This month, we are very glad to have our first guest-edited issue of e-flux journal care of Irit Rogoff, whose activities we have followed with great interest over the years, drawn to her insights into the potentialities of education unbounded. Already a number of contributions to the journal in its first year (those of Tom Holert, Luis Camnitzer, and Dieter Lesage, in addition to Rogoff’s own immensely influential text, “Turning”) have surveyed current conditions and possible reformulations of educational structures. But at a time when even the status quo of many educational institutions is threatened by budget cuts, tuition hikes, and measures taken to standardize and regiment learning (see for instance the recent protests throughout the University of California system or the Bologna Process in general), and the art world increasingly seems to absorb an “educational turn” as a mannerist curiosity, it becomes all the more important to consider how forms of learning and exchange, of thinking and making, can take place within flexible, temporary, unstable configurations—which may or may not be educational or instructive—unrestricted by measurable outcomes or predetermined expectations.
—Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle
All around us we see a search for other languages and other modalities of knowledge production, a pursuit of other modes of entering the problematics of “education” that defy, in voice and in practice, the limitations being set up by the forces of bureaucratic pragmatism: a decade of increasing control and regulation, of market values imposed on an essential public right, and of middle-brow positivism privileged over any form of criticality—matched by a decade of unprecedented self-organization, of exceptionally creative modes of dissent, of criticality, and of individual ambitions that are challenging people to experiment with how they inhabit the field, how they inhabit knowledge.
Our notion of “Education Actualized” lies in the tension between these antagonistic spheres. If we think of actualization as the incarnation of an idea of “an education” within one particular educational system, we arrive at the duality we inhabit and work with. This issue is teeming with voices—angry and bewildered, critical and speculative, voices of ideas put to the test, producing fictions of impossible encounters—all efforts to grasp and locate, to actualize and inhabit this ongoing process in which we are all immersed.
Read the full article here.