non-specialisation

Non-specialisation
The question has always been organizational, not at all ideological: is an organization possible which is not modelled on the apparatus of the State, even to prefigure the State to come? (Gilles Deleuze 1988)
For a brief time there was and continues to be a relief from capital’s tyranny of specialization that forces us to perform as if we are a fixed set of relationships and characteristics, and to repress or strictly manage all other forms of desire and expression (Critical Art Ensemble 2001).
When you enter any classroom – be it at a university, public/ private school, language school, technical college, or kindergarten – look around the room. Note the organisation of the tables and chairs, the way they are positioned in careful linearity; line after line facing the blackboard, the segregation between the desk of the teacher and the desk of her students. The podium of the lecturer perched like the apex of a pyramid, rows of chairs saluting the hierarch of education. The fairly regimented schedule of breaks and pauses. This material manifestation, this material environment of the institution of knowledge, makes visible those widely unchallenged power structures that legitimate and mobilise a division of labour, a division of expertise, a division of authority. The teacher and her pupil co-constitute the subjectivities and roles of one another. Even in those most progressive institutions, inspired (implicitly or explicitly) by radical pedagogy, these relationships can be seen to be played out. The expert and the novice. These divisions and these relationships – this very classical ecology of knowledge generation – formed the impetus for us to begin speaking about non-specialisation.
Non-specialisation is a term we use to describe experimental critical interventions in hierarchical systems of value that underpin how we produce, and relate to, knowledge. 
Because we ourselves come from contexts informed by a state-education system – schools, technical and art colleges and universities – non-specialisation looks at those uni-directional relationships of learning (teacher-expert imparting knowledge on her student-novice) paradigmatic of these institutions. Such traditionally one way methods of transmitting and receiving knowledge are taken by us as a site from which to investigate how the relationships engendered through this process are reproduced outside of the classroom, in all facets of everyday life.
Central to the concept of non-specialisation is questioning the socio-political and economic role played by the specialist or expert, who is often considered to be more “valuable” than a non-expert in terms of what kind of knowledges they possess. The specialist commands power based on her legitimation through, and production of, specific kinds of knowledge. That said, it is not the act of gaining expertise or experience within a field that we see as the problem. What we are critical of are the ways in which hierarchies of knowledge are judged based on what kind of education/ degree/ qualification/ resources/ vocabularies and experiences someone has had access to. This way of distributing merit is integral to the definition of the expert as such. We understand this as problematic because it disqualifies and devalues individuals and groups who are excluded not only from dominant institutions and their resources, but also from any kind of “meritocracy”: whether due to gender, class or racial reasons, or because of different desires and lines of interest.
This is why non-specialisation acknowledges the importance of initiating all analysis through a critical examination of the relationships between the nation-state, class and neoliberal capitalism. What may be shown through such a method is how these relationships impact upon the possible attainment of recognised expertise. We propose that this is a necessary way to start our analysis because institutions of state education increasingly engage in commercial enterprise and private partnerships with economic industry. For us, what this indicates is a need to incorporate both the philosophical and the political into questions around specialisation and hierarchies of knowledge: what might comprise expertise outside of qualification? How might the structure of authority which places the teacher over her student reflect other state-organisational and socio-political structures? What is the dynamic between capital and expertise, and how has this affected the historical conceptualisation of labour? How do the discourses of neoliberalism, that adopt rhetorics of “horizontality” and “equality”, repeat hierarchical categories of value in knowledge production? How does specialisation affect the specialist and what impact does it have on her? Why do cultural/ social knowledges, practical skills, and affective/ desiring and haptic knowledges still remain marginal in comparison to institutionalised knowledges? How might we question and transform our understandings of knowledge through recognising our own motivations and privileges? And how can we do this without falling back into the power and value structures, the ways of speaking and acting, that we want to move away from?
By committing to both critical inquiry and direct action, we understand that the basis of non-specialisation must be not only in questioning and reflecting but also in practical experimentation. Our objective is to try out different, creative methods of organisation as a way to transverse both discursive and material elements of knowledge production and distribution. Crucial to the praxis of non-specialisation is self-reflexivity, and we try to maintain an awareness of alienating ways of speaking, behaviours and environments that must be negotiated through. Such negotiations may inform different kinds of learning and teaching that explicitly encourage reciprocality, relationality and dialogue. These kinds of education might draw, for instance, upon tactics such as skill and resource sharing, public conversations, and trans-community collaborations and research. Within such education events, modes of facilitation and self-organisation that focus on non-representative principles of participation may be practiced. While such principles often feature in these events, non-specialisation cannot be limited to known forms of organisation and must retain a responsibility to experimenting through praxis (both conceptual and empirical). In this way, for us, non-specialisation thus acts as an ongoing process of questioning and responding, unmaking and remaking, that through this very process performs the relationships of knowledge that we desire to see.
Critical Art Ensemble (2001) Digital resistance: explorations in tactical media. New York, Autonomedia.
Deleuze, G. (1988) Foucault. (trans. And ed.) Hand, S. London, Athlone.
Some possible ways to engage with this material:
[…] too often the promotion of leading intellectuals by the media and publishing houses has had the effect of inhibiting the inventiveness of collective Assemblages of intellectuality which in no way benefit from such a system of representation. Intellectual and artistic creativity, like new social practices, have to conquer a democratic affirmation which preserves their specificity and right to singularity. This being the case, intellectuals and artists have got nothing to teach anyone. To return to an image that I proposed a long time ago, they produce toolkits composed of concepts, percepts and affects, which diverse publics will use at their convenience
—- Felix Guattari "Chaosmosis" 129
For all activities write down/ record/ videotape your reflections/ responses which you can share around later if you want to. Also feel free to map things out, write lists, diagrams etc visually, which can then be scanned and put onto the website if you like
Activity suggestion
Arrange space into format for conceptual speed dating 
(2 rows of chairs inner and outer – facing each other: inner person moves every 5 mins. 
Spend about 5 min on each term and move once, so each person talks to two people about each term – each term gets 10mins altogether)
Sit facing each other in pairs, each pair should talk about how you understand these terms (also keep in mind how they might relate to one another):
Knowledge 
Discourse 
Specialist 
Expert 
Public 
Layperson
Activity suggestion
For whole group together.
Discuss how specialised conceptual and theoretical terms and vocabularies arise from particular institutional contexts: universities, political spheres, philosophy etc.
Engage with these questions if you would like to:
How do these institutions operate/ how are they organised? What determines participation in these institutions? How do discourses get produced in these institutions? What are the parallels/ differences in how institutions and discourses are organised (accessibility (who has access); visibility (who and what is seen/ heard as dominant); structure (hierarchies: who has knowledge/ power); etc)?
What are the implications of this in terms of accessibility to discourses/ vocabularies? How does this effect the person or group who has the means to participate (and then become an expert) and the person or group who does not have the means to participate (who is then seen as the layperson)? How do we value particular institutional ‘intelligences’ and ‘knowledges’ in relationship to others; for instance cultural, social, affective etc?
How does the way we write/ speak (the terms/ vocabularies/ discourses/ gestures we use etc) underpin and reproduce relationships and ways of being in the world? What does this imply for the ways in which we might relate our ideas and work to people who have had different access to educational resources from us, and/ or who utilise non-dominant types of discourses and knowledges?
How might we produce vocabularies that challenge or rupture hierarchical ways of relating? How might we use the access to resources and discourses we have to create new relationships with people of solidarity and mutual aid without reproducing relationships of expertise or hierarchy?
Activity suggestion
Break into small groups of 4-5 which can break into pairs if you like
Discuss these questions:
What is an expert or specialist to you? What qualifies them or defines them as such in your opinion? Do you consider yourself as an expert or specialist? Why or why not? What do you think about the role of experts and specialists in public life?
Consider this quote in terms of the specialist and the dominant discourses/ ways of learning and speaking they may use:
The painter has many things in his head or around him, or in his studio. Now everything he has in his head or around him is already in the canvas, more or less virtually, more or less actually, before he begins his work. They are all present in the canvas as so many images, actual or virtual, so that the painter does not have to cover a blank surface, bur rather would have to empty it, clear it, clean it.
—- Gilles Deleuze "Francis Bacon – the logic of sensation" 86.
If you are an expert or specialist how might it be possible to clear your preconceived ways of operation? How might it be possible to work around the discourses, vocabularies and concepts you usually appropriate to discover new ones?
How might we understand the nonspecialist in the sense of someone who originally comes from a position of education/ specialisation in one field or another? Is the nonspecialist opposed to the specialist? Can we think of the nonspecialist as a process of unlearning? What might be some of the benefits of this? What about some of the drawbacks?
What might the relationship of nonspecialisation mean in terms of rethinking interaction with people possessing different kinds of knowledges? How might you think about yourself and their processes of subjectivity in this exchange and how this is communicated and described? How might that be different from that of the specialist? What might be some methods for rethinking this in terms of material struggle?
Methods/ discourses/ social and political resistance:
We have spoken about the need for different types of discourses and vocabularies that are less alienating and hierarchising and more reciprocal and co-constitutive. But how is it possible to compose the dynamics that such mutual states are produced through and reproductive of? What kinds of relations can you draw upon and how might you think about the ways you discursively interact with other people in the production and dissemination of your work? In what follows you will find excerpts from two types of methods: “militant ethnography” and “militant research”. These are both methods that are more specific to the human sciences, but can also be useful to opening up how you think about some of the developmental processes to your creative praxis. Especially in terms of political and social networks, struggles and engagements.
Can be done in whole group or smaller groups whatever you feel most comfortable with.
Begin with reading out this passage:
What we are here approaching is the problem of the constitution of the researcher- researched relationship. How, if at all, can research be a process of co-constitution rather than one of objectification? To consider research as an on-going process of dialogue and engagement, of creation and exploration, as the creation of the common through engaged political action. Antonio Negri argues
Action is a struggle to constitute the world, to invent it … To act is at once a form of knowledge and a revolt … [it] is precisely the search for and the construction of the common, which is to say the affirmation of absolute immanence. (2004: 19/28/27)
The task is not one of the researcher going bravely onwards into the field and through Herculean efforts, coming back with findings. Nor is it to reverse the dynamic in the name of auto-ethnography, a supposedly painful soul-searching that makes a virtue out of narcissism, ironically re-inscribing authority with the author, the sovereign and bounded subject (Clough, 2001). The task of creative mutual constitution is to explore the relationship between researcher and researched in a manner that underlines the moments where the assumed division between them collapses, revealing a necessary inability for each to exist in and by itself
—- Stephen Dunne, Eleni Karamali and Stevphen Shukaitis "Editorial: Inscribing Organized Resistance" 563.
Activity suggestion:
Start by considering these questions, they don’t need to be answered just to have in the back of your mind, as a contextualising device:
If we only have had the experience of speaking about social and political struggle in the language of dominant discourses what effect might this have on such struggle and its enunciation? How might the practices we engage in help to challenge the ways we frame struggle? What might our ethical imperative in terms of finding new ways of speaking and relating to one another? How might the production of imaginative and innovative vocabularies help this?
Read the following excerpts together from different methods around “militant ethnography” and “militant research” and engage with the questions after each section, if you feel them to be appropriate, and in relation to the questions posed above. The questions provided are simply intended as a means through which to spark conversation/ thoughts/ etc. Feel free to discuss any aspect of the section that affects you.
Excerpts from: Practicing Militant Ethnography within Movements against Corporate Globalization 
Jeff Juris
In order to grasp the concrete logic that generates specific practices, researchers have to become active participants. With respect to social movements, this means precisely becoming engaged activists: helping to organize actions and workshops, facilitating meetings, weighing in during strategic and tactical debates, staking out political positions, and putting ones’ body on the line during mass direct actions. Simply taking on the role of “circumstantial activist” (Marcus 1995) is not sufficient; one has to build long-term relationships of mutual commitment and trust, become entangled with complex relations of power, and live the emotions associated with direct action organizing and transnational networking. The kind of engaged ethnographic practice not only allows researchers to remain active political subjects, it also generates more penetrating analyses
Questions:
- How might being an active participant challenge conventional modes of engagement? What might this mean for the kind of discourses you use in these situations?
For the militant ethnographer the issue is not so much the kind of knowledge produced, which is always practically engaged and collaborative, but rather, how is it presented, for which audience, and where is it distributed? These questions go to the very heart of the alternative network-based cultural logics and political forms more radical anti-corporate globalization activists are generating and putting into practice. Addressing them responds not only to the issue of ethical responsibility toward one’s informants, colleagues, and friends; it also sheds light on the nature of contemporary movements themselves
Questions:
- Who do you think about when you are writing/ constructing work? What role does the audience play in how you frame your work? How do you think about the audience when you adopt certain terminologies or ways of speaking and communicating ideas?
In sum, militant ethnography thus involves at least three interrelated modes: 
1) collective reflection and visioning about movement practices, logics, and emerging cultural and political models; 2) collective analysis of broader social processes and power relations that affect strategic and tactical decision-making; and 3) collective ethnographic reflection about diverse movement networks, how they interact, and how they might better relate to broader constituencies. Each of these levels involves engaged, practice-based, and politically committed research that is carried out in horizontal collaboration with social movements. Resulting accounts involve particular interpretations of events produced with the practical and theoretical tools at the ethnographer’s disposal, and offered back to activists, scholars, and others for further reflection and debate
Questions:
- What do you think about this concept of militant ethnography? What ideas does it give you? How might it effect your modalities of practice?
Excerpt from: On the Researcher-Militant 
Colectivo Situaciones. Translated by Sebastian Touza
According to James Scott, the point of departure of radicality is physical, practical, social resistance. Any power relation of subordination produces encounters between the dominant and the dominated. In these spaces of encounter, the dominated exhibit a public discourse that consists in saying that which the powerful would like to hear, reinforcing the appearance of their own subordination, while – silently – in a space invisible to power, there is the production of a world of clandestine knowledges (saberes) which belongs to the experience of micro-resistance and insubordination
Questions:
- Regarding the statement: “In these spaces of encounter, the dominated exhibit a public discourse that consists in saying that which the powerful would like to hear” what might be the role of institutions of knowledge such as the state, universities, schools in the formation of a public discourse? How does the appropriation and cross-pollination of discourses outside of these institutions into different public arenas effect the way we compose social relations? 
- What might “the production of a world of clandestine knowledges” mean to the work that you do? How might your work engage with these kinds of production?
Thus, the universe of the dominated exists as a scission: as active servility and voluntary subordination, but also as a silent language that allows the circulation of jokes, rituals, and knowledges that form the codes of resistance.It is this precedence of resistances that grounds the figure of the ‘researcher-militant’, whose quest is to carry out theoretical and practical work oriented to co-produce the knowledges and modes of an alternative sociability, beginning with the power (potencia) of those subaltern knowledges. Militant research works neither from its own set of knowledges about the world nor from how things ought to be. On the contrary, the only condition for researcher-militants is a difficult one: to remain faithful to their ‘not knowing’. In this sense, it is an authentic anti-pedagogy
Questions:
- What might some examples of “silent languages that allows the circulation of jokes, rituals, and knowledges that form the codes of resistance” be? How do these gestures and events form a discourse? How might such discourses destabilize ways of relating to one another? 
- How might you interpret the statement “research works neither from its own set of knowledges about the world nor from how things ought to be”? 
- What might an “anti-pedagogy” look like? How might this relate to nonspecialisation?
Militant research distances itself from those circuits of academic production – of course, neither opposing nor ignoring them. Far from disavowing or negating university research, it is a question of encouraging another relation with popular knowledges. While knowledges (conocimientos) produced by academia usually constitute a block linked to the market and to scientific discourse (scorning any other forms), what characterizes militant research is the quest for the points in which those knowledges can be composed with popular ones. Militant research attempts to work under alternative conditions, created by the collective itself and by the ties to counter power in which it is inscribed, pursuing its own efficacy in the production of knowledges useful to the struggles
Questions:
- What might we understand as “popular knowledges”? How might they differ from specialized knowledges? What is the relation of popular knowledges to minoritarian knowledges? 
- What might be knowledge that is “useful to the struggle”? How might the knowledges you generate in your work be useful to the issues you engage with?
Militant research thus modifies its position: it tries to generate a capacity for struggles to read themselves and, consequently, to recapture and disseminate the advances and productions of other social practices
Questions:
- How might we read struggles outside of the dominant modes of interpretation? What kinds of terminologies might we use to describe these? How can “struggles read themselves”? What effect might framing these in the discourses we use have upon their enunciation? 
- What strategies can you think of to “recapture and disseminate the advances and productions of other social practices” in your own work? How does this relate to producing new vocabularies and discourses? 2008-02-09T22:31:49Z 22 true non-specialisation

2008-07-10T22:30:52Z