The summit’s successful failure through anarchical organisation rather than professional declaration

I would like to suggest that the summit was a successful failure in that it failed to produce a final declaration, but did so for the purpose to create maximal learning output. A learning (instead of educating, lamenting, or politicising) communication could first of all take place thanks to the social organisation in the form of garbage can structure. This is what Cohen and March describe as organisational anarchy, where solutions are generated for yet unknown problems, and therefore assembled like garbage in a can for their time being useless. As soon as problems arise, however, the garbage might yield fitting solutions, and should for this reason be interpreted as a potential.

Consequently, the following interpretation of the summit as such anarchical organisation invites participants to search solutions for emerging problems within their own messy and imperfect memory, rather than some alternative declarations as they only declare some failure more successful.

Reflecting on the summit, I think that in escaping problems such as the privatisation or bureaucracy of knowledge, it offered an experience of non-alignment; however, not only in terms of content, but primarily and most bitterly on emotional grounds, as through non-alignment achieved freedom from traditional classification systems, political dogmatisms, and actual debates, turned out to be just another word for nothing left to lose. In order to not align with current frontiers, participants rejected any construction of a common enemy, and hence did not enable the gathering to build a political group. In other words, participants didn’t fear to definitely escape the traditional criteria, nor to remain lost, or even lonely in the absence of a community. As individuals did not belong to a defined organisation, the summit necessarily initiates an open process, instead of a professional conclusion in the form of definitive declaration.

As openness is an unfamiliar and exhausting mode of knowing, at the end people might find themselves equipped with a potential for sustainable learning that however depends on future examinations of the individual memory. To conclude, the summit undermined the typical academic expectations and prejudices that only written text displays lasting and powerful results.

Whereas participants could not construct the theoretical unity of a ‘we’ that would have allowed to declare, they nevertheless unified on the basic level of social dynamics. However, this rather aesthetic unity was solely created by the fact of simultaneous presence. That one recognised each other after some days, and had the chance to simply start discussions due to some common context, demonstrates this unity. The crucial thing is that it could not be spoken about without conflict, because experience and aesthetics are individual rather than universal. Accordingly, a declaration would have been possible only as a collection of contradictory conclusions as it is based exclusively on the unique feelings and judgements of individuals, hence on the chaos within heterogeneous garbage.

In conclusion, if the impossible will become possible some times (in hopefully further meetings), namely a declaration that is able to unify the unaligned, then it will demonstrate how meaning can be provided for an intelligence that does not depend on relating the current action to already known goals, and would thereby move beyond binary modes of traditional knowledge production.