A group of researchers from the
EIPCP
(European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies) formed by all these people, has launched the project
Creating Worlds
. As can be read on the project’s page, the title comes from a quote by Maurizio Lazzarato in which he says: ” In control societies, the objective is no longer “appropriation”—as it was in sovereign societies—nor is it “combining and increasing” power, as it was in disciplinary societies. The objective now is “creating worlds.” .
The project, which will be developed over several years, until 2012, aims to “explore the relationship between artistic production and knowledge production, in the context of the transformations and crises of contemporary capitalism” and is structured around three thematic areas: the critique of cognitive capital, the knowledge factory and its discontents, and the overlaps of art and knowledge production.
Of these three points, we are especially interested in the second, which traces a direct line of thought between the current transformations of the productive system and education. Specifically, those responsible for Creating Worlds are wondering what happens to the old knowledge factory at a time when knowledge itself becomes the raw material of capitalism, pointing out how universities become objects of desire for neoliberal transformations, elements of competition between regions and continents; also subjects of the struggles against these transformations and these new forms of competition.
We have talked about these issues in this same blog and on several occasions, and it seems that the relationship between economic and educational systems is becoming increasingly relevant from certain areas of study of cultural policies. Precisely for this reason, a couple of questions never cease to surprise us:
Firstly, it seems that, in a kind of disciplinary castling, the discourse on education ignores this relationship, restricting its analysis, in the worst case and more or less explicitly, to strictly methodological questions.
The second question may have a bit more substance, and that is that it seems to us that the approach of this research and other similar ones lacks, with all due humility, sufficient breadth of vision. We say this because the analysis that guides such studies is always reduced to higher education and overlooks the role of primary and secondary education in all this. Let’s go bit by bit: Maurizio Lazzarato himself wrote in this article published a couple of years ago the following: ” The worker is an entrepreneur and a businessman of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of his own income. What is demanded of individuals is not to ensure the productivity of labor but the profitability of a capital (of their own capital, of a capital inseparable from their own person). The individual must consider himself as a fragment of capital, a molecular fraction of capital. The worker is no longer a simple factor of production, the individual is not, properly speaking, a “labor force”, but a “competitive-capital”, a “competent-machine” “. As Lazzarato points out in that same article, the “entrepreneur” is offered as the new model of subjectivation of cognitive capitalism, the model of homo oeconomicus that neoliberalism needs to rebuild. We sense that the construction of this model has more to do with the formation of a
We are given to emphasize that these apparently abstract reflections have, contrary to what one might think, an effective correlate in the most everyday situations and the most concrete policies. An example of “meridian clarity”: in Catalonia, the local employment services, largely overwhelmed by the avalanche of people who are currently coming to their offices, recommend, by indication of the autonomous government, “self-employment” as a possible job opportunity; most of these people reject this possibility, surely because they lack “entrepreneurial spirit”, that is, because they consider themselves possessors of a “labor force” and not as a “human capital”. It would be a different story if their school life had taken place in an environment such as the one proposed by the Circle of Entrepreneurs in a recent report entitled
The entrepreneurial spirit: an essential element to face the Spanish economic crisis
(pdf), in which they point out, within the section “Educational framework” of their battery of proposals, the following: “The educational field is called to occupy a prominent place in the promotion of the entrepreneurial spirit” and: “Education in Spain has to be based and organized on a series of fundamental values for personal, social and economic development. Effort, continuous learning, the desire to excel, the assumption of risks, the capacity for autonomous thinking and learning or the recognition of merits are essential values and capacities to undertake in any facet of life; the organization and teaching methods should be considered as the ultimate goal of their transmission to the younger generations” (to the younger generations!) or finally: “Education in any place and at any time must aspire, by definition, to promote personal qualities such as creativity, initiative, responsibility, or independence, which are precisely those that are at the heart of the entrepreneurial spirit“. That’s all…
For all this, it seems to us that to the express will of the project Creating Worlds to “update micropolitical processes of self-organized education and auto-formazione that go beyond universities” we should add that of updating those processes that, in the same direction, go beyond schools.