An Apology

[JOHN REARDON reads]

APOLOGIES are formal notices from people who are unable to attend a meeting. They are noted at the beginning of a meeting and included in what are called ‘Minutes’.

Jack has put this short apology together to help orient himself within the group during his absence over the first few weeks of this class. Jack thinks this is funny, because it is a stereotype of the British to introduce themselves by apologizing.

Jack can’t be here due to work commitments at Camberwell College of Arts, where he teaches as a lecturer in the Design department. He’s been doing this job for a year but has been teaching off-and-on for six.

Despite being his 9–5 job Jack is interested in teaching and the histories of teaching. In particular, the ‘failed’ radical histories within pedagogic practice such as the Bauhaus and the Black Mountain College (with their different approaches to interdisciplinary experimentation) as well as the Copenhagen Free University and the Anti-University in London (with their roots in 60’s Situationism and the Anti-Psychiatry movement).

For a few years following 2016 Jack was a member of a group called Evening Class, which he imagines has a similar sensibility to this class here. An alumnus of ‘Designing Politics’, Chris Lacy, was also a member of Evening Class… it’s a small world!

For Jack, Evening Class was an attempt to give himself a collaborative, self-organised postgraduate education along the lines of the ‘radical pedagogies’ he’d read about from the past. During his time there he helped organise public workshops, talks and debates, reading groups, radio broadcasting, performances, walks, and publishing projects. He’s hoping we can do some of this, this term.

A quote from a co-founder of the Anti-university – American psychiatrist Dr Joseph Berke – that has stuck with him is:

“In the process of making an institution we deinstitutionalised ourselves”.¹

This is really his experience of the concept of the Group Project, which this class – now ‘Designing Politics’ – used to be called, and which Evening Class is an example of.

[Pause, see if people are following]

More recently Jack has turned to publishing projects which express different research interests. The two books I have here…

[Holds up books]

…he gave to us yesterday to share with you. One of them is a Lexicon, called the Geofinancial Lexicon. This book is a kind of thought experiment around what his collaborator, Sami Hammana, calls the ‘literary convergence of earth- and financial-systems’. It takes its cue from the surprising number of financial terms that reference the natural world. For example, protagonists such as ‘Bulls’, ‘Bears’, ‘Doves’, and ‘Hawks’, and phenomena such as the ‘iceberg order’, ‘dead cat bounce’ and ‘vampire squid’. The idea is to think about the relationship between finance and the climate-crisis or Anthropocene through these terms. This is a general interest of Jack’s, and he would be keen to explore it in the group.

When I first saw this book yesterday, I mentioned to Jack that I personally liked the idea of reading these definitions performatively, for example…

[JOHN reads from the book, perhaps the entries for ‘DEAD CAT BOUNCE’ & ‘BEAR’]

Jack is also interested more generally in the process of archiving, curating, and categorizing technical knowledge(s) like this, and publishing it as a kind of tool people can go on to use themselves…

[Pause, some exasperation]

What’s happening here is Jack is trying to be clever and draw attention to the politics of the teaching space in his absence… he thinks that’s part of what this class is about. He thinks it’s interesting that I, JOHN, am teaching the class but am also being used as a stooge, reading an apology on behalf of a student, and giving over this ‘power’ to him despite his absence.

[To MICHAEL]

He’s thinking about The Ignorant Schoolmaster Michael, which you mentioned at the induction last week… it’s a bit heavy handed I’ll admit.

In The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 20th Century Rancière blends his own voice with that of 18th Cenury educator Joseph Jacotot. In many cases throughout the book it’s not really clear who is talking. Rancière writes the book in this way as part of a general rejection of explication, a kind of pedagogic practice which assumes an inequality between the writer and reader, or the teacher and the student.

Playing with language – and the politics of language – is something that Jack is obviously interested in, in his work.

[Holds up ENTROPIA VOLUME 2 (the smaller one)]

For this second, grey book he has produced an artificially intelligent text generator that has been trained on the art criticism of another collaborator Habib William Kherbek based between London and Berlin. The writing it generates mimics the styles and concerns of Kherbek through a potentially infinite series of ‘fake’ art reviews. These reviews are often absurd, but Jack thinks it’s interesting to examine the way we can give meaning to what is ultimately a set of words stylistically or statistically arranged.

For example, we can read a review about a fictional Serpentine Pavilion…

[JOHN reads ‘THE SERPENTINE PAVILLION’, p.79]

…and reading this, we can think again about who is speaking. Is it Kherbek as an author? Is it Jack as a designer or programmer? The program or A.I. itself? Is it me – JOHN – in this room? Or is it an art world which enforces this kind of language – what some have called International Art English – as a standard for discussion? Similarly to the lexicon, this project becomes a way of exploring the technical language and infrastructure of a global system.

[Pause]

In any case, Jack can make books and websites and is interested in group experiences like ‘Designing Politics’. In what we can do together! And in this, what interests him is not necessarily transitory, ‘local’ or ‘folk’ political situations and problems (all of these words imperfect), but rather what the researcher Gabrielle Hecht has called ‘interscalar vehicles’: “Objects and modes of analysis that permit scholars and their subjects to move simultaneously through deep time and human time, through geological space and political space.”

That sounds very grand, but he thinks it can be a good starting point for a conversation. One he unfortunately cannot attend but to which he sends his apologies.

---

An apology sent to students of the Masters module Designing Politics supervised by John Reardon and Michael Dutton.

---

Footnotes

1. This quote is taken from Jakob Jakobsen's wonderful research project Antihistory exploring the Anti-University. ↩