Reposted from Platform for Pedagogy, June 2010

In what ways can public pedagogy strengthen communities as an alternative to consumer-exchange based relationships?

Intellectual work and culture can certainly create communities and collectivity—politically motivated or otherwise. Pedagogy itself is usually associated with some kind of process of socialization—a lovely word, really. The echo in your question seems to be about the reification of community making—at least in densely metropolitan areas—into lifestyle brands, products and industries. Orienting a cultural project against this sort of historical development in culture and popular taste on a foundational level to me seems a bit academic and uninspired. Can we imagine, instead, imparting moral and intellectual questions as a critical component of popular taste—rather than simply pushing them out into the world as that taste’s solvent?

Full interview… Read the rest of this entry »

7:30 Wednesday April 28 - 5651 San Pablo Ave, Oakland

Kultural Kapital is a class that was first held at The Public School in Los Angeles.
A variation of this conversation is now being organized as an informal reading / discussion group in the bay area.

The idea is to explore how social/cultural capital operates within the arts.
In other words, how value, authorship, credit, and symbolic power is distributed across collaborative projects or among people within a particular “scene” and especially for those who imagine themselves in opposition to traditional capitalist forces.

This discussion would reflect on current trends (in the bay area?): collaborative, curatorial, pedagogical, involving alternative-economies, celebrating “community” and de-authored production, and so on. In the context of an ongoing financial crisis, it also seems important to understand how cultural capital is related to real economic flows, to grants and art markets, for non-profits and established art institutions, and within the field of marketing or advertising.

The “class” will not have a teacher. Hopefully, it will be conversational: Informed by the readings but not circumscribed by them.
For the first get-together you may want to read:
+ Pierre Bourdieu - The Field of Cultural Production (highlighted excerpt)
+ Diedrich Diederichsen - On (Surplus) Value In Art
+ Marysia Lewandowska & Neil Cummings - An Economy of Love
download

Each meeting will include brief presentations by people who have special relationships to cultural capital (like case-studies or story-time).
On the 28th, it will be Luke Fischbeck and Joseph del Pesco talking about some of the projects they are working on…

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Sight School
Luke
Joseph
The Public School, KK Klass in LA
a.aaaarg for additional reading

“[Texas Tower number 4,] anchored in 30 fathoms of water, [about 180 feet,] rocked ominously in even moderate seas. Navy underwater survey teams identified and corrected some of the problems found with the supports, but nothing could offset the continual damage below the surface. [Hurricane Donna] battered the tower with 132-mile-an-hour winds and waves in excess of 50 feet, doing enough damage to force the Air Force and its construction contractor to specify February 1, 1961 as the date to begin completely renovating TT-4. A caretaker crew of 14 contractor maintenance workers and 14 Air Force personnel stayed aboard the tower. On January 15, 1961, a fierce winter gale bore in on the hapless station and ripped off all 3 of its legs in succession. Its 28 occupants sank with the platform into the sea; none survived.

Excerpt from “The Emerging Shield”