NB: The views reflected herein are the opinion of the author (Austin McCann), not the School for Designing a Society or its constituent organizers, participants, and friends.
Scene 1.
Introduction
At the beginning of this month, New College of Florida hosted its 4th annual All Power to the Imagination! Conference, a convergence aimed at “closing [the] gaps” between radical theory & practice.
Student organizer Matt Polzin invited me to present at the conference. I’ve lectured on art & radicalism at API in previous years. This year, I explained to Matt, I had nothing to say except on behalf of my work with the School for Designing a Society, and so could I please bring one or two SDaS organizers? Little did I know that in the days preceding my suggestion, philosophy professor Dr. Aron Edidin suggested that SDaS be invited to the conference, indicating traces of the proto-SDaS Performers Workshop Ensemble’s residencies there in the early 90s. When I suggested that API invite me-as-SDaS rather than me-as-myself, I unknowingly closed a gap!
Susan Parenti agreed to travel with me to my sunny, cynical alma mater. We offered the following language for our presentation:
DESIGNING A DESIRABLE SOCIETY
Dr. Susan Parenti & Austin McCann, School for Designing a SocietyA college-educated young person can speak of what she knows, but cannot speak of what she desires—the terrain of her DESIRE, and of HER desire, is untraveled by her, alien. “Desire” is defined as wanting the not-yet, as missing that which only the desirer can create and for which the desirer is needed.
What to do? In the attempt to grapple with slippery political problems, two related, overlapping approaches are called for: design & composition. Susan & Austin took “All power to the imagination!” as the design challenge for this session; we will explore design & composition as approaches to slippery problems. Both approaches hinge on desire: an image of not-yet-existing reality, deliberately formed as a critical reflection on images of currently existing reality.
The emphasis in design & composition is to engage in dialogue with a situation. Along the way, the problem’s problematic language is taken to task, interrogated, altered, and refreshed via “playing attention to language.” This workshop—part paper, part performance—aims at addressing problems which cannot be addressed in the system in which they arise. To that end, we will bring forth an arsenal of tools/concepts to help us to think ourselves out of the box, formulate our desires, and create the societies we want to live in.
Dr. Susan Parenti founded the School for Designing a Society in 1991 with other teachers, performers, artists, and activists to answer the question “What would I consider a desirable society?” In the spaces between coordinating this project, she is a touring performer, writer and collaborator with Dr. Patch Adams. Austin McCann is a language activist/social change artist, current SDaS student, and non-profit development staff person.
Part of my hope was to touch the wound lying at the heart of undergraduate cynicism. Maybe I wanted to create the workshop that would’ve helped me when I was at New College, suffering the painful throes of my own post-adolescence, abetted by an absence of my care in my intellectual labor: I was part of the “cynically-educated class,” as Peter Schumann once called it. And I think our workshop made huge strides towards sounding the clarion call of the reconstructive vision, belying vulnerability and hope.
Scene 2.
“Designing a Desirable Society”: the workshop, or: how to convince kids from a beach paradise to move to a corn desert
More than 35 people of diverging backgrounds and interests participated in the workshop. I was hoping to reach apples sitting higher up in the tree than already politicized activists and counter-cultural types; and as we surveyed the room, we happily counted Continental philosophers, modernist drama enthusiasts, photographers, and school teachers in our ranks.
Here’s a rough, bare outline of our 3½ hour presentation:
- BASIC SDaS DESCRIPTION:
- Who we are, what we’ve spawned
- “The School for Designing a Society is a project for people committed to changing society by means of composition, design, performance, and care. We approach those problems which—we assert—cannot be solved within the system/structure/context in which they arise. In order to solve them, we need to compose and design new systems/structures/contexts. Not only will these problems not be solved within the systems in which they arise—-they will be perpetuated. Herbert Brün wrote, ‘Every system will solve the problems that assail it and perpetuate the problems that maintain it.’
- “A participant in the project of SDaS is thus involved in an entailment structure of study and action: the participant needs to study problem, social change, systems, structures, society as we know it and society as we desire it, desire, composition, design, performance, choice, assertion, power, power over, media, commitment—and to care all these things as well as to know them. At all points: language is involved.” (Susan Parenti)
- Who we are, what we’ve spawned
- META-LEVEL CONVERSATIONAL METHODOLOGY:
- Conversation as a technology:
- Intellectual vulnerability: “midwife-ing each other towards thoughts we hadn’t articulated yet about what we want, why we hurt, who we are”; creating an environment for creating risks
- The dialectic of friction & care (not trying to win in a discussion) in our desirable conversations; legitimate questions
- Conversation as a technology:
- DESIRE
- False Statements
- Performance, The Politics of the Adjective ‘Political’
- LANGUAGE
- Language speaks us; language has its own agenda/dynamic
- Loneliness of people in a familiar language
- “If you seek the new, compose asynchronicity” (Larry Richards)
- Ethics being embedded in language through mastery (Heinz von Foerster)
- Language speaks us; language has its own agenda/dynamic
- DESIGN
- Bandages assignment (ran out of time)
- Based on a premise by artist Krzysztof Wodiczko, name a wound, then design/compose a bandage that both heals the wound and exposes the social conditions making it possible
- Austin’s New College-specific point: How often do we read a passage in a book by, e.g., Foucault, by which we are deeply moved, but have no productive response to? This methodology allows us to turn our intellectual labors into design strategies for social change
- Based on a premise by artist Krzysztof Wodiczko, name a wound, then design/compose a bandage that both heals the wound and exposes the social conditions making it possible
- Performance, Harry McClintock’s “Big Rock Candy Mountain” (Austin on accordion; suggested by participant Alex Cline as an example of false statements)
- Design Groups
- Sensitivity to systemic dynamics; the way that certain desires are implied by others
- Design Ideas
- We shouldn’t have to start from scratch; how we can borrow structures from other language?
- Ex. AA, “edges” (permaculture)
- Bandages assignment (ran out of time)
- WRAP-UP
- GPS: We know what we did, but we don’t know what what we did did (ran out of time)
- Q&A
Trying to cram the School’s work into 3½ hours was a challenge, as you might imagine. I kind of hoped to give participants too much information so that there’d be desire for follow-up, necessitating a visit to either Gesundheit! this summer or Urbana next year or in the future, etc. And our feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
(I shouldn’t count these damn eggs before they hatch, but … what’s that? Did I just hear the train whistle of the old New College –> SDaS express? Could it be? Let’s start the welcome party!)
Too often, radical convergences promulgate this kind of anti-intellectual “actions speak louder than words” orientation, which excludes the person who takes words very seriously, who recognizes that ethics can be implicit in well-crafted language (cf. Heinz von Foerster), and this person is a great person for SDaS to connect to. The theoretical component of this anti-intellectualism is exhibited when so-called “radicals” enforce a uniform code of political and linguistic desirables (this is called “political-correctness” by reactionaries) on political energies which are, at their heart, desires, i.e. necessarily idiosyncratic. Radical critical thought should not look uniform, yet that is the reality at so many radical spaces. It is not a conversation, but an imposition; counter-domination, not transformation. But this anti-intellectualism has an equally undesirable challenger. You know him: the undergraduate philosophy student whose articulation of, e.g., “the real Heidegger” is supposed to be making a huge contribution to our collective political thought. This essentially academic creature, so out of place in radical spaces concerned with social change (he is a creature of analysis, not change), is treating a corpse for syphilis, rather than promoting health in a living being. He is creating an expert’s analysis of the problem, devoid of actionability. These two undesirable choices force individuals with radical energies to either (1) subsume their desires into pre-established general political movements or (2) reject social change practice as either ineffective or not meaningful, retreating into cynical disengagement and/or, for artists, individualistic aesthetic hedonism.
This long, unfair generalization is aimed at bolstering the uniqueness of what the School for Designing a Society were offering at New College’s All Power to the Imagination! conference, and our positive reception affirmed this hopeful frame.
TO BE CONTINUED …
