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.