AN AESTHETIC EDUCATION IN THE ERA OF
GLOBALIZATION
Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, a Fellow of Harvard University, wrote a book published in
2012 entitled, An Aesthetic Education in
the Era of Globalization, a study of philosophic criteria for cultural
discernment, its instruction, pertaining to worldwide economic processes. This
is the summary of Chapter Sixteen, subtitled, “Imperative to re-imagine the
Planet”.
Spivak, originally an educator in rural India
recalled a speech he delivered at Stiftung Dialogik, an international civil
society in Switzerland, in their series of presentations on refugees and
immigrants. Her lecture became a renewed, global commitment to universal
acknowledgement of Holocaust survivors’ memory. Vaguely described as community,
resources, sustainability, ‘planetary’ is a situation of shared contentious
issues to be addressed with challenging courses of action.
Spivak, born during WWll, her generation in
India regarded that war as European because of the Holocaust, although a world
war that became an device to end imperialism. Decolonization failed. That
negotiated liberty is neocolonialism. She explained, significant Eurocentric
economic migration affected consumer markets and from the fall of the Berlin
Wall onwards, these demographics became unstable.
Her ability to contradict is especially
available because Spivak is not an inherent member of sectors she critiques. She critiques the US and is not a US citizen, for example. She arrived in the USA in
1961, remains a resident alien or permanent resident, a designation that allows
her to retain her Indian passport conceding “neighborliness rather than
subjection” and allows objectivity.
Spivak explained the beginning of the
evolution of Migration Studies as an academic sub-discipline, migration of
people from countries other than their origin and displaced persons were not
differentiated in the US and Europe. Europe is a conglomerate of small units
each determined by its own colonial past, Switzerland being the exception,
without a colonial background. European nations, including Switzerland allows
“guest workers” adding that international aid / agricultural aid to support the
growing populous.
Interpretive strategies are required to
re-imagine the planet. Globalization, the imposition of the same system of
exchange everywhere contradicts the otherness of cultural orientation.
Spivak suggested, the planet (which we
inhabit) overwrite global (which we do not inhabit) that controls by digitally
imposed variables. she determined this overwrite, replacement of old with new
data, in the computer programming sense, a refreshed paradigm is needed for
exchanges.
Referring to Charles Taylor’s "The
Politics of Recognition", a Hegelian philosopher that wrote about a moral
ideal, the subjectivity of culture, Spivak asserted, assumes the intellectual,
political culture of Northwestern Europe was obliterated by imperialism. Spivak
compared care with responsibly verses care as an obligation. She cited examples
through history of how labour versus goodness view right and responsibility to
work as the truth of being.
She contrasted views of nomads view of the
earth, human habitation and work in community as planetary, collective
responsibility as a human right. She says that learning the Aboriginal way of
living as the ‘custodians’ of the planet was daily being compromised by the
Development lobby’s drive to patent indigenous knowledge.
We are also reading one of Marx’s
‘subjunctive’ and very interesting formulas for the transition from capitalism
to socialism. When we compare the world situation of Marx’s times to today,
where there is a tremendous shift versus more capitalism and less social
equality it is hard to imagine how mankind could possibly find ways out
of this dilemma, where one percent of the world owns more than the other 99%.
https://www.theguardian.com › Business › Savings
https://www.theguardian.com › Business › Savings
Debt and Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Haney
Die Schere zwischen arm und reich wird immer
groesser. Rich countries profit from exploiting poorer countries, instead of
giving and providing, the debt only rises and brings those who own into deeper
and deeper debts. Resourses are exploited.
“Bad debt” is described as debt that cannot be repaid – debt as duty, as
black commitment, queer promise, criminal liability. “Excessive debt,
incalculable debt” is shared within communities and is a means of
socialization.
Credit is asocial. It is means of business or community means to
increase financial liability and diminish societal responsibility. Pairing debt
with credit advances credit that can be expanded by debt. Credit is a means of
privatization and debt as a means of socialization. Creditors want to destroy
societal responsibility, the bad social debt that is widespread, in the shared
state of indebtedness, people share, without wanting anything. Creditors keep
track.
Students avoid credit. Credit offers to match credit for debt. Studying,
the students builds debt they do not intend to pay. Debt cannot be forgiven. It
can be forgotten and remembered.
Forgiven debt (unlike bad debt) is a means to restore credit, which is
called “restorative justice”, but there is no compensation for communities suffering.
Only creditors forgive debt by offering credit, offering more from the
source of the pain of debt. There is no justice for those suffering because the
societal “bad debt” cannot be forgotten nor can it be paid. It cannot be
forgiven.
A parallel example is described. An entity called “North” can be a
person that spends with credit cards, becomes destitute or lends to a friend
who will never repay. Another comparison is made with “Global South” regarding
credit contributions to organizations that retains its debts, changes them for
other debts, common business practices that drain community resources.
Credit can be rebuilt. Restored credit is renewed obligations to be met,
“measured, dispensed, endured” that prohibits justice, the justice where there
is no obligation or demand and no payback. “Good (private) citizens” have consistent
backgrounds, income and obtain credit for more debt. Bad debt is not because of unemployment, no
credit / bad credit. Bad debt is a state that is disconnected from creditors.
It resists restructuring, seeks others in need. Bad debt cannot be perceived by
wealth. Governance wants to reconnect debtors’ obligation to society. Interests
allows policy development through credit to pay for interests.
What kind of a society is this? That does
not substitute university fees? In North America one has to be rich to be able
to be a student or risk to run into unbearable debts? It is a society that does
not want poor people to study, a society that wants University knowledge to be
available only to the rich and privileged community. In Germany, there are no
university fees. Studying is free and is paid for by the tax payer. Education should
be available for everyone who wants to study, no matter which social class
people are from. In some countries like the US there are only a small
percentage of well educated people, the majority does not have a good education
and is prepared to work for minimum wage. Even if people work full time, their
wages do not pay for their cost of living, often people need to work two jobs
in order to be able to keep out of debt. How can a government want this? Billions
are spent on weapons, only some get rich, and less money gets spent on
education. The government does not have an interest to educate their people
well. The less educated people are the easier they can be manipulated.
A co-written article by Fred Moten, Stefano Harney,
The University and the Undercommons - 7
theses
Professionalization
Is the Privatization of the Social Individual through Negligence
This section addresses public
administration courses, especially Masters of public administration, public
health, environmental management, nonprofit and arts management, human service
disciplinary clusters. The authors deny professionalization brings benefits of
competence, practical advances or critical projects that would turn
competencies to radically beneficial outcomes.
The authors declare they have ended any
association with critical academics. They maintain “underlying negligence” is a
cause for university labours’ anxiety. Average lectures are skeptical of
government, modest in its social policy goals. Especially, the authors are
concerned that there is no state theory
in public administration programs in the United States. Apparently, passionate
students are suppressed by professionalization.
“This is not merely a matter of
administering the world, but of administering away the world (and with it
prophecy)”, which “borders on the criminal”, they wrote. Questioning becomes a
departmental breach. Public administration confronts socialization created by
capitalism, which can be reduced to public or private socialization. This
division invalidates scholarly opinions and creates a social deficiency.
Socialization divided between public and
private denies common labour, in the Undercommons, for example. This is the
negligent opinion of professional public administration scholars, according to
the authors.
There
Is No Distinction between the American University and Professionalization
Professionalism is shaped by compliant
people that engage in education control, impose professionalism rather than
intellectual rigour. Paradoxically, the Undercommons’ academics refuse to
decline professionalization or “to be against the university”. Therefore, the
university and by association professionalization is shaped what it cannot and
will not acknowledge as its internal opposition.
A professional education has become a
“critical education”. This does not refer to progress in professional schools, nor
collaboration with the Universitas, but disrepute for those who refuse to
criticize or dismiss the Undercommons. Those “critical” academic professionals
tend to be regarded as safe and submissive. The university ambition mirrors the
state’s ambition, because it, too, wants to control education and impose a
worldview that threatens rigorous academia of the Undercommons.
In Derrida’s reading of the Universitas, he
describes the university as intellectual and not a professional entity that
always has the drive of State, the political power where the university is
located. The university also has the power of enlightenment, and the pressure
of State (governance) - state of being, or the lower case idea of state where
politics remains theoretical. Derrida wrote that onto (name) and auto (self) –
encyclopedic (information) refers to both the State as governing body and the
state of theoretical politics., both being ambitious.
The
Only Possible Relationship to the University Today Is a Criminal One
Quoting Shakespeare’s character, Pistol, a
swaggering coward, “To the university I’ll steal, and there I’ll steal,” the
authors explained that American universities repository of valuable thinking is
located in a place of refuge for rebellious intellectuals, where ideas produced
are stolen. The place, which is not a physical place, explicitly, is called the
“Undercommons”, the academic retreat where the nonconformist thinkers and
achievers congregate. Defining the optimal relationship to the university that
needs academics but cannot tolerate the outcomes of academic achievement,
academics are forced into the “Undercommons of Enlightenment” to continue their
pursuits in a covert setting, maintain accompanying political rigour, “where
the revolution is still black, still strong”, especially denoting the likely
biographical experience of one of the authors, Fred Moten.
The work of the university as
“Universitas”, the Latin word meaning the whole, total, the
universe, the world, according to Merrium Webster dictionary, is a commitment to the discipline called education through the
experience of being taught and teaching reciprocally between student and
instructor, the world at large as teacher.
A student would ideally gather what they
can from the university instruction, furtively (steal), because to do so is to
acquire knowledge that cannot be bought. Knowledge is not an object for sale.
Universities attempt to sell the knowledge as a product and therefore, students
must steal, although what they seek is intangible. Students enter the
Undercommons, where “fugitive enlightenment enacts” the demanding and
passionate societal and personal expansion in students’ education.
The university needs to continually recruit
new labour and it recruits from the Undercommons because of the academic rigour
available there, in spite of its denunciation by the university, “Like the
colonial police force recruited unwittingly from guerrilla neighborhoods.”
Exceeding professionalism’s restraints, students, with life-long learning may
return to the university, could consider themselves part of the problem of
inadequate academic contributions.
Critical
Academics Are the Professionals Par Excellence
Critical academics question the university,
questions the state, questions art, politics, culture. The authors ask, “What
can it mean to be critical when the professional defines himself or herself as
one who is critical of negligence, while negligence defines
professionalization?”
The academic critical of the university
would be a professional par excellence and more negligent. To distance oneself
professionally through critique is the most active consent to privatize the
social individual.
Artistic Research in the Future Academy
Daniel Butt discussed the
evolution of postgraduate programmes in studio art. Historically, artists
rejected scholastic activity to minimize the challenges of art production
(Wachter) or because art research opposed the intelligence inherent in art,
“There is no solution, because there is no problem.” (Duchamp). Because art
students often evade supervised written research reports, although insightful
critics, most artists are unhappy with being told what to do. Failure to
recognize artists as independent may occur when artists are required to write.
Previously, the market saw artists as producers of mystery, not an explainers
of mystery.
Butt recorded enduring
questions regarding the expected and accepted outcomes pertaining to art
production in relation to postgraduate studies. Art as a concept in a research
paper exists for bureaucratic calculation of a student’s degree performance.
Making art without written concept development allows direct, personal exchange
with the viewer. Art materiality, its varied classification and understanding
enables art to be, quoting David Joselit, “beside itself, decomposing stable identity into possibility.”
He argued that the institutional (university / literary criticism / artistic
research) audience, however, bound by sociological and political-economic
dictums prevented art from being readable.
This readability was
challenged by artists / researchers, now art theory writers. there is an
evolution in writing because visual arts became theorized, unstable as a
product as visual art. Erratically theorized writing, otherwise called work of
art research was produced, intended to direct the reader to create worlds.
Through reading the written delivery of art concepts, the reader became the
creator. It is not the writer but the reader that produces. This reader /
viewer role reversal requires independent critical interpretation.
Explanations (critical
interpretation) of what was experienced through artists’ written concept
development affected the independence of the work. To achieve a doctorate,
artists must have artistic freedom to choose their medium, (written concept
experienced by the reader). They must be evaluated on their contribution to
aesthetic knowledge available through this choice, a scientific paradigm of
technoscientific intuitions.
Butt identified
institutional histories, conceptual frames and ideologies, bureaucratic,
financial molding that transformed theological into philosophic, then
technoscientific progressions that allowed fine arts into the university. Every
university discipline is a market segment. Artistic research / explanatory
writing became marketable, inquiry that experimented with the research degree as industry, countered the art sales market. Butt suggested radical growth,
rationalized university teaching in creative disciplines allowed global art
education to influence art production, more than the art sales market.
Butt explained global art
education influence is a result of the correspondence of art practices through
the research degrees as industry within the university market. Making work in
the visual arts has become an institutional critique of the constraints of art
production that contests universities’ knowledge making practices.
Because of the history of
authoritative interpretation, it became habitual practice for artists rely on
others to interpret their work. Writing about their own work gives artists
authority, although the first in the chain of interpretation (curator /
audience / critic) - “the correct interpretation can no longer be the artist’s
property if the audience is to find their own experience of the work”.
Heidegger restated that a “work of
art” prompts an experience where we exist in our current present, remember a
world outside ourselves, which capitalism would have us forget in our chase to
improve what we already know.
As artistic production is incorporated
uneasily into the constraints of university knowledge, artistic research
becomes capable of pushing the future university to understand how to live on
the planet. The goal of this book is to provide intellectual support to those
practitioners making this critique of planetary life through their works,
identifies the forces inhibiting this critique. For example, university limits
artistic research to ask unconditional questions.
“Neo-liberalism” the catch-all term
for capitalism, critiques globalization and international monetary policy.
Foucault’s historical analysis of neo-liberalism showed governments manage
populations, individuals through regulation. The capitalist concept of freedom
embodies a civil society that trades outside the confines of the state.
The transition from the European
nation state to electronic global capitalism dominates contemporary life. It is
the context to analyse art education. Individualist freedoms have become a
barrier to new forms of collective freedom that must be thought outside the
neo-liberal conception of the collective as a sum of individuals that have been
identified from within critical artistic practices from the late 1960s,
particularly those associated with feminist, queer and anti-colonial movements.
Institutional constraints on freedom are disavowed through the collective
disruption of art’s organizing mechanisms.
The incorporation of the art school
into the university continues to create productive tensions between scientific
and artistic production because it brings the previously distinct university
knowledge and artistic production into a shared logic and a shared economy. The
transformation has included Ph.D.’s in studio art. Debates question if an art
object can hold knowledge or produce knowledge in the scientific model.
Other questions include:
·
How
does the previous gatekeeper of culture’s historical disciplines conform to an
educational industry, training ground for every field of production?
·
How
does image production and circulation as the extension of artistic practice
with its own medium and institutional context fit into a broader politicized
affect?
Creativity has become inconsequential
labour and production, where the entrepreneurial neo-liberal individual must
creatively author their own life narrative. Debates about whether art is able
to make a contribution to university knowledge requires that any university
activity be profitable.
