Session 1

Torstai 17.04 klo 9-12

Morning: Overview of context, introducing personal backgrounds, and group wiki

Introduction

My approach as an artist-organiser.

Saul Alinksky:
"Organiser as a highly imaginative and creative architect and engineer"

“The area of experience and communication is fundemental to the organiser. An organiser can communicate only within the areas of experience of his audience; otherwise there is no communication. The organiser, in his constant hunt for patterns, universalities, and meaning, is always building up a body of experience.

Through his imagination he is constantly moving in on the happenings of others, identifying with them and extracting their happenings into his own mental digestive system and thereby accumulating more experience. It is essential for communication the he know of their experiences. Since one can communicate only through the experiences of the other, it becomes clear that the organiser begins to develop an abnormally large body of experience.

He learns the local legends, anecdotes, values, idioms. He listens to small talk. He refrains from rhetorical foreign to the local culture.. And yet the organiser must try not to fake it. He must be himself.” (page 70)

Saul Alinksy (1971), Rules For Radicals: a pragmatic primer for realistic radicals, Vintage Books.

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Culture war between free autonomous culture and proprietary ("permission") culture in relation to online media.

Lawrence Lessig (Creative Commons)
Free Culture:

"We come from a tradition of 'free culture' not 'free'as in 'free beer' (to borrow phrase from open-source pioneer Richard Stallman), but 'free' as in 'free speech', 'free markets, 'free trade', 'free enterprise', 'free will', and 'free elections'. A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators- It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee the follow-on creators and innovators remain _as free as possible_ from the control of the past. A free culture is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a "permission culture" - a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past."

Concentration of power produced by concentrations in ownership.. which has produced in the last 20yrs an the laws related to the concentration of ownership.

http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/movingimages/Building_On_The_Past.mov

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Chapter: Artistic Autonomy & The Communication Society

Brian Holmes:
"What we really need is to spend a lot more time asking each other whether our cultural fictions - our architectures and images - our hierarchies and ambitions and ideas and narratives - are any good for us, whether they can be used in an interesting way, what kind of subjectivity they produce, what kind of society they elicit. But to do that effectively, we also need to invent new fictions, to shake up the institutional imaginary with what (Philosopher Corneluis) Castoriadis call the "radical" or "instituting" imaginary. Only by actively imagining different possible realities can we engage in the.. 'deconstruction and reconstruction of complex machines' - taking the notion of machines in the strong sense, whereby it denotes the symbolic, technological and human assemblages that configure ourselves and our societies, and make them work in the specific ways that they do" p102

Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: essays in reverse imagineering, Autonomedia, AK Press, 2008.

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'Culture Wars'

"One of the central political issues of the late 20th century, the Culture Wars"

says Richard Jensen
Professor of History Emeritus
U of Illinois-Chicago

"Political conflict based on sets of conflicting values" (conservative v progressive)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_War

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Living Library

"Meet your own prejudice: In the Living Library the books are people representing groups frequently confronted with prejudices and stereotypes, and who are often victims of discrimination or social exclusion. As a reader you can borrow a book and talk to your own prejudice."

"The fact that our books can talk! Our books are people – individuals – that are in their daily realities fighting with stereotypes and prejudices."

http://book.coe.int/EN/ficheouvrage.php?PAGEID=36&lang=EN&produit_aliasid=1987

Download PDF: http://apaterso.info/projects/orgcult/living-library_handbook.pdf [1.7 MB]

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Politics supporting which cultures?

Who funds what and why?

Gramsci: Battle for the dominant voice in mass media, education and other mass organisations

Where do you think
Government funding for arts will be withdrawn next?

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What is your "hot button" in the Culture Wars?

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Increasing polarisation of positions

organized groups want recognition, respect ("dignity," no discrimination) and various tangible benefits. They may also identify enemy groups that they think should not get respect or benefits. What these groups are, and how they are mobilized by leaders and issues, and how they interact

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The Culture War Speech

Neo-liberal conservative politician Pat Buchanan's speech at the Republican National Congress, 1992.

Part1: 02.00-04.00
"Discredited liberalism of the 1960s faliled liberalism of 1970s no matter how slick the package of the 1990s"

Pat Buchanan Culture War Speech Part 3
http://youtube.com/watch?v=lstA7j5fmio
Part3: 04.00-04.40

"Friends this election is about more than who gets what, it is a about who we are, it is about what we believe, what we stand for as [Americans].. There _is_ a religious war going on this country. it is a cultural war as critical as to the kind of nation we shall be, as the cold war itself.. this war is for the soul for America.. and in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton and Clinton is on the other side, and George Bush is on our side."
http://youtube.com/watch?v=lstA7j5fmio

"Friends, this election is about more than who gets what, it is a about who we are, it is about what we believe, what we stand for as _________.. There _is_ a _________ war going on this ________. It is a cultural war as critical to the kind of _________ we shall be, as the ________ war itself.. this war is for the soul of _________.. And in that struggle for the soul of ________, ________ and _________ is on the other side, and __________ is on _our_ side."

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Culture Wars:
"conflict was about power over society's definition of right and wrong" (wikipedia)

Brian Holmes:
"The Struggle over the definition of social services, scientific research, cultural production and the natural and built environments either as provate commodities or as common goods under some form of collective stewardship has become one of the centre conflicts of our time, disputed on a territory that extends from intimate subjectivities to the networked spaces of politics. Given the manipulability of public opinion in the contemporary media democracies, the destinies of this struggle will depend crucially on people's ability to recognise and resist the new techniques of social management." p169-170

Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: essays in reverse imagineering, Autonomedia, AK Press, 2008.

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The Art of Free Cooperation

"On Rules and Monstors: An introduction into Free Cooperation"

a film about cooperation: about forced cooperation, the dominant social logic in today's world, and about free cooperation, an alternative, utopian social logic

by Christopher Spehr and Jörg Windszus
narrration by Tony Conrad and Stephanie Rothenberg

40 mins, 2007.

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Resources

Hunter, D, ‘Culture War’, 2004 (2) Law, Social Justice and Global Development Journal (LGD). http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/law/elj/lgd/2004_2/hunter

Jensen, Richard. "The Culture Wars, 1965-1995: A Historian's Map" Journal of Social History 29 (Oct 1995) 17-37. http://members.aol.com/dann01/cwar.html

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Pat Buchanan's speech at the Republican National Congress, 1992 on YouTube:

Patrick Buchanan Culture War Speech Part 1
http://youtube.com/watch?v=iO5_1ps5CAc

Pat Buchanan Culture War Speech Part 2
http://youtube.com/watch?v=pICypNXHKbg

Pat Buchanan Culture War Speech Part 3
http://youtube.com/watch?v=lstA7j5fmio

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Saul Alinksy (1971), Rules For Radicals: a pragmatic primer for realistic radicals, Vintage Books.

Lawrence Lessig (2004), Free Culture: the nature and future of creativity, Penguin Books.
http://free-culture.cc/freecontent/
http://lessig.org/

Trebor Scholz and Geert Lovink, Eds. (2007), The Art Of Free Cooperation, Autonomedia, AK Press.

Brian Holmes (2008), Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: essays in reverse imagineering, Autonomedia, AK Press.

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