moholy-Nagy as its founding director. The New Bauhaus would operate for just one year under the auspices of the Association of Arts and Industries, closing in 1939 after breaking with the organization and reopening later that same year as the renamed School of Design (its name would change a second time, to the Institute of Design, in 1944—for the sake of clarity I’ll refer to it here as the Chicago Bauhaus). However, long after its rupture with its initial backers the Chicago Bauhaus retained its close ties to industry and designed its pedagogy to meet the needs of industrial production.
In his correspondence with the Association of Arts and Industries prior to his appointment, Moholy expressed his confidence in the “universal validity of the teaching principles of the Bauhaus,” and the “possibility of adapting them in America.” In the U.S. at the time of the school’s founding, the ground was being prepared for the postwar educational landscape described by Jamie Cohen-Cole in The Open Mind. Already in the interwar period, creativity was coming to be seen as an essential ingredient of social cohesion and economic success. Determining who was creative and why, and how to make more people more creative, was regarded as critical to educating the nation’s citizenry and training its workforce.
Moholy’s pedagogical program for the Chicago Bauhaus was guided by a humanistic belief in creativity as a universal capacity, not limited to art or artists but possessed by all and touching all forms of human experience, and by a conviction that creativity could be instrumentalized to at once serve and transform the ends of industry. One of the articles of faith of Moholy’s Bauhaus pedagogical philosophy was the belief that “Everyone is talented” (Ein jeder Mesch ist begabt). This maxim would remain a guiding principle of Moholy’s work at the New Bauhaus and its subsequent iterations; it would live on at the school even after his death in 1946, but tellingly, it would be revised in later years to “Everyone is creative.” Creativity was the essential ingredient of design and the most valued characteristic of the designer; it was also a design object—as a later observer of the Chicago Bauhaus would remark, “Imagination is the product.”
Moholy located the basis for creativity in sensory experience. “Everyone,” he claimed, “is sensitive to tones and colors, everyone has a sure ‘touch’ and space reactions, and so on.”This was a position characteristic of what Leah Dickerman has termed the “elementarism” of Bauhaus pedagogy, which presupposed the existence of a set of universal, a priori psychophysical responses to sensory stimuli. In Moholy’s lexicon these responses were the “ABC of expression” (what he referred to in German as Grunderlebnisse or Urerlebnisse): “those timeless biological fundamentals of expression which are meaningful to everyone.” The pedagogical program at the Chicago Bauhaus began with a set of foundational exercises designed to encourage experimentation with the properties of color, surface, tone, form, and space as “the first step to creative production before the meaning of any culture (the values of an historical development) can be introduced.” The ultimate end of this “sensory training” was twofold: to confer an understanding of the common psychophysical basis of experience; and to activate the whole sensorium and unify it under the crowning faculty of “vision”—a term that implied not mere sight but the embodied formal and spatial awareness that was the foundation of creative production.
*
We’re going to do one of those “sensory training” exercises together in class. It was taught in the preliminary photography course at the Chicago Bauhaus and was invented by Nathan Lerner, a student in the school’s inaugural class who stayed on as an instructor. (Lerner is best known today for two things: designing the bear-shaped honey bottle and acting, along with his wife, as the executor of the estate of his tenant, the so-called outsider artist Henry Darger.) Lerner’s exercise, called the “light box,” involves repurposing a cardboard box as a kind of photography studio in miniature, in which small objects can be arranged and photographed under controlled lighting conditions. According to Lerner’s diagram of a light box [Fig. 1], reproduced in Moholy’s posthumously published Vision in Motion (1947), one of the long sides of the box is left open, while its ends are perforated so that lights can be shone through the holes. The interior is painted black. Strings are stretched at various heights and angles across the interior of the box so that objects may be suspended from them. Objects are placed or hung in the light box, a light or lights are positioned at one or more of the holes, and the assemblage is photographed through the open side of the box.
The purpose of the lesson was to teach students to photographically render the surface and volume of objects and the spatial relationships between them by means of directed light. This, it was hoped, would attune students to the interactions of form and light in the world at large. Lerner, for his part, used the technique extensively [Figs. 2–8] and claimed that it inflected the way he saw and photographed; he went so far as to compare urban space itself to an immense light box—an analogy he made literal in a photograph of laundry hanging on clotheslines strung across an alley, in which clotheslines line takes the place of strings, brick walls replace cardboard ones, and hanging clothes and fire escapes fill the container as if they were assemblages of dowels and crepe paper [Fig. 9].
Lerner, quoted in Vision in Motion, described the light box exercise in characteristically elementarist terms:
With this simple device a great measure of control over light can be exercised. But aside from its value as a method for experimenting in a new medium, it has a further general value.
For light is one element; material object another, and the relationship of one to the other makes up our visual world. In the light box they become easily understood elements of visual communication. The light box, therefore, has significance for any artist. Working with it can give him a deeper insight into the visual-psychological elements that play an important role in making pictures exciting and meaningful.
The logic of the exercise was experimental, in the sense of experiment as “testing under controlled circumstances” put forth by Diaz in The Experimenters. The dark interior of the light box was for Lerner a controlled environment in which visual experience was analyzed and synthesized: separated into its component parts—light and material—out of which photographic compositions were constructed. By manipulating and configuring these “visual-psychological elements” under the experimental conditions of the light box, it was hoped that students would come to better understand the nature of their complex interactions in the visual field of everyday experience and learn how to synthesize meaningful visual communication out of them. Implicit in this program was a faith in a common substructure of psychophysical responses to form which underlay the complex and differentiated aesthetic experiences of individuals.
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We’ll be splitting into groups and working with three light boxes—I’ll give a brief demonstration before we get started, but I haven’t had the chance to experiment with the boxes too much, so we’ll all be learning what works as we go. We’ll be using our phone cameras to photograph, so if you can, do make sure your phones are charged. I’m looking forward to trying this out with you all!
Fig. 1
Fig. 2
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Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
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[NB starts here]
Along the conceptual lines NI elegantly traced above, I also chose to investigate pedagogical efforts aimed at workers, though in this case, the context is early nineteenth-century Britain. While this selection partially reflects my own academic training and investments, I figured it might be generative to think through class-targeted experimental education at the historical juncture in which the modern British proletariat was “made” (per E.P. Thompson’s formulation). Some questions guiding my inquiry and demonstration: What intellectual and experiential resources did the different founders of the London Mechanics’ Institute tap into when designing the institution? What strategies did they devise to reach and engage people who spent most of their waking hours at work? How did they define “useful knowledge” and which subjects, bodies of thought, or epistemological configurations (metaphysical speculation? Poetry and art?) were excluded from that category? How did they conceptualize the relationship (or distinction) between physical and intellectual labor? What did education mean in practical terms to these men in the era before compulsory mass schooling, in which the few schools that did exist were mostly controlled by the Church of England or competing religious sects?
Historical-contextual speed-run: By the mid-1820s, the British working class was in a particularly embattled state, reeling from the economic aftershocks of the Napoleonic Wars and the state’s intensifying repression of radical political activity and combination (proto-unionization) efforts, including mutual improvement and friendly societies which often sponsored collective education programs. After Britain’s victory at Waterloo in 1815, agricultural protection was reinstated (causing food prices to skyrocket), the state’s massive war debts had to be serviced, and, most importantly, tens of thousands of demobilized soldiers returned to an enervated economy marked by high unemployment, low wages, and an overburdened Poor Law system. In 1819, Parliament estimated that there were at least 120,000 pauper children in London alone. As Britain scaled the heights of European (and indeed global) geopolitical hegemony, its domestic social order appeared on the verge of catastrophic collapse. Along with electoral disenfranchisement and exclusion from most mainstream schools (again, mostly controlled by local parishes and churches, which, even with subsidies, could be prohibitively expensive), these developments narrowed the few educational opportunities on offer for working-class people.
Percy Shelley’s poem “England in 1819” perfectly instantiates the political-cum-affective atmosphere of post-Napoleonic Britain––and also serves as a nice TL; DR:
It was within this social-structural and ideological matrix that two radical writers, Joseph Robertson and Thomas Hodgskin, launched the London Mechanics’ Institute in 1823 to spread “those facts of chemistry, mechanical philosophy, and of the science of the creation and distribution of wealth” to the city’s male working-class denizens through irregular, nighttime, and/or weekend classes. The word “mechanic” during this time referred to any (usually literate) skilled worker and included furniture-makers, blacksmiths, tailors, potters, metallurgists, cutlers, shoemakers, weavers, cartwrights, coopers, carpenters, and ironworkers (to simplify a complex etymological debate I only vaguely understand).
Today, the LMI is called Birkbeck College, University of London and has, though passing through different institutional permutations and arrangements in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, expanded into a large degree-granting research university with an endowment of £10.2 million. Its alumni include Marcus Garvey, Britain’s first Labour Party Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, and Bear Grylls, host of Man vs. Wild. Former faculty members include Eric Hobsbawm, Slavoj Žižek, and T.S. Eliot.
J.C. Robertson worked as a patent agent in England’s rapidly expanding print industry, while the (at the time) more politically militant Hodgskin had established his reputation through his 1813 polemical critique of military hierarchy and the enervating psychic effects of arbitrary authority, published after his discharge from the Royal Navy (what we would now call in the States a “dishonorable” discharge). The two met earlier in 1823 in Edinburgh, where they learned of an autonomous, part-time educational cooperative launched by Glasgow’s skilled workers, the Glasgow Mechanics Institution. This occurred after the artisans broke with the middle- and upper-class leadership of the “Andersonian Institute,” an adult education center funded through the bequest of former Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow John Anderson, and organized their own member-funded school. Robertson and Hodgskin sought to replicate their success in London and quickly attracted small donations from the abolitionist William Wilberforce, the radical pamphleteer William Cobbett, the utopian socialist Robert Owen, and Lord Byron. In the early days of the LMI (late 1823 through 1824), thousands of workers flocked to the twice-weekly lectures held in a chapel in Moorgate. It is crucial to note, too, that the vast majority of unpropertied workers could not vote or run for office until the Second and Third Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884-1885. Women could not vote at all until 1918 (propertied and over the age of 30) and 1928 (every adult over the age of 21).
However, Robertson and Hodgskin’s leadership was quickly eclipsed by the well-connected and wealthy Benthamite physician George Birkbeck, who emphasized moral reform/temperance and “apolitical” bourgeois respectability as opposed to the original founders’ dreams of working-class intellectual independence and insulation from the “philanthropy” (ideological hegemony) of the leisured classes. The LMI was relocated from the humble, rented church space in Moorgate to a newly constructed theater, adorned with a portrait of Birkbeck, in Holborn. In nineteenth-century discourse, Holborn was metonymically linked with the legal profession. Two of the four legal professional-accreditation organizations, the Inns of Court, were and still are based in the neighborhood. The class dynamics instantiated by this move were clear. As one anonymous radical activist would complain in 1832, “Let the huckstering owners of the misnamed Mechanics’ Institution, and the would-be rulers of mechanics’ minds, see that the day is gone by when the million will be satisfied with the puny morsels of mental food which aristocratic pride and pampered cunning have been wont to deal out to them. Let them see, in reality, that ‘the schoolmaster is abroad.’” (The Poor Man’s Advocate and People’s Library, February 25, 1832: 44; quoted in Lloyd and Thomas, Culture and the State, 103).
Accordingly, the most intense curricular debates centered on political economy, starkly dividing the reformist-Benthamite patrons courted by Birkbeck (including the lawyer and parliamentarian Henry Brougham, the author of one of our readings) from the emancipatory political vision sketched by Hodgskin and Robertson. The latter abandoned the project altogether, while Hodgskin, though dismayed by what the LMI had become, continued to teach there. As Richard Clarke writes:
“The Utilitarian liberals had no problem with the ‘facts’ of science, but their ideas about the ‘facts’ regarding the creation and distribution of wealth were very different from Hodgskin’s. Very different too was their vision of the consequences of education for the ‘mechanics’. Both were based on ‘self-help’, but for Hodgskin, self-help meant collective action to secure fundamental social change; for the Utilitarians sobriety, thrift and individual self-improvement were the route to personal advancement and social progress. …By 1825 Hodgskin and Robertson, having instigated the idea of an Institute, regarded it as a lost cause, whose existence depended on the ‘great and the wealthy’” (5).
As implied by one of my earlier questions, the LMI, especially in its original form, was notable for its relative lack of attention to art and literature at a discursive moment characterized by persistent Coleridgean/Carlylean claims that individual capacities for aesthetic perception and production were atrophying under industrial capitalism. Lloyd and Thomas have a fascinating riff on this (p. 89):
Many of the questions I wanted to pose to you all have already been articulated perfectly by NI above (to repeat: “What can education look like when working life cannot be fully suspended? And building upon that, how might we think of the space of education as *interrelating* with work, family, and political action, rather than being a place autonomous from “the everyday”? How could education not just reproduce, but reconfigure the social?”) NI also rightly identified the unsettled status of social mobility in proletarian pedagogic theory (especially for the most vulnerable and precarious populations within the wider WC) in the twentieth century. There is a certain resonance there with the moral-reformist impulse animating both the radical and moderate wings of the LMI, articulated in the language of “self-help” and “improvement” (though here it is more of a psychological and ethical category than an economic one). However, as we’ve seen, these terms were deployed toward quite different ideological ends by the Hodgskin and Birkbeck/Brougham camps. On what conceptions of collective or political life, individual cognitive and intellectual capacity, and labor’s value did these contending usages of “improvement” rest?
I conclude with Dickens’s scathing opening chapter of Hard Times, set in the classroom of the delightfully detestable Thomas Gradgrind. Gradgrind, along with Satan from Paradise Lost, Mrs. Grundy from Archie Comics, Prince Musidorus and others from Philip Sydney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, Dr. Bledsoe and Ras the Exhorter from Invisible Man, the schoolmasters from Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Hollis Lomax from John Williams’s 1965 novel Stoner, Edna Krabapple from The Simpsons, and Ben Stein’s character from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, occupies a vaunted position in the Pantheon of Bad Educators.
Though Gradgrind was likely modeled on the utilitarian James Mill, Dickens, in his public lectures at various mechanics’ institutes (he served as President of the Chatham Mechanics’ Institute in Kent for over a decade) in the 1840s and 1850s, consistently railed against narrow, instrumental conceptions of pedagogy that “neglect[ed] the fancy and the imagination[.]” Do you see any resonance between Dickens’s acerbic satire of psychic-epistemic mechanization in Hard Times and any of the attitudes towards education expressed in the assigned primary sources? How might we view this chapter in light of the Lloyd/Thomas-Gramscian critique cited above?
The exercise/demonstration I’ve cooked up for tomorrow depends on a certain pedagogic immediacy, so I’ll refrain from specifics for now. More soon!
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POST-CLASS POSTS
[DGB starts here]
I think the idea here is that JD and I are not going to try to résumé/document our seminars across these next four weeks. That was a Week 1-8 thing. So much of what concerns us now with these “Cases” involves the practical immediacy of the lessons/exercises/activations that you all are leading — and that are happening live in the room when we are all together. Where there is relevant documentation of those encounters, let’s put it up here in the chat thread (see below for some pics already posted from AK’s thing). And generally, where there are thoughts or comments, everyone should feel free to use this space as a pinboard. But the emphasis going forward wants to be on the pre-class posts composed by the seminar leaders.
All that said, I do have a few quick thoughts after the three wonderful presentations/projects we did today (led so engagingly by AK, NB, NI).
They were all totally great!
For me, important “take-homes” were the encounter with orality (in NB’s “lecture”), and the element of surprise or expectation that ran through all of them in different ways. With AK that was simply the delight at walking into the room and seeing how much work had been done to set something up for us. With NB that was the sense that “anything could happen” because of the performativity. With NI I had the sense we were going somewhere specific, but I could not tell where (so there was a sense that I was headed for a “reveal” — and I was not disappointed in that regard).
When JEHS noted the Jacotot-ness of the afternoon (the sense that we had enacted, three ways, a kind of everything is in everything pedagogical proof-of-concept), I found myself feeling that my delicious/expectant “anything might happen” joy-suspension might actually be a kind of affective corollary of the proposition that everything is in everything. This felt interesting.
After class, musing to myself about the goodness of what had happened, my thinking circled the question of “a class” — not in the socioeconomic sense (though that was on my mind, of course, in the wake of NI’s presentation in particular), but rather in the sense implied by “school.” You all, we all, are…a “class.” In what ways was the goodness of our session today a result of the way we have become a “community of inquiry” across these weeks? Which is to say, what is the role of (emergent) community in the actual project of teaching/learning? I know that is the actual question that a number of our texts (e.g., Duberman) wrestle with explicitly. But I suppose it really hit home today. I felt it as a puzzle. Part of what made class good was…us. You. The openness and willingness you brought — that we all brought. We were all “game.” And so much can be so good when folks are “game.” But how is that condition of possibility achieved? And maintained?
-DGB
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[CA starts here]
Our group’s composition, from its first to final stages:
[OK CA, I’m seeing what you were saying about the rave-to-battlefield progression. On the subject of the battlefield, there’s a really interesting article by Robin Schuldenfrei on the involvement of the Chicago Bauhaus with the war industry during the Second World War. Schuldenfrei describes how experiments with artificial light and light manipulation informed Moholy’s work with Chicago’s Civil Defense Commission, a group tasked with camouflaging Chicago against air attack, and how they were incorporated into a course on camouflage design offered at the school under the auspices of the Office of Civilian Defense. She mentions that two light boxes were included in an exhibition of the Camouflage Course’s work “to show how light and shadow could conceal the character of forms” (111). -AK] — researching this now, Thank you! -CA [[[I had the wrong link in there for the Schuldenfrei, but the article previously linked to, by Emma Stein, actually goes into greater depth about the role of photographic pedagogy in the school’s war work. Both worth a read! -AK]]]
* * *
[AK starts here]
Some process shots of the moody colonnade created by CA, NB, JD, EH, PH, NI, and JEHS, courtesy of DGB:
A few photos by DGB of the composition by CB, DGB, CF, and TU:
And another from TU:
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[JD starts here]
I was thinking after class a little bit about this idea of a class, too, though in terms of—structure, I suppose, is the most neutral term, what parts it has and what relation they have to one another. Especially, whether and when a class abstracts from its proceedings to account for what has been said or done, the reflexive operations of summary or so-what. On what basis would a structural analysis of a class proceed?
Possible paradigms or auspices for structural analysis include the sentence (syntax), narrative, argument (logic), and rhetoric (as a series of speech acts). (Some of these may be derived from others, e.g. Barthes’ project of developing a narrative structuralism from syntax.) These preliminary thoughts are partly narrative, partly rhetorical, I think.
It was AK’s light-box exercise that got me started thinking about this, because the question arose, with five minutes to go, whether we would try to talk together about what had happened. You could I am sure talk about the various overlapping micro-structures of practical experiment involved in our manipulations in those dark little rooms, but basically, it was an open space of immersion without organized reflection. Just trying things, talking miscellaneously, trying again. Then there was open time for a few remarks and then we were done. The lessons about e.g. Bauhaus elementarism were mostly implicit or ad hoc—though not the less powerful for that? (Or even, the more?)
NB’s session with the Mechanics Institute was much more structured: there was a priming question, for writing (how can you do your job better?); a ten-minute lecture on the history of seminar instruction; and then discussion, in pairs, then in the whole group, of the lecture in relation to that initial question. We moved from mode to mode—private writing to collective listening to open discussion to a kind of summary reporting out. A series of discrete events, and in this, like a narrative? (A story if so of what? Of the formation, the consolidation of a community?) But the relation of the events to one another was variously rhetorical: a question, narration (setting forth the facts), division (breaking down the problem, here in discussion), and epitome (pulling it together, or something like that)? Different movements of dilation and economy, with a privilege given to that final stage of summary.
And then NI, who started us off talking about the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, which had the function both of orienting us in the reading material and also raising some questions—an open seminar discussion, of a sort that could simply occupy the hour, with more or less marked moments of recursiveness and summary inside it. But there was a second part, which focused us on health, especially oral health, and invited us to think in relation to our own experiences (the rhetoricians would call this testatio, or, wonderfully, martyria). Finally, there were—pH strips for each of us! An experiment? An example? A little difficult to say, but it seemed to put what had happened so far to test or proof, without much opportunity afterward for discussion (except the weird, powerful sense that such a direct inquiry into each person’s oral health brought us back around to questions of insurance and workers’ precarity with which we began). Structurally so interesting—how would the class have been different if that were the first thing that we did? (How would its rhetorical status have changed? It might be more clearly and example, less a proof? Or a puzzle?)
Anyway—this is hardly systematic, and as with many such enterprises, it’s not clear what the return would be for developing a proper, comprehensive terminology, architecture etc. (Barthes goes a good distance with narrative, with considerable self-assurance, but never really takes up his tools again; one could think too of Empson’s seven types, which are more of an excuse for thinking than they are boxes for sorting.) But—the basic questions of parts, order, and especially recursion (when and if the class becomes about the class; or in what sense different of its events represent transformations of other events); well, it’s something to think about! And it’s a little more tractable to analysis than whatever was the solidarity and bonhomie that carried us so happily through the session—though I too tip my hat gratefully to that.
-JD
* * *
CLASS 10
Readings
From TU: Gudskul
Ruangrupa and the Artistic Team, “Lumbung” and “What Is Harvest,”in documenta15: Handbook. Kassel: Hatje Cantz, 2022. (File: Documenta15Handbook)
Ruangrupa + Team Majalah Lumbung, “Editor’s Introduction lumbung Connect and Interconnect,” in Majalah Lumbung: A Magazine on Harvesting and Sharing. Kassel: Hatje Cantz, 2022. (File: IntroLumbung)
Maulida Raviola, “Probing into Gradiasi: lumbung as a Medium, for the Management of Movement Knowledge,” in Majalah Lumbung: A Magazine on Harvesting and Sharing. Kassel: Hatje Cantz, 2022. (File: Gradiasi)
Dedy Hermansyah, “Harvesting Rice, Caring for lumbung, Keeping Traditions,” in Majalah Lumbung: A Magazine on Harvesting and Sharing. Kassel: Hatje Cantz, 2022. (File: Hermansaya_HarvestingRice)
Melani Budianta, “Equal Lumbung of Culture: Poso Women’s School,” in Majalah Lumbung: A Magazine on Harvesting and Sharing. Kassel: Hatje Cantz, 2022. (File: PosoWomen’sSchool)
“Serigrafistas Queer,” in documenta15: Handbook. Kassel: Hatje Cantz, 2022. Please also google them. (File: SerigrafistasQueer)
Please consult this website and focus on the concept of nongkrong: https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/lumbung-members-artists/gudskul/.
Please consult the lumbung rules: https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/easy-lumbung/.
*
PH: Education in Ecovillages // The School of Integrated Living
Read: About SOIL / Earthhaven Mission and Goals / SOIL Values and Code of Conduct / SOIL Compositions (aka curriculum)
Marshall B. Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, (Encinitas: PuddleDancer Press, 3rd Edition 2015), Introduction, pp. 1-14; Chapter 11 “Conflict Resolution & Mediation,” pp. 161-184; Chapter 13 “Liberating Ourselves and Counseling Others” pp. 195-208.
(and for those that prefer having a PDF, page numbers are as follows: Intro pp. 24-38, Chapter 11, pp. 208-239, Chapter 13 pp. 254-268).
–
Additional Reading:
M.E. O’Brien & Eman Abdelhadi, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune (Brooklyn: Common Notions, 2022).
Benjamin Walker’s Theory of Everything, “Utopia (part ii),” 2017.
Karen T. Litfin. Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014) Chapter 6 “Consciousness: Being in the Cirlce of Life” pp 149-186.
Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (Great Britain: Calder & Boyars, 1973).
Jason Hickel, Less is More: How Degrowth will Save the World (London: Heinemann), Chapter 1 “Capitalism: A Creation Story” pp 43-77.
*
From CA: Drawing Restraint
Johan Huizinga, “Nature and Significance of Play as a Cultural Phenomenon,” in Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1949.
Pierre Bourdieu, “Invention within Limits,” in Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Alfred North Whitehead, “Lecture Two: Expression,” in Modes of Thought. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1938.
*
PRE-CLASS THINK PIECES (TU & PH & CA)
[CA starts here]
In 1987 while an undergraduate at Yale University, the artist Matthew Barney produced a series of performances that continue to evolve today collectively called DRAWING RESTRAINT. Barney entered Yale on a football scholarship with the intention of studying pre-med but soon changed his degree to studio art after coming to the realization that his obsession with self-inflicted experiments of physical endurance and psychological willpower would be more readily accepted in the arena of performance studies than the medical laboratory. During these performances, Barney would first manufacture a device that limited his ability to reach a set goal, which could be as simple as reaching a drawing board or marking a ceiling, and then placed himself in the device to act out the challenge with varying success. These devices ranged from sculptural barriers to bondages designed to restrict movement to prosthetics. For example, in DRAWING RESTRAINT I (1987), Barney wore a harness connected to a thick bungee-cord that bound him to the wall of a classroom and then attempted to climb up a steep ramp stretching himself against the tension of the cord to set pencil to paper positioned on a desk at the other side of the room.
In these performances, Barney approached art making as athletic conditioning, as a sport, a game, one that he set the rules for but also one that allowed those rules to be rewritten in real-time should certain interventions unfold. Interested in pushing his bodily and mental threshold, Barney used the DRAWING RESTRAINT exercises to test his capacity to withstand repetitive physical stress, tension, resistance, but also to play, improvise, and collaborate. I have no doubt that at times his exercises were meant to cause him pain, to measure his tolerance, but I think what has been underemphasized in academic studies of DRAWING RESTRAINT is his willfulness to play. In one of the primary sources I provided, Johan Huizinga examined play as a foundational element of cultural and historical production and asked what play is in itself and what it means for the player. He wrote:
“It goes beyond the confines of purely physical or purely biological activity. It is a significant function-that is to say, there is some sense to it. In play there is something “at play” which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action. All play means something. If we call the active principle that makes up the essence of play, “instinct”, we explain nothing; if we call it “mind” or “will” we say too much.” (Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1944): 1)
Barney would perform all hours day and night, not just for class or in front of an audience. Some performances were documented, some witnessed, while others remain unknown. Was he playing? Playing and seriousness are often treated as a dialectic — something that Huizinga has been criticized for in secondary literatures. “Play lies outside the antithesis of wisdom and folly,” wrote Huizinga, “and equally outside those of truth and falsehood, good and evil. Although it is a non-material activity it has no moral function. The valuations of vice and virtue do not apply here” (1944: 7). Can play not be work? Can the imaginary not produce the real?
There is something that does not sit well with me when reading the critics of Huizinga who claim that his was an attempt to categorically define play into taxonomies. While it is evident that Huizinga thought of play as being separate from ordinary life, I think he did so as a strategic methodology to examine how rules in play form group relations. Like Barney in his earliest iterations of DRAWING RESTRAINT, which were all performed within his studio space, Huizinga set artificial perimeters to his study as a means to operate under controlled conditions and take notes along the way. Athletic training, in which the body strives to surpass threshold after threshold of corporeal limitation, is at the center of DRAWING RESTRAINT. These early performances demonstrate Barney’s objective to create a “hypertrophic process” — an endless loop between desire and discipline, and ultimately, a self-enclosed aesthetic system.
Performance as pedagogy has for centuries been valued and studied. Theater was typically centered, but over the last century, the discourse around performance and performativity has undergone a revolution. Performance studies contribute to and draw from the currents of feminist, critical race, postcolonial, and queer theory discourses. The first American theatre department was the Carnegie Mellon’s School of Fine and Applied Arts in 1914. When performance served the innovations of Fluxus artists in the 1960s, visual art pedagogies altered dramatically. As artists experimented with the durational, environmental, and embodied techniques, schools around the country found it necessary to incorporate performing into an otherwise “fine” curriculum. Indeed, Fluxus could have been my “school” for this seminar, although making it so would have raised debate about whether or not Fluxus can be said to still be in practice as a “school.” In the 1970s, artist Augusto Boal began a series titled Theater of the Oppressed to promote student engagement in a set of highly interactive games, exercises, and techniques designed to excite participants in a “problem-posing” dialogue. And it is easy to find similar themes to those exposed here in the practices of Shigeko Kubota, Linda Montano, and Tehching Hsieh.
Performance that requires endurance is now considered to be a critical modality of expression in human behavior, social processes and hierarchies, identity deconstructions and constructions, and educational programming, with teachers and students alike seeking to better understand it for the benefit of their own field as well as a pedagogical method. For these reasons, it was difficult to choose only a few primary texts. And there are plenty of great reads, from texts about speech-act theory by John L. Austin (1962) to the phenomenology of gender in ritualized repetition of communicative acts by Judith Butler (1995). Then there is Elyse Pineau, who described performance through the ideological meanings it bears and the temporal axes it operates within:
“It precedes and creates the condition for action; it is instantiated anew in each moment, and it is carried forward through each repetition. In other words, if “performance” is the situated instantiation of historical meanings, “performativity” is the sociocultural dynamic that lends it longevity, power, and the appearance of inevitability. Thus, one might attend to discreet performances within educational life while investigating the performative trajectories in which they are embedded… Critical performative pedagogy combines acute physical awareness of one’s kinetic and kinesthetic sense with candid and thoughtful consideration of the implications of those bodily sensations. Every time that we ask students to perform across gender, ethnic, or generational lines we have the opportunity to unpack their resistance to the unfamiliar, their stereotypic assumptions about how others move through the world, as well as to confront their own habituated responses and experiences.” (Elyse Pineau, “Performance Studies Across the Curriculum: Problems, Possibilities, and Projections” (1998): 133)
These and other scholars have shown that linking performance to pedagogy within the classroom without an accompanying recognition of historical, social, or cultural antecedents is problematic. Rather than viewing performance as merely a theatric, or assigning the reductive metaphor of teacher as performer, it should be understood as a humanizing pedagogical framework that helps teachers and students interrogate their collusion in the social construction of meaning and excavate new conditions of knowledge production.
Over a couple of years, the DRAWING RESTRAINT performances grew increasingly complex with more difficult obstacles to overcome. Fellow student at the time, Sophie Arkette, observed that Barney’s works “do not refer to something static, a composed form, but reveal the way one action precipitates another in the course of making a work” (Art Safari No. 1, video recording). For Barney, the game itself is less important than the accumulation and release of energy in a controlled corporeal environment. Later in the 1990s, Barney incorporated the DRAWING RESTRAINT performances into long-format films and expanded their meaning, identifying a three-part internal system that processes the ebb and flow of energy in the body toward and away from productivity. He called the first level of the system “Situation” to indicate pure potential and described it as the first six weeks of embryonic development when the embryo is both XX and XY and is thus undifferentiated.
The second level is called “Condition,” which he distinguished as a “disciplinary funnel” that like a digestive tract, processes energy and distills it for use. The final level is “Production” in which the outcome is realized. Notably, however, Barney often chooses to skip over “Production,” short-circuiting the system so that the internal matrix continues to oscillate between “Situation” and “Condition.” He wrote on the subject, “Something that’s really elusive can slip out — a form that has form but isn’t overdetermined” (Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, Travels in Hypertrophia (1995): 117). What becomes clear when you watch his work is that if you stay in “Production,” you have swallowed what he calls “The Hubris Pill,” and are doomed to stasis. On this three-tiered system, Barney has explicitly vocalized that concepts put forth by Bourdieu were important to his thinking, especially Bourdieu’s habitus, or the tendency for people to behave and think in a certain way because of socialized norms. Bourdieu defines habitus in the primary sources I provided:
“It is the object of explicit injunctions and express recommendations, sayings, proverbs, and taboos, serving a function analogous to that performed in a different order by customary rules or genealogies. Although they are never more than rationalizations devised for semi-scholarly purposes, these more or less codified objectifications are, of all the products of habitus structured in accordance with the prevailing system of classification, those which are socially recognized as the most representative and successful, those worthiest of being preserved by the collective memory; and so they are themselves organized in accordance with the structures constituting that system of classification.” (Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977): 98)
Habitus is, for Barney, a good (and by good, I mean bad) way to die. It is the state you find yourself in if you reach “Production” and fail to return to “Situation.” Habitus prevents us from accessing the energy, the movement, within the domain some might call “practice” and others might call “self.” At stake here is the problem of determinism — of how corporeal aspects of embodied subjectivity is directed by social determinants. Recall that the most generative level of Barney’s system is represented by an embryo that has yet to differentiate to XX or XY. Here again, I was tempted to add Butler to the required reading list for this week and I encourage you to seek out their scholarship. Butler has written extensively on biological reductionism and, not unlike Bourdieu, rejects gendernaturalising roles of symbolic orders.
Since the 1990s, the DRAWING RESTRAINT performances have taken new form beyond Barney or any one institution or movement. Listing out the numerous pathways would require another think piece, but for now, I can share a picture I took while attending one in 2019. Organized by six female artists, this DRAWING RESTRAINT took place in a warehouse in Queens.
– CA
[TU starts here]
I would like to start this think piece by asking: what is lumbung? (I am really interested about this concept and how it has been applied by Ruangrupa and all the collectives in documenta and in Gudskul) And I will leave the answer open until our session starts on Wednesday afternoon. Maybe because I don’t know the answer yet (or because I don’t want to know the answer), which I think it’s a good way to start. Maybe, because it’s good to leave it open as the concept reminds us. What I would like is for you to think about this concept and to bring something for the beginning of our session. Something short, not so developed, something from your own experience. We will start from here. Hopefully we don’t find an answer to the question that is triggering this think piece, but instead we find multiple and diverse answers. Multiple broad, diverse, open, and broad answers.
When we think of a school we could think of many different things. But maybe we would agree at some point that is a place where knowledge is shared. When I started thinking about a school for my presentation/project/activation, I was thinking a lot about how knowledge was transferred and how it was kept/used/stored/shared. I was thinking a lot about what it means to know something, and that in many Western educational systems knowing something differentiates people from others: the people who know from the people who don’t. Themes largely developed in Ranciere’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster, and Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. What I want to reinforce here is that in these structures knowledge appears as an individualistic thing tied to narratives of progress and personal development. How many times have we heard about the importance of knowledge in regards to the job market? What is our relationship to knowledge, do we conceive it as a collective practice or as an individual thing? How we could think of knowledge as a space for resistance? What is the real value in generating and sharing knowledge?
In a lumbung, knowledge is shared. This is to say that lumbung carries with it the notions of collectivity and interwinedness. In its traditional sense lumbung is the collective practice of harvesting crops. But as reminded in the reading about the Poso’s Women School, lumbung is not only a collective harvesting practice in its literal meaning, but also a cultural practice. A cultural practice that is shared by the community in the consecration of their goals. It is a practice of sharing knowledge in a way that things are held together. This idea of gathering and storing knowledge is the essence of the lumbung practices: to collect the “entire wealth of values, knowledge, and social practices as regards the identity of the (a) village” (Budianta, 67). Lumbung is the practice of creating togetherness.
There is also another characteristic of the idea of lumbung that I would like to share here, the idea of lumbung as a modular practice. Lumbung knowledge could be “placed according to the context of the space where the participants are located.” (Raviola, 164). As per Raviola, the modularity of lumbung dissolves authority actions and transforms them in circular and creative collective actions. Knowledge sharing is presented then as a circular and reflective practice, in which the members of a community negotiate to keep the collective interests of the community alive. So modularity provides the possibility of keeping the flow of knowledge and reflection in constant fluctuation. I will quote the last question posed by Maulida Raviola in “Probing into Gradiasi: lumbung as a Medium for the Management of Movement Knowledge,” in which se asks: “how can lumbung truly provide a transformative action for the movement of and not stop as merely interest group?” (Raviola, 165). I would like us to reflect a little bit about what this question means, and to reflect on how it is our approximation as knowledge as a practice.
Gudskul is presented as an educational knowledge sharing-platform, structured around the concepts of sharing and working together. Maybe these two concepts summarize why Gudskul sparked some interest in a sense to start thinking-with it. Gudskul is structured under the concept of lumbung, and this is why it is so interesting. It doesn’t intend to be something defined and structured, it intends to stay open. If we think of Gudskul, we need to think of an ecosystem, a system in which every participant affects the others. Each of them is defined by the interaction with the other members of the community. Gudskul is an educational practice.
Maybe this is the fascinating thing about Gudskul and lumbung. The conception of thinking of a school, or a platform, as an ecosystem that implies a collective practice. It is not only a practice, but a practice of practices. A collective of collectives, in which knowledge is circulated to activate other activities. I really like this, Gudskul is not only a “school” it’s a practice, documenta15 has nothing to do with an art exhibition. It’s practice! A shared one.
Finally I would like to reflect or dedicate some lines to Serigrafistas Queer. A collective that participated in documenta 15 and has been highly influential in the activities that we’ll be conducting together. In short Serigrafistas is also a collective working with collective care practices, sharing and knowledge circularity (please check the file submitted into the readings for this week and try to google them if possible). Because Gudskul is structured under the concept of lumbung, and lumbung is a collective of practices. I’ll be inspiring my activities in some collective exercises developed by Serigrafistas in the framework of documenta15. The idea is to think about ourselves in relation to others and how our actions are affected and affect others.
These activations were also influenced by Donna Haraway’s “Playing String Figures with Companion Species.” It was my intention to include this whole text as a required reading for the week but I preferred to include more lumbung related stuff and leave here a little reflection of what inspired the activation. I will finish here with a little quoted paragraph and look forward to a nice time together. A time of sharing and reflection (please notice that my activity will happen outside, so please be prepared to spend some time below the sun beams.
On the practice of string figures by Haraway:
Practice = Action
-TU
[PH starts here]
The School of Integrated Living (SOIL)
In 2018, I quit my job as a project manager at an architecture firm and started driving west to Taos, New Mexico. I was moving to Europe soon and the goal was twofold: use the transition as an opportunity to take an adventure and draw my knowledge of conventional construction closer to “regenerative” at the Earthship Biotecture Academy. Around halfway, I stopped in Rutledge, Missouri to partake in the Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage weekend experience (and to stay at what I thought might be a nice place to camp). Reflecting on my inaugural visit to an intentional living community, the first thing I can think is that 24 years old feels worlds apart from 29…but I’ll try to sketch a picture.
Besides my own, there are no cars, save for four sitting in a big open shed at the edge of the village, alongside stacks of reclaimed lumber, that all 75 members of Dancing Rabbit share. We pitch our tent, scoop woodchips over humanure in an outhouse, take a lap through 20 acres of native prairie grasses (a sliver of the 280 acres of rolling hills and woodland), and share a meal with fellow visitors and residents alike at the Milkweed Mercantile Inn. Sharon—who teaches most of our workshops—is gray-haired, gentle, and welcoming. They have dirt floors inside their home and chickens circling it outside. Their husband has recently died, and we connect over being fellow Citizens’ Climate Lobby members. Stephen with the round, 2-story house lives there just some of the year, and for the rest, sells Christmas trees in New York and travels around to various odd jobs. Alis built himself a literal hobbit house and explains the process one goes through to join the community. Cutting up apples from last season at Sara and Ted’s house, we learn that Sara is one in a collection of midwives. Later on, I adjust to the experience of swimming nude at the lake, and my brain rewires as Ted and his middle-school-aged daughter do the same. Each person at Dancing Rabbit seems to know and be deeply committed to their role and shows up to it not just as doers, but as teachers. Everyone has something different to offer—skills or knowledge—which they freely and generously share, in hopes that we will carry it forth into the networks we belong to. It is evident residents are as committed to changing the world as they are to changing their own lives, and education is essential to this mission.
While for centuries, small groups of people have come together to seek new ways of living in harmony, ecovillages trace their roots to various historical lineages: the ideals of self-sufficiency and spiritual inquiry found in monasteries, ashrams, and Gandhian movements; the environmentalist, peace, feminist, and alternative education social movements of the 60s and 70s; and both “back-to-the-land” and cohousing movements in affluent countries. GEN’s original vision—for new ecovillages to “sprout like mushrooms”—has not come to pass. Instead, ecovillages form something more akin to a mycorrhizal network, transmitting information from the bottom up through educational programs offered all over the world.
Contrary to popular opinion, ecovillages are not isolated enclaves but culturally, architecturally, economically, and climactically diverse communities that hold in common a strong educational mission. The Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) was established in 1995 and today includes around 400 ecovillages worldwide, a number which swells to 15,000 when including traditional rural villages in the Majority World that belong to participatory development networks within GEN. Formed under the GEN umbrella in 2005 and now a part of the UNESCO Global Action Programme, Gaia Education is an international NGO that teaches participatory processes in all four areas of regeneration: social, cultural, ecological, and economic. Gaia’s Ecovillage Design Education (EDE) curriculum culminates in a hands-on project designed and implemented by students under faculty supervision, most of which export ecovillage practices into existing communities (building shared gardens, establishing environmental education programs for children, transforming sewage systems in urban slums) and are undertaken by graduates who have never lived in an ecovillage. The cost of land has slowed the growth of new ecovillages, but courses emanating from them are more popular than ever, fulfilling Gaia’s mission to promote both information exchange among ecovillages and to provide education for widespread social change.
Earthaven is a “living laboratory for a sustainable human future” in the Blue Ridge Mountains about a 45-minute drive southeast of Asheville, North Carolina. Established in 1994, the 320 acres of jointly owned forest has steadily taken on 100 residents (75 adults and 25 children). Their mission is to live sustainably and to serve as an educational center. Karen T. Liftin captures the spirit and function of education at Earthaven in the book Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community, which she wrote after a year of visiting intentional communities across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia:
“Brian Love and others like him have acquired economic assets as a direct consequence of the impressive skills they’ve developed at ecovillages. Brian’s skills include carpentry, masonry, plastering, insulation, concrete casting, excavation, grading, logging, lumber processing, setting up renewable energy systems and wastewater systems, as well as construction management and building design. In addition, there are the skills in law, accounting, and financial management that are necessary to handle any project that interfaces with a larger community and the communication skills – verbal and emotional – necessary for living in a community. Part of an ecovillage economy is the education that comes along with it.” (78).
Unsurprisingly, both the most challenging and the most rewarding aspect of ecovillage life for the 150-plus residents Liftin interviewed was: “the people” (113). Author and longtime Earthaven resident, Diana Leafe-Christian, distinguishes between strategic and relational people. “Strategic people are goal-oriented and focused, energetic, and often blunt in their manner. Relational people are process-oriented; for them, the strategic movers and shakers are like bulls in a china shop. To strategic thinkers, relational people are self-indulgent wimps” (Liftin 119). Ecovillages often attract people who urgently want to build a different future and people who are seeking deep connection, a combination which spurred Earthaven to adopt non-violent communication (NVC) after a conflict over whether or not to build wells in response to the state health department declaring their spring-fed water system unfit for visitors. While many ecovillages operate by consensus, others have elected “king guides,” super-majority voting, or sociocracies (wherein decision-making is decentralized to specialized subgroups). Communication is arguably the most foundational aspect of intentional living communities, and many have developed and exported techniques and forums that draw on improvisational theater, and collective mediation, which build essential capacity to respond to our own and others’ suffering—a kind of intelligence that guides our evolution and interconnects us with other human beings.
As self-proclaimed living laboratories, ecovillages often function like one big classroom. The ultimate outcome of people living in an evolutionary laboratory is a relational experiment that fosters new modes of human beingness. Wendell Berry suggests that spirituality and practical life should be inseparable—practicality alone can be dangerous and spirituality alone feeble, and neither is very interesting without the other. If spirituality can help translate intrinsic connections with nature into lived experience, what does this look like in practice? Where does the scientific method fit in? Like Outer Coast, the School of Integrated Living incorporates hands-on teaching methods which diverge sharply from the intellectual status quo of traditional educational institutions. Many of the SOIL compositions are deeply focused on spirituality and the development of self-awareness and relation to others. On the metaphysical spectrum, ecovillagers share a core belief in the power of the group mind—the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Practicing such a unified worldview seems to offer an advantage in dissolving old polarities between simple living and big-picture thinking, religion and science, and secular and spiritual. If every culture lives out its core story, what kind of cultural stories does the education that takes place in ecovillages have to offer?
–PH
* * *
POST-CLASS POSTS
[DGB starts here]
Lots to think on again this week. TU gave us a wonderful series of exercises with a rope and those schematic narrative diagrams.
Yes, we had to get over a moment of initial awkwardness (it would be interesting to theorize that perennial threshold of something like polite caution). But once we got going the format proved to be a remarkably efficient way to get a group of people generating and (in some sense) “performing” collaborative stories. In fact, I felt it worked so well that it was slightly haunted, for me, by the specter of well-grooved “team-building exercises” such as turn up at expensively curated corporate retreats. I want to be clear: I am not in any way saying this as a critique of TU’s lesson! On the contrary. The people who run those retreats are total professionals who have refined absolute best practices for facilitating group dynamics. (I have some friends and former students who have moved into the “coaching” world, who have reported to me about the high-quality understanding of group dynamics often on display among the leaders in that growth area — an area about which it is easy to feel ambivalent, though perhaps wrongly?). I more found myself puzzling over how strange it is that an entire industry has arisen that services that very real need — and that this industry has arisen pretty much totally without connection (in either direction) to university/classroom situations. Is this correct? Maybe. I am not sure. Still, I found myself wondering in this direction. A genuinely remarkable and catalytic lesson — one that I would like to do again in another group situation, because I feel like it really “worked.”
*
And with PH’s lesson on Non-Violent Communication we really “went there”: drilling pretty close (in at least some instances) to the heartland of our emotional and interpersonal lives — those spaces of conflict, misunderstanding, love, hope, hurt. Her care in setting up the circle and providing for our needs surely contributed to the sense of safety that enabled many of us to take a turn into this territory. After the role-play exercise, we went around the group. What was most “alive” for each of us there on the grass? Different things: the status of the silence we had permitted ourselves (its place in spaces of thought); the denaturing function of certain forms of “structure”; the careful maintenance of distance that can sometimes thwart genuine love and intimacy, but at other times is an absolute condition of possibility for both. (How close were we, in all this, to the “encounter session” class that Martin Duberman tried to run on this campus circa 1970? What was different? What would those students recognize in our physical configuration? In what we actually said?).
In this lesson the tie back to the question of educational community was left nicely in suspension: SOIL communities apparently use NVC practices, and so we were dropping right in on the “discourse” understood to make possible a certain kind of utopian community of teaching and learning. The rules for the governing of these special places (in the reading) provided a nice window into the kind of “constitution” that can undergird “flatter” forms of intentional co-living. And such forms of life clearly enable forms of pedagogy quite different from the dominant paradigm within modern American higher education.
*
And then, finally we descended into the basement for the harness and blindfold, for elastic bungees and the problem of restraint. Much of this will be better invoked in a gallery of judiciously selected images (see below). Does everyone know the Lars Von Trier film The Five Obstructions? It activates in its own way the problem of constraint — as well as the problem of reenactment. Also very relevant (especially for the physical aspects of the Matthew Barney exercise): the work of the path-breaking choreographer Elizabeth Streb.
Many thanks to TU, PH, and CA for three really interesting lessons today — and thanks to all for being willing to jump in on the explorations…
-DGB
* * *
[JD starts here]
That was a remarkably safe space (the lawn, the basement), given the range of our lessons this week, so maybe it’s a little perverse that I found myself meditating afterward on pedagogy and violence—not a topic we’ve broached so far, but an old and evergreen one. I couldn’t find any hint of hurt in TU’s irenical exercises in lumbung, hybrids of Harraway and Serigrafistas Queer. The project of translating from drawings to configurations of body and line to stories felt alert and adaptive and just about immune to coercion. PH’s nonviolent communication protocols encouraged an open attentiveness to the real needs of others, and it felt in my own exchanges, and those vibrating around me, that everyone gave themselves pretty fully to the invitation to role-playing. NVC assumes that when those needs are surfaced, they will be benign and meetable: Marshall Rosenberg opens his book, “Believing that it is our nature to enjoy giving and receiving in a compassionate manner,…” But I and others were struck by SOIL’s Code of Conduct on “Honoring Boundaries”: “I honor others’ boundaries as well as set and honor my own. When I honor someone’s boundaries, it is a sign of respect. I understand that if I continue to say or do things that violate other people’s needs after being asked to stop, protective use of force may be used.” Nonviolence is a negation of violence. What is the root assumption here—Rousseau or Hobbes?
Of course all this got a twist from our experiments with Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint. There is a world of thinking about restraint and pleasure that ought to be adduced. Likewise, the resources of disability studies. But for our immediate purposes, I felt like a kind of analysis was being performed: that a tangled knot of effort, pain, constraint, making, gender, consent, complicity, was being untangled by the open inventiveness and collaborative invitation of the exercise as CA posed it. That is, here was effort, and even small pain, not as consequences of hierarchical violence—rather, as chosen experiences and allegories (both at once—the feeling and the availability for thinking) of the difficulties that attend any act of creation. It was not punishment. Au contraire! But its elements are often recruited to punish. Maybe more fundamentally, it was not violent, not in the slightest, and so we got to think, in the heat and after, about how what makes a relation violent and what saves it from violence.
These are questions for any school. Where and when can or does violence happen? Among students? (Informal or outlaw regimes of discipline and hierarchy.) Teachers punishing students? Or administrators punishing students? Or is violence outsourced beyond the building—onto kin, onto police? When it is imposed, how is it imposed—in private, in public? (What is its relation to shame?) How much violence is tolerated among students before a response, violent or otherwise, is triggered? How is the threat of it invoked in the course of ordinary business, if at all; how is it interpolated into pedagogy? (The great Jesuit media theorist Walter Ong has a famous article on “Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite.”) Is there a theory of pain and learning, pain and memory? (Ditto, shame?) And of course one could also ask—how does the school respond to violence outside its walls, in the society at large or in its past? That is a powerful theme for some of the schools we have seen, from the anticolonialism of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Paulo Freire to the restraints on beating in Locke and Rousseau. Violence might be said to shape the care with which many of the educators we have read create the spaces of their schools. How do they keep violence out?
And of course—what do we mean by violence? Something like, the deliberate use of physical force to cause pain and constrain behavior. But it is an intellectual, moral, and political project of our moment to diagnose violence in situations where ideology may conceal the physical force, for example in stable structures which are sustained by implicit threat, or in situations of slow degradation rather than sudden blows. Here I am starting to get (still) more abstract, so I’ll stop in a moment—but it is interesting how resistant violence is to metaphor. To look at rows of desks and see a scene of violence is not to say that this is like some other violent scene, but rather, there is real violence here, just slower or subtler than you’re used to seeing it. Maybe a violent storm is an exception; but to say something in human affairs is like violence is almost always to say that it really is violence. Different from love?—which is promiscuously available for metaphor, in human affairs and in the natural world (the Ficinian love among the spheres, for example). Extensions of the concept of violence characteristically insist on its literalism. Hmmmm. Perhaps what is useful for us is to measure the challenge of making a school that is a genuinely non-violent space? In that, we had some lessons this week.
-JD
* * *
CLASS 11
Readings
From LD: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)
Read for context: Intro from Patrick McCray, Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture, 2020
Some basic info on E.A.T (I found this a bit late in the game): The Experiments in Art and Technology Datascape (Leclercq and Girard 2011) (I stopped at “A digital method to work on E.A.T. archive?”)
Klüver’s “Fragment on Man and the System,” a short essay in Alfred Leslie’s The Hasty Papers, 1960.
“Homage to New York”
Watch 1-min Video
I love McCray’s description of this work on p. 87-90 in “Part of the machine”.
9 Evenings
General info about this project
DVD of Rachenburg’s piece with Klüver, Rauschenberg, and others talking about E.A.T. in more general terms afterward.
Check out the performance of Robert Whitman’s 1960 piece American Moon, re-staged at PACE earlier this year (scroll down for the film)
Additional Reflections (optional?):
John Blakinger on Gyorgy Kepes and his work at MIT (not an E.A.T.-er). This essay is based on this book.
Steven Shapin Making Art / Discovering Science
Fully Optional:
McCray’s full book, if you’re interested
Klüver “The Great Northeastern Power Failure”, 1966
MoMA press release of “Homage to New York”
“Some More Beginnings” exhibition
Conference organized by the Exploratorium, a science-education museum in San Francisco.
*
From CB: The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University
Basic info- The Jack Kerouac School’s about page, Poetry at Naropa: The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and Introducing the Naropa Collection, which briefly details the founding of the Naropa Institute (now university).
From Disembodied Poetics: Annals of the Jack Kerouac School –
Read Intro and Counterpoetics Statement, Declaration of Interdependence, and The Nomad Tent
Archival Documents –
Video or Transcript – Naropa Institute: First Convocation June 10 1974
Audio or Transcript – Dharma Poetics: Talk 1 June 22 1982
Audio or Transcript – Naropa Institute: Meditation and Poetics: Class Discussion August 11 1978
Audio or Transcript – Naropa Institute: Faculty Seminar: Discussion July 18 1975
The Naropa Poetry Wars – on WS. Merwin and Dana Naone’s visit to Naropa
Read – The Party: A Chronological Perspective on a Confrontation at a Buddhist Seminary
Trungpa, Naropa, and the Outrider Road
Suggested Reading/Viewing
Fried Shoes and Cooked Diamonds (1978) – Documentary about the Jack Kerouac School narrated by Allen Ginsberg
Crazy Wisdom: The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (2010)
Video or Transcript – Naropa Institute: Poetry Reading August 9 1975
Audio or Transcript – Naropa Institute: Meeting with Poetics Faculty July 1 1982
*
From MG: Utilitarian Education (The Case of John Stuart Mill)
John Stuart Mill, “Letter to Samuel Bentham” in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XII—The Earlier Letters (1812-1848), ed. John Robson (Toronto 1963), p. 6-10
John Stuart Mill, “Autobiography,” in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume I— Autobiography and other Literary Essays, ed. John Robson (Toronto 1963), p. 33 (starting at second paragraph, which begins “At this point concluded what can properly be called my lessons…) – p. 39; 137 – 153. [NOTE: This version of Mill’s autobiography contains the published draft and his earlier draft together; there is no need to read the pages with the “Early Draft” heading]
“Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrews” in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXI—Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, ed. John Robson (Toronto 1963), p. 217- 257 (This is a bit long, so feel free to skim pp. 237-255)
*
PRE-CLASS THINK PIECES (LD & CB & MG)
[LD starts here]
For my ‘school’, I have taken up Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). This wasn’t a school in the formal sense but a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering collaborations between artists and engineers. It was founded in the 1960s by Bell Labs engineers Billy Klüver, Fred Waldhauer, Robert Rauschenberg, and Robert Whitman, established artists at that time.
I came to learn about E.A.T. via the book Making Art Work (Patrick McCray 2020), recommended to me by DGB.
The collaborative experiments carried out by E.A.T. participants were conducted in the key of BMC experimentation, minus the pedagogical component, at times with many of the same artists. Other notable enterprises in this space from that time include the inception of Leonardo, a journal still active today that publishes on interdisciplinary work spanning art and science, LACMA’s Art & Technology Program, and Gyorgy Kepes’s founding of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT (I’ll return to Kepes below).
E.A.T. was catalyzed by a one-off collaborative project between Klüver and Jean Tinguely in Homage to New York.
Klüver maintained that, when paired with art, engineering failure was one acceptable outcome. Art liberated engineering from previously understood best practices of pragmatism, efficiency, and the known subject matter dictated by industry. Meanwhile, engineering expanded art’s toolbox and palette. Common themes included wirelessness, communication and transmittance, modulating and projecting light and sound, mechanism design, and temporary yet dramatic space-filling.
Kluver’s vision for E.A.T. was founded in his ideas of “total reality,” which could be paraphrased as an acknowledgment of the structures in which we act, i.e. “systems”. The sources of those structures might be “religious, psychological, scientific, technological, social or moral, a painting or poem…” and these systems provide order against the perceived chaos of our world. A chaotic world is one-dimensional, so to live ‘dimensionally’ we (humans) construct systems. Importantly, our systems “are only relevant because of our commitment to them,” i.e. our need and desire to live beyond a one-dimensional existence verify the relevance of such systems. Klüver’s essay reminds me of this by Lorraine Daston. Both authors give buoyancy to the ideas that a) these structures exist, b) their sources are diverse, and c) the supposed discovered ‘truths’ of nature, i.e. science, are impossible to pin down.
For Klüver, “total reality” provides a basis for disciplinary holism based on a fundamental, common architecture. At the same time, contradictorily, Klüver thinks that engineers and artists can connect by differentiating what is discovered vs. what is made — with art and technology belonging to the last activity. He insists that art connects only with technology in the spirit of invention and that “art and science have really nothing to do with each other” (Klüver 1995) on the ground of science’s ultimate goal of producing theory rather than things. He ignores that science is indeed a system that could (and would) commingle with systems of art. Shapin takes up the fuzziness of these boundaries here. To put an unjustly dismissive, temporary cap on the issue, here I’ll say that I’m not sure it matters then or now — as we see in E.A.T.’s later collaborations with scientists with no apparent upheaval of their ideology. I’ll leave this point on the table and proceed using both terms almost interchangeably.
I keep this in mind as I puzzle over what kind of activity or lesson would be relevant and productive for our class. Posing a challenge is the fact that these collaborations were carried out between individuals over some time. E.A.T. invested in personal relationships between sole actors. There was no institution, despite suggestions to institutionalize. In E.A.T. projects, learning consisted of mutual exchange between individuals with complementary expertise. This dynamic will be difficult to replicate under our set of constraints.
To this end, I also wonder if I should have focused on Kepes and CAVS… an actual institution with an actual pedagogy conveniently packaged in a series of books named the Vision + Value Series. This work and thought grew directly out of the Chicago Bauhaus and ran in parallel with the flavor of experimentation we’ve already discussed (and practiced) from BMC. Indeed, Nathan Lerner’s light boxes and Bucky Fuller appear in these volumes. I have been wondering how sprinkling high-tech image-making equipment into our classroom would add anything new to that conversation of experimentation. That said, Kepes’s depictions of science’s visual effects exhibit an infatuation with science and technology as a means of image-making, an approach that landed him and his colleagues in the crosshairs of criticism per MIT’s affiliation with military research. A critic of Otto Piene, Kepe’s successor, writes:
(Blakinger p. 351)
Aestheticization of the instrument — albeit loosely defined — was seen as a move of complacency and uplifting of the power and brutality that science could unleash. In the wake of WWII, the tensions of the Cold War, and then Vietnam, the general aesthetics of the time were perhaps equally wonderment and deep mistrust of science and technology. Blakinger suggests Kepes dwelled in wonder, not out of naivety but hope.
With or without militarization or aggressive critique, aestheticization of science continues today. As a physicist/engineer/artist/designer, I’m asked to contribute entries to scientist-curated competitions and galleries. JMM, Bridges, Gallery of Fluid Motion, and the new Gallery of Soft Matter are just a few that I’ve either participated in or brushed up against one way or another. As I type, Princeton is assembling its own, “The Art of Science”. Here I’ve shared a video of mine they accepted, “Frozen instabilities”. To make this, I persuaded a salesperson to drive six hours to Princeton with a $100K thermal imaging device. The idea grew out of my PhD advisor’s dissertation work. I woke up early but didn’t bleed to create this (maybe the salesperson did) or its conception (that’s on my advisor), as I have bled for other projects that haven’t been as well-received. I don’t mean to depreciate the value of what is happening here. Still, I’d like to point out that this curation of science imagery (aesthetics? design? visuality?) feels unrelated to the types of experiences and thoughts that I carry around with me and comprise the whole effort and experience I acknowledge when saying to others “I am an artist”.
Returning to E.A.T., I think Klüver’s most salient innovation in the founding of E.A.T. lies in releasing his expertise to the possibility of failure. This isn’t present in Kepes’s oeuvre. For all of Kepes’s scrapbooking and voyeurism of scientific practice, he doesn’t consider the silence of Klüver’s blackout. For all of the experimentation in visuals, Kepes’s gadgets are working as planned. In my coiling movie, I hijack a 3D printer to not work correctly while the fancy equipment is working exquisitely.
Another difference between E.A.T. and CAVS that I have already pointed out was the absence of pedagogy. Instead of a school, there was a number to call (212-285-1960, and I double-dare you) as a collaborator match-making hotline. E.A.T. paired mature artists (we know that Rauschenberg already had a chance to experiment with his education at BMC) with mature engineers. An exchange of knowledge and experience ensued, but identities remained fixed and identity crossovers were discouraged. It was assumed that artists would confidently supply an idea for what they were interested in doing with some imagined technology. Klüver mentions that many artists wanted to “reveal the invisible” (McCray, p. 111). When you try to turn art-making with the tools of science into pedagogy, do you necessarily end up with an aestheticized depiction of the tool? This is where my mind went in my lesson planning. If so, is it then a binary issue of upholding what can be done or breaking down as means of critical commentary? Or is there another story to be told?
If E.A.T. members embraced technological failure in some earlier projects, this wasn’t the dominant way they worked. Many of their projects demonstrated great technological success and innovation, exemplified in the Pepsi Pavilion’s many moving parts. Among successes and failures, the players in E.A.T appeared to value their community and unlikely relationships forged among individuals from otherwise very different backgrounds. In this sense, there is the work and there is the act of ‘trying to make it work.’
Tomorrow we will try to make it work and see what happens!
——
Gyorgy Kepes: “I sometimes dream about being just a painter, painting and forgetting everything else” (1965)
*
[CB starts here]
In America, poetry has long been siloed off into the academy as a matter of economic necessity – in the absence of a meaningfully marketable artform, how can poets make a living, receive healthcare, etc.? The repeated answer has been education – generally, one is hard pressed to find a poet working in America that doesn’t derive a significant portion of their income from the university.
I’m interested in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University as an expression of that phenomenon and a radical utopian project centered on a fusion of spirituality and art making. A brief history – the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics was formed in 1974 by Allen Ginsburg and Anne Waldman after the former’s chance encounter with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche in the streets of New York. The Naropa Insitute (later University) was founded by Trungpa Rinpoche in Boulder, Colorado during a wave of Western interest in Buddhism and “Eastern” spiritual practices in the late 60s and early 70s. The faculty was comprised mainly of Beat poets and leftist iconoclasts who had only some years earlier attempted to levitate the Pentagon. All this began under the sign of Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher and practitioner of “Crazy Wisdom” who is widely regarded as a central figure in the popularization of Buddhism in the West. What began in that decade as a freewheeling experiment in the fusion of wisdom traditions and art education has today become widely known as a gathering place for some of the most important and well-known poets working in the English language.
The Kerouac School’s innovation, if there is one, is in the formulation of a “dharma poetics,” a fusion of contemplation and composition that extends the purview of the poetic beyond the written word. Dharma poetics is a relationship to and realization of the phenomenal world – a level of attention that transfigures (or restores) human livingness as the site of poetry; what Trungpa calls “poetic way of eating food, drinking tea, poetic way of seeing the world as they are, in other word[s], altogether.” In Dharma poetics, there’s no detached notion of pure art – the art in question is an art that arrives as the instantiation and expression of presence. In this way, dharma poetics is also a reconciliation of the division between art and all other human enterprise. If art can be in anything, in ways of being and knowing, then the possibilities for other non-normative ways of being and knowing can expand.
Poetry, then, is no less than a utopian practice dependent on an ongoing investment in the world, and aimed at dismantling the socio-political engines that govern it. The vision recorded throughout the Kerouac School’s manifestos and speeches demands “a way to radically transform ourselves and our relationship to the world and America.” The positions taken up by the poets and thinkers that worked there (made up in part by environmentalism, a struggle for indigenous rights, and ethical anti-natalism) was a searching and affirmation of “other North Americas” – the articulation of a set of beliefs and forms of sociability that sought to scout out other possible ontologies that could reshape our communities through a sense of dharma poetics. This commitment follows directly from the actionist underpinning of Trungpa Rinpoche’s Shambhala Buddhism, which posits that an enlightened, utopian society is actually realizable by all people through meditation and mindfulness.
But what does that mean for the school as a community enterprise? What did courses look like at a school run by poets and monks whose charge is to transform the world? The answers vary. Classroom sessions recorded and archived as part of the digital library make the general air seem open and light – earnest questions about poetry and its relation to Buddhist teaching are worked through collectively, with laughter. Other accounts are more troubling. Footage from Fried Shoes and Cooked Diamonds, the 1978 documentary on the school narrated by Ginsburg, marks out scenes that are starkly confrontational, misogynist, and infused with the gonzo-toxcitiy that the Beat generation has come to be known for. Two examples include; Gregory Corso’s attack on Anne Waldman’s work, and excerpts from former student Sam Kashner’s memoir When I Was Cool, which include a professor (Corso) kidnapping him and attempting to force him to shoot heroin. Then there’s the incident of the Naropa Poetry Wars, recounted by Ed Sanders’ Investigative Poetry Class, wherein poets WS Merwin and Dana Naone where attacked and stripped naked at the behest of Trungpa Rinpoche. Trungpa’s alcoholism and penchant for sleeping with his students was widely known and tolerated (if not celebrated – the student literary magazine, Bombay Gin, was reportedly named for the monk’s favorite drink). What does all of this say for the actual commitment to utopianism and pedagogy at the school? Can contemplative poetry be meaningfully pursued if hostility is built into the program?
I don’t know. But what remains is that the school persists and continues to attract the best and brightest poets working today. What emerges from the swirl of contradictions that comprise the Kerouac School is poetics as a way of living, and poetry as a level of attention. That work begins at the level of the mind, as Waldman notes in the interview I linked.
“It is important to be able to work firstly with the mind, to still the mind, to synchronize it. To break through habitual obsessive patterns. To act with care, kindness, and compassion. But with intellect and discriminating awareness. To respect others. To stay curious and investigative. And to be innovative, inventive with language, and to honor our predecessors who struggled with form, with genre, with imagination, with a world gone mad with war.”
The work of the university, then, is to encourage the creation of this meditative state that exists as the abandonment of habit. This is a meditation that is expressed in “discriminating awareness,” a disavowal of the taken for granted beginning at the lowest levels of perception and extending out into broader society. Like many of the pedagogical experiments we’ve studied this semester, the ultimate goal is an onto-epistemological awakening, which in this case is meant to unlock radical potential. What poetry results is varied. “First Thought, Best Thought,” the quote often attributed as Allen Ginsburg’s essential idea of poetic composition, was developed at Naropa through conversations and teaching sessions with Trungpa Rinpoche. This spontaneous composition (on display in one of the linked audio files) isn’t simply an arbitrary stream of consciousness – it’s a consciousness honed and crafted by meditation, and a meditation that holds an “enlightened relation to the world and to fellow species” as an ethical imperative.
But the career-oriented American university system seems exactly antithetical to this project. Waldman offers up a consideration of the Kerouac school as an example of what Hakim Bey calls a “temporary autonomous zone,” wherein “there is less interest in a sort of institutionalization of creativity than in the liberation of utopian potentials.”
The deeper down the Kerouac rabbit hole I go, the more I wonder about the separability of ways of knowing from those who articulate them. Trungpa Rinpoche was accused of being a charlatan in his time. The Beats have a long list of socially and ethically unsavory practices attached to them. And generally, it seems like for all of the “good teaching” that may have gone on there, some on faculty seemed to use the school as a location to get loaded, shoot up, and sleep with students. What does that all mean for the earnestness of the utopian project articulated there? How much of the manifesto writing and poetry readings were only lip service for further funding? It’s maybe unfair (but not untrue) to paint the place with so broad a brush, but the accounts of the school’s early years lead me broadly to question what boundaries are troubled or transgressed in the name of art as a form of living. If the barriers between art and life are broken down, what does that mean for life and study? Life and teaching? How far do our commitments take us?
*
[MG starts here]
John Stuart Mill’s childhood education is one of notoriety. He’d learned Greek by the age of three and Latin by the age of eight, to say nothing of the whole host of material he had mastered by the time he was a teenager. He was also kept away from children his own age, in part so he would not know how special his education was. But this intensive education came with a price–by the age of twenty he entered into a severe depression and was saved from it only by rejecting some of the intense rationality he had learned from his father and turning instead to poetry. From there, Mill continued the Utilitarian project of working towards achieving the greatest happiness for the greatest number but, unlike his father and other teacher, Jeremy Bentham, began to place a greater weight on the role of character and personal development, rather than rational calculation.
But what does this mean for us, in our New Schools context? Surely the obscure education of a 19th century figure is not replicable. Further, even if it were, what could possibly be gained from doing so? To begin, I should acknowledge that, for better or worse, the form of Mill’s childhood education has not been entirely relegated to the dustbin of history–in New York, Success Academy Charter Schools claim to employ that very model. Of course, that this practice still exists is a different question from whether or not it should exist. But its uptake nevertheless tells us something important about our own time: for all the rightful warnings against it, there is something appealing about a kind of education which seeks to teach its students as much as possible.
It’s also helpful, I think, to turn to Mill’s own defense for leaving behind a record of his education. At the outset of his biography, he writes, in a passage worth quoting at length, “It seems proper that I should prefix to the following biographical sketch, some mention of the reasons which have made me think it desirable that I should leave behind me such a memorial of so uneventful a life as mine. I do not for a moment imagine that any part of what I have to relate, can be interesting to the public as a narrative, or as being connected with myself. But I have thought that in an age in which education, and its improvement, are the subject of more, if not of profounder study than at any former period in English history, it may be useful that there should be some record of an education which was unusual and remarkable, and which, whatever else it may have done, has proved how much more than is commonly supposed may be taught, and well taught , in those early years which, in the common modes of what is called instruction, are little better than wasted. It has also seemed to me that in an age of transition in opinions, there may be somewhat both of of interest and benefit in noting the successive phases of any mind which was always pressing forward, equally ready to learn and to unlearn either from its own thoughts or those of others” (CW I. 5). All of this is to say that Mill’s education can still teach us something, even in our own time and even (as I think we would all, and perhaps even Mill, too, agree) though it itself seems somewhat unachievable.
Perhaps on this point, it remains worthwhile to discuss the practicality of his education. In his Autobiography, Mill tells us that his educational experiment is applicable because he himself was not particularly special. In short, he seems to think, if he could do it, anyone could do it. This may be nothing more than a bit of modesty from Mill, but it does seem relevant: how accessible is this view of education? It’s tempting to conclude that it’s not. Further, Mill’s case also gives us an interesting way into what counts, exactly, as education. The information force-feeding he receives as a child (though, as he himself insists, his instruction “was not an education of cram” (CW I. 35)) is intentional, in the way that his experience of reading poetry and discovering himself is not. If we manufacture this kind of experience, say, by forcing a bunch of information into someone, and then also exposing them to poetry, does it matter that this experience doesn’t happen organically?
By way of conclusion, it also seems important to ask how much Mill’s own education informs the educational program for which he advocates. As we see in his University of St. Andrews Address, Mill understands that the complexity of education means that there is no one right way to educate. As he says, education “is one of the subjects which most essentially require to be considered by various minds, and from a variety of points of view. For, of all many-sided subjects, it is the one which has the greatest number of sides…Whatever helps to shape the human being, to make the individual he is, or hinder him from being what he is not–is part of his education.” (CW XXI.217). In great contrast to the thinking machine he was programmed to be, we here see Mill claiming life itself, with all its variety, as having utmost educative value. Indeed, in perhaps his most famous essay, On Liberty, Mill champions freedom for people to engage in “experiments in living” precisely because we can learn from others. There is, of course, a forward-looking element to this: Mill would not be content with experiments in living which passed by without making themselves known. Education, after all, still is meant to play a role in his utilitarian vision; we all benefit, he thinks, by learning about others. Indeed, as he concludes in his St. Andres Address, “There is not one of us who may not qualify himself so to improve the average amount of opportunities, as to leave his fellow creatures some little the better for the use he has known how to make of his intellect…You are to be a part of the public who are to welcome, encourage, and help forward the future intellectual benefactors of humanity; and you are, if possible, to furnish your contingent to the number of those benefactors” (CW XXI. 256-257).
* * *
POST-CLASS POSTS
[DGB starts here]
“Teach the release, without the pain?”
We started out on the floor today, sitting in a circle, cross-legged — with blank sheets of paper before us, distributed by CB. But after a brief preamble on the Naropa Institute/University and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, we received our meditative sacramentals (one pre-wrapped dinner mint each) and embarked on fifteen minutes of what might be called “oral presencing.” (Shout-out here to C. A. Conrad.)
I basically loved this. I am a total sucker for the simple richness always foregrounded by any formal “bracketing” that gives structured permission for a consideration of being itself. I tend to think we don’t do enough of this, and that it is a key resource (for resistance, for orientation, for emancipatory consciousness, etc.). It is part of the work. And it is work that belongs in the work we do in universities. I believe this. I am not sure if I am right about this. But I believe it deeply (and am always keen to hear from those who think otherwise).
I lay on my back. I closed my eyes. I low-key sucked the candy.
Following our instructions, I again and again returned my meandering mind to the slowly dissolving mint, which I held in various positions in my mouth: in a dimple in the middle of my tongue (gripped by means of light pressure against the roof of my mouth); in the pouch of my right cheek (snugged up against the outside of my molars); later, as it go smaller, on the tip of my tongue (where it felt abrasive and where I had trouble holding it still behind my front teeth). The candy itself had a pumice-like lightness — somehow both hard and spongy-porous.
Being slightly paranoiac, I considered the possibility that CB was using these sweets to dose us each with a hit of acid, or otherwise chemically addle the class. This seemed immensely unlikely, and I succeeded in tamping the anxiety down.
Lying on my back, it was not perfectly easy to swallow the gobbets of syrupy saliva called forth by the dissolving mint.
That all makes it sound like I kept my consciousness in my mouth. But this was not at all the case. On the contrary, those fifteen minutes were a healthy reminder of how immensely difficult it is to keep a mind (any mind? my mind, anyway) in one place. An inventory of my thoughts is already beyond recovery, but I remember noticing how reliably, how subtly, my head was in the future.
Again and again when I noticed my mind had meandered, I found it beavering away on some PROJECT — thinking about a way to arrange some aspect of this or that thing that needs to get done or that would be a good idea to do, or that could perhaps happen if only I did this, or he could be persuaded to do that other thing, or she could be brought on board with respect to a new version of that other thing that was done before…
Endless! Peaceably returning to my tongue and the mint (again and again and again), it was impossible not to wonder why am I like this?
But such a question, being neither my tongue nor the mint, had to be released — and release it I did.
To be “present.” What does this even mean? Is it a temporal idea (to be in the present)? Or is it the spatial immediacy — the hereness — that is at issue?
Musing, I returned (as I often do, but why?) to Michael Fried’s formulation: not presence, but rather presentness. Yes. Presentness is grace. Presence? It comes cheap, does it not?
And anyway, why do we have a word that so deeply cannot decide if it is about time or space? What does this imply? How can the term “present” fully and completely mean “the magical knife edge upon which the future becomes the past” and function adjectively to signify “before the eye” or “available” or “accessible,” ready-to-hand?
But the mint—the mint. Return to the mint. And the mouth. The wet cavity. The point of entry. The vulnerable lips.
And yet, it all must have something to do with one of the French words for “close,” no?
Près — near.
That has to be the same “pre” that turns up in “present,” and “presence” (and, yes, “presentness,” too). Presumably no relation, etymologically speaking, to the word: pré — “field.” Both of words, however, are pronounced more or less like the English “pray” — also presumably unrelated.
But all this, while tantalizing, is not the mint, which is no bigger than a pea when the bell chimes time.
CB next set up on another mouth task: the reading and re-reading (while remaining focused, as with the mint, on what might be called “buccal consciousness”) of a given line from Shakespeare — provided on a tantalizing little strip of paper. This we did in pairs, aloud, but without a clear sense as to what relation we were to have to our partner (and to our partner’s vocalizations). NI and I went on walkabout ,muttering intently to ourselves like a couple of madmen strolling the quad. It was lovely. But odd.
And, about five minutes into that perambulation, I experienced what felt like an actual, true-to-God revelation: so much poetic palaver about breath, but what about all the spittle!?
Yes, yes, yes. The throat as a vibrating pipe for the sounding air. But the mouth is a place of water, always almost welling up and out…
And so,
*
MG kept us in the circle, and gave us a pair of reading exercises: first, the Ricardo text on political economy (which we were to read with critical/analytic scrutiny); and the Wordsworth poem, “Intimations of Immortality…” (which we were to read, well, more like a poem — whatever, exactly, that means). This juxtaposition was designed to give us some access to the peripeteia in Mill’s life/education: his pivot, across an encounter with Wordsworth (though really, perhaps, what broke the dyke was his reading of an especially sentimental scene in Marmontel’s memoirs), from an uber-utilitarian machinic rationality to some kind of new appreciation for sentiment, etc.
RS — my poem-partner — wondered if there wasn’t a kind of false antinomy being drawn (by Mill, perhaps; in the exercise, perhaps), and I felt sympathetic to this concern. Although in both cases one was trying to read something a bit hard, and hence the forms of reading were, at first blush, more similar than not (for me): just the work of trying to make sense of a linguistic artifact.
But in the end, there was a real difference that loomed up, at least in my own reflections: the ode aims at something like existential salvage; the Ricardo, not so much (at least not in any explicit way). Wordsworth is struggling to offer up some consolation, something that might redeem. He is asserting — asking us to sense, to recognize, to concede — that the world itself may be enough. That life, within us and beyond us, may indeed be, somehow, self-justifying.
If Ricardo is after the same matter, he has disguised it pretty successfully. Or maybe we could say that such issues arise in his text only obliquely (in the glint that can be discerned coming off the epistemic program to which he is committed). Put that aside.
I found myself feeling that, in a way, CB and MG had brought us problems (of education) that were genuinely consilient — even beyond the obviously shared subject matter (i.e., both dealt with poetry). The issue at stake in both lessons, ultimately, is that most ethereal problem (that redoubt of charlatans?): Being.
Which is to say, us. Each of us. And all of us. Down in the work of figuring out what to do with existence. How to notice it. How to stay with it. Perhaps even how to bear it — or, when possible, to bloom it (whatever this may mean).
Is this part of “school”? Yes. I think so. Though Mill himself seems a bit ambivalent on the problem (in his Inaugural Address): the university, as he has it, is not for “religion” (in any but a historical sense) and not for “morality” either (exactly). And yet it is for, as he puts it, the “making of capable and cultivated human beings” — who would, it seems, need to have some explicit capacity to address themselves to the condition of “being” itself. They can hardly get by on pure “becoming,” right? (Or, well, maybe a sufficiently energetic utilitarian might make exactly that claim… hmmmmm).
*
What to say about LD’s amazing E.A.T. redux? OH MY HEAVEN! What a perfect circus of thought-play and collective experience! I loved the framing conceit (the theatre of our taking on the “roles” and our getting our “assignment” from the University). And I really liked the prompt, too: “making the invisible, visible.” And I loved what we did. Thank you, LD! Pics below.
(Might any of you be aware of an ancient project we did at Cabinet back in the day? It was called Iron Artist, riffing on the food show. Our 40-minute ready-GO framing of an art project put me back in mind of those days…[emoji of nostalgic smile]).
-DGB
* * *
[JD starts here]
That mint exercise was demanding for me: I have a very, very hard time letting those things pass mildly away, as John Donne might put it; after a little savoring, I just want to catch it between my molars get all the flavor all at once, so help me. But I committed myself to CB’s exercise!—and in my strenuous patience I found myself thinking all kinds of things about that sweet, chalky, pocked and dimpled lychee-sized object in my mouth, as I rolled it around, tucked it away, tried to figure out how best to keep it at least fifteen minutes safe. The classic William James problem about attention itself! (From Principles of Psychology.) Was I keeping it present, or constantly distracting myself from it, by imagining the moon?
It’s interesting to think about what role the exercise might play in a creative writing pedagogy: basically, is it preparatory, a way of clearing the mind so that words and thoughts can come better after; or is it a stimulus to invention of those words and thoughts, an experience to write about? Or even, is it the thing itself, the best, the truest poetry? The words, the analogies, the metaphors that crowded my mind, was I supposed to let them go, or let them accumulate, constellate? Was this exercise meant to be like writing or to prepare the mind for writing?
The issue came right around in the second exercise, reciting a line of Shakespeare to a partner, enough times to dissolve the sense of it (like that mint?) and be left with—sound? New, counter-syntactic associations, or new, anti-expressive rhythms? I just love doing that kind of thing and was so grateful. How to think of it in relation to school? I guess I would just keep us on that question of whether such exercises are preparation, or the thing itself. That ambiguity is latent in the words practice and exercise, both of which can mean getting ready, and actually doing. And maybe in school itself, which is before adulthood, or even, before life, but also, obviously, and yet sometimes we forget, part of it. (Back to Dewey on the question of whether education is oriented toward the present or toward the future.) With the additional complexity here that you might think of this interval of preparatory presence (?) as the true heart of the matter—you might write a poem after, but wouldn’t it be a sort of sad compensation for the mint’s having melted away? (At least, insofar as the poem was itself a deferral of presence, as all language is said to be.) The whole experience seemed to build in a contradiction that is very deep a) in any poetic practice which is related to buddhism, and yet pointed to the construction of lasting linguistic artifacts, and more generally, b) the ambiguous situation of school between present and future. (Always an interesting question to ask about a school: how is the future present there?)
And good heavens, once you’re thinking about that problem, what about John Stuart Mill? MG’s exercises gave us a very compressed experience of Mill’s early life—his rigorous encounter with the nascent social sciences, as a child watched over by Bentham, Ricardo, et al., and the expansion of sensibilities he experienced reading vernacular poetry, especially Wordsworth, as a young adult, rescued from depression by the “Intimations” ode. The Ricardo actually brought me back to the surprise of encountering Thomas Hodgskin with NB two weeks ago—I know so little about the history of economics, and I was startled by this working-out of a labor theory of value, in which Hodgskin seemed intent on the idea that it is only the continuous and active engagement with labor that sustains the value of what we might have thought was capital (machines, buildings, etc.). In its way, a radical argument for value as activity, if not as presence. How to think of Ricardo in these terms? It’s not obvious to me that the problems of value he raises are especially problems of temporality—but within the scope of MG’s exercise, you could certainly understand how young JMS might have encountered those arguments as preparation for his career of service, a career aimed at an abstract greatest happiness for the greatest number. Whereas Wordsworth’s poem is a vortex of elegy and nostalgia, crossing moods of childhood freedom, adult constraint, and poetic Aufhebung. You could spend a happy afternoon trying to think through the relation between Conrad’s protocols of presencing and the ode’s manic-depressive time management. But at all events Wordsworth demands that you be present to the career of his own hopes and doubts—one can imagine Mill finding that subjective immediacy a startling alternative to the orthodoxies of his training.
We had an interesting conversation in the break about the pedagogy of withholding and revelation—does Wordsworth mean more, for coming as a rescue, rather than as a curriculum? Is there anything in Mill’s experience that could be replicated as a school? Rousseau seems to haunt the whole scene, though in contradictory ways. On the one hand, he is a Romantic, with Wordsworth, and his valuation of childhood seems at odds entirely with the precocity of young JSM’s induction into the best that has already been thought and said. On the other, Mill’s father protects his son from the company of other children, from comparison and competition, much as young Emile is protected. Rousseau is the great dramaturg among our educators. Mill’s education is a kind of play, though his father scripted only the opening acts. It this another version of the idea of education-as-preparation—to think of it as the necessary foil for a necessary rebellion?
Well—we were in a very different space, in and around LD’s mylar tent. Time here was mostly the forty minutes we had to make some kind of Gesamtkunstwerk out of the ingredients laid before us (the tent, two infrared cameras, a contact mic, etc.). It was a fantastic experience, with beautiful weird results. Was it a school? My intuition is, yes—certainly, it could be understood as an exercise, a structured challenge to our ingenuity. You had to hurry up and learn something about the technology. You had to learn, or practice, skills of collaboration. You had to jog your imagination to produce surprising image and sound. But it felt like all this activity was at a limit of immanence, very hard to experience as preparation for anything. Maybe we were simply (delightfully!) in the Deweyan experience-territory again? Or experiment-territory? Not as systematically controlled and incremental as Albers; not as grandiose and failure-loving as Fuller. But still. I have been associating pretty freely over these remarks, but they do circle around three interrelated questions: Is this school conceived of as preparation for something? If so, for what? And is it experienced by its students (in the moment, or after) as preparatory, or immanent, and in what ratio? These are questions again that apply at every scale: from the most local rituals of the school day, to the duration of a degree.
-JD
* * *
CLASS 12
Readings
From RS: Baumschulen
The Secret Life of Plants. Directed by Walon Green. Written by Christopher Bird and Peter Tompkins. Paramount Pictures (United States, 1978).
From CF: New Architectural Schooling
V. Mitch McEwen, Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski (2023) “Reparations!,” Journal of Architectural Education, 77:1, 3-6
From EH: The Tuskegee Movable School
Thomas Monroe Campbell, The Movable School Goes to the Negro Farmer (Tuskegee Institute: Tuskegee Institute Press, 1936).
Dedication, “To My Wife”
Preface, pp. vii-viii.
Introduction, pp. xiii-xiv.
Chapter One of Part II: The School on Wheels, “Booker T. Washington: Champion of the Negro Farmer,” pp. 79-91.
P. O. Davis, Review, “The Movable School Goes to the Negro Farmer by Thomas Monroe Campbell,” in The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Jul., 1936), pp. 339-341.
Booker T. Washington, “A Farmers’ College on Wheels,” in The World’s Work, Vol. XIII (Nov., 1906-April, 1907), pp. 8352-8354.
Please explore these darning samplers belonging to the permanent collection of the Textiles Department at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, as well as this brief description
[completely optional for those interested…]
Carmen Harris, “Grace under Pressure: The Black Home Extension Service in South Carolina, 1919-1966,” in Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
Susan L. Smith, “Good Intentions and Bad Blood in Alabama: From the Tuskegee Movable School to the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment,” in Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women’s Health Activism in America, 1890-1950 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).
Linda O. Hines, “George W. Carver and the Tuskegee Agricultural Experiment Station,” in Agricultural History, Vol. 53, No. 1 (Jan., 1979), pp. 71-83.
Jeannie M. Whayne, “Black Farmers and the Agricultural Cooperative Extension Service: The Alabama Experience, 1945-1965,” in Agricultural History, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Summer, 1998), pp. 523-551.
* * *
PRE-CLASS THINK PIECES (RS & EH & CF)
[CF starts here]
As a student in architecture school, I’ve been searching for new ways of learning and teaching throughout my educational career. There are two main schools of thought within architecture school –
The Bauhaus method : here are all the basic tools you need for architecture, use them to construct your own identity
The Beaux Arts method : The master teaches the apprentice methods of their architecture process.
I have been longing for a different form of teaching that produces a supportive encouraging environment. I discovered Dark Matter University. What is DMU? DMU is not like a conventional university in the sense it is a collective of professionals rather than a place. DMU questions the conventional systems in which we operate.
One of the main missions of DMU is to challenge the centered whiteness of design today. Bellow is the mission statements found on the website https://darkmatteru.org/about
DMU MISSION
Dark Matter U is a democratic network with the following principles guiding its actions. We work to create:
01
NEW FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE AND KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION
through radical anti-racist forms of communal knowledge and spatial practice that are grounded in lived experience. We challenge hegemonic pedagogies, canons, and epistemologies drawn from paradigms of white domination while elevating ancestral and local knowledge.
02
NEW FORMS OF INSTITUTIONS
along a networked resource distribution model between institutions. We extract from those who have extracted to collate resources and lift up marginalized voices.
03
NEW FORMS OF COLLECTIVITY AND PRACTICE
that democratize models of practice, education, and labor at all phases of production. We operate with deep consideration of ethics and a duty of care, moving from hard to soft power.
04
NEW FORMS OF COMMUNITY AND CULTURE
that expand the circle of those contributing to anti-racist design pedagogy and practice. We actively build power and share knowledge to build capacity and resilience in communities beyond the preconceived boundaries of our fields.
05
NEW FORMS OF DESIGN
that open the possibilities and methodologies for designing the built environment. We aim to co-create new formal and spatial imaginaries that serve broader, often overlooked, constituencies and consider multiple subjectivities.
I was surprised when I dove in to try and find resources for DMU. Not many materials, if any are publicly available and accessible. Lectures on youtube and blurry unreadable posts on instagram are where most of the information resides. I wasn’t sure how to feel about this. On one hand, I think it is quite important that the people who repeat and teach the practice of DMU be trained by DMU. They must earn those materials in order to pass them down. On the other hand, it seems one of the key beliefs of DMU is accessibility. Not everyone has access to DMU taught courses, Not everyone has the time to reach out and go through a multi week chain of emails for information, only to not hear back. I’m very interested to hear others’ thoughts on this.
For the class I picked Reparations, Journal of Architectural Education, 77:1, 3-6, for them to read. I am white and am not BIPOC, and therefore I do not believe I have any agency to teach that to the class. Instead we will focus on the collaborative nature of learning within DMU in class. I wanted to make sure that I provided resources on the importance of BIPOC within DMU. I am very excited to teach a very collaborative teaching process in class tomorrow!
*
[RS starts here]
Baumschule, -n. Nursery, tree garden, arboretum. From Baum (tree) + Schule (school).
Phaedrus
You are an astonishing and most unusual person. For you really do seem exactly like a stranger who is being guided about, and not like a native. You don’t go away from the city out over the border, and it seems to me you don’t go outside the walls at all.
Socrates
Forgive me, my dear friend. You see, I am fond of learning. Now the country places and the trees won’t teach me anything, and the people in the city do. But you seem to have found the charm to bring me out.
Plato, Phaedrus, 230c-d
What can we learn from the trees?
German has the word Baumschule. Plural Baumschulen. The grafting of two nouns, Baum (tree) and Schule (school), it means a planted forest, a nursery, an arboretum. School for trees, in other words. But nothing prevents us from casting this word, against the grain, as school of (better, from) trees.
In some sense, we learn from trees all the time. Paper and pencil, emblems of the schoolroom, are made of them. Traditionally, humans will inscribe speech in, sometimes with, but never by, trees. Can we imagine “school” as we know it without book learning?
The book, the scroll, the newspaper. This is the “charm” (phármakon) that whisks Socrates from the chattering city to the stillness of the grove. Is he right to think that trees have nothing to teach him? We might notice Socrates describes himself as a philomathès. He wants the mathematically learnable. Hence his word for teaching, didáskein, root of our ‘didactic.’ Schoolroom teaching, in other words.
The quiet grove has its own chatter. There is a babbling brook and a kind of zephyrean wind. It causes leaves to rustle. Is it an accident that this locus amoenus, this literary topos of the wood-ensconced ‘lovely place,’ sets the scene for a discourse on writing?
The amount of paper consumed in Old Schools exceeds the imagination of the common student, invariably a reader. A tabloid with a daily run of 100,000 exemplars requires for each number the amount of wood grown in a hectare over one year. Karl d’Ester, the source of this statistic, puts it even more vividly: There was in 1928 in the Fichtel mountains a fir tree, among the largest in Germany: 30 meters tall, 46 paces around, 42 cubic meters of mass; aged over 400 years. Four centuries it took to grow this tree, yet a daily with a run 100,000 exemplars finished it in eight days.
Tomorrow we attempt to even the odds. We will hand over the means of production, Old School paraphernalia, to the trees themselves. If to Socrates trees teach nothing ‘mathematical,’ nothing ‘didactic,’ what might they teach us, who perhaps are open to become “lettered” in other ways? (Last week, I attended a thought-provoking workshop on “multiliteracies” in second language acquisition. How far might the plural idea of language and of literacy go when extended, like an unthumbed hand, to non-human organisms? To what extent can this be not metaphorical, but literal?)
In handing trees our Old School equipment (brushes, paper, charcoal), we will loaf in the summer shade of many New Schools (‘school’ is, originally, nothing but ‘a place to loaf’) that have sprouted up among the trees, from the global network of Damanhur spiritualist eco-communes to the “tree drawings” of artist Tim Knowles. The latter we try tomorrow to emulate.
Though people have learned from trees for as long as people have been, critical eco-consciousness since the 1960s, reinforced by the popularization of (admittedly controversial and contested) research into plant sentience (Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird’s The Secret Life of Plants: Harper & Row, 1973) nourish the perpetually New Schools of Trees – “new,” that is, for us, but not for them – the Baumschulen.
*
[EH starts here]
In order to understand the Tuskegee Movable School and its relationship to the broader ambitions of Tuskegee University, I would like to first quickly try to position the school within a national context in which the education of the farmer was of critical importance to research universities to begin with. During the last few decades of the 19th century, agriculture emerged as a scientific discipline in new ways, and in turn, the small farmer similarly emerged as a newly professionalized subject, as well as a politicized one. Particularly in the southern United States, arable land remained concentrated in the hands of the few even after the Civil War, with frequently absentee landowners benefitting from a system to which tenant farmers were often chronically indebted. For many trained agriculturists [including George Washington Carver, more on that later] scientific farming was viewed as a possible salvation from the problems that maintained relationships between landowner and farmer practically akin to peonage.
This emerging interest in scientific farming contributed to shifting national conceptions regarding the primary goals of higher education [particularly within public colleges and universities.] In 1862, the first Morrill Act dedicated large tracts of land to states and territories for the establishment of public colleges and universities “for the benefit of agriculture and the mechanic arts.” The resulting institutions, commonly referred to as land-grant colleges or universities, aimed to “promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes.” This had little immediate impact on the education of black farmers, as the land-grant colleges established by the first Morrill Act were accessible exclusively to white students. Black colleges and universities at this time, even those with similar educational goals as those outlined by land-grant institutions, didn’t have access to the federal funding provided by the Morrill Act and existed largely on their own terms. In 1890, when the second Morrill Act was passed to increase the funding of existing land-grant colleges, a provision was added for the establishment of black land-grant colleges as well. However, the seventeen “1890 colleges” established as a result of this law were significantly differentiated from the white “1862 colleges” by discrepancies in the state and federal funds allocated to each.
In the mid-1880s, the administrative boards of the land-grant colleges established by the 1862 Morrill Act argued for additional federal funding specifically for the development of agricultural research. The resultant passage of the Hatch Act in 1887 established an annual federal research grant of $15,000 per state, to “be divided between such institutions as the legislature of such State shall direct,” toward the establishment or maintenance of agricultural experiment stations. In order to maintain funding, the stations were required to disseminate the results of their research through the publication of quarterly bulletins and annual reports, with a copy of each sent to all other existing agricultural experiment stations as well as to local newspapers and a list of relevant government officials, and additionally to interested farmers “as far as the means of the station will permit.” This striking ambivalence about whether the information ever reached working farmers suggests a commitment to the production of paper knowledge primarily intended to circulate between agricultural researchers.
Conflicting attitudes about how knowledge was disseminated [and to whom] was perhaps the biggest ideological difference between stations established by land-grant colleges and the one founded at Tuskegee in 1896. [Practically speaking, the biggest difference was how they were funded. Auburn University’s station received the entirety of the $15,000 of federal funds allocated to the state of Alabama each year, while Tuskegee’s station received only $1,500 from state funds annually.] While George W. Carver, who was hired by Booker T. Washington as the first head of Tuskegee’s Agricultural Department, did produce a bulletin categorically similar to those published by other stations, he was uniquely explicit in defining his intended audience. In his first bulletin, published in 1898, he insisted that “neither time nor expense will be spared to make our work of direct benefit to every farmer.” And because his bulletins were directed more towards farmers than other researchers, Carver promised that “few technical terms will be used, and where such are introduced, an explanation will always accompany them.”
However, while Carver’s bulletins were indicative of an interest in the education of the individual farmer not necessarily shared by land-grant institutions, the fundamentally different position held by Tuskegee was best exemplified by the Jesup Agricultural Wagon, or the first Tuskegee Movable School. Encoded in the logic of the movable school were not only ambitions of improved farming practices but, importantly, of improved behavior. This emphasis on the comportment and respectability of its students was also held by the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, a preparatory and trade school for black and indigenous students from which Washington himself graduated. It was also a position that elicited vociferous criticism, particularly from anti-segregation activists such as W.E.B. DuBois. However, Washington promoted a model of black education that accommodated segregation policies instead of advocating for more radical forms of political resistance throughout his life. This is palpable, if not foregrounded, in his writing.
Those who benefited most from the improved behavior of black tenant farmers was, of course, not necessarily the black tenant farmers themselves. In 1899, the principal of the Hampton Institute, along with W.E.B. DuBois, commissioned Frances Benjamin Johnston to photograph the school for the American Negro Exhibit pavilion at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. In displaying images of improved respectability, particularly in the form of before and after photographs, the exhibition intended to showcase improved race relations in America [regardless of whether this was true.] Johnston’s highly choreographed images, which seem to occupy a relatively neutral position on the Institute’s goals, illustrate the white Victorian ideals towards which black students were encouraged to aspire. These ideals are rendered not just by the improved well but by the improved ground, the improved fence, the improved clothing, the improved posture of the bodies.
The movable school was, in many ways, perfectly positioned to work towards Washington’s ideals of black assimilation as it related to ambitions of property ownership [and of home ownership.] In Washington’s own words, the gospel of Tuskegee was “that every Negro should own his own home or farm.” As the children of tenant farmers received an education at the university, the tenant farmers themselves [as well as their wives and daughters] received an education at home. The education provided [at home] by the movable school was an education in improved methods of farming that saved money and time: money that could eventually buy a small plot of land, time that could be spent on productive forms of domestic labor. The nuclear family was the ideal economic unit through which black tenant farmers could eventually become landowning citizens, as long as each member of the family performed what was demanded of them.
As illustrated by the texts, these demands followed a highly gendered division of labor. According to Washington, “the operator in charge of the Jesup Wagon pays as much attention to the kitchen as to the field, for experience has shown us that the wife must be taught as well as the husband, if real advancement is to be made.” Women were thus instructed in the various tasks of home-making, for example, butter-making lessons that illustrated “the superiority of the revolving churn over the old “dasher” churn, and how the use of butter moulds would make the butter more salable.” They were also instructed in ways to behave in a manner that was worthy of the respect of men, as well as in the manner of their dress. To quote the introduction of Campbell’s The Movable School Goes to the Negro Farmer, their lessons “laid great stress on self-help, on thrift, and on hard work intelligently applied.” This interest in thrift as it relates to domestic labor and respectability is the basis of the exercise I have planned for tomorrow [the darning samplers are a clue.]
-EH
* * *
POST-CLASS POSTS
[DGB starts here]
Our final meeting for the semester. And it unfolded on a cool, bright Spring day. Lovely. I found myself, from the start, in a funny state of proleptic nostalgia: already I missed our class. But it was not yet over…
EH gave us such an affecting and important set of readings. Some of the story they tell I knew. But not all. And it was interesting, as we sat in the little sun-dappled glade, at the tables so elegantly laid with antique linens, and set ourselves to the delicate handwork of darning — it was interesting (painful?) not to talk about those readings. But rather to permit them to haunt the bucolic scene.
The ”Tuskegee Movable School” was such a paradigmatic “New School” within the rubric of our seminar. And the primary source material was so suffused with utopian aspiration (uplift, grit, pride). Reading on into the optional secondary/critical, I could not help but feel a creeping sense of dread (But OF COURSE, looking more closely, contextualizing, of course the whole project had to have been so agonizingly matrixed by the vexing injustices, the slights and cruelties and mistrust of that moment, those places…). And then, like a nightmare, what rises out of the annals of aspiration? A tragedy too bitter to bear: the networks of trust and connection and relation achieved by the Movable School became the condition of possibility for one of the very most grotesque and shameful episodes in American history: the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments. And one is left with a historico-ethical quandary of such depth and difficulty: how to understand a figure like Eunice Rivers Laurie, who began as a nurse in the Movable School program, and became a key part of the Tuskegee Experiments.
We could have talked about all this. And how such a transit speaks to the perils of pedagogical intimacy — and the complex ambivalence of so many teacherly projects rooted in dreams of betterment. But we did not.
And not talking about it had its own distinctive force. For me, anyway. Some things are very hard to talk about. And sometimes it might be better to let the silence hold their power. What is the place for that kind of haunting in our schools?
I kept cutting my fingers on the edges of my darning loom.
*
With CF we came inside, and thought about the architecture of communal life — meaning the actual built environments that facilitate co-living. The exercise asked us, in small groups, to conjure (fictive) persons. And then we were asked, sequentially, to imagine integrating our living arrangements with the other invented persons. Much conversation ensued, and some hilarity (since it was hard to resist the imaginative possibilities afforded by the fictional frame, and that led to some rather unlikely characters….). I am not quite sure why the exercise teetered on the brink of a surrealist parlor game. I don’t think that was CF’s intention. Though CF was certainly “game” in leading the conversations that resulted. In the end, without a stronger sense of the constraints (particularly the financial frameworks), I found it a little hard to get a handle on the dynamics of “shared” and “private” in these exploratory living arrangements. We did, certainly, feel the reflex in the direction of self-sequestering (bourgeois?) individualism — or I did, anyway. Cannot speak for the ADA/DADA dyad, whose ritual bloodletting and solarized nudism cannot be said to retain much by way of linkages to normative bourgeois ideology!
*
And then there was RD’s tree project. With the lovely protocol by which we were to collaborate with our woody familiars. RD graciously invoked IHUM’s Secret Life of Plants project/exhibition/conference of 2013, and then set us up for a final session of outdoor experimentation. This project had some memory-energy for me, because Cabinet magazine did a piece with Tim Knowles the year I joined as an editor. I paired with PH, and we had a very special time, working with one of the giant spruce trees that rim Prospect Garden. There was a magic to our efforts at stillness, and we held the tablet from below, on our finger tips—a kind of Ouija board in reverse…
Even looking back at these photos returns me to a measure of the nearly still bliss of those minutes. The birds singing. A little conversation. A kind of almost-dance. Here, I have uploaded a few seconds of film:
Onward, into the final phase of our course: your “reports” on your chosen “New Schools”!
Thank you all for a wonderful term…
– DGB
* * *
[JD begins here]
I’ve put off writing these last-for-now afterthoughts—hard to let go of this term, as DGB says. And I’ll keep them brief, but there were a couple of distinctive features of our last session that I wanted to comment on. Maybe beginning with CF’s introduction to Dark Matter University, and exercise in communal planning, in three stages: each group works out a living arrangement for an imagined individual or cohabiting family (vel sim.); then two groups combine forces to figure out what they could share between them, in a hypothetical building; then the two micro-communities do the same, multiplying complexities but also possibilities for common space and facilities.
Have we done anything together that has been configured as a game? To be sure, the exercise could have been gamier—we didn’t begin, Monopoly-wise, with a limited set of resources; what bargaining we did was not zero-sum. That made the whole thing a little more dreamy-utopian (with, as DGB observed, some surreal or at least highly particular stipulations, e.g. provision for therapeutic blood-letting, nude sunbathing, and slot-car racing). But at a moment when “gamify” is a verb that can be applied to most anything, and especially education, the question of how you learn from a game hung in the air. There is learning the rules, but also the emergent strategies and consequences. It’s a pretty secular form, different from ritual (immanent rather than transcendent?). Among our schools, which would be amenable to gamification? Is it a property of games to occlude the ultimate ends of their activity, at least while you are playing? In ways that are part of the fun, to be sure. (Back to CA’s readings from Huizinga.) But also ideologically facilitating. Maybe the great game-player of the semester is (yet again) Rousseau, whose Emile was so entirely in the dark about what his education would mean (remember those crazy rigged races?). Compare Betasamosake Simpson’s pedagogy of land: not a game. Or Albers’ incremental experiments: not a game. (Relation between those two categories, experiment and game?) Anyhow, yet another question for a school, and tickling open another we didn’t ask, about school and sport. (Drawing Restraint: play but not a game?)
Maybe DMU (or CF!) kept the parameters of the exercise open precisely in order not to seal the game’s boundaries—to keep it from being merely a game?
Very different from what EH and RS brought us, which were activities of making, one arguably more craft, the other more…experiment? Or even art? Darning; drawing with trees. In each case we came away with something to show for our time. EH’s in particular gave us a school (on the model of the Tuskegee Movable School) that was about learning a useful practice. Impossible not to think of the practical skills we learned in Sitka, and the solidarity made by learning and working together, work addressed to material need. The part played in school by such collective labor, responsibility for sustaining the community—which schools acknowledge and involve students in such work, which schools are at pains to conceal it? (Does anybody still do work-study at Princeton? That was the phrase at Yale, when I used to carry reams of xerox paper around the School of Organization and Management—tree work, maybe, in some exquisitely mediated sense; did I learn anything from it?) Education for work, education as work. Anyway—let that be a question for another time. For now, I’ll just observe that we were pretty privileged to do so many different things together, in so many different configurations, play and work, experiment and game. It made for a real community. Were we a new school? The question seems a little hubristic (especially after seeing up north the labor it takes to get a new school off the ground). And yet, it did feel, especially in the second half of the semester, like the many things we tried might add up to something collectively distinctive, an example of something, for something. We’ll see what happens next, for each and all of us.
-JD
