Democracy Ateneo Summary 4-20-13
Compañer@s,
What follows is a brief summary of the Universidad de la Tierra Califas' Democracy Ateneo convened on Saturday, April 20, 2013. Seven of us gathered for our regularly scheduled local reflection and action space. We began by generating agreements with local activists and community members as well as pose questions emerging from community struggles across the Bay Area. Motivated by the North by Northwest compas who recently convened the Bellingham Eco-Feminisms Ateneo, we agreed on the importance of rehearsing the history of the present ateneo as well as its relation to UT Califas and the broader Universidad de la Tierra community. We were particularly interested in how the ateneo has worked as a strategic "tool" to not only generate local wisdoms and provoke strategic questions, but also to make observable the distinct articulations of Unitierra as a praxis.
The discussion began by examining Unitierra as a political strategy specifically noting its emergence in Oaxaca from conversations and struggles that included both indigenous and non-indigenous communities and their attempts to construct a space that organizes itself around "learning by doing." Unitierra insists on a language and political practice that avoids academic or abstract categories. It also recognizes that its praxis begins from the specific contexts of social relations. In regards to UT Califas, we agreed that though a literal understanding of "university of the land" may be useful for some of our comrades, the political praxis of learning by doing can and should speak on its own behalf. Recognizing the recent emergence of Unitierra Puebla and their work with communities in the Sierra that struggle against foreign, particularly Canadian, mining companies on what they call "Proyectos de Muerte," we registered some key collaborations they have had with more formal academic institutions in Puebla such as the postgraduate institute of critical theory associated with John Holloway.
After briefly discussing some of the history of Unitierra in Southern Mexico, we posed the question regarding the emergence of the ateneo and Universidad de la Tierra Califas locally. While acknowledging the historical practice of oppositional learning and research in the early 19th and 20th century ateneos most closely associated with the Spanish anarchist community, the Democracy Ateneo in San Jose and the Insurgent Knowledges Ateneo in San Francisco have been deployed specifically to interrogate how to construct a social infrastructure of community regeneration and community safety. The ateneo as an autonomous learning space deployed as a strategy begins with early articulations of the "advanced seminar" in both Austin, Texas and Arcata, California.
The first incarnation of the “advanced seminar,” the Advanced Seminar in Postcolonial Borderlands and the later formation of the Advanced Seminar in Chican@ Research subverted the elite and hierarchical traditions of the traditional Advanced Seminar without completely refusing the university as a strategic site for political interventions. Both the Advanced Seminar in Postcolonial Borderlands (ASPB) and the Advanced Seminar in Chican@ Research (ASCR) were imagined as a strategy of collective mentoring, collective advising, and collective pedagogy that could host various political projects that could intersect with local community members and university students and faculty in various disciplines (see Bahl and Callahan <https://www.box.com/s/7kxpc0npqbpdncvt0r0e>). The ASCR more deliberately was a space to interrogate what was being learned from the Zapatistas and to evaluate the emergence of a local Zapatismo. In Humboldt the Advance Seminar Grassroots Postmodernism articulated the strategy of Temporary Autonomous Zone of Knowledge Production (TAZKP) and theorizing the practice of "networked pedagogies" as a specific strategy to move beyond the intersecting restrictions of the non-profit and educational industrial complexes. The Advanced Seminar on Grassroots Postmodernism and Women Power and Autonomy also allowed for further interrogations of community based research, or convivial research, specifically how it might be applied to exposing the impact of low intensity warfare on historically underrepresented communities. Through the “advanced seminar” we were able to inform other spaces with research agenda, analyses and strategies towards autonomy. We did this by resisting the role of students as consumers, and instead, taking control of our intellectual futures that disrupted the individualism fostered in the formal education institution.
The social infrastructure of community currently being explored in the Bay Area makes explicit learning as a relation and attempts to construct a different language with a very explicit politicization. TAZKP, for instance, claims a political practice and strategy that avoids labels and confusion with typical academic seminars, politicizing everyday common meeting spaces. For the ateneo to function as a space of collective learning and convivial research we have had to be explicit about the facilitation strategy. Without burdening the space with "too much" facilitation, we agreed that the strategy has to be modular, or to be explicit and clearly determined in the form of specific tasks from the outset so that each task can be agreed upon and eventually shared such that all participants are active in insuring the space manages question of power. Moreover, a modular facilitation makes it possible for the different spaces/strategies (e.g. the ateneo) to travel to other sites of struggle. We agreed that at the center of the strategy are the relationships that have been built in and through the spaces such as the ateneo that have created the context for it to emerge in different sites of struggle.
We transitioned to generating questions. These began by interrogating the media and news. More specifically, we asked how the recent incident in Boston exposes the “consumer-spectator” and market logics of corporate media. Media dominated by large news corporations leaves little to no room for debates about political formations. In some instances it can also make use of the language of social justice in an uncritical manner, further showing how hegemony as a category of analysis is no longer sufficient to generate a complete analysis of oppressive systems. Cultural leadership, for example, as a critical dimension of hegemony and as a category does not always allow for an interrogation of fixed narratives such as the narrative of the success of civil rights –a framework that often overlooks the persistence of racial violence, including the impact of violence that amounts to a low intensity war. Nor does it account for community efforts to demilitarize their communities in the wake of persistent violence. In Richmond, for instance, we observe more “random” shootings of “innocent” people --a phenomenon that further militarizes communities and amplifies violence, yet it is not critically analyzed through an examination of the role of state and capital by media, news, and research (academic or other).
We began to think about a “new racial regime” (NRR), a category of analysis we had been discussing in other spaces, for example during Alan Gomez’s visit to the Bay Area and his discussion of organizing in and through the prison system that constituted an "insurgent learning" managed by political prisoners (see, for example, Alan Gomez, "Resisting Living Death at Marion Federal Penitentiary, 1972." <https://www.box.com/s/5f4kyw35td60vqnovz4h>). We wondered if a critical analysis of NRR cannot fully succeed without a shared theoretical understanding of capital and the state. We asked what tool can best analyze capital and also manage critical questions of race that take into account emerging strategies of oppression, privilege, and dehumanization. A critical concern revolved around not being tied to simple binaries of Marxist or non-Marxist frameworks but to find conceptual tools to interrogate race and racial formation in regards capital as a relation. Therefore, a NRR in the Bay Area cannot simply be analyzed through shootings, but must also take into consideration the role of Tech, Biotech, Art and Culture, and other industries that carve out the Bay Area as an “income valve.” In other words, an interrogation of the current NRR should not solely rely on an analysis that focuses on the disciplining of labor as the extent of class/race relations, but also questions and observes the everyday lived violences such as low intensity war that maintains a middle class lifestyle and secures the privileges of whiteness as a system.
Our questions and conversation led us to think about how we read class/race in U.S. social movements and particularly anti-capitalist movements. The Occupy Movement, for example, claimed an anti-capitalist politics yet clumsily managed race, also exposing an underdeveloped analysis of capital. Some argue that it uncritically reproduced whiteness despite its best effort. The blatant disrespect and mistreatment of the Mexicano and Indigenous community during one San Jose Occupy General Assembly <https://www.box.com/s/0ous5hd4v85iml8v38e2>, for example, illustrates the dissonance around race in movement spaces. The interrogation of race around movement spaces forced a re-reading of social movements and the danger of limiting social movements to an academic category. How do anti-capitalist spaces “fit” or “misfit” into a theory of capital. We reflected on how the ateneo, tertulia, and insurgent learning spaces claim an anti-capitalist politics because they construct spaces, and more an infrastructure, that creates and reproduces itself without the state or capital. Furthermore, we have been exploring modular strategies and tools that do not impose a single path or a future but instead privileges ways of doing work that address community needs. Since we are reading the Zapatistas politically, we referenced the infrastructure they use to manage their autonomy without the state or capital as the Caracoles and Juntas de Buen Gobierno (JBG), and how and what we are learning from them and those processes.
We concluded by acknowledging, and drawing from the insights of Gustavo Esteva, that a new lens is necessary for a collective analysis of our struggles and community work (see the short clip <http://vimeo.com/41579587> "Challenging the Institutional Production of truth" delivered last year at the "Economics of happiness" conference in Berkeley). Although everyday people are not necessarily expressing themselves in theoretical language, they understand the relations that cause violence are related to those from state and capital, and at the same time they understand that the work is creating new relations that can go beyond state or capital. Two stories were shared to highlight this: one is how a woman cooks for the neighborhood every month at the site where her son was killed to honor his life. While this helps with grieving her loss, it also generates a space that interrogates violence and creates new relations of community safety. The second story is about how a young man along with his friend helped an older man who fell outside of the train stop in San Jose. After the incident the friend questioned the young man as to why he bothered to help when an ambulance would come anyway and the young man said “if that were your grandfather you would want someone to help him and not wait for the ambulance to come hours later,” which again is a moment where new relations are created that do not rely on state or capital.
At the end we assessed the ateneo and many of us agreed that it remains a powerful space for insurgent learning and necessary investigations of democracy. We also thought that convening the space with a brief genealogy of the ateneo was a useful practice along with agreements, questions, and summaries. Last, we appreciated the space and how when we are together we are creating new relations, how we can respectfully disagree and question one another, that we lose prohibitions of behaving and misbehaving, and that we are able to walk with people using different tools and strategies.
Questions
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How are ethnography, interview, oral history, and testimony strategies of insurgent learning and convivial research?
What hegemonic thinking does/did the Boston incident expose? When do they become “critical”?
What explains the increasingly “random” shootings? How does it further militarize a community and increase violence? What role does the state play?
What are the ethics in doing counter counter-insurgency research?
What are the categories that explain “difference” as it negotiates “border making”? How does it escape multiple violences?
How and are we confronted by a new racial regime?
How do we negotiate the university to produce insurgent knowledges as we anticipate emergent racial regimes?
How do we work with older generations and imagined threats of violence? How do we work with past ways of organizing? --Strategies that don’t go away?
How do we/does one engage people (we care about) who have trouble “reading” situations politically?
How do we walk with them if they claim different tools and technologies?