Occupy the University: Reconsidering the Local. Micha Cárdenas
Author’s Note As this article goes to publication, the University of California is erupting as a site of political conflict over the recent budget cuts, tuition increases and furloughs. A UC wide strike and walkout of faculty, staff and students has been called for on August 24th, 2009, the first day of instruction. It seems that the UC’s disregard for the health and wellbeing of their employees, as well as for the quality of education, has reached an intolerable point for many. Many academics have taken this opportunity to turn their research back to the university itself, which is exemplified by UC Berkeley’s colloquium event entitled “The University in Crisis: The Dismantling and Destruction of the University of California.”[1] In a conversation recorded for pros* journal, Teddy Cruz and Rick Lowe agree that socially engaged art has the ability to actually change the material conditions under which art is made and in which people’s lives occur. They seem to agree that the best way to change housing conditions is to engage at the level of local legislation, housing associations and city governments. I would like to intervene on this point. While I agree that socially engaged art can change people’s lives, my intervention, to be simple, is to say that the decision about how to intervene is not so simple. Cruz and Lowe urge artists to engage in local city politics, yet I argue that perhaps an even more local focus may be more beneficial. In her book When Species Meet, Donna Haraway describes a feminist approach to political ethics, which accepts our finitude, contingency and historical situatedness. Her approach acknowledges that from a position of a lack of certainty, “there is no outside from which to answer that mandatory question”[2] of what political action to take. Refusing to take a political action is still a political action, and so we are faced with “bearing the mortal consequences” of our choices of where to put our artistic energies in this expanded field where any artistic practice is apparently acceptable. My own affinity with a feminist ethics of uncertainty grew out of my work with Avital Ronell at the European Graduate School where I asked, “But how can we sit and discuss the deep meaning of this punctuation mark while bombs are being dropped on people?” Her response was, to paraphrase, that by introducing doubt into commonly accepted definitions of ideas and political strategies, that the decisions about dropping those bombs, or imprisoning people, may be stalled, changed or ended. more... http://bang.calit2.net/pros/?page_id=11 _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
