Irit Rogoff

Nora Sternfeld

Now it appears that the concept of “the curatorial” may be leaving these problems far behind, since, after all, it understands education as simply part of the curatorial production of knowledge. On the one hand, this connection represents an achievement, to the extent that the binary logics of representation and reception (between showing and viewing) and of production and reproduction of knowledge (between curating and mediating what is on view) are overcome. Nevertheless, it seems important to consider—in addition to the question of whom it benefits—what potential omissions can perhaps result from such a conflation of the educational and the curatorial. With the help of a few concepts, I would like to shed light on a rehabilitation of the various logics education itself employs—perhaps, in part, to make the contribution of the educational productive for the curatorial as well.

Adrian Rifkin

All this is frightening enough; first you have an education that is, above all, not artistic. And then you have the art world—which is very often an artistic world—which demands both pride and vanity as attributes of what it recognizes as art, and of the person who makes it. Here is another question about how education unfolds in the peculiar relation between art and its publics. The tension between the idea that anyone can be an artist, and our knowing that only a few individuals wish to be one, is quite different from that between the idea that not everyone is prepared to see art and its place in the world, and our knowledge that so many are ready to declare themselves art lovers.

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney

We went to the public hospital but it was private, and we went through the door marked “private” to the nurses’ coffee room, and it was public. We went to the public university but it was private, and we went to the campus barbershop, and it was public. We went into the hospital, into the university, into the library, into the park. We were offered credit for our debt. We were granted citizenship. We were given the credit of the state, the right to render private any public gone bad.

Dietrich Lemke

Seen from the point of view of the internal structure of courses (or of other “study units”), modularization leads to standardization and to the breaking up of learning into bite-sized chunks, chunks then linked together in a system of incessant and immediate testing. Here, in the interest of a superficial and economistic notion of pedagogical efficiency, there is a return to a primitive pedagogy of outcome-based learning, a fallacy I thought had been overcome thirty years ago.

Nicolas Siepen and Åsa Sonjasdotter

It is for this reason that earlier thinkers like Godard and Guattari claimed that the institutional is the political, or that claims were made in the 1960s for recognizing other modes of labor—suggesting the TV viewer should also get paid for his “work” of consumption, for example. While they had institutions like the media in mind, the analogy between who gets paid and for what kind of labor remains: self-organized structures are fundamentally shaped by a lack of payment or budget, which means that—with regard to institutional power relations—the distinction between those who pay and those who get paid is largely dissolved; we face the free market alone—but together!

Irit Rogoff

While an unbounded circulation of capital, goods, information, hegemonic alliances, populist fears, newly globalized uniform standards of excellence, and so forth, are some of the hallmarks of the late neoliberal phase of capitalism, we nevertheless can not simply equate every form of the unbounded and judge them all as equally insidious. “Free” in relation to knowledge, it seems to me, has its power less in its expansion than in an ultimately centripetal movement, less in a process of penetrating and colonizing everywhere and everything in the relentless mode of capital, than in reaching unexpected entities and then drawing them back, mapping them onto the field of perception.

Susanne Lang and Darius James

You bet your stinky communisms underwear I’m “counter revolutionary”! You communisms didn’t give me no constitutional rights! I didn’t get no try by jury of my pee! Constitutional Rights says I have to be try by my pee! I was railroaded by you communisms pioneer club kangaroo court! I want color people have the right to eat at a lunch COUNTER too! I’m a lunch counter revolutionary! You go try and eat a Woolworth lunch counter down south with your color Negro doll and see how fast them white folks chase you out with a water hose! You be a “counter revolutionary” real quick!

Bernard Stiegler and Irit Rogoff

What is created between generations are in fact long circuits. What Freud or Groddeck calls the “id” is an unconscious space of long circuits. These unconscious spaces link generations along very, very long spans of time. What is produced within these long circuits are the material of the dream, for example, which is at stake in Freud’s interpretation of dreams, as well as clearly being the matter from which artists operate and produce. Joseph Beuys is extremely important for me because he was working on this question of long circuits aligning him in individuated ways with the past.

Isabelle Bruno and Christopher Newfield

I like two other points you make in your paper. First, you say there’s no evidence that the implementation of “competitiveness” by the European Community has actually done what it is assumed to do—improve educational quality, or EU productivity, or economic growth rates, or something else. And second, you say that the absence of real outcomes doesn’t matter. The goal isn’t to have economic or social benefits, but competitiveness. You describe competitiveness as a kind of existential state, a form of life. You describe the “neoliberal belief” as this: “every institution has as its ultimate end to become competitive, and can achieve this only by being exposed to competition.”

Florian Schneider

Ekstitutions have usually appeared as alternatives to institutions, or at least they have emerged in that order. There are of course numerous examples of ekstitutions that have first evolved and then been swallowed up by institutions. The opposite direction is still hard to even imagine, since an institution would rather cease to exist than abandon the pretense of its own infinitude.