ISSA – Island School of Social Autonomy

Category: Reflections

  • Illich: Silence is a Commons

    Illich: Silence is a Commons

    Computers are doing to communication what fences did to pastures and cars did to streets.

    This article is from Illich’s remarks at the “Asahi Symposium Science and Man – The computer-managed Society,” Tokyo, Japan, March 21, 1982.

    Minna-san, gladly I accept the honour of addressing this forum on Science and Man. The theme that Mr. Tsuru proposes, “The Computer-Managed Society,” sounds an alarm. Clearly you foresee that machines which ape people are tending to encroach on every aspect of people’s lives, and that such machines force people to behave like machines. The new electronic devices do indeed have the power to force people to “communicate” with them and with each other on the terms of the machine. Whatever structurally does not fit the logic of machines is effectively filtered from a culture dominated by their use.

    The machine-like behaviour of people chained to electronics constitutes a degradation of their well-being and of their dignity which, for most people in the long run, becomes intolerable. Observations of the sickening effect of programmed environments show that people in them become indolent, impotent, narcissistic and apolitical. The political process breaks down, because people cease to be able to govern themselves; they demand to be managed.

    I congratulate Asahi Shimbun on its efforts to foster a new democratic consensus in Japan, by which your more than seven million readers become aware of the need to limit the encroachment of machines on the style of their own behaviour. It is important that precisely Japan initiate such action. Japan is looked upon as the capital of electronics; it would be marvellous if it became for the entire world the model of a new politics of self-limitation in the field of communication, which, in my opinion, is henceforth necessary if a people wants to remain self-governing.

    Electronic management as a political issue can be approached in several ways. I propose, at the beginning of this public consultation, to approach the issue as one of political ecology. Ecology, during the last ten years, has acquired a new meaning. It is still the name for a branch of professional biology, but the term now increasingly serves as the label under which a broad, politically organized general public analyzes and influences technical decisions. I want to focus on the new electronic management devices as a technical change of the human environment which, to be benign, must remain under political (and not exclusively expert) control. I have chosen this focus for my introduction, because I thus continue my conversation with those three Japanese colleagues to whom I owe what I know about your country – Professors Yoshikazu Sakamoto, Joshiro Tamanoi and Jun Ui.

    In the 13 minutes still left to me on this rostrum I will clarify a distinction that I consider fundamental to political ecology. I shall distinguish the environment as commons from the environment as resource. On our ability to make this particular distinction depends not only the construction of a sound theoretical ecology, but also – and more importantly – effective ecological jurisprudence Minna-san, how I wish, at this point, that I were a pupil trained by your Zen poet, the great Basho. Then perhaps in a bare 17 syllables I could express the distinction between the commons within which people’s subsistence activities are embedded, and resources that serve for the economic production of those commodities on which modem survival depends. If I were a poet, perhaps I would make this distinction so beautifully and incisively that it would penetrate your hearts and remain unforgettable. Unfortunately I am not a Japanese poet. I must speak to you in English, a language that during the last 100 years has lost the ability to make this distinction, and – in addition – I must speak through translation. Only because I may count on the translating genius of Mr. Muramatsu do I dare to recover Old English meanings with a talk in Japan.

    “Commons” is an Old English word. According to my Japanese friends, it is quite close to the meaning that iriai still has in Japanese “Commons,” like iriai, is a word which, in preindustrial times, was used to designate certain aspects of the environment. People called commons those parts of the environment for which customary law exacted specific forms of community respect. People called commons that part of the environment which lay beyond their own thresholds and outside of their own possessions, to which, however, they had recognized claims of usage, not to produce commodities but to provide for the subsistence of their households. The customary law which humanized the environment by establishing the commons was usually unwritten. It was unwritten law not only because people did not care to write it down, but because what it protected was a reality much too complex to fit into paragraphs. The law of the commons regulates the right of way, the right to fish and to hunt, to graze, and to collect wood or medicinal plants in the forest.

    An oak tree might be in the commons. Its shade, in summer, is reserved for the shepherd and his flock; its acorns are reserved for the pigs of the neighbouring peasants; its dry branches serve as fuel for the widows of the village; some of its fresh twigs in springtime are cut as ornaments for the church – and at sunset it might be the place for the village assembly. When people spoke about commons, iriai, they designated an aspect of the environment that was limited, that was necessary for the community’s survival, that was necessary for different groups in different ways, but which, in a strictly economic sense, was not perceived as scarce.

    When today, in Europe, with university students I use the term “commons” (in German Almende or Gemeinheit, in Italian gli usi civici) my listeners immediately think of the eighteenth century. They think of those pastures in England on which villagers each kept a few sheep, and they think of the “enclosure of the pastures” which transformed the grassland from commons into a resource on which commercial flocks could be raised. Primarily, however, my students think of the innovation of poverty which came with enclosure: of the absolute impoverishment of the peasants, who were driven from the land and into wage labour, and they think of the commercial enrichment of the lords.

    In their immediate reaction, my students think of the rise of a new capitalist order. Facing that painful newness, they forget that enclosure also stands for something more basic. The enclosure of the commons inaugurates a new ecological order: Enclosure did not just physically transfer the control over grasslands from the peasants to the lord. Enclosure marked a radical change in the attitudes of society towards the environment. Before, in any juridical system, most of the environment had been considered as commons from which most people could draw most of their sustenance without needing to take recourse to the market. After enclosure, the environment became primarily a resource at the service of “enterprises” which, by organizing wage-labor, transformed nature into the goods and services on which the satisfaction of basic needs by consumers depends. This transformation is in the blind spot of political economy.

    This change of attitudes can be illustrated better if we think about roads rather than about grasslands. What a difference there was between the new and the old parts of Mexico City only 20 years ago. In the old parts of the city the streets were true commons. Some people sat on the road to sell vegetables and charcoal. Others put their chairs on the road to drink coffee or tequila. Others held their meetings on the road to decide on the new headman for the neighbourhood or to determine the price of a donkey. Others drove their donkeys through the crowd, walking next to the heavily loaded beast of burden; others sat in the saddle. Children played in the gutter, and still people walking could use the road to get from one place to another.

    Such roads were not built for people. Like any true commons, the street itself was the result of people living there and making that space liveable. The dwellings that lined the roads were not private homes in the modern sense – garages for the overnight deposit of workers. The threshold still separated two living spaces, one intimate and one common. But neither homes in this intimate sense nor streets as commons survived economic development.

    In the new sections of Mexico City, streets are no more for people. They are now roadways for automobiles, for buses, for taxis, cars, and trucks. People are barely tolerated on the streets unless they are on their way to a bus stop. If people now sat down or stopped on the street, they would become obstacles for traffic, and traffic would be dangerous to them. The road has been degraded from a commons to a simple resource for the circulation of vehicles. People can circulate no more on their own. Traffic has displaced their mobility. They can circulate only when they are strapped down and are moved.

    The appropriation of the grassland by the lords was challenged, but the more fundamental transformation of grassland (or of roads) from commons to resource has happened, until recently, without being subjected to criticism. The appropriation of the environment by the few was clearly recognized as an intolerable abuse By contrast, the even more degrading transformation of people into members of an industrial labour force and into consumers wastaken, until recently, for granted. For almost a hundred years the majority of political parties has challenged the accumulation of environmental resources in private hands. However, the issue was argued in terms of the private utilization of these resources, not the distinction of commons. Thus anticapitalist politics so far have bolstered the legitimacy of transforming commons into resources.

    Only recently, at the base of society, a new kind of “popular intellectual” is beginning to recognize what has been happening. Enclosure has denied the people the right to that kind of environment on which – throughout all of history – the moral economy of survival had been based. Enclosure, once accepted, redefines community. Enclosure underlines the local autonomy of community. Enclosure of the commons is thus as much in the interest of professionals and of state bureaucrats as it is in the interest of capitalists. Enclosure allows the bureaucrats to define local community as impotent – “ei-ei schau-schau!!!” – to provide for its own survival. People become economic individuals that depend for their survival on commodities that are produced for them. Fundamentally, most citizens’ movements represent a rebellion against this environmentally induced redefinition of people as consumers.

    Minna-san, you wanted to hear me speak on electronics, not grassland and roads. But I am a historian; I wanted to speak first about the pastoral commons as I know them from the past in order then to say something about the present, much wider threat to the commons by electronics.

    This man who speaks to you was born 55 years ago in Vienna. One month after his birth he was put on a train, and then on a ship and brought to the Island of Brac. Here, in a village on the Dalmatian coast, his grandfather wanted to bless him. My grandfather lived in the house in which his family had lived since the time when Muromachi ruled in Kyoto. Since then on the Dalmatian Coast many rulers had come and gone – the doges of Venice, the sultans of Istanbul, the corsairs of Almissa, the emperors of Austria, and the kings of Yugoslavia. But these many changes in the uniform and language of the governors had changed little in daily life during these 500 years. The very same olive-wood rafters still supported the roof of my grandfather’s house. Water was still gathered from the same stone slabs on the roof. The wine was pressed in the same vats, the fish caught from the same kind of boat, and the oil came from trees planted when Edo was in its youth.

    My grandfather had received news twice a month. The news now arrived by steamer in three days; and formerly, by sloop, it had taken five days to arrive. When I was born, for the people who lived off the main routes, history still flowed slowly, imperceptibly. Most of the environment was still in the commons. People lived in houses they had built; moved on streets that had been trampled by the feet of their animals; were autonomous in the procurement and disposal of their water; could depend on their own voices when they wanted to speak up. All this changed with my arrival in Brac.

    On the same boat on which I arrived in 1926, the first loudspeaker was landed on the island. Few people there had ever heard of such a thing. Up to that day, all men and women had spoken with more or less equally powerful voices. Henceforth this would change. Henceforth the access to the microphone would determine whose voice shall be magnified. Silence now ceased to be in the commons; it became a resource for which loudspeakers compete. Language itself was transformed thereby from a local commons into a national resource for communication. As enclosure by the lords increased national productivity by denying the individual peasant to keep a few sheep, so the encroachment of the loudspeaker has destroyed that silence which so far had given each man and woman his or her proper and equal voice. Unless you have access to a loudspeaker, you now are silenced.

    I hope that the parallel now becomes clear. Just as the commons of space are vulnerable, and can be destroyed by the motorization of traffic, so the commons of speech are vulnerable, and can easily be destroyed by the encroachment of modem means of communication.

    The issue which I propose for discussion should therefore be clear: how to counter the encroachment of new, electronic devices and systems upon commons that are more subtle and more intimate to our being than either grassland or roads – commons that are at least as valuable as silence. Silence, according to western and eastern tradition alike, is necessary for the emergence of persons. It is taken from us by machines that ape people. We could easily be made increasingly dependent on machines for speaking and for thinking, as we are already dependent on machines for moving.

    Such a transformation of the environment from a commons to a productive resource constitutes the most fundamental form of environmental degradation. This degradation has a long history, which coincides with the history of capitalism but can in no way just be reduced to it. Unfortunately the importance of this transformation has been overlooked or belittled by political ecology so far. It needs to be recognized if we are to organize defense movements of what remains of the commons. This defense constitutes the crucial public task for political action during the eighties. The task must be undertaken urgently because commons can exist without police, but resources cannot. Just as traffic does, computers call for police, and for ever more of them, and in ever more subtle forms.

    By definition, resources call for defense by police. Once they are defended, their recovery as commons becomes increasingly difficult. This is a special reason for urgency.

    The CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter 1983

  • Conversation with Hito Steyerl

    Conversation with Hito Steyerl

    Hito Steyerl is a German filmmaker, moving image artist and innovator whose practice engages with the evolving role of technology in the systems of globalisation, surveillance and migration.
    Steyerl is one of the co-founders of ISSA and currently teaches New Media Art at the Berlin University of the Arts.
    The following conversation was conducted by David Adler for “The Internationalist” published by the Progressive International in December 2022.

    Hito Steyerl

    David: I would love to know what’s occupying you right now, Hito. What are you working on? What is motivating you?

    Hito: In recent years, I have tried to explore technology and the politics associated with it. I’m still trying to think about the consequences of Blockchain technologies, artificial intelligence, and platform capitalism — plus their interactions with one another.

    David: How would you say that the relationship between technology and politics is evolving?

    Hito: Obviously technology has been extremely relevant to politics because, over the past (at least) two decades, digital platforms have privatised public discourse to a large degree, with known consequences.

    Since public discourse and data have become private property owned by monopolist corporations, they have polarised public opinion by monetizing toxicity. Moreover, this has pushed aside other attempts to use technology for communication such as earlier P2P networks. In recent months, I have been exploring these themes and extending them to account for how Web3 is colonising digital space in similar ways to the earlier Web2.

    David: Can you explain a bit more about this concept of colonising digital space? What do we mean when we refer to that process? Is it what you had said before about the privatisation of public infrastructures, or is it something more geographically specific?

    Hito: Both aspects are true. There is a sort of colonisation or privatisation or appropriation of virtual space, by different blockchain standards which, for now, are still competing with one another.

    But also there are geopolitical aspects to it. My collaborators and I have been exploring, for example, the geopolitics of Bitcoin mining or crypto mining in Eastern Europe and also in Central Asia. To say it very simply, political conflict drives destabilisation — including in relation to electrical power and the grid. Cryptocolonialism feeds on extracting power and thus it is a subsection of larger debates around extractivism.

    These circumstances are then being exploited to facilitate large-scale crypto mining, which is not only harmful to the environment but is also happening on the back of political conflict and destabilisation. This concerns, for example, the border region between Serbia and Kosovo, or between Georgia and Abkhazia. This also concerns several regions of Kazakhstan, for example.

    David: So, in some ways, you could say that these technologies are new, but the geographies of extraction are very familiar?

    Hito: Yes, the power source that’s being tapped or exploited is conflict. Cryptocolonialism is a term that had been coined before blockchain and the invention of Bitcoin, by Michael Herzfeld. But it is more relevant now than ever, also to account for other non-standard, indirect situations of colonisation.

    David: The concept of ‘crypto colonialism’ captures both the novelty of the ‘crypto’ side and the more classic dynamics of colonialism it follows. What is, in your view, genuinely novel about this concept of crypto colonialism?

    Hito: Cryptoeconomies feed on power imbalances, they exploit precarity and the momentum of instability. Even though they proclaim decentralisation they converge towards centralisation in terms of decision-making power and assets. This also comes with a neocolonial philosophical front called Effective Altruism, a fork of utilitarianism that purports to optimize doing ‘good’ using whack math. But what is it? It’s a financialised calculation of the most effective way to do philanthropy. The donor is imagined as an ultra-rich person from the West, and the imagined beneficiary is mostly a poor person from the Global South who is supposed to get, for example, a bednet to protect them from malaria without asking for it. The whole relationship is imagined as a data-driven depoliticised top-down consumer choice for oligarchs — this is the crypto version of internationalism.

    There was this excellent suggestion by my colleague Paul Feigelfeld on Mastodon liberating the wasted energy stuck in NFT´s (Non-Fungible Tokens) and meme coins to solve the energy crisis. Until recently one needed a lot of power/electricity to mint these crypto ‘assets’. I would love to perform an act of negative entropy and magically transfer the power stuck in NFT´s and shitcoins to Kobane or Qamishlo or Kharkiv or Kyiv, where autocrats are waging war on infrastructure, heating, electricity etc. If you look at these power/energy relations, questions of data and the internet, platform extractivism is a subcategory of questions of extractivism proper — fossil extractivism, extraction of labour and attention — those are linked with questions of power, emissions, energy wars and related issues like the climate crisis.

    David: A case study suggests that technology mirrors politics, rather than driving it. We’ve had centuries of colonialism, extraction, of outsourcing to vulnerable populations; today, these new technologies come in with that promise of liberation but end up reproducing those same dynamics.

    Is that inevitable? Is there a way in which these technologies are bound to reproduce existing power dynamics and asymmetries? Was there radical promise to the internet at one point? Or was that always an empty promise because it was always bound to be co-opted and captured by these existing dynamics? Or should we still try to grapple with a more egalitarian digital proletarian vision? What does the internationalist vision look like?

    Hito: The internationalist vision is simple: to expropriate corporations and whales and establish data platforms as cooperative structures. Period. It is the opposite of Effective Altruism and other whack optimization cults. Internationalism today means wholesale deoptimisation.

    If you look at these power and energy relations, questions of data and the internet, platform extractivism is a subcategory of questions of extractivism proper – fossil extractivism, extraction of labour and attention – those are linked with questions of power, emissions, energy wars and related issues like the climate crisis.

    David: Speaking about the Web3 project in particular: Would you say that it is already going to fall victim to the same dynamics of privatisation and colonial capture and extraction? Do you still see this project of Web3 as having some progressive potential?

    Hito: Web3 is marketed as a decentralised technology. And the advantage of decentralised technology is that there is no central power, and no one is able to pull the strings. Well, what’s happened is that within Web3, powers have been centralised to a substantial degree already. The collapse of the FTX exchange is just one example.

    Another example: power in crypto ventures is measured in possession of tokens. You get some say in the governance of these projects if you are a shareholder and own coins or other shares in a certain project. If you own something, then you’re able to participate in the discourse; you’re not able to participate in decision-making just by the fact of your existence. It’s an almost pre-revolutionary concept, harking back to before the French Revolution. And ownership in cryptocurrencies is more and more shrinking to fewer big owners, who actually control the prices. These are all factors that make it difficult to think of Web3 as something that is going to evolve in a progressive manner. Of course, nothing is ever excluded and there have been some collateral benefits.

    David: Give us an example of how we might understand the concept of collateral benefits.

    Hito: A small example is redistributing benefits in NFTs. There has been, for decades, this idea of some kind of resale clause for artists which could be implemented via smart contracts. This is very specialised. This is why I say collateral benefits because it’s not really essential. Discussions around DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organisations) and governance protocols were a collateral benefit but drowned out by megawatts of casino propaganda, North Korean raids on gaming platforms, creepy Madonna avatars and the overall gamification of austerity.

    David: Do you have a sense of where it’s all heading? Do you have a sense of whether these speculative projects are just going to flame out and we’ll be left with more basic infrastructural questions?

    Hito: Right now we are in the middle of a major crash. Crypto winter will be probably over at some point, with some semblance of so-called regulation installed but in the meantime there will be further centralisation. What’s more interesting to me is in relation to an internationalist left. Can one overcome the tendencies of identitarian fragmentation that keeps people from being in solidarity with one another? How can this be done? I mainly speak of technology so I am dealing with these questions from this angle. But if you want to abstract them, and ask yourself, what are going to be the important questions in the next five years, both on- and offline? It’s going to be the questions of power structures, fair remuneration, economic inequality and other forms of oppression, the lack of a public sphere and self-governance. It’s these same issues, whether we see them from a tech angle or not.

    David: There’s certainly one school of thought that is very concerned about polarisation. That school suggests that polarisation is a vector of profit-making by certain corporations – the engagement, the clicks, the rage. But there’s another school of thought that says polarisation is the essence of politics – and when we have low degrees of polarisation, that’s the era of fake consensus. That second school argues we must rip the band-aid off to see a more honest portrait of our society and its composition. What is class conflict but polarisation realised? Which school of thought are you?

    Hito: Sadly, the second school fails to recognize that today’s polarisation is not ‘progressive’ but just mining intensity for profit. Polarisation is happening in terms of an ethnic, nationalist, or otherwise identity-related horizontal axis. This does not help create solidarity. This type of polarisation is the one that drives clickbait and is profitable for big platforms. Other forms of polarisation that would account for economic inequality on a vertical axe are less profitable.

    Basically, this type of polarisation happens when people are forced or nudged by technology to identify as products and as very specialised products, with a lot of different attributes so they can be targeted by targeted advertisements, and so on.

    David: So in the end, we are still the product. We’re becoming easier and easier to sell to in this new technological landscape.

    Hito: Well, let’s just say that our precise location on the shelves of the shop is defined every day in a much more granular way.

  • Bifo: Why Start a School, Today?

    Bifo: Why Start a School, Today?

    The Whys:

    • Why start a school, today?
    • What is the context in which we are going to open a school?
    • What is the goal of the school?
    • And finally: what should be studied in a school that is starting today?

    Let’s have a look at the landscape before replying to these questions.

    The Earth is rebelling against the World. The Earth is taking revenge against the history of men. No way out. No way back.

    Fire, water, air – the basic elements unchained against the animal that has dissipated resources, polluted the atmosphere the oceans and the soil.

    This is provoking a cascade of catastrophic effects at every level of social life: huge migrations are expected from Pakistan – a country of 224 million people, as the floods have destroyed crops and cattle, and one third of the population have lost their home.

    Nationalist aggressiveness is therefore destined to grow everywhere. Wars are going to multiply.

    Climate change is out of control. The plans for reducing the effects of global warming are totally ineffective: the green economy is useless as long that the economic growth stays an unquestionable myth. Because of the war, energy is extremely expensive, so the economic growth needs more carbon, and nuclear plants everywhere. And time is running out out out.

    Let’s be frank: the social civilisation that the Westerners have experienced in the last Century is doomed.

    The final apocalypse of the human civilisation has started already, and no political action will reverse the irreversible.

    This is the context in which we are starting the school of ISSA (Island School for Social Autonomy).

    What’s our goal? We are not willing to prepare the cadres for the government of the future. There will be no government in the society of the future, because human will is and will be more and more unable to understand and govern the complexity of Chaos unchained.

    We’ll create a school amid spreading Chaos, and our goal will be to listen to the rhythm of chaos, to interpret the meaning of chaotic flows, to strike a friendly deal with Chaos, and to thrive in Chaos.

    We are planning a school for the communities that are preparing the Great Desertion. Communities of people who desert war, spreading everywhere. Communities of people who desert work consumption and political participation.

    Those people will be survivors of the ongoing Apocalypse.

    All around we’ll witness spreading dementia, aggressive psychoses, mass murders, despair.

    We’ll try to create islands of survival, islands of happy life and human understanding.

    What do we need for this? What should we study for making possible a new age of autonomous life, during the long-lasting process of dismantling of the social civilisation?

    We’ll need knowledge for survival, for therapy, and for meditation.

    We’ll need to study the history of the past, particularly of the last Century.

    We’ll try to answer the question: how could the humankind destroy and dissipate the legacy of social solidarity, and of science?

    But our school will be first a school of imagination.

    Imagination will be the core of our teaching: we must imagine human life in non-human environments.

    We’ll study the history of the Twentieth Century from the point of view of the present.

    We’ll dedicate a special attention to environmental studies.

    And finally, we’ll research together about technologies for practical survival in apocalyptic environments: agronomy, nutritional sciences, medicine, pharmacology, and housing.

    The first task that we are facing nowadays, and we’ll develop during the coming year is the creation of an Autonomous Survival Syllabus.

    We are now going to elaborate a consistent program of activities and of contents.

  • Srećko Horvat Talks of ISSA

    Srećko Horvat Talks of ISSA

    In late July 2022, a crew of Hungarian journalists and filmmakers came to visit us to speak about the history and future of emancipatory struggles and social experiments.

    You can watch or listen the entire conversation here:

  • About ISSA

    About ISSA

    The Island School of Social Autonomy (ISSA) is a place that imagines, experiments with, and cultivates forms of knowledge production and sharing that go beyond traditional notions of education and its purpose. It also fosters modes of living that extend beyond mere survival in the “age of extinction.”

    We perceive social autonomy as the ability of individuals to function as cooperative group members, engaging in communal self-governance while being aware of the interconnectedness and interdependence of communities within broader networks (or archipelagoes) of human and non-human life-organization. Autonomy does not imply isolation but rather the ability to make autonomous decisions, through mechanisms of collective deliberation, about how to live together and take responsibility for caring for those that are not able to make them (children, non-human living worlds, etc.)

    With ISSA, our aim is to cultivate ways of living, learning, and teaching together. We seek to explore autonomy as a political strategy and a model for social organization. Additionally, we adopt a hands-on approach to design, experimentation, and the implementation of processes, goods, and services. We collaboratively engage in discussions, physical labor, and the development of joint projects and programs, working with individuals and collectives. Throughout our endeavors, we remain guided by our motto: “We build the school, the school builds us” (“Mi gradimo školu, škola gradi nas”).

    Why a School?

    We’re starting a School on an island in the middle of the Adriatic Sea because we believe that the future lies in the archipelagos of autonomy. Moreover, we recognize that the contemporary educational system, as highlighted by the eminent educator and philosopher Ivan Illich in his groundbreaking book “Deschooling Society” (1971), has turned into an “advertising agency that makes you believe that you need the society as it is”.

    Education as we know it, is a relatively recent invention. Until the 19th century, children from middle-class families were educated at home with the assistance of private tutors. It was only with the rise of industrial society that the modern school system became the central mediator of socialization. This shift resulted in the removal of socialization from both the family and the community. The education system transformed into a statist institution rather than a communal one, thus becoming one of the fundamental pillars of social order, based on nation-states, their economies, and various hierarchies related to gender, race, and more.

    Throughout the 20th century, the prevailing model of education transformed into a process that engineered consumers who propelled economic “growth” and (national) citizens responsible for political rights and obligations. In the 21st century, the privatization of education and knowledge, coupled with the penetration of technology into every sphere of life, including education, led to the proliferation of techno-solutionist approaches and reasoning. As Wendi Brown notes this diminishing separation between economy and polity brought about a situation wherein political principles of equality and freedom no longer figure as alternative social and moral referents to those of the market. Contrary to this, we want to create condition where public resources are not to be used “for some new device that makes people learn” but for, as Ivan Illich suggested, “the creation of a new style of educational relationship between man and his environment. To foster this style, attitudes toward growing up, the tools available for learning, and the quality and structure of daily life will have to change simultaneously.”

    Illich observed that urban life tends to become increasingly reliant on bureaucratic civic services, which in our present context, can be viewed as bureaucratic business services. We now heavily rely on complex technological systems owned by large private tech companies in almost every aspect of our lives. This trend of data collection, surveillance, and behavioral engineering promotes predictable and automated human behavior. Illich diagnosed this particular way of life as an ideal “pan-hygienic world,” a world where all interactions between individuals and between individuals and their surroundings result from foresight and manipulation. The school itself has “become the planned process that tools man for a planned world, the principal tool to trap man in man’s trap.”

    What is missing in this reality is the essence of the true master-disciple relationship. It is not about simply reproducing socially “suitable” individuals, but about a shared understanding between the master and pupil that their relationship is invaluable and mutually beneficial.

    Aristotle referred to this relationship as a “moral type of friendship” that operates without fixed terms. The master acts towards the pupil as they would towards a friend, providing gifts or engaging in any other action out of genuine care. Thomas Aquinas described this form of teaching as an act of love and mercy. Illich reminds us that this kind of teaching is always a luxury for the teacher and a form of leisure (from the Greek term skhole, from which our word “school” originates) for both the teacher and the pupil. It is an activity that holds meaning for both parties and serves no ulterior purpose.

    In the current convergence of multiple crises (environmental, political, economic, etc.), it is precisely this form of teaching, devoid of fixed terms, which functions as a moral type of friendship that must be reinvented. Although it may not prevent mass extinction, it has the potential to create an actual, existing social and educational experiment and provide a platform for contemplating a different world.

    Why Vis?

    “I am at the Philippines of the Adriatic,” wrote the great poet Tin Ujević of his trip to the island of Vis in 1930. “I find myself in the deep heart of the deep sea. It was the fairies themselves who brought me here, on an unknown date when the globe fell asleep, and no one could see me. I am a part of the empire of adventures, a miracle of events. I finally experienced what the world has forgotten. And I became the owner of a mystery.”

    Vis’ mystery to us seems rooted in both its philosophy of pomalo (“take it slow” or festina lente) and the fact that throughout its history it was always distant enough to remain mysterious while also being at the center of events.

    The earliest known inhabitants of Vis were Illyrian tribes, most likely Liburni, who settled on the island during the late Bronze Age. In the 4th century BC, ancient Greeks colonized the island when Dionysius the Elder, the tyrant of Syracuse, founded the colony of Issa. It later became an independent polis, with its own currency and colonies. Subsequently, it became a part of the Roman Empire until its collapse. From then until 1797, Vis was under the rule of the Republic of Venice, after which it was passed to Napoleon and then to the Kingdom of Italy. The island was then ruled by the Austrian Empire for over a century. Following World War I, it briefly became part of Italy once again and later joined the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

    During World War II, after a two-year fascist occupation, Vis became the starting point for the final phase of the Yugoslav antifascist liberation struggle. Interestingly, it was the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) that removed the island from tourist maps and preserved some of its authenticity. From 1944 until the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991, Vis served as one of the strategically crucial Adriatic army bases, prohibiting foreign visitors. It remained relatively untouched by global tourism until the late 1990s.

    Apart from its intriguing history, what distinguishes Vis is its geological past. The Vis Archipelago consists partially of the oldest rocks in the Adriatic Sea, dating back around 220 million years. This uniqueness sets it apart from other Adriatic islands. During that time, there was an active volcano deep beneath the surface, and if one knows where to look, petrified lava, volcanic bombs, ash, salt, and sedimentary rocks can still be found along the beaches of Komiža. Additionally, Vis benefits from its own water sources, unlike the rest of the Adriatic islands.

    It is not a romantic notion of “escaping” catastrophe because we are well aware that there is no escape. Climate crisis, microplastics, capitalism, and other challenges are reaching even the most remote shores. Nor is it merely a variation of Voltaire’s famous line from “Candide” that suggests we should tend to our own garden, implying that self-sufficiency is both possible and desirable on “our” island.

    The selection of Vis represents a symbolic gesture, affirming the significance of certain local characteristics that we find important, such as pomalo or the antifascist legacy. Simultaneously, it is a coincidence, an accidental convergence of people, ideas, and energies, as well as a personal and collective decision made every day. It serves as a reminder that we always find ourselves in a tangible material reality fixed in a specific place while being shaped by processes originating elsewhere.

    Similar to ISSA itself, the island of Vis embodies an essential dialectic relationship between autonomy and dependency, nature and society, local and global. For ISSA, it is not an either-or situation.

    Why Here and Now?

    In Aldous Huxley’s utopian novel “Island,” he writes about an imaginary island located somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. The society inhabiting this island enjoys universal economic well-being and a high level of respect for individual rights and freedoms. Individuals are also provided ample opportunities for emotional and spiritual growth. Among the island’s many peculiarities are specially trained birds called mynas, whose purpose is to intermittently screech out “Attention!” and “Karuṇā,” reminding the inhabitants to live in the present moment and cultivate compassion. The island remains untainted by modern-day civilization, capitalism, imperialism, and domination. However, it is destined to be engulfed by these forces.

    Our island is not innocent, and we acknowledge that there is no outside. We are deeply entrenched within the belly of the beast. We understand that we are starting from a point of ruins, destruction, and smoke. Yet, our island is not alone; it is part of an archipelago consisting of isles, caves, valleys, and swamps where alternative forms of life persist or are reborn. These possibilities exist within the philosophy of buen vivir embraced by indigenous groups in South America, in Jason Moore’s concept of world-ecology, in shadow libraries hosted on secret servers, in the notion of public wealth, in participatory processes within communities, and countless other places and spaces.

    In conclusion, as the impending catastrophes we face are both local and global in nature, so too is ISSA. Our school is not merely a space for contemplation but a place of action. Its role is to explore and address the significant challenges ahead through the process of teaching and learning, while also practicing social autonomy in the present moment.

    Faced with the end of the world, how do we educate ourselves for the “age of extinction”? What type of education do we need to secure a future? Moreover, how can we achieve a “good life” amidst extinction, and what does “good life” truly mean? Finally, what forms of social organization and coexistence can we foster because of, or despite, the impending disaster?

    You might also want to read Bifo’s text “Why starting a School today?”

  • Plato in Issa?

    Plato in Issa?

    Ancient Greek-Roman ruins on island Vis, remains of Issa

    As crazy as it sounds, it is possible – and, indeed, likely – that the ancient Greek philosopher Plato visited Vis. Unfortunately, there are no traces of his possible stay yet: even though Issa represented the most important polis in this part of the Mediterranean, not even 10 % of the 120,000 m2 of the ancient city has been excavated until today.

    Vis has been inhabited since the Neolithic period. It was in 397 BC that the Greek tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius the Elder, founded the colony of Issa on the island that would later become an autonomous and independent polis and establish its own colonies – the most notable of which is today’s Split. Dionysius the Elder, a tyrant of the worst kind who would later appear in Dante’s Inferno, was known for transforming Syracuse into the most powerful city in the Greek world, with an empire extending from Sicily to Italy and the Adriatic island of Issa, from which the name Vis derives.

    He was also known for inviting the philosopher Plato, around 40 years old at the time, to visit his court in Sicily in 388 BC. Plato, who was dreaming of philosopher-kings and wanted to integrate politics and philosophy to create the perfect society, was of course chuffed by the invitation, and soon he befriended Dion, the tyrant’s brother-in-law, who accepted his ideas with enthusiasm. However, the tyrant didn’t like Plato’s philosophy at all. First, he wanted to kill him, and only after Dion’s intervention, Plato’s life spared and he was instead sold as a slave. He was recognized at a slave market in Aegina (Greece), where he was redeemed by Anikeris, who didn’t want to take the money that Plato’s pupils collected to free their teacher.

    This ransom money was instead used to buy a plot of land in the grove of Hekadem, surrounded by olive trees, where the school of philosophy called Akademia was founded. In other words, the creation of Plato’s School in 387 BC – ten years after the foundation of Issa – could perhaps be understood as a consequence of his first failed voyage through the Mediterranean Sea to Syracuse. As we know, the most famous student would soon become Aristotle, who after studying at the Academy for almost twenty years went on to tutor Alexander the Great and later founded his own school at the Lyceum, which would later turn into the Peripatetic School of Philosophy due to Aristotle’s tendency to walk while teaching.

    The School of Athens by Raphael, with Plato & Aristotle at the center

    In 367 BC, exactly thirty years after the foundation of Issa, Dyonisous the Elder died and was succeeded by his son Dionysus II. He was young and a tyrant as well, but Dion succeeded in convincing him to invite Plato to Syracuse again. After his initial hesitation (who wouldn’t hesitate after already being almost killed and sold into slavery?), Plato accepted the invitation and visited Sicily for a second time. But again, the new tyrant didn’t like his ideas, suspecting they would undermine his own position, so Plato was detained. He was eventually set free and returned to Greece, where he would continue teaching at his Academy. Now it already sounds like Plato’s “Groundhog Day,” but in 360 BC, despite all the awful experiences he had already encountered, he accepted the third and final invitation to Syracuse. He would again end up disappointed. Around that time, the tyrant’s empire was already collapsing, and Issa wasn’t a colony of Syracuse anymore; it turned into an independent polis that started to build its own empire in this part of the Adriatic Sea and the Adriatic coast of modern-day Croatia.

    Recent and older archaeological, historical, and seafaring evidence suggests that the route Plato may have travelled to Syracuse was one of the most important ancient seafaring routes used by the Greeks at that time. It followed the string of islands that stretched from the coast of present-day Split via Hvar (Pharos) and Vis (Issa). The historical and archaeological evidence from these colonies and later poleis, including the numerous caves found on both the islands of Hvar and Vis, evoke important elements of Plato’s Republic, such as land division or polis public institutions, and possibly even the famous Allegory of the Cave.

    According to Harald Haamann’s recent book Plato’s Philosophy: Reaching Beyond the Limits of Reason, “Plato could have joined the various groups of founding colonists and tried to persuade them to implement his vision of an “ideal state.”In theory, Plato could have also visited Issa and maybe he contributed to the foundation of the new polis.

    Greek colonies in the Adriatic Sea – Issa, Pharos – and its routes from Syrcause, Paros and Knidos

    Whether Plato visited Issa or not, we may never find out, but Plato’s comparison of philosophy to a second navigation, the one that starts when favorable winds stop blowing and the ship remains immobile, is even more pertinent today. The role of philosophy is precisely to navigate when sailing has become impossible. The philosopher is a navigator who gazes at the stars and sky and understands the seasons and winds, including the play of shadows in the cave. What if, instead of sailing to Syracuse, Plato simply decided to stay on Issa? And what if, unlike Plato’s desire, we do not need philosopher-kings anymore but a simple and modest community of navigators?

  • Michel Foucault: Of Other Spaces

    Michel Foucault: Of Other Spaces

    Portret: Michel Foucault

    The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world. The nineteenth century found its essential mythological resources in the second principle of thermodynamics. The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. One could perhaps say that certain ideological conflicts animating present-day polemics oppose the pious descendents of time and the determined inhabitants of space. Structuralism, or at least which is grouped under this slightly too general name, is the effort to establish, between elements that could have been connected on a temporal axis, an ensemble of relations that makes them appear as juxtaposed, set off against one another, implicated by each other—that makes them appear, in short, as a sort of configuration. Actually, structuralism does not entail denial of time; it does involve a certain manner of dealing with what we call time and what we call history.

    Yet it is necessary to notice that the space which today appears to form the horizon of our concerns, our theory, our systems, is not an innovation; space itself has a history in Western experience, and it is not possible to disregard the fatal intersection of time with space. One could say, by way of retracing this history of space very roughly, that in the Middle Ages there was a hierarchic ensemble of places: sacred places and profane places: protected places and open, exposed places: urban places and rural places (all these concern the real life of men). In cosmological theory, there were the supercelestial places as opposed to the celestial, and the celestial place was in its turn opposed to the terrestrial place. There were places where things had been put because they had been violently displaced, and then on the contrary places where things found their  natural ground and stability. It was this complete hierarchy, this opposition, this intersection of places that constituted what could very roughly be called medieval space: the space of emplacement.

    This space of emplacement was opened up by Galileo. For the real scandal of Galileo’s work lay not so much in his discovery, or rediscovery, that the earth revolved around the sun, but in his constitution of an infinite, and infinitely open space. In such a space the place of the Middle Ages turned out to be dissolved, as it were; a thing’s place was no longer anything but a point in its

    movement, just as the stability of a thing was only its movement indefinitely slowed down. In other words, starting with Galileo and the seventeenth century, extension was substituted for localization.

    Today the site has been substituted for extension which itself had replaced emplacement. The site is defined by relations of proximity between points or elements; formally, we can describe these relations as series, trees, or grids. Moreover, the importance of the site as a problem in contemporary technical work is well known: the storage of data or of the intermediate results of a calculation in the memory of a machine, the circulation of discrete elements with a random output (automobile traffic is a simple case, or indeed the sounds on a telephone line); the identification of marked or coded elements inside a set that may be randomly distributed, or may be arranged according to single or to multiple classifications.

    In a still more concrete manner, the problem of siting or placement arises for mankind in terms of demography. This problem of the human site or living space is not simply that of knowing whether there will be enough space for men in the world—a problem that is certainly quite important—but also that of knowing what relations of propinquity, what type of storage,  circulation, marking, and classification of human elements should be adopted in a given situation in order to achieve a given end. Our epoch is one in which space takes for us the form of relations among sites.

    In any case I believe that the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time. Time probably appears to us only as one of the various distributive operations that are possible for the elements that are spread out in space,

    Now, despite all the techniques for appropriating space, despite  the whole network of knowledge that enables us to delimit or to formalize it, contemporary space is perhaps still not entirely desanctified (apparently unlike time, it would seem, which was detached from the sacred in the nineteenth century). To be sure a certain theoretical desanctification of space (the one signaled by Galileo’s work) has occurred, but we may still not have reached the point of a practical desanctification of space. And perhaps our life is still governed by a certain number of oppositions that remain inviolable, that our institutions and practices have not yet dared to break down. These  are oppositions that we regard as simple givens: for example between private space and public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between the space of leisure and that of work. All these are still nurtured by the hidden presence of the sacred.

    Bachelard’s monumental work and the descriptions of phenomenologists have taught us that we do not live in a homogeneous and empty space, but on the contrary in a space thoroughly imbued with quantities and perhaps thoroughly fantasmatic as well. The space of our primary perception, the space of our

    dreams and that of our passions hold within themselves qualities that seem intrinsic: there is a light, ethereal, transparent space, or again a dark, rough, encumbered space; a space from above, of summits, or on the contrary a space from below of mud; or again a space that can be flowing like sparkling water, or space that is fixed, congealed, like stone or crystal. Yet these analyses, while fundamental for reflection in our time, primarily concern internal space. I should like to speak now of external space.

    The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.

    Of course one might attempt to describe these different sites by looking for the set of relations by which a given site can be defined. For example, describing the set of relations that define the sites of transportation, streets, trains (a train is an extraordinary bundle of relations because it is something through which one goes, it is also something by means of which one can go from one point to another, and then it is also something that goes by). One could describe, via the cluster of relations that allows them to be defined, the sites of temporary relaxation—cafes, cinemas, beaches. Likewise one could describe, via  its network of relations, the closed or semi-closed sites of rest—the house, the bedroom, the bed, et cetera. But among all these sites, I am interested in certain ones that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invent the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect. These spaces, as it were, which are linked with all the others, which however contradict all the other sites, are of two main types.

    HETEROTOPIAS

    First there are the utopias. Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces.

    There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places—places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society— which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are

    outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once  absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.

    As for the heterotopias as such, how can they be described? What meaning do they have? We might imagine a sort of systematic description—I do not say a science because the term is too galvanized now—that would, in a given society, take as its object the study, analysis, description, and ‘reading’ (as some like to say nowadays) of these different spaces, of these other places. As a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live, this description could be called heterotopology.

    Its first principle is that there is probably not a single culture in the world that fails to constitute heterotopias. That is a constant of every human group. But the heterotopias obviously take quite varied forms, and perhaps no one absolutely universal form of heterotopia would be found. We can however class them in two main categories.

    In the so-called primitive societies, there is a certain form of heterotopia that I would call crisis heterotopias, i.e., there are privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis: adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant  women, the elderly, etc. In out society, these crisis heterotopias are persistently disappearing, though a few remnants can still be found. For example, the boarding school, in its nineteenth-century form, or military service for young men, have certainly played such a role, as the first manifestations of sexual virility were in fact supposed to take place “elsewhere”

    than at home. For girls, there was, until the middle of the twentieth century, a tradition called the “honeymoon trip” which was an ancestral theme. The young woman’s deflowering could take place “nowhere” and, at the moment of its occurrence the train or honeymoon hotel was indeed the place of this nowhere, this heterotopia without geographical markers.

    But these heterotopias of crisis are disappearing today and are being replaced, I believe, by what we might call heterotopias of deviation: those in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed. Cases of this are rest homes and psychiatric hospitals, and of course prisons, and one should perhaps add retirement homes that are, as it were, on the borderline between the heterotopia of crisis and the heterotopia of deviation since, after all, old age is a crisis, but is also a deviation since in our society where leisure is the rule, idleness is a sort of deviation.

    The second principle of this description of heterotopias is that a society, as its history unfolds, can make an existing heterotopia function in a very different fashion; for each heterotopia has a precise and determined function within a society and the same heterotopia can, according to the synchrony of the culture in which it occurs, have one function or another.

    As an example I shall take the strange heterotopia of the cemetery. The cemetery is certainly a place unlike ordinary cultural spaces. It is a space that is however connected with all the sites of the city, state or society or village, etc., since each individual, each family has relatives in the cemetery. In western culture the cemetery has practically always existed. But it has undergone important changes. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the cemetery was placed at the heart of the city, next to the church. In it there was a hierarchy of possible tombs. There was the charnel house in which bodies lost the last traces of individuality, there were a few individual tombs and then there were the tombs inside the church. These latter tombs were themselves of two types, either simply tombstones with an inscription, or mausoleums with statues. This cemetery housed inside the sacred space of the church has taken on a quite different cast in modern civilizations, and curiously, it is in a time when civilization has become ‘atheistic,’ as one says very crudely, that western culture has established what is termed the cult of the dead.

    Basically it was quite natural that, in a time of real belief in the resurrection of bodies and the immortality of the soul, overriding importance was not accorded to the body’s remains. On the contrary, from the moment when people are no longer sure that they have a soul or that the body will regain life, it is perhaps necessary to give much more attention to the dead body, which is ultimately the only trace of our existence in the world and in language. In any case, it is from the beginning of the nineteenth century that everyone has a right to her or his own little box for her or his own little personal decay, but on the

    other hand, it is only from that start of the nineteenth century that cemeteries began to be located at the outside border of cities. In correlation with the individualization of death and the bourgeois appropriation of the cemetery, there arises an obsession with death as an ‘illness.’ The dead, it is supposed, bring illnesses to the living, and it is the presence and proximity of the dead right beside the houses, next to the church, almost in the middle of the street, it is this proximity that propagates death itself. This major theme of illness spread by the contagion in the cemeteries persisted until the end of the eighteenth century, until, during the nineteenth century, the shift of cemeteries toward the suburbs was initiated. The cemeteries then came to constitute, no longer the sacred and immortal heart of the city, but the other city, where each family possesses its dark resting place.

    Third principle. The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Thus it is that the theater brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are foreign to one another; thus it is that the cinema is a very odd rectangular room, at the end of which, on a two-dimensional screen, one sees the projection of a three-dimensional space, but perhaps the oldest example of these heterotopias that take the form of contradictory sites is the garden. We must not forget that in the Orient the garden, an astonishing creation that is now a thousand years old, had very deep and seemingly superimposed meanings. The traditional garden of the Persians was a sacred space that was supposed to bring together inside its rectangle four parts representing the four parts of the world, with a space still more sacred than the others that were like an umbilicus, the navel of the world at its center (the basin and water fountain were there); and all the vegetation of the garden was supposed to come together in this space, in this sort of microcosm. As for carpets, they were originally reproductions of gardens (the garden is a rug onto which the whole world comes to enact its symbolic perfection, and the rug is a sort of garden that can move across space).  The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world. The garden has been a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia since the beginnings of antiquity (our modern zoological gardens spring from that source).

    Fourth principle. Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time—which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies. The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time. This situation shows us that the cemetery is indeed a highly heterotopic place since, for the individual, the cemetery begins with this strange heterochrony, the loss of life, and with this quasi-eternity in which her permanent lot is dissolution and disappearance.

    From a general standpoint, in a society like ours heterotopias and heterochronies are structured and distributed in a relatively complex fashion. First of all, there are heterotopias of indefinitely accumulating time, for example museums and libraries, Museums and libraries have become heterotopias in which time never stops building up and topping its own summit, whereas in the seventeenth century, even at the end of the century, museums and libraries were the expression of an individual choice. By contrast, the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity. The museum and the library are heterotopias that are proper to western culture of the nineteenth century.

    Opposite these heterotopias that are linked to the accumulation of time, there are those linked, on the contrary, to time in its most flowing, transitory, precarious aspect, to time in the mode of the festival. These heterotopias are not oriented toward the eternal, they are rather absolutely temporal [chroniques]. Such, for example, are the fairgrounds, these’ marvelous empty sites on the outskirts of cities that teem once or twice a year with stands, displays, heteroclite objects, wrestlers, snakewomen, fortune-tellers, and so forth. Quite recently, a new kind of temporal heterotopia has been invented: vacation villages, such as those Polynesian villages that offer a compact three weeks of primitive and eternal nudity to the inhabitants of the cities. You see, moreover, that through the two forms of heterotopias that come together here, the heterotopia of the festival and that of the eternity of accumulating time, the huts of Djerba are in a sense relatives of libraries and museums, for the rediscovery of Polynesian life abolishes time; yet the experience is just as much the rediscovery of time, it is as if the entire history of humanity reaching back to its origin were accessible in a sort of immediate knowledge.

    Fifth principle. Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place. Either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications. To get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures. Moreover, there are even heterotopias that are entirely consecrated to these activities of purification—purification that is partly religious and partly hygienic, such as the hammin of the Moslems, or else purification that appears to be purely hygienic, as in Scandinavian saunas.

    There are others, on the contrary, that seem to be pure and simple openings, but that generally hide curious exclusions. Everyone can enter into the

    heterotopic sites, but in fact that is only an illusion—we think we enter where we are, by the very fact that we enter, excluded. I am thinking for example, of the famous bedrooms that existed on the great farms of Brazil and elsewhere  in South America. The entry door did not lead into the central room where the family lived, and every individual or traveler who came by had the right to open this door, to enter into the bedroom and to sleep there for a night. Now these bedrooms were such that the individual who went into them never had access to the family’s quarter the visitor was absolutely the guest in transit, was not really the invited guest. This type of heterotopia, which has practically  disappeared from our civilizations, could perhaps be found in the famous American motel rooms where a man goes with his car and his mistress and where illicit sex is both absolutely sheltered and absolutely hidden, kept isolated without however being allowed out in the open.

    Sixth principle. The last trait of heterotopias is that they have a function in relation to all the space that remains. This function unfolds between two extreme poles. Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory (perhaps that is the role that was played by those famous brothels of which  we are now deprived). Or else, on the contrary, their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled. This latter type would be the heterotopia, not of illusion, but of compensation, and I wonder if certain colonies have not functioned somewhat in this manner. In certain cases, they have played, on the level of the general organization of terrestrial space, the role of heterotopias. I am thinking, for example, of the first wave of colonization in the  seventeenth century, of the Puritan societies that the English had founded in America and that were absolutely perfect other places. I am also thinking of those extraordinary Jesuit colonies that were founded in South America: marvelous, absolutely regulated colonies in which human perfection was effectively achieved. The Jesuits of Paraguay established colonies in which existence was regulated at every turn. The village was laid out according to a rigorous plan around a rectangular place at the foot of which was the church; on one side, there was the school; on the other, the cemetery, and then, in front of the church, an avenue set out that another crossed at right angles; each  family had its little cabin along these two axes and thus the sign of Christ was exactly reproduced. Christianity marked the space and geography of the American world with its fundamental sign.

    The daily life of individuals was regulated, not by the whistle, but by the bell. Everyone was awakened at the same time, everyone began work at the same time; meals were at noon and five o’clock, then came bedtime, and at midnight

    came what was called the marital wake-up, that is, at the chime of the churchbell, each person carried out her/his duty.

    Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development  (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.

    This text, entitled “Des Espace Autres,” and published by the French journal Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité in October, 1984, was the basis of a lecture given by Michel Foucault in March 1967.

    From: Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité, October, 1984; (“Des Espaces Autres,” March 1967 Translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec)

    Although not reviewed for publication by the author and thus not part of the official corpus of his work, the manuscript was relaeased into the public domain for an exhibition in Berlin shortly before Michel Foucault’s death.

    Source: https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf

  • Ivan Illich: “Deschooling Society”

    Ivan Illich: “Deschooling Society”

    Below you can find the introduction to Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society, as well as the link to the PDF of the entire book – enjoy!

    INTRODUCTION

    I owe my interest in public education to Everett Reimer. Until we first met in Puerto Rico in 1958, I had never questioned the value of extending obligatory schooling to all people. Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school. The essays given at CIDOC and gathered in this book grew out of memoranda which I submitted to him, and which we discussed during 1970, the thirteenth year of our dialogue. The last chapter contains my after- thoughts on a conversation with Erich Fromm on Bachofen’s Mutterrecht.

    Since 1967 Reimer and I have met regularly at the Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC) in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Valentine Borremans, the director of the Center, also joined our dialogue, and constantly urged me to test our thinking against the realities of Latin America and Africa. This book re- flects her conviction that the ethos, not just the institutions, of society ought to be “deschooled.”

    Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teach- ers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bed- room), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue’s responsibility until it engulfs his pupils’ life- times will deliver universal education. The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring. We hope to con- tribute concepts needed by those who conduct such counterfoil research on education — and also to those who seek alternatives to other established service industries.

    On Wednesday mornings, during the spring and summer of 1970, I submitted the various parts of this book to the participants in our CIDOC programs in Cuernavaca. Dozens of them made suggestions or provided criticisms. Many will recognize their ideas in these pages, especially Paulo Freire, Peter Berger, and Jose Maria Bulnes, as well as Joseph Fitzpatrick, John Holt, Angel Quintero, Layman Allen, Fred Goodman, Gerhard Ladner, Didier Piveteau, Joel Spring, Augusto Salazar Bondy, and Dennis Sul- livan. Among my critics, Paul Goodman most radically obliged me to revise my thinking. Robert Silvers provided me with brilliant editorial assistance on Chapters 1, 3, and 6, which have appeared in The New York Review of Books.

    Reimer and I have decided to publish separate views of our joint research. He is working on a compre- hensive and documented exposition, which will be subjected to several months of further critical ap- praisal and be published late in 1971 by Doubleday & Company. Dennis Sullivan, who acted as secre-

    tary at the meetings between Reimer and myself, is preparing a book for publication in the spring of 1972 which will place my argument in the context of current debate about public schooling in the United States. I offer this volume of essays now in the hope that it will provoke additional critical contributions to the sessions of a seminar on “Alternatives in Education” planned at CIDOC in Cuernavaca for 1972 and 1973.

    I intend to discuss some perplexing issues which are raised once we embrace the hypothesis that soci- ety can be deschooled; to search for criteria which may help us distinguish institutions which merit de- velopment because they support learning in a deschooled milieu; and to clarify those personal goals which would foster the advent of an Age of Leisure (schole) as opposed to an economy dominated by service industries.

    DESCHOOLING SOCIETY by Ivan Illich (you can find the PDF here)

  • A Conversation with Bifo: Future Islands

    A Conversation with Bifo: Future Islands

    On the 28th of July 2021, !Mediengruppe Bitnik recorded Franco “Bifo” Berardi in conversation with Srećko Horvat and Saša Savanović on Vis. The conversation is about the meaning of the notion of “island”, autonomy, pleasure and death, extinction and resistance. And, of course, about the necessity and multiplicity of possibilities for the School of ISSA. The conversation was recorded on a very hot day (temperatures were hitting 40 °C), and just as the sun was setting, Bifo described it as a Philip K. Dick sun. The conversation took place a few days after Bifo visited ISSA for the first time.

    Listen to the full conversation here:

  • Gilles Deleuze: Desert Islands

    Gilles Deleuze: Desert Islands

    Desert Islands

    Geographers say there are two kinds of islands. This is valuable information for the imagination because it confirms what the imagination already knew. Nor is it the only case where science makes mythology more concrete, and mythology makes science more vivid. Continental islands are accidental, derived islands. They are separated from a continent, born of disarticulation, erosion, fracture; they survive the absorption of what once contained them. Oceanic islands are originary, essential islands. Some are formed from coral reefs and display a genuine organism. Others emerge from underwater eruptions, bringing to the light of day a movement from the lowest depths. Some rise slowly; some disappear and then return, leaving us no time to annex them. These two kinds of islands, continental and originary, reveal a profound opposition between ocean and land. Continental islands serve as a reminder that the sea is on top of the earth, taking advantage of the slightest sagging in the highest structures; oceanic islands, that the earth is still there, under the sea, gathering its strength to punch through to the surface. We can assume that these elements are in constant strife, displaying a repulsion for one another. In this we find nothing to reassure us. Also, that an island is deserted must appear philosophically normal to us. Humans cannot live, nor live in security, unless they assume that the active struggle between earth and water is over, or at least contained. People like to call these two elements mother and father, assigning them gender roles according to the whim of their fancy. They must somehow persuade themselves that a struggle of this kind does not exist, or that it has somehow ended. In one way or another, the very existence of islands is the negation of this point of view, of this effort, this conviction. That England is populated will always come as a surprise; humans can live on an island only by forgetting what an island represents. Islands are either from before or for after humankind. But everything that geography has told us about the two kinds of islands, the imagination knew already on its own and in another way. The elan that draws humans toward islands extends the double movement that produces islands in themselves. Dreaming of islands—whether with joy or in fear, it doesn’t matter—is dreaming of pulling away, of being already separate, far from any continent, of being lost and alone—or it is dreaming of starting from scratch, recreating, beginning anew. Some islands drifted away from the continent, but the island is also that toward which one drifts; other islands originated in the ocean, but the island is also the origin, radical and absolute. Certainly, separating and creating are not mutually exclusive: one has to hold one’s own when one is separated, and had better be separate to create anew; nevertheless, one of the two tendencies always predominates. In this way, the movement of the imagination of islands takes up the movement of their production, but they don’t have the same objective. It is the same movement, but a different goal. It is no longer the island that is separated from the continent, it is humans who find themselves separated from the world when on an island. It is no longer the island that is created from the bowels of the earth through the liquid depths, it is humans who create the world anew from the island and on the waters. Humans thus take up for themselves both movements of the island and are able to do so on an island that, precisely, lacks one kind of movement: humans can drift toward an island that is nonetheless originary, and they can create on an island that has merely drifted away. On closer inspection, we find here a new reason for every island to be and remain in theory deserted.

    An island doesn’t stop being deserted simply because it is inhabited. While it is true that the movement of humans toward and on the island takes up the movement of the island prior to humankind, some people can occupy the island—it is still deserted, all the more so, provided they are sufficiently, that is, absolutely separate, and provided they are sufficient, absolute creators. Certainly, this is never the case in fact, though people who are shipwrecked approach such a condition. But for this to be the case, we need only extrapolate in imagination the movement they bring with them to the island. Only in appearance does such a movement put an end to the island’s desertedness; in reality, it takes up and prolongs the elan that produced the island as deserted. Far from compromising it, humans bring the desertedness to its perfection and highest point. In certain conditions which attach them to the very movement of things, humans do not put an end to desertedness, they make it sacred. Those people who come to the island indeed occupy and populate it; but in reality, were they sufficiently separate, sufficiently creative, they would give the island only a dynamic image of itself, a consciousness of the movement which produced the island, such that through them the island would in the end become conscious of itself as deserted and unpeopled. The island would be only the dream of humans, and humans, the pure consciousness of the island.

    For this to be the case, there is again but one condition: humans would have to reduce themselves to the movement that brings them to the island, the movement which prolongs and takes up the elan that produced the island. Then geography and the imagination would be one. To that question so dear to the old explorers—”which creatures live on deserted islands?”—one could only answer: human beings live there already, but uncommon humans, they are absolutely separate, absolute creators, in short, an Idea of humanity, a prototype, a man who would almost be a god, a woman who would be a goddess, a great Amnesiac, a pure Artist, a consciousness of Earth and Ocean, an enormous hurricane, a beautiful witch, a statue from the Easter Islands. There you have a human being who precedes itself. Such a creature on a deserted island would be the deserted island itself, insofar as it imagines and reflects itself in its first movement. A consciousness of the earth and ocean, such is the deserted island, ready to begin the world anew. But since human beings, even voluntarily, are not identical to the movement that puts them on the island, they are unable to join with the elan that produces the island; they always encounter it from the outside, and their presence in fact spoils its desertedness. The unity of the deserted island and its inhabitant is thus not actual, only imaginary, like the idea of looking behind the curtain when one is not behind it. More importantly, it is doubtful whether the individual imagination, unaided, could raise itself up to such an admirable identity; it would require the collective imagination, what is most profound in it, i.e. rites and mythology.

    In the facts themselves we find at least a negative confirmation of all this, if we consider what a deserted island is in reality, that is, geographically. The island, and all the more so the deserted island, is an extremely poor or weak notion from the point of view of geography. This is to its credit. The range of islands has no objective unity, and deserted islands have even less. The deserted island may indeed have extremely poor soil. Deserted, the island may be a desert, but not necessarily. The real desert is uninhabited only insofar as it presents no conditions that by rights would make life possible, whether vegetable, animal, or human. On the contrary, the lack of inhabitants on the deserted island is a pure fact due to circumstance, in other words, the island’s surroundings. The island is what the sea surrounds and what we travel around. It is like an egg. An egg of the sea, it is round. It is as though the island had pushed its desert outside. What is deserted is the ocean around it. It is by virtue of circumstance, for other reasons than the principle on which the island depends, that ships pass in the distance and never come ashore. The island is deserted more than it is a desert. So much so, that in itself the island may contain the liveliest of rivers, the most agile fauna, the brightest flora, the most amazing nourishment, the hardiest of savages, and the castaway as its most precious fruit, it may even contain, however momentarily, the ship that comes to take him away. For all that, it is not any less a deserted island. To change this situation, we would have to overhaul the general distribution of the continents, the state of the seas, and the lines of navigation.

    This is to state once again that the essence of the deserted island is imaginary and not actual, mythological and not geographical. At the same time, its destiny is subject to those human conditions that make mythology possible. Mythology is not simply willed into existence, and the peoples of the earth quickly ensured they would no longer understand their own myths. It is at this very moment  literature begins. Literature is the attempt to interpret, in an ingenious way, the myths we no longer understand, at the moment we no longer understand them, since we no longer know how to dream them or reproduce them. Literature is the competition of misinterpretations that consciousness naturally and necessarily produces on themes of the unconscious, and like every competition it has its prizes. One would have to show exactly how in this sense mythology fails and dies in two classic novels of the deserted island, Robinson and Suzanne. Suzanne and the Pacific emphasizes the separated aspect of islands, the separation of the young woman who finds herself there;1 Robinson Crusoe, the creative aspect, the beginning anew. It is true that the way mythology fails is different in each case. In the case of Giraudoux’s Suzanne, mythology dies the prettiest, most graceful death. In Robinson’s case, its death is heavy indeed. One can hardly imagine a more boring novel, and it is sad to see children still reading it today. Robinson’s vision of the world resides exclusively in property; never have we seen an owner more ready to preach. The mythical recreation of the world from the deserted island gives way to the reconstitution of everyday bourgeois life from a reserve of capital. Everything is taken from the ship. Nothing is invented. It is all painstakingly applied on the island. Time is nothing but the time necessary for capital to produce a benefit as the outcome of work. And the providential function of God is to guarantee a return. God knows his people, the hardworking honest type, by their beautiful properties, and the evil doers, by their poorly maintained, shabby property. Robinson’s companion is not Eve, but Friday, docile towards work, happy to be a slave, and too easily disgusted by cannibalism. Any healthy reader would dream of seeing him eat Robinson. Robinson Crusoe represents the best illustration of that thesis which affirms the close ties between capitalism and Protestantism. The novel develops the failure and the death of mythology in Puritanism. Things are quite different with Suzanne. In her case, the deserted island is a depository of ready-made, luxurious objects. The island bears immediately what it has taken civilization centuries to produce, perfect, and ripen. But mythology still dies, though in Suzanne’s case it dies in a particularly Parisian way. Suzanne has nothing to create anew. The deserted island provides her with the double of every object from the city, in the windows of the shops; it is a double without consistency, separated from the real, since it does not receive the solidity that objects ordinarily take on in human relations, amidst buying and selling, exchanges and presents. She is an insipid young woman. Her companions are not Adam, but young cadavers, and when she reenters the world of living men, she will love them in a uniform way, like a priest, as though love were the minimum threshold of her perception.

    What must be recovered is the mythological life of the deserted island. However, in its very failure, Robinson gives us some indication: he first needed a reserve of capital. In Suzanne’s case, she was first and foremost separate. And neither the one nor the other could be part of a couple. These three indications must be restored to their mythological purity. We have to get back to the movement of the imagination that makes the deserted island a model, a prototype of the collective soul. First, it is true that from the deserted island it is not creation but re-creation, not the beginning but a re-beginning that takes place. The deserted island is the origin, but a second origin. From it everything begins anew. The island is the necessary minimum for this re-beginning, the material that survives the first origin, the radiating seed or egg that must be sufficient to re-produce everything. Clearly, this presupposes that the formation of the world happens in two stages, in two periods of time, birth and re-birth, and that the second is just as necessary and essential as the first, and thus the first is necessarily compromised, born for renewal and already renounced in a catastrophe. It is not that there is a second birth because there has been a catastrophe, but the reverse, there is a catastrophe after the origin because there must be, from the beginning, a second birth. Within ourselves we can locate the source of such a theme: it is not the production of life that we look for when we judge it to be life, but its reproduction. The animal whose mode of reproduction remains unknown to us has not yet taken its place among living beings. It is not enough that everything begin, everything must begin again once the cycle of possible combinations has come to completion. The second moment does not succeed the first: it is the reappearance of the first when the cycle of the other moments has been completed. The second origin is thus more essential than the first, since it gives us the law of repetition, the law of the series, whose first origin gave us only moments. But this theme, even more than in our fantasies, finds expression in every mythology. It is well known as the myth of the flood. The ark sets down on the one place on earth that remains uncovered by water, a circular and sacred place, from which the world begins anew. It is an island or a mountain, or both at once: the island is a mountain under water, and the mountain, an island that is still dry. Here we see original creation caught in a re-creation, which is concentrated in a holy land in the middle of the ocean. This second origin of the world is more important than the first: it is a sacred island. Many myths recount that what we find there is an egg, a cosmic egg. Since the island is a second origin, it is entrusted to man and not to the gods. It is separate, separated by the massive expanse of the flood. Ocean and water embody a principle of segregation such that, on sacred islands, exclusively female communities can come to be, such as the island of Circe or Calypso. After all, the beginning started from God and from a couple, but not the new beginning, the beginning again, which starts from an egg: mythological maternity is often a parthenogenesis. The idea of a second origin gives the deserted island its whole meaning, the survival of a sacred place in a world that is slow to re-begin. In the ideal of beginning anew there is something that precedes the beginning itself, that takes it up to deepen it and delay it in the passage of time. The desert island is the material of this something immemorial, this something most profound.

    Source: https://monoskop.org/images/2/23/Deleuze_Gilles_Desert_Islands_and_Other_Texts_1953-1974.pdf