Welcome words by Nora Sternfeld

I want to welcome all of you to this summit of non-aligned initiatives in education culture. What all of us will be trying to invent during the next four days is a particular form of gathering: a summmit. A summit is not simply a conference where people arrive and then depart without anything happening in-between. A summit in our sense is not a counter-summit either, for it is not intended to be simply reactive. What we aim to build up here is a positive context, of action rather than re-action, that stands on its own and that allows for a change of the terms of the debate between education, politics, activism and art. Together, I hope, we will be able during these days to develop such context, a context that makes other practices of education thinkable. In this sense a summit is a space for negotiation, where the outcome remains open. But what is at stake in this process of negotiation is the role of education as a practice of social change.

Education as a practice of social change will be premissed upon the follwing set of assumptions:

First, there is no such thing as neutral education. For neutrality in education will always be complicit with and consolidate the existing status quo. To develop a new vision of education therefore implies to take position.

Second, the pedagogical relation, in its traditional sense, has to be broken. It is a relation between those who supposedly are in possession of knowledge and the poor have-nots who are supposed to be educated. This relation has to be broken, because in its essence, it constitutes a relation of domination by which hierarchical structures are perpetuated.

Third, on the level of content, the existing canon of knowledge has to be changed. Existing power-relations have to be thematized and the dominant power/knowledge complex has to be put into questions through a process of unlearning and through the production of counter-knowledges.

Fourth, since the production of alternative knowledges and new educational concepts takes place within society, we will always have to reflect on and be conscious of our own position within society. That means that we have to ask: which knowledge is produced by whom, from which perspective and in whose interest? And, in addition, we will have to take into account the blind spots created by ourselves in this process.

And fifth, in order to create some consciousness regarding our own position, one has to break out of isolation. In this sense, to organize is a necessary precondition for education as a practice of social change. This summit was intended as one stept in this direction where a context for discussion and debate is created between different groups and individuals.

What does all this have to do with non-alignement? Non-aligned here refers to the possibility of cutting across and escaping the classical alternatives: The alternatives between, on the one hand, institutionalized practices and entirely non-institutionalized practices on the other; of, on the one hand, educational institutions as an apparatus of the state and, on the other, the neoliberal form of economizing learning. Of, on the one hand, the old Humboldt idea of „Bildung“ and, on the other, today’s Bologna process where learning means to accumulate the general equivalent of credit points. Referring to the historical idea of the non-aligned movement we insist on the idea of a political position that refuses the given alternatives, in the same way in which the non-aligned nations refused to subject to either the rule of NATO or the rule of the Warsaw Pact. The logic of either/or is undone by our claim of a neither/nor. In other words: We are claiming that there is an alternative to these alternatives.
In this sense non-aligned means that new possibilies are opened of what can be seen and what can be said, and that a whole range of knowledge-effects is produced.

The question of education is central to this effort. By education we do not refer to the practice of teaching in the narrow sense. What education means in our context is the wide field of themes and questions concerning knowledge production, teaching, learning and the information society. Education and knowledge production will be the topic of this summit, but at the same time it will also be our very practice while gathering here in Berlin. Together we will contribute to a new definition of what education can mean today.

Let me end by posing only a few questions with which many of us will engage during the next four days:
What do we have to learn and what do we have to unlearn in order to make all this possible?
How can we challenge the racism, classism and sexism of the existing eductional system?
How can the existing canon be shifted by alternative forms of knowledge production, and how can we, at the same time, avoid to be in turn defined by this canon?
To put it in a nutshell: How can the current conditions of knowledge and the power to define be challenged?

We hope that in this unfolding process a new context of non-alignment will be created where to change education means to change society.

Opening speech by Florian Schneider

Ladies and Gentlemen,
dear SUMMIT delegates and SUMMIT contributers,

it is my utmost and sincerest pleasure to welcome you to the first SUMMIT non aligned initiatives in education culture.

I am supposed to deliver a speech since a summit is usually opened by a speech. But of course such a speech would be un-speechable. Who am I that I could possibly take the chance to claim the right to open such a thing as a summit? For whom could I speak -- hardly for what is supposed to be myself? Whom should I represent? Why should you believe such a performance is relevant at all?

I am mentioning these questions not in order to impress you (or our guests from britain) with some autodidactically appropriated understatement. I am mentionig them since it refers to the condition that characterizes the aporia of the project SUMMIT and its process as such.

i learned today, impossibility might be the wrong word: what i mean is an inverted potentiality, or if you like: a negative potentiality in the sense that we feel an urgency to do exactly what seems to be unthinkable, unfeasable, unforseeable and way beyond our power or actual capacities.

Ladies and Gentlemen,
let me reflect on this basic condition of the event for a few minutes at its very beginning and lets start by describing some phenomena: We are meeting in an extremely interesting place at a very distinct moment.

The main venue of SUMMIT is a theatre. Truly one of the most exciting theatres in Germany and we are very grateful for the hospitality we encountered over the past few months -- we really know that this is everything but a matter of course and we appreciate it very much.

But why did we choose a theatre, and not a conference center, an art academy or any other more or less appropriate space for a gathering like this?

The reason may be obvious: a certain playfulness, a kind of mockery or mimikry. Something like a parody in the truest and driest sense of the word, a parody understood as a melody that is slightly misaligned and by that uncovering the mechanisms in which authority operates due to a small delay and a certain distortion. Let me please make thi absolutely clear: It is not about humorous effects or satirical exaggerations, but about gaining access to the courtly theater by the relatively simple means of copy-paste.

But there is also another reason. That reason implies the opportunity to stage something, to make an experiment, to create a certain artificial mis-en-scene that would not be possible by nature. We understand the SUMMIT as a dramatic laboratory that calls into question all that exists.

SUMMIT is taking place less than two weeks before the heads of governments of the eight most powerful nations of this world are going to meet in a rundown luxury ressort a two hours car-ride north of here. We have chosen this moment explicitely not in order to protest, not in order to lament, and not in order to propose alternatives.

We are meeting here and now, since we feel the urge and desire to open up new fields.

At the moment SUMMIT consists of 82 working groups, workshops, presentations, caucuses, dj-sets, and parties. We are sure that there will be further, ad-hoc sessions that are going to be scheduled on the fly.

The wide range of delegates is characterising the specific concept of SUMMIT: From professors of universities and art academies to delegates from migrant self-organizations, from software developers to artists, curators and museum directors, from the initiators of free and self-organized academies to precarious labor activists and union organizers.

It would have been unthinkable in advance, impossible to envision, let alone planning it, and in fact it is nothing we can rely on: there is no common ground or common agenda and i promise you: there won't be anything like that.

Non-alignment is a non-identitarian and non-representative category. It is neither nor. It does not call for unity, it does not claim a territory, it rather tries to overcome blockages, escape dichotomies and liberate itself from a self-inflicted immaturity and dependence.

We are perfectly aware that on this basis we can only produce misunderstandings and i really do hope that these misunderstandings become as creative, enlightening, unexpected as possible.

So, what can be the goal of SUMMIT? What can we achieve in these four or five days?

I do not believe that we should try to start a new project. Most of us are already busy enough and can hardly manage to cope with our manifolded commitments, mostly unpaid and extremely urgent.

i also believe, that we do not just have to renovate and realign an existing body of knowledge, update its organizational structure and methodologies. No, we really need entirely new terminologies, we urgently need really new concepts and new categories...

I am very confident that these four days offer us the extraordinary opportunity to formulate the challenges and demands, compile the sources and release a program that might outline the main characteristics, lay out the infrastructure and make available the pre-requisites of a multitude of networked educational, pedagogical projects.

Please allow me to mention quickly three points that seem important to me and might work as an example how we could proceed last but not least in terms of an "impossible" declaration or action plan:

1. open source radicalism

We are not satisfied by the wikipedia. The button with the logo of the creative commons license is defientely not enough. If free software is not free beer, free knowledge is more than information about some ingredients and on this basis we want to take over and run the entire brewerie and create two, three, four, many open, free, nomad, monad, pirate, peer-to-peer universities

2. new configurations of the self

in order to struggle against the ongoing privatization and proprietarization of knowledge production we need to invent and create new models of multiple ownership. This seems to me the only chance to deal with increasingly fluid forms knowledge and would enable us leave the common notion of individual mastery behind. A generecally open notion of mutual owenership that might enable us to reappropriate the means of immaterial production

3. increasing complexities

we all know, that we live in a world that undergoes dramatic changes and is commonly perceived as increasingly complex. Instead of reducing these complexities, simplfying them, the enormous challenge we are currently facing is to fold and unfold, or better: multiply complexity.

Tomorrow night we have scheduled the first session with a public editing of the declaration and we are going to use that opportunity to start from scratch, with a blank sheet of paper and

Ladies and Gentlemen, dear SUMMIT delegates,
we are all more or less familiar with the fundamental problem of emancipatory pedagogy: in the moment when I try to teach somebody how to liberate him or herself, i re-align to an infinite line of regression and power reappears even stronger than before. The more I try to explain, mediate, communicate or teach, the more I reaffirm the distance, inequality and dependency of those who lack knowledge on those who seem to possess it.

Lets cut this gordic knot, lets take advantage of a this enormously privileged situation where we have the opportunity to meet and discuss, argue with each others and question ourselves in such a great company for about four days and nights.

Lets come forth and lets unalign!

Thank you very much!

Opening Address to the Berlin Summit by Kodwo Eshun

I would like to thank all of you for coming along this evening. And to thank Nora, Florian, Nicolas and Irit for their presentations. Afterwards, I will pass onto Susanne Lang who has been responsible for ensuring this project reaches this moment.

Tonight, I will restrict myself to elaborate upon two of the core ideas to which my colleagues have already drawn attention.

The first is the idea of authorisation. Florian has talked about this in terms of self–authorisation. Irit talked in terms of self-empowerment, in terms of people gathered around curiousity

This notion focuses upon the question of how we authorise ourselves to ‘claim the power to shape and define the terms of the debate’ around education in the expanded sense with which we understand it.

Florian has talked about the mode of address that informs such a claim; that is, in whose name, such claims are to be made. I want to approach these questions of authorisation along a slightly different prismatic focus-that is through the act of inauguration and the practice of self-inauguration. The question then is How do we inaugurate?

The second idea I want to elaborate upon is the idea of potentiality as Irit has articulated it in her elaboration of Agamben’s work on potentiality. In the broadest sense, we have invited ourselves to be here because we are all, in our distinctive ways, preoccupied by the sense that ‘the crisis in education offers us potential modes of engagement.’

What I want to look at is the mode of power that informs potentiality; a mode of control we that now know as pre-emption which operates in and through potentiality. I think that this is one way of thinking through the implications of our modest proposal. The question here is How do we practice pre-emption?

If we think of this summit as an experiment in collective self-inauguration whose implications might exceed the parameters of the next few days, then a productive paradox begins to emerge. What draws everyone here is a preoccupation to examine the ongoing forms of self-organisation, the already constituted forms of self-inauguration; but not in the interests of a new assembly or a new trade union or a Great Learning; instead what interests us is the widening of scope and of scale, one of whose outcomes is a document, a declaration, a charter, which borrows its mode of address from the field of the political.

The foundational paradox of all politics is that those who gather to make a declaration are not themselves authorised to make such a declaration. That is why they are making it. To declare ourselves non-aligned is to announce that we are not yet so. For if we were, what, then would be the need or the purpose of inaugurating ourselves as such. It is in the event of such an action of declaration that they, that is we, whoever we are, become the recognisable subjects of the condition designated in and through the summit. A condition that is not so much myspace or yourspace but possibly, perhaps, ourspace.

And to declare the right to declare a right is to designate ourspace as a mode of co-existence. This coexistence cannot be counted upon. It cannot be taken for granted or secured. On the contrary, the unguaranteed fragility of the production of commonality requires the intimacy of distance and the patience of disagreement.

What is specific to this context is that the condition of non-alignment occupies at least two spaces. It is a historical moment. Relating to 1955, Nehru, Nasser, Nkrumah and Sukarno convened the Asia-Africa Conference in the city of Bandung, Indonesia, leading to the foundation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. The movement, which explicitly refused the bipolar division and denounced the nuclear threat, would become the reference-point for all the subsequent struggles of national liberation in the still-colonized world.

And non-alignment is a practice in the making, something to be achieved in the present. It is a potential that oscillates between these two states without reaching equilibrium.

Which leads me towards my second point. To be precise, the non-aligned movement is more than historical. We could term it a past potential future. Past potential futures are, effectively, inoperative futures, futures that in some way were halted or shut down. My feeling is that we are haunted by these unrealized futures; that these futures that did not come to pass are nonetheless with us.

On a bad day, I find myself wondering whether our critical weapons, which we wield with such pride, are just consolation prizes for those of us who are intimate with a defeated radicalism or a defeated future. These days, there are more kinds of resistance than ever before but there is little or no language to analyse the kind of yearnings that initiate and that can inform desires that exceed resistance and seek however tentatively to affirm.

I am preoccupied with what Herbert Marcuse called the ‘exile of our longing for non-sacrificial freedom’. What that means can be illustrated by something the artist Carol Bove said, namely, that we are the future that the 1960s dreamed of.

It is clear that the dream of total liberation that the 1960s had for us has not come to pass. We feel ourselves to be at the dead end of the Utopian imagination, at the heat death of utopia, we cannot but sense that we live at a point where the utopian imagination is not feasible. That might sound like a lament but it is more than that.

It is the realisation that potentiality has been captured by capital. Capital, whether it was Clintonian neoliberalism or neoconservatism mobilizes speculative affect. It is attuned to the emergence of the unpredictable.

The implications of this are that the affective register of our relation to the future has shifted from euphoria to fear, a state of fear without foreseeable end.

Pre-emption transforms our generalized alertness into a mobilizing force. It compels us to become the uncertain future that we are in thrall to. As Melinda Cooper has pointed out, it is a mode of anticipation that is future-invocative rather than predictive or representative, since the future it calls forth is effectively generated de novo out of our collective apprehensiveness.

In the face of a politics that prefers to work in the speculative tense, what the Summit might allow us to explore is the idea of what I call, adapting Cooper, the creative sabotage of the future.

Perhaps we can view the Summit as a space in which to practice a pragmatics of pre-emptive intervention capable of actualizing the future outside of the boundaries of property.

One congress less (a summit instead) by Nicolas Siepen

One congress less (a summit instead)

There is a sentence by Brian Massumi I like and which fits quit well into this context:

„An individual live is a serialized, capitalistic mini-crisis, a desaster that bears your name.“

Let me make a general remark – If we speak about non-aligned initiatives in education culture, what we need is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. The challenge is to be able to define more than one difference at once. In terms of Education it could mean that the experiences which are made within the framework of Institutions and the experiences which are made in so called self-organization are maybe very different, but at the same time they are already mingled together in peoples live. When Institutions offers structural frameworks and therewith a kind of stability and secureness, self-organization offers the possibility to define and experiment with the framework itself but under the condition of a constant lack of organization and secureness. This two qualities are very rarely seen in a mixed form. To work on this task could be called a non-aligned initiative.

If one takes a closer look on the conditions where this possible mixture could take place, both on the macro and on the micro level, two things are especially striking: capitalism is not a single thing or a single logic, which simply asserts itself, but a specific way of production, which must constantly branch off, re-establish itself, and adapt in order to find a footing and eventually assert itself in completely different social formations. In other words, one can never see capitalism in its pure form and the word is therefore only conditionally suitable as a term in political struggle, its use being necessarily implicated in antinomies and performative contradictions, which ultimately cannot be solved within the »system«. In a certain way, it is precisely the »free« markets and the global macro-structures of the capitalist way of production that even provoke micro-structural resistances – that is, forms of self-organisation – on the social, technological, and cultural levels; and once they are put into motion, they can be rather dangerous for particular areas of the »system«. At the same time, these »deviations« materialize and articulate themselves on the very matrix of capitalism and draw their entire material, which they are trying to turn against »the System«, from this world. Only this can explain why such »small escapes« mostly reach their miserable end so soon, either pinned down and suppressed or turned into merchandize themselves. Between the macro-level of existing powers and hegemonies on one side and forms of self-organisation, there is a constant exchange of means of production and investments, which do not have the same origin, but are still intertwined so closely as to have become indistinguishable. This makes all retrospective political reference so difficult and eventually turns it into a complicated archaeological and genealogical task of reading semiotic and material traces, which again lead to other traces. However, this logic does not stop at the macro-level of large units, but is valid also for the convolutions, subsystems, and micro-vacuoles that self-organized groups and spaces are made of. Here also borders are drawn and »we« created, identities and essences are generated for a while and subject to a specific division of transparency and opaqueness, while in their interior power relationships are created that not only mark and structure the way they function, but also lead to the immediate vicinity of structures to be fought, which are often repeated. Each difference is tied to a specific form of repetition. In order to be able to dissolve oneself from traditional forms, conventions, or normality, one need not only see through or deconstruct their fetishist structure, but also prevent it permanently from functioning further, on a more abstract level. It happens rather often that the »art of reason« is beaten to the bone by the arts of power. As a matter of fact, it was various agents trying from various directions, in a sort of archaeological investigation, to reconstruct carefully the splitters of a political practice that had suffered painful defeats even at the time of its boom, since it was not capable or willing to allow political and social realities to come close to it in their entire complexity and insisting stubbornness. If one wants to get any further in retrospective or actual analysis of what self-organisation consists of, one must direct one’s attention to the fact that problems of power, which have been presumed to stand »outside«, reappear also here in a manifold way, However, this should never be done for its own sake, firstly because criticism of particular forms of power can turn itself into an instrument of power, secondly because there can be no »outside« with respect to power, and thirdly because political radicalism could be left behind: the adversary likes nothing better than to see leftist groups being hopelessly caught in their sectarianism or tear each other apart. That belongs to the numerous lessons learned from the experiences and conflicts of the 60s and 70s.

The time when a particular code and its attendant lines were enough to define a political project are maybe over. Strictly speaking, there never was such an opportunity. Maybe it's possible to learn how to operate between fundamentally different and untranslatable codes. We are already right in the middle; that's one condition that we initially share.