MODE05

“One day I saw a mountain bike in a magazine and knew that the future didn’t just exist in sci-fi sequels on television” (Hal Foster)

“The moment when Nike launched their first Air model it was clear that we had left the dark ages we normally call modernism” (Hans Ulrich Obrist)

“In fact Photoshop is as big a revolution as central perspective, not what you can do with it, but what it does to you” (Lew Manowitch)

It seems that what we often recall as, the time of the yuppie, the era of the cell phone and global village version 1.0 coincide with a few years when the future changed. The quotes above all refer and stem from this period when the thickness of our agendas was evidence of success.

In the beginning of the 20th century it was enough to put out one, black car on the market. Everybody needed one and they were all called T-model. 20 years later, after the depression, it wasn’t anymore. Companies started to produce cars for different classes, different personal needs and desire for representation of wealth. In order to sell more cars the manufacturer needed to expand the market and make people make choices. From there the race of the manufacturers were not whose car is the best, but who put a new model on the market first, and in what new colour (we all remember the times of “metallic”).

Hundred years ago somebody built a car in his garage and when he, all amazed, understood that somebody else wanted a similar one, he started up an all American business. Later on the business proposal was to research and release new improved cars, hoping that people would find it inspiring. Today, the situation is reversed. First the manufacturer creates and audience with a desire for a certain car, feature, style, and then the actual product is produced. (Jean-Paul Baietto, CEO for Eurolille)

What changes first is rather mystical, is it our attitude or strategies of global economies? Perhaps the answer is ‘both’, ‘and’, and ‘of course’, but what we know is that our perspectives on life has changed and the world with it. Our cities change because we live them, but they also change our lives, there are only two things that haven’t changed: Dixieland music and theatre. Well, actually the theatre has changed but the change is similar to the idea that one would have to enter a phone booth to talk in one’s mobile phones. In other words theatre still favour the exploitation of the given at the expense of the creation of novelty.

To keep something alive and vivid the first rule is to change before you need it. There is no, and have never been ways of changing traditions, they are what they are and the past will only change through our desire to participate in the formulation of the future. Perhaps the Sioux Indians got it right: “When you discover you are riding on a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.” (J. Ridderstråle, K. Nordström: Karaoke Capitalism)

“We were seeing the future and we knew it for sure. I saw people walking around in it without knowing it, because they were still thinking in the past, in references to the past. But all you had to do was know you were in the future and that's what put you there... The mystery was gone, the amazement was just starting” (Rem Koolhaas)

To venture into the arts implies to explore the critical role that technique and discipline play in thinking, ethics and politics, and to do so in a way that accentuates the creative and compositional dimension of thinking and doing. By creative dimension I mean the opaque process by which new ideas, concepts, and judgments bubble into being; by compositional dimension I mean the way in which thinking helps to shape and consolidate brain connections, corporeal dispositions, habits, movements, bodies and sensibilities. Some theories, themselves products of arduous thought, ironically depreciate the activity in which the theories are invested: they reduce thinking to cognition, or situate it in a wide band of transcendental regulations that curtail its inventiveness, or contract it into a bland intellectualism that neglects its affective sources, somatic entanglements, and effects. But the inventive and compositional dimension of thinking is essential to freedom of the self and to cultivation of generosity in ethics and politics. Thinking participates in the uncertain process by which new possibilities are ushered into being. One invention may be a new identity that jostles the roster of established constituents as it struggles to find space. Another may be a thought-imbued disposition, incorporated into the sensibility of an individual or folded into the ethos of engagement between constituents.
The first issue is to address the complex relays between thinking/writing body/movement among technique, composition and creativity, and a second to examine what cultural environment, political, ethical, social, ethnical, class, psychological beckons on the horizon of contemporary possibility.

Generalised one could say the art can not not be conceptual after Duchamp, but could one for a moment turn towards an etymology of the term and use it, in itself as a practice. Contemporary philosophy is accustomed to regard the term ‘concept’ as the translation of the German word Begriff, in which philosophers from Kant and on has invested enriching speculative complexity. But are we perhaps mixing the two terms up here, since what tends to escape us is that the etymology of ‘concept’, with its Latin origin, has a rather different connotation. Begriff, links to the verb greifen, to take, in the sense of reaching out and seizing. In Latin conceptus derives from con-capio, meaning to take, in the sense of gathering in, receiving. To conceive does not mean to appropriate, but to make room for. Conceive is not the act of the subject to take an object, but the disposition to receive something from the outside, that comes, occurs, arrives.

In 1974 the department of economic studies at Cornell University, under Professor John R. Campbell, decided to cancel all courses and programs in favour of only one continuous seminar held for all active members at the department. All students were consequently evaluated through oral exams in relation to how long they had enjoyed their work in the department. Professor Campbell argued his decisions in an accidental text “The Names of Economics” - against a massive critique from fellow professors of economics - that knowledge of any kind must be understood as a heterogeneous field into which the student himself has to advance in his personal ways all to gain a knowledge which is not applied upon him but incorporated. A discourse can’t be applied but must be emancipated, and it is in the process of emancipation that knowledge is becoming.

Concepts of emancipation has often been used as a matter of critique in relation to knowledge and power, that is, as a means to dismantle power structures. For Professor Campbell this however was not the central axis of his argumentation. The motivation for his construction was rather to organize his department, which core research field was to analyze different management apparatus, in accordance to the models his researchers proposed. Professor Campbell had in 1971 presented a management model that radically turned over conventional American Fordism, and it was in accordance with this model - “performance management” - that his department was organized.

The articulation of performance management seems rather evident today, but we shall bear in mind that the early 70’s carried other experiences. Basically what Professor Campbell proposed was to: 1. Exchange the force towards homogeneity implicit in Fordism, in favour of heterogeneity in which each participant contributed with his/her specific cultural feature, 2. To exchange specialisation with and understanding of each worker/individual of a complete machinery in order to produce a drive towards collective responsibility of the whole organism and not only to the particle, and 3. To exchange departementalisation for transparent organisations in order for all employed on all levels to function as a creative force within the organisation. Add here a 4th notion, one of control, an exchange of evaluation from produced units to a workers/individuals potentiality/performance.

In the early 70s the proposal made by Professor Campbell were considered highly provocative, but not as we could think on the side of progressive political opinion but in the reactionary communities. When today we can observe that this shift in production centrally is a shift from a model of discipline towards one of control it implicitly mean the decay of labour unions and capacities of transgression of structures, to a more floating, open field of possibilities which however only offers an illusion of equality, co-ownership etc. Paradoxically reactionary communities initially defended the worker from a new regime, but of course in order to, what they understood, defend established hierarchies.

It was in the light of this initial critique that Campbell turned the notion of management around, in favour of installing it in an educational organisation. Here the power structures where not initiated to enable control and efficiency but for the sake of production of emancipated discourses, in other words to allow the student to articulate his or her own perspective, to be allowed not to study a discipline but to participate in an economy of knowledge. Fortunate for the students that studied with Professor Campbell, what they were experiencing was not only a unique educational situation but also a highly successful one as it produced some of the most prominent economic theorists and a whole line of consulting and practicing economists among other places on Wall Street. Unfortunately for the university and for Professor Campbell the educational platform was dismissed already in 1978 after which the department returned to a conventional model.

If theatre would have been a horse humanity would have dismounted long ago, but unfortunately theatres doesn’t start smelling as fast as dead horses and as it anyway is all about illusion it seems that theatre lovers have decided it’s not dead enough yet. If theatre, as a place where we also present dance, isn’t dead enough then it seems that the educations we have for dance in Europe is rather suitable, but if one are of an, or many other opinions there are indeed several issues to raise. Those are more then evident and the question is not which to ask but in respect of what dance or choreography. A choice must be made: an education for a future dance/choreography or of a dance of the past, but if a profile of an education influences what dance that can be produced who are on a mission to write a concept for a future dance/choreography educational platform? In other words to write a concept for a dance education is to resurrect a dead horse, so what can be done initially must be to write a concept for a concept of a dance/choreography education, or more precisely, what Mode5 can produce and discuss is, in my opinion, a consideration of what ethics can be applied in respect of a concept for a future dance/choreography education. Practically that implies three conditions, 1. To identify the limits; is a future education concerned with educating dancers, practitioners, choreographers, artists, creative competence or something else. 2. What possible external demands can be identified; in respect of what interests are the understood limits viable. With these two conditions in to mind create a third; to establish a dynamique d’enfer, a dynamic from hell… so complex that all interconnections, mutual dependencies, the proliferation of interfaces, the superimposition of users and providers all together form a group of capacities, shacked together by mutual obligations, exacerbated by the very complexity offered by the concept unwittingly.
It is only when these capacities are all tied to the site by each other’s demands, chained together by an overall vision never entirely revealed, when the dynamic from hell makes the entire situation irrevocable and the concept/project is like quicksand from which no one can escape that one can succeed with a vision similar to the one of Mode5 (that is, if I have understood anything at all of what Mode5 is all about).
Such a complex would not be one education, a school from which you graduate, not an education platform with individual programs, but a site for, or of, knowledge production, i.e. a platform not of individual programs but of individuation, not a platform for, or of, multiplicity of choice, but one of multitude, of singular multiplicity.

What John Campbell managed at his department was easy since limits and demands where easy to detect but unfortunately his dynamics from hell was visionary only in respect of internal production and not within the network of established forces in the existing context of economical educations.
Perhaps an education to come must first of all be concerned, not with what can be acquired, but how such an educational frame can be administrated. A dynamics from hell is only from Hell as long as the writers/initiators of it also is from hell and desire to remain. Mode5 is hence a project, an initiation, and a proposal of a utopia, or rather in Foucault’s terminology of heterotopia, but only then can it make a difference.

The final three principles? Practice, practice and practice. Changing our ideas requires rewiring our minds for the future. So, the only way in which we can assure change is by rehearsing.

Mårten Spångberg
Brussels 21/12-04