Alun Rowlands, “Symposium for a Community of Unlearning,” originally published in Communion, ed. Ben Judd (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2014), 34–43, with texts from Emma Cocker and Pandora Syperek

This chapter, Symposium for a Community of Unlearning, proposes an experimental and politically engaged rethinking of collective and individual value systems through the ethical act of unlearning. Drawing on Blanchot’s ecstatic community, The Unavowable Community, 1982, and Nancy’s The Inoperative Community, 1991, the text situates community as a site of moral freedom rather than shared identity, an assemblage “of those who have nothing in common”. The text constructs an unstable epistemology operating “in the tense, poetic spaces between documentary and fiction”, where the dissolution of the individual becomes a condition for collective intensity and transformation.

Unlearning, as it is framed, functions as both a method and a mode of critique —a “dynamic amnesiac method” that “erases hierarchies that privilege objective knowledge”, recalibrating the relation between researcher and subject. The chapter advocates a non-hierarchical politics of collaboration founded on participation, uncertainty, and “productive non-reading”.

The symposium envisioned is a performative community of experimentation—ephemeral, model-like, and open to dissolution and death—where ritual, performance, and “non-knowledge” (Agamben) become tools for reimagining research as a shared and ungovernable practice. Through this framework the chapter advances an alternative ethics of knowledge production —intensity, affect, and the transformative potential of un-working over disciplinary rigour or institutional coherence.

ABSTRACT OR PREAMBLE

Our symposium seeks to weave new connections between our value and belief systems, plotting their effect on our communal and singular spaces through the documents and narratives that govern, shape and guide them. Working directly with the networks of people and practices that surround us, we often employ tangential forms of anthropology, focusing on the relational limits, endings, translations, transitions and losses through a provocative and often erroneous search. Our search for an unstable knowledge operates in the tense, poetic spaces between documentary and fiction. Breaking and reshuffling ideas is an intensely political project. Repurposing the habits of learning, the urgency of unlearning attempts to invalidate entrenched patterns of understanding. 

The community, its practices, rituals and its location is the work. The group is the work. The inconsistencies amongst the group lead to distraction and searching in anyplace other than here. This somewhere else, this whatever, is where we should start, acceding all decisions to the group, at least those decisions transmitted through experimentation and desire to learn. ‘Unworking’ and ‘unlearning’ notable methodologies will be key – disentangling first person ethnography, we seek to catalyse looking towards vision. Actors co-creating the event, ritual and social bond might afford us particular direction of how we encounter each other. But this collaborative ‘fieldwork’, with its equality of intelligences, allows us to navigate a particularly uncertain terrain of misunderstanding and productive non-reading. Only through the idea of a group will we realise - via sharing and losing  - our research. Only through the group will there be intensity, an intensity that the individual alone could never attain. Dissolution of the individual is therefore necessary. The group must be open to death.

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DAY 1 – THE QUESTIONS OF COMMUNITY

I can imagine a community with as loose a form as you will – even formless: the only condition is that an experience of moral freedom be shared in common, and not reduced to the flat, self-cancelling, self-denying meaning of particular freedom…  There can be no knowledge without a community of researchers, nor any inner experience without the community of those who live it… Communication is a fact that is not in any way added onto human reality, but rather constitutes it. (1)

Can community be more than the thin ties between groups of people? Are our common goals, common attributes, common skills or deficiencies the basis for community? Is the desire for community a desire for our ecstatic selves to exceed our individuality? Can we project ourselves as affiliates of an assemblage, a group or community? Does our passion for community reveal the absence of community? What does an aesthetic community look like? Is to think a community to share in the folds of history that expand through time? And what of a community of those who have nothing in common? (2)

The search for community haunts our contemporary societies, which are fragmented into virtual positions, splintered into incommensurable and incommunicable assertions, aspirations and agreements. Our search for community reveals itself in two modes. Firstly, our political urge for solidarity, mirrored in the deception of groups, unions or states. And, secondly, our sovereignty escaping its own immanence pursues others in the headlong rush to dissolution. This sense of community lies ahead of us, yet to be discovered. The singular self is incomplete; it does not desire recognition but contest, seeking others through ecstatic and often violent desire. (3)

Affiliation of any kind produces ties, commitment, responsibilities, it weaves a social fabric of exchanges, bonds, rejoinders; it defines civil duties, solidarity, and debts.  And yet the passion for community is not fulfilled by membership in these bathetic groups, by communities based on rational calculation or societal ties. Our thinking through community cannot be invented, created or established through our communal work or by congregating in mutual groups, as the rhetoric of society or historical destiny would have us believe. It is only when we have nothing in common that we can face each other, in our rituals over time. The promise that emerges cannot be disengaged - it haunts us. The true community fleetingly visualizes the scenario as an absence. Ungoverned by practices, exchanges, projects, and obligations it cannot be maintained and dissolves as soon as we are re-incorporated into the learned social. 

Experimental communities place emphasis on both the temporary and the model-like character of their endeavours. Here, bringing together individuals with different knowledge and experience in a collaborative process is the essential factor that distinguishes these communities from those rigidly defined by one specific feature. Endeavouring towards the figure of community is fraught with ephemeral distinctions. If the collective efforts exceed a mayfly temporality, internal divisions often signal collapse and inertia. Our discussion orbits the potential of art to militate an affective communitarian politics. Here, we are involved not as members of a particular social habitat but as co-creators of a ‘desire-based production’ for long-term use. 

Dani and Sheilah ReStack, Cuts in the Day is an intimacy emergent—a love-story that celebrates and questions what it means to be a queer family in contemporary society.

The social appearance of a group working together makes visible for the first time their ‘co-appearance’ or ‘compearance’. (4) In order to compear, all the members of the group play a part in building a composition that stages reciprocal cooperation and becomes significant enough to substitute the members. The figure that compears is what we call community. This community imagines that reality can be transformed rather than just being managed. In this sense, politics becomes a form of stewardship. The group cuts a vital profile and enables the compearance of a real community diagraming what actual society should be. Discussion points powerfully to the question of what constitutes our co-existence today; the ontological question of the political arises with the evaporating possibility of a polity that would incarnate such a “being-with”. (5)

We digress into consideration of film, as mode of documentation, capture and colonisation. Film becomes an analogical machine, a learning machine, a guessing machine, an aesthetic machine and a self-correcting machine. Such films are occasionally closer to ocular stammering than to actual discourse. In their performative reiterations they may be read as a countenance of scientific failure. Spoken voice-over guides throughout, restlessly preventing connection with any one image in particular. Signs evacuate to evade ending up being consumed in the belly of coherent knowledge or anthropological rationality. Errant, inflexible, distant signs return to the space where subjectivity takes shape. The depths of these waters make the surface less transparent but more readily reflective. This is the luminescent space where the narrators, the filmmakers, the ethnographers eventually let themselves be caught up in the concentric circles that emerge in the sphere of the translatable. 

We do not communicate to understand each other more. The tools of our research capitalise on and the production of ever more connections. They merely reproduce the industrial glut of audio-visual, text and image material transmitted with interest. Attention becomes currency, the need to be seen and heard across increasing bandwidth. In every particular interpretation, we receive multiple voices. The voice is continually shared and is itself a sharing. There is polyphony at the core of each voice. All voices are in themselves exposed, plural, revealing themselves to the unknown. To exist, to communicate, we need to address ourselves to another. Community or communication renders the request for speaking possible.

There is both insistence and resistance with a newly articulated relation to work and labour – the ‘unworking’. (6) The ‘unworking’ community does not realise or represent itself through the production and work of its participants. The desire to communicate (to mesmerise in speech or sound or image or performance our experiences) defines what we crave or who and what we are, and is being colonised beyond that of conveying and understanding. We could speculate that there is the ephemeral community of artists and writers, who work for those that they do not and will not ever know – the anonymous body of readers and spectators. We write at anonymous distance for unknown friends, others not engaged in a project with us, others who do not work for or with us, others who have nothing in common with us. We work towards a “community of those that have nothing in common”. (7) Our anonymous communication delineates bonds of friendship and the ghostly shape of our desires. (8) We are never freed from this ecstatic desire that points to a hauntological absence of community. Our research is dispatched, enveloped in the promise of community.

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DAY 2 – NOTES ON METHOD OR REMEMBER THAT WE DON’T KNOW

My 'I am I' is no hard, small crystal inside me, but a cloudy, a vapour, a mist, a smoke hovering round my skull, hovering around my spine, my arms, my legs. That's what I am, a vegetable animal wrapped in a mental cloud, and with the will-power to project this cloud into the consciousness of others. (9)

Unlearning becomes our conduit, a means of connecting us with the world. As a verb it is both an individual and collective tendency; a voluntaristic tendency, allowing us – everyone – to rethink and re-interrogate what we assume we know and think. Art, perhaps, has the potential to reformulate our perceptive understanding of the world. (10) Unlearning is a dynamic amnesiac method in operation, erasing hierarchies that privilege objective knowledge. Knowledge proceeds from the senses. Acquired knowledge coalesces into a blockage between the event and experience. We argue that the value of objective knowledge is overestimated, considered counter-productive in its devaluation of ignorant subjectivity. No doubt such an enterprise will necessitate us to begin by parading misanthropic dichotomies of subject-object or animal-human-mineral. 

Unlearning initiates a long process of enquiry fraught with ethical probing formulated as - “only that which is not pushed to the extreme has no return effect”. (11) Unlearning enables us to critique the thought-experiment of our own research interests. It tests the relations between interlocutors and unstable ideas of audience and participation in the name of exploration. The precarity of these positions need to forego any deterministic approach for us to ask the questions in the subjunctive tense. The ‘what if question’ is an attempt to unlearn - it is an interrogative act of disobedience and manifestation of resistance. 

This question of unlearning is not so much to create a sense of ambivalence towards the tension that marks the conflicts between positions, but to create a sense of theoretical doubt concerning the forms of categorical knowledge of these cultural, intellectual, historical, and philosophical positions. Our point of departure forges an ethnographic poetics, draws on various disciplines to irradiate the corpse of historical knowledge. We change everything we contact, and everything we touch changes the terms of our assemblages, since it contests the disjointing ascription of agency. We have to unlearn the inherited practice of ethnography, as necessarily guilty, as manifestation of power hierarchies. Acknowledging that disciplines inject forms of power relations into our field, we engage with the recalibration of knowledge forms through unworking and unbuilding these poetics. We never hesitate amidst the flux of participation. 

“If there is someone you do not wish to recognize as a political being, you begin by not seeing them as the bearers of politicalness, by not understanding what they say, by not hearing that it is speech coming out of their mouth.” (12)

The mute ‘objects of study’ and the agency of the researcher ‘subject’ configures the space of knowledge production. This spatial configuration is under the stewardship of the anthropologist subject, while the object of knowledge is consigned to an observable quantity, an object of interest to be counted, ordered, and regulated. In discussion we note, the equality of intelligence is not the equality of manifestations of intelligence (i.e. knowledge) but rather the non-hierarchy of theoretical capacity. Equality is not something that can be seen or measured, and neither can it be considered a goal or future state. Equality must be approached as it is practiced and verified; it has no value in itself but only in its effects through practical experimentations. This scenario banally presupposes the condition for understanding – me to you and back again – speaking beings versus those who produce only noise. Our aesthetic expertise activates, particularly in those moments of participation, a disruption and redistribution of anthropological roles. In turn, what can be seen, heard, thought, said, and done in our episteme, we argue, would be a politics of collaboration. The politics at work in the collaborative is a presumption of equality, which is primarily a disruption of disciplines, its suspension, interruption and reconfiguration.

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DAY 3 – THINK – FEEL – KNOW SORTIES

Some people love to divide and classify, while others are bridge-makers weaving relations that turn a divide into a living contrast, one whose power is to affect, to produce thinking and feeling… But bridge-making is a located practice. (13)

Papers argue for curiosity as state of mind. They emphasise a quality of attention. Objects of study are misconstrued via over-intensive scrutiny in the name of rigour – our scenario foregrounds ‘the hunch’. Dwelling in disciplines remote from our own the desire for knowledge is too disparate for one faculty. Drives for novelty and knowing desire nothing but to know. Objects of illicit knowledge fuel curiosity and a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds and makes us. Interpretation is a rational straight jacket that makes the world more comfortable, manageable, and less potent. A case is made for artists to have freedom to browse through ideas with the curiosity of the unskilled novitiate. An irrational approach to knowledge is promoted, tempered through the recognition that this is a privileged position. To see the world as a fragmented ensemble and to see that fragmentation as traumatic requires us to establish some continuity. The more we progress the more indiscriminate categories appear and oppositions collapse. Irrationalism and the thirst for knowledge are not contradictory towards this indefinable end. Open interrogation allows research to be focused on all-encompassing projects meant to achieve an image or a history compressed into a singular event, a total contraction of knowledge within representation. To the mind of those assembled there is a form of over-communication and over-saturation in our efforts to gather and structure knowledge. A complete worldview, which, by all appearances, allows subjectivity to creep in, seems to finally resemble an artistic project. 

I FIND THEIR TEXTS TOO PUZZLING. THEY REDUCE A) FORMULAS TO WORDS & B) IDEAS TO FORMULAS. FOR INSTANCE I SAY ‘SOUL’ A SIMPLE FORMULA LIKE ALL THAT DEAL WITH ENERGY, BUT THAT VAGUE INCREMENT OF ‘PSYCHE’ (THOUGH ITSELF IREDUCIBLE) FALLS INTO NO EAST NUMBER SYSTEM, THUS RENDERING MAN’S GAINS & LOSSES, THESE CLERKS DISCOUNT THE LOSSES OF FACULTIES OR GAINS IN WISDOM FOR THEIR CALCULATIONS START FROM A TREACHEROUS, LEDEAN 0. 12:88, THEN IS A FACULTY READ OUT DESIGNED TO KEEP US GROPING IN THE DARK. I SAY: START SHAKILY, END OFF THE MARK! (14)

Attention, inattention and distraction, our frustration is that nothing is unknowable. In this sense our research is at odds with the computational constancy and equilibrium of ‘know-how’ and closer to the all-over smears, surges and spasms, the unpredictable swell and dip of “no-how”. (15) The artist-researcher-ethnographer acknowledges his or her vulnerable relationship to knowledge. They are engaged in constant co-productive figuring open to what knowledge could be. But the complex claims for knowledge-production do not define what knowledge – what does art know? What marks out its difference? Our findings advocate that “art knows that it knows nothing” and in this moment of recognition embody a productive paradox – the paradox of ‘non-knowledge’. (16) This is a particular branch of knowledge in its elegant articulation with the capacity to create epistemological forms where knowing effectively coexists with not-knowing. This double bind renders explanation void, rupturing the know-don't-know binary. These epistemic machines substitute rigour with congeries of divergent activities, disciplines and domains –  “each secreting its own epistemology”. (17)

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APPENDIX 

Today, it seems interesting to me to go back to what I would call an animist conception of subjectivity, if need be through neurotic phenomena, religious rituals, or aesthetic phenomena. How does subjectivity locate on the side of the subject and on the side of the object? How can it simultaneously singularize an individual, a group of individuals, and also be assembled to space, and all other cosmic assemblages? (18)

A table-rapping comedy our symposium is a corpse without heft. Artists, animists, occultists, conjurors… are absurdly indistinguishable in pursuit of an illusive operative knowledge that can split the eggshell of appearances. They can throw voices in acts of gastromancy, extracting strange objects from their bodies or from the bodies of the sick. And, equally, they can make those objects disappear. Seeing and looking are instruments which chart the detachment of knowledge from practical life, through a manipulative culture and paranoid behavioural structures. Reason becomes irrational and conjuring questions origins. We believe ourselves to be free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown, expunging ritual and radicalising myths – human or non-human. Our collective social memory is vague and distant but present in us as a certain inchoate feeling of loss. Rupturing accepted standards of permitted knowledge, known experiences and rhetoric, motivates a quest to penetrate cordoned off areas of study. The insistence of personal witness throughout modern cultures, signals an enlightened mind to escape public categories or established truths. Eventually, we require a witness to our dying, a hand, no longer efficacious, but which reassures us that we are not alone. We come to the side of the dying, as a desire to go outside of ourselves, confronting the limits and making us responsible accomplices. It is the ambition to go beyond unexpected combinations that give rise to unclassifiable phenomena, attracting attention. 

With its love of rapid disappearances and appearances out of nowhere, with its turning of insides into outsides and vice versa, conjuring helps us understand how this performance is a form of transforming forms. Artifice is recouped as a proxy of participation, or seductive gatherings, inversely becoming efficacious and infectious assemblages. A sticky medium frames the magic of such an event, as a projected metaphor. Our death is but a metaphor? The group here represents the mechanism for attaining that, which lies beyond the group, in the dissolution of death that tears apart the individual as well as the community. Is it necessary to rescue the negative ground of community, around which each of us is able to acknowledge our shared singularity? An inquisitive voice refrains, lured into an expression of agency that does not belong to us, a perpetual critical voice whispering that we should not accept being mystified. Suggestive, inductive, and captivating, our words mesmerise and direct the instability of attractive forces. Whatever seduces us or animates us may also bind us – the more so if taken for granted. Is this fiction or critique? The internal monologue, the voice of the interrogator, echoes redoubtable potentials against the rule of illusions. If it were only fiction we would undoubtedly laugh with a rictus grin and ask whom amongst us trusts that fiction is powerless. 

— Alun Rowlands

1 Bataille, G. “Against All Odds” quoted in Blanchot, M. The Unavowable Community, Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1982

2 See: Nancy, J.L. The Inoperative Community, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991 

3 For Bataille, erotic love could capable produce an intense community of shared making without forfeiting the singularity of the members. Bataille, experimented with establishing different kinds of communities believed that a central existence determined by forms of communication focused on expressing the power of libidinous contact was the only valid way of countering the modernist tendency of reducing living beings into ‘servile organs’ for state and society. For Bataille, the ecstasy of erotic love immunized the lovers against political madness.

4 Nancy, J.L., “The Compearance”, In: Political Theory, vol. 20, no. 3, Sage Publications 1992, pp.371 - 398

5 Nancy, J.L., Being Singular Plural. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000

6 For Jean-Luc Nancy this is a search that we are all engaged. And, as he claims, community is not something that has been lost, but is something yet to come. It is the "insistent and still unheard demand for community"

that gives rise to absences of community, ephemeral or virtual communities of those who have no community.

7 See: Lingis, A., The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, p 108

8 For Bataille and Blanchot, the need of community is most persuasive for those who have no community. For Nancy, in the last lines of The Inoperative Community, writes that he should think through the community of those who cannot commune, those who can neither read nor write, or who have nothing in common. But, he observes, in actuality, there is no such person.

9 Cooper Powys, J. Wolf Solent,  NY: Simon and Schuster, 1929

10 See: Staebler, C., “Editorial” Le Journal de la Triennale, no.1, 2012, p.2

11 Levi-Strauss, C., Structural Anthropology (Vol. 2), Michigan: University of Chicago Press, 1983 “Never more than in the last two centuries of his history, has man been better able to understand that by arrogating to himself the right to separate humanity from animality, ascribing to the one what he refuses to the other, he was opening a cursed circle, and that that same barrier, constantly pushed back would serve to alienate men from other men, and to claim for ever smaller minorities the privilege of a humanism that is corrupt from the outset for having taken its principle and its very concept from pride.”

12 Rancière, J., "Ten Theses on Politics", Theory & Event ,Volume 5, Issue 3, 2001

13 Stengers, I., “Reclaiming Animism”, Animism:Modernity through the Looking Glass, ed. Anselm Franke, Berlin: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig /Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2011

14 J. Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover NY: Atheneum, 1982. The title page informs us that the 560-page poem is derived from a convened séance. The text itself is divided into sections first marked after the letters of the alphabet, then the numbers 0 to 9, and three headings ‘yes’, ‘&’ and ‘no’. 

15 See: Agamben’s ‘Nameless Science’, Beckett’s ‘Unnameable’, Warburg’s ‘impromptu think-feel-know sorties’, Bataille’s ‘non-knowledge’ or Barthelme’s ‘not-knowing’

16 Huberman, A., For The Blind Man in the Dark Room Looking for the Black Cat that Isn’t There, St. Louis: Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2009

17 Bachelard, G., The New Scientific Spirit, Boston, MA: Beacon, 1984

18 Guattari, F., Chaosmosis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1995

19 See: Franke, A., ‘Animism’, In: Animism:Modernity through the Looking Glass, ed. Anselm Franke, Berlin: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig /Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2011. “We find ourselves in a time at which it is ultimately urgent to “understand”—in order to step beyond and unmake—the magic circle of double binds. But this time it is not the sorcery of the animist ‘other’, but the modern and “capitalist sorcery” (Isabelle Stengers) that keeps us spellbound, trapped within a set of false choices, within a systemic closure that suggests no alternatives, and does not cease to assimilate into clinical management its other and its outsides.”