“The Passion of the Pedagogical”, by Jan Verwoert

(copio aqui uma passagem de um texto de Jan Verwoert, que acho não só relevante para o encontro com os professores mas também, de alguma forma, para “One & Three Words” como um todo)

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How to conduct the cerimonies of the pedagogical?

Questions concerning the ethics of the practice are of course also a crucial issue when it comes to teaching itself, or any kind of work concerned with the communication or production of knowledge, for how can you ever claim the right to make others listen to what you believe they should know? This is a problem a documentary filmmaker or artist doing research-based or politically engaged work will have to face as much as the a teacher in an art school. It is the question of how to deal with the position of authority you inevitably assume when you make others listen. Is that authority not always imposed, thus making anyone who claims it an impostor? Moreover, does speaking from the position of what Lacan mockingly calls ‘the subject who is supposed to know’ not always entagle you in all the tedious oedipal power games of forced loyalty and adolescent rebellion which this roles provokes? Can there not be other scenarios for producing and communicating knowledge?

Addressing this question of how to imagine a different mode of exchange in the space that art and education open up for discourse, Irit Rogoff argues that hierarchical structures of authority may be invalidated by a mutal commitment of all those who happen to find themselves in a given situation – be that an art project or seminar – to confront the challenge this situation implies, together*. The mirage of authority is bound to vanish when, facing a pressing problem at hand, the teacher or engaged artist has to acknowledge that they know as much and as little as any other problem – and that the first essential step in solving it is to find out what the people caught in the same situation can bring into the process of coming to grips with what is at stake. So, instead of hierarchical relations such a scenario will create ‘momentary shared mutualities’ which come ‘into being fleetingly as we negotiate a problem, a mood, a textual or cultural encounter’**. Rogoff models this scenario on the concept of a ‘space of appearance’ which Hannah Arendt developed to describe how, in moments of political unrest, people drawn together by the intuition that their concerns may be shared, create improvised situations that allow for these concerns to come out into the open.

To imagine an ideal situation in a debate, seminar or art project in which pressing problems are addressed together in ways that are not solicited by structures of authority is a notion with which I strongly identify, quite simply because I believe to have experienced such situations. At the same time I can not help but understand such a ‘space of appearance’ quite literally as a scenario that resembles a séance in the sense that a group convenes to make something appear with the force of their joined mental powers. I believe that there is a beauty in conspiring to create a moment of artistic and intellectual significance and I would also agree that when the demon arrives anyone in the group is in the same position as any other when it comes to containing the spectre.

But not quite – there can be no scéance without a medium and a master of ceremony to conduct it. In the same way, I would argue any discourse or project usually needs someone who claims the authority to speak first and raise the issue, point out the problem and create the necessary turbulence to make people feel that something is at stake. There are many names for the master of such cerimonies: ‘pressure cooker’ is the management slang term, ‘agitator, instigator or ring-leader’ the political equivalent. The question  of authority becomes even more pressing. How can you, as an artist, teacher, writer or curator, instigate and conduct a ceremony in which things of shared concern are articulated through the joint effort of all presnt without tacitly assuming the role of the auratic master of cerimony? The pragmatic answer to this would be to consciously delimit your powers by exercising the authority of the instigator only to the degree that you set a process in motion in which others subsequently take over. Ideal forms of pedagogy would then be about realising the operative nature of authority as a role that someone temporarily has to play to make something happen. But can you ever be so soberly pragmatic about the magical skills of creating a stir around an issue?

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* – Irit Rogoff, ‘Looking away’, in Gavin Butt (ed.), After Criticism, Blackwell publishing. Malden USA, Oxford UK and Victoria Australia 2005, p. 117-134.
** – Ibid., p.123.

Essay originally published in ‘Metropolis M’, bimonthly magazine on contemporary art, issue nr. 4, 2006 and reprinted in ‘Nicosia this week, an unofficial guide to the biennial that never was’, Louise Døssing, Maxine Kopsa, Susanne Stetzer, Layla Tweedie-Cullen (eds.), Veenman Publishers/Gijs Stork, Netherlands, 2006.

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