SONG DELAYS

or,

the A B C of Pedagogy

By

Jesal Kapadia and Brian McCarthy Abstract: In the face of capitalist responses to environmental and economic crisis, in which the notion of “property” is often expanded or intensified – whether as territorial enclosure, forced extraction and privatization of natural resources, or the privatization of collective knowledge production in the university – notions of withdrawal and autonomous escape from the destructive machine of capitalism take on a variety of forms. This work is designed to visualize the ways in which spontaneous collective actions and reconfigured notions of “property” can take root in a notion of “life” itself: e.g. promoting of the potentiality of land without the spectre of monetization; free knowledge production or Lok Vidya (people’s knowledge) that exceeds the territorial enclosure of the private university; reclamation of the right to be and to speak through encirclement; and the collective performance of street actions and protest. Keywords: Hunger Strike, Property, Territory, Post-Capitalist Life, Lok Vidya, Collective Pedagogy, Commons.

Part I Eviction: New York City

A: The evacuated space of the classroom, which looks like an unused corporate boardroom. Is this a surprise?

B: The language of visual signification of the classroom space is meant to prepare us one would suppose for the universal translation of our “skills”. Bootstrap entrepreneurs, armed with the codes of symbolic and cultural capital, and a complete understanding that we are clients in a global system of exchange. C: The difference is, as the eviction metaphor … A: It’s not a metaphor. C: … as the metaphor of eviction makes plain, the unique pedagogical atmosphere which is created in the classroom, in which we release our communal energies–of “time spent together,” is temporary, and subject to our “time being up.” A: The time is never up though: after the temporary territorial enclosure of 2, or 4, or 7 years we are face to face with the real temporal accumulation: debt. B: As can be seen by the student-wage movements in the mid-1970’s, the demand for wages for the intellectual and affective labor of being a student, is a form of negativity which does not seem to exist anymore in neoliberal models of education. C: Positivized: a contractual, client-model of the student production and consumption of pedagogy, naturalized and reproduced through Powerpoint, seamless professionalism and the charming charisma of the effective presentation, similar to what an architect might propose to a corporate client. All of which is assumed will be transportable to all future work contexts. A: Meanwhile, the entire apparatus of intensive, just-in-time pedagogy, which prepares us to be separated from the very territory in which we have invested in the first place, ensures that the collective energies roused by the classroom are ultimately repressed. B: That is why the classroom is empty.

Eviction: Sikkim In 2007, activists from ACT - Affected Citizens of Teesta1 decided to go on an indefinite hunger strike for over a year to appeal to the government against the construction of mega hydel projects that were being built in Sikkim.

ACT members protesting on the streets of Gangtok in 2012.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 Teesta is the name of the river that runs through the state of Sikkim in North-east India. The State Government of Sikkim has commenced construction on some 26 proposed mega hydel power dams in the small, mountainous state. The most contentious hydel, Teesta Stage IV, is slated to be built in the Dzongu Lepcha Reserve. http://weepingsikkim.blogspot.com/

We Want Land Not Money Indigenous people who live and farm on their ancestral land are being bought out by the corporation to build dams. Sonam Paljor, a monk and activist who runs a school in Gangtok, and who also went on a hunger strike in the 1980’s, speaks about the plight of Lepcha tribe:

“They give them one lakh rupees in cash – this looks like a lot of money. You see, they haven’t seen so much cash like this, so they think it’s a lot of money! They make piles out of these ten rupee notes, and it appears like it’s a lot…but it’s nothing, it’s nothing in today’s world. They have only heard of the myth that money can buy anything. I fear that. I mean, managing money …we are all educated people, right? And even we don’t know how to manage money. It’s the toughest. And you expect these people from Dzongu (village in central Sikkim) to manage this money? What kind of a farce idea can you introduce more than that? How can you be so crude and rude? You buy their land, give them money, and tell them they have to manage their money and survive, when you have taken away their tools of survival. What is the responsibility of the so-called educated ones? Or of the government, knowing that their people don’t know anything about money, but to make a deal with these companies to sell their land and make revenue, at the cost of these people? What revenue? For what and for whom? For the bureaucrats?”

Sign found in Gangtok, Sikkim.

“Get rid of the misconception that farmers want to leave agriculture. A lot of migration is natural; members of farming families take up non-farm jobs in towns. But let that be voluntary. Today migration is forced. Let agriculture develop and let youth from farming families move to non-farm jobs by their free choice.

Farmers are deeply attached to the land. Even landless labourers are using earnings from non-farm employment to buy land, for land provides food security, is still a good asset and source of prestige. Villagers’ attachment to the land, their skills and their indigenous wisdom are pillars on which a strong edifice of agriculture can be built.”

Vidya Ashram, Lokvidya standpoint2

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!!Members of ACT – monks, farmers, lawyers, shamans, students and youth of Sikkim, who were falsely arrested, gathered outside the district court in Gangtok waiting for their hearing, March 2011.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!2 Towards a peopleʼs knowledge movement. http://www.vidyaashram.org/index.html

“University is the most prized product of the capitalist age. It is the university where all that knowledge has been produced which provides the basis of the destruction of nature and production of poverty everyday. The university obstructs the free movement of thought by building enclosures, both physical and social. However one thing that cannot be done to thought, is to stop its movement. There are people everywhere who are not constrained by extraneous considerations and who individually or collectively challenge the false limitations. All these people must become part of this gyan panchayat.”

Vidya Ashram, Gyan Panchayat3

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!3 Gyan panchayat is like a people's court in the world of knowledge. It is what ought to turn philosophy into a social force. It is the place from where the knowledge basis of another world is prepared.!http://www.vidyaashram.org/gyan_panchayat.html

Part II Forms of Reproduction, and The Right to Be

Archival photo of women discussing deforestation, in Radha Kumar’s book, The History of Doing, 1997. How do forms for collective pedagogical work emerge? How do they iterate themselves and become obvious? Women. Students. Workers. Teachers. Monks. Farmers. Shamans. Artists. Activists… If the territorial enclosure of the university creates singularities of us, what new pathways can we open up to sustain collectives? If what we need to do is extract ourselves from the systematic exploitation of our capacities for analysis, and rediscover new modes of being together – such as minimal forms of reproduction - of our selves, of our lives, of our affinities - then how can the university become this space of seeing where the forms for social reproduction begin to become apparent?

Forms of Non-capture, or Encirclement

Archival photo of women gheraoing district government officials, in Radha Kumar’s book, The History of Doing, 1997. Owing to its popularity and intensity as a new method of labor action, the word “gherao” got inducted into the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, in 2004. On page 598 it has the following entry: “Gherao: n (pl. gheraos). Indian; a protest in which workers prevent employers leaving a place of work until demands are met. Gherao, meaning "encirclement," is a word originally from Bengali. Usually, a group of people would surround a politician or a government building until their demands are met, or answers given.

Gender is the last word. Figure out the double binds there, simple and forbidding.

Gayatri Spivak, ‘An Aesthetic Education

in the Era of Globalization’.

Part III Collective Visualization Spanning the continuum from the way that intention is housed in the body, through the ways that this intention gains collective form…an exercise in “collective visualization”: See river Teesta. See the gyan panchayats. Gherao! As we convene together the forms of association and spontaneous modes of productivity become apparent: of course, this pedagogical process has its fits and starts. At their most radical, collective visualization works to counter-act the deep colonialization of capitalism in our bodies and in our intention, exposing the pathogenic reaction intrinsic to privatization, as a psychic and affective complex. It indicates the very structure of new forms that need to emerge to dissolve a privatized ideology. And the site of most resistance is located where the practice of collective visualization interfaces with a system that intends to instrumentalize it. The market is like a vast reservoir of un-collectivized intention. Spontaneous modes of association emerge at precisely this point of interface, as a strategy to collectively resist the operation of unspoken intention.

ACT members after their court hearing, March 2011.

The primary tension in any society is between the way we internalize these forms of ephemerality – the transient, the passing, deep time, that which cannot be monetized – and the mechanisms or infrastructures (legal and economic) which emerge to govern, control and regulate this. That neoliberal capitalism is inscribed in our intention and our behavior as a pathogenic reaction, a privatizing reaction in which MY and I exist in emphatic capitals whose only purpose is to generate exclusions when we are faced with atmospheres we cannot control, should be obvious. Neoliberal behaviors are structured according to this double movement, as a compensatory mechanism and mitigation for the very separations that are produced by privatization. It should also be obvious that anything we really want only exists when we come together: collective cooking, collective learning, and collective work are the grounds out of which new forms of behavior become apparent. These collective and communal forms provide a “minimal refuge” from the system-effects of the market, and as they exist in real life, they are inherently political. Pedagogy exists to visualize this. The work we must do then, is at a micrological scale, a kind of “transcendence downwards”, or what Gayatri Spivak calls “learning to learn from below” which prioritizes the minor gesture, the miniscule, the local, dissolving all succeeding orders of scale. The macrological does not exist.

When the ACT activists were arrested (on false pretexts) and imprisoned in the local jail, they continued their “protest” within the space of this detainment: refusing to be called, or call themselves “prisoners”, they considered themselves as “strikers”. They made friends with the prison guards and cooked in the prison, played volleyball with other jail-mates, talked with them about the conditions of their villages and the effects of the hydro-electric dams, and generally took on to improving the conditions of the space from within – they said that whatever they were doing outside (of the prison) must continue inside. Consider this metaphor: - of converting poison into medicine - of the internal aesthetic and epistemological transformation, from within, through a practice of resistance - to be the model.