Democracy Ateneo Announcement 2-14-15
Compañer@s,
We will convene the Universidad de la Tierra Califas' Democracy Ateneo, Saturday, February 14, from 2-5 p.m. at Casa de Vicky (792 E. Julian St., San Jose) to resume our regularly scheduled reflection and action space and to explore some of the struggles and questions mentioned below.
In recent years there has been a great deal of attention regarding the role of knowledge production in emancipatory projects. Alongside the serial protests and convergences of the 1990s, and the occupations and assemblies of the 2000s, has been a keen interest in insurgent spaces of learning and research, especially including free, radical, and autonomous universities. These oppositional and alternative sites of inquiry have been central to radical democratic projects and sustained campaigns that link the reclaiming of knowledge commons with oppositions to the destructive forces of capitalism. Not surprisingly, those committed to maintaining the dominant system have also been heavily invested in controlling the circulation of information, gathering data on suspected threats, and generating misinformation and disinformation to subvert collective self-determination. Policing has come to rely a great deal on mapping, for example, and the counterinsurgency projects in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other sites of U.S. military interest regularly suffer university trained ethnographers (e.g. human terrain system) and embeded media personnel alongside troops. Indeed, counterinsurgency by its nature is dependent on "intel." (see, for example, R. Gonzalez, American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain and Network of Concerned Anthropologists, The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual, or Notes on Demilitarizing American Society).
Without a doubt, the group that has led the way in recognizing the strategic importance of knowledge production to autonomous movement building has been the Zapatistas. Since the earliest moments of the war, those first few days of January, the EZLN have pursued a civic pedagogy, a political strategy that promotes a network of democratic spaces of assembly. Simultaneously spaces of learning, research, dialogue, and collective action, the success of a Zapatista civic pedagogy can be measured in the vibrant political network that has emerged over the years as well as a renewed faith in the possibilities of historically marginalized political actors, such as women and Indigenous communities, as well as the political possibilities of collective subjects. In this way, the Zapatistas have constructed a unique space of learning to not only manage the EZLN's transformation from an armed guerrilla to a unique and dynamic political force, but also share their critical insights and achievements in constructing autonomy.
A project that has emerged alongside the Zapatistas is the Universidad de la Tierra of Oaxaca and Chiapas. In a manner very similar to the Zapatistas, the extended convivial community that comprises the Uni-Tierra network organizes its political work around the challenges and opportunities of reclaiming learning. In each site, Indigenous communities of Oaxaca and Chiapas have constructed their own spaces of reflection and action, generated a "curriculum" based on local, situated knowledges, and engaged self determined political struggles around the struggles of life including food sovereignty, healthfulness, environmental stewardship, and community safety. Indeed, both "campuses" have been at the center of many prominent political mobilizations that have had a profound impact across Mexico over the last twenty-five years.
It is in this context that persistent calls for alternative universities and the mobilization of precarious academic labor must be examined. (See, for example, Academic Abolitionism: Native/Women of Color Feminist/Queer of Color Learning and Living Beyond the (Re)Production of Death, and the recent CfP by Ephemera.) The struggle to reclaim the university by some, and the commitment of others to abandon it altogether to create something entirely outside the formal academic community, has produced a "liminal" space, a space between the neoliberal corporate university and autonomous spaces of inquiry. Yet, there is no escaping that the modern university has from its inception been in service of the construction and maintenance of the nation state. It has been a hologram of a democratizing institution. Even in the current post-state moment of global capital the university remains a critical nexus introducing new subjectivities submissive to emerging supra state free market strategies. In the western context the university is at the center of the chimera of liberal democracy, operating under the conceit that it embodies the democratic ideal to its fullest. However, for many of us struggling to engage autonomous alternatives to formal institutions of higher education, it seems we have not fully abandoned the campus and the surrounding college-town cafes. Most of us refuse to accept that the university is one of the principal sites for the production of racial, class, and gendered hierarchies.
Autonomous spaces of inquiry on the other hand can work as nodes for the circulation of struggle where research, learning, and civic action can coalesce into a civic pedagogy that is both the laboratory of autonomy and the scaffold for a social infrastructure of community regeneration and reclaimed commons. What the Universidad de la Tierra and the Zapatistas have succeeded in doing is reclaiming the "university" as a convivial tool. They have forged a tool, or as Ivan Illich suggested, a rational device that has been produced collectively and in response to the concrete desires of an organized community deliberate about its collective regeneration. (See, R. Kahn, "Anarchic Epimetheanism") It's a tool that reflects the lived reality of a community claimed, an embodiment of an effort to live the world imagined in the present moment. According to Raul Zibechi, "a new metaphor of the possible transition is being born before us: when the world-system begins to disintegrate generating tsunamis of chaos, the peoples will have to defend life and reconstruct it. Upon doing so, it is probable that they adopt the kind of constructions created by the Zapatistas. That's what happened in the long transitions from antiquity to feudalism and from feudalism to capitalism. In the midst of chaos, the peoples usually bet on principles of order, like some indigenous communities of our time are." (See, R. Zibechi, "Systemic Chaos and Transitions Underway")
The Universidad de la Tierra Califas has pursued this question to its fullest. Rather than view the university as a battleground of democracy or as an opportunity in a "developed" world, we approach it as a relation. For us, it is a not yet fully declared cargo, or collectively determined set of obligations, to construct an autonomous space of research, learning, collective thinking, shared decision-making, and action that explores the possibilities of an urban Zapatismo. In this nexus of convivial research and insurgent learning we have taken up the challenges of a civic pedagogy that organizes investigation, learning, and action through prefigurative spaces that make explicit critical pedagogical elements (curriculum, facilitation, space, assessment, theoretical framework, and research question). The prefigurative spaces also construct a social infrastructure of community, determined by participatory democratic spaces in service of community regeneration through the participation of all members of a given local space. How then does a community form to designate collectively determined research tasks, or tequios de investigacion? How do we collectively determine work projects, such as a People's Investigation into the shooting death of, for example, Asa Sullivan –a young man shot seventeen times by two police officers as he hid, unarmed in the crawl space of a Parkmerced apartment?
South Bay and North Bay Crew
NB: If you are not already signed-up and would like to stay connected with the emerging Universidad de la Tierra Califas community please feel free to subscribe to the Universidad de la Tierra Califas listserve at the following url <https://lists.resist.ca/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/unitierracalifas>. Also, if you would like to review previous Democracy Ateneo and Social Factory Ateneoannouncements and summaries as well as additional information on the ateneo in general please see <http://ccra.mitotedigital.org/ateneo>. Please note we have altered the schedule of the Democracy Ateneo so that it falls on the second Saturday of the month.
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