Generalist Practice
25 October 2011 – 22 November 2011
READING GROUP – A critique of exclusive knowledge production and specialisation
Five Tuesdays, 8pm-10pm, from the 25th of October
Texts for discussion week 1
• Paul Feyerabend – Against Method (he coined the term ‘Epistemological Anarchism’)
• Michel Foucault – What is Enlightenment?/The Order of Things
• Mary Wollstonecraft – A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (specifically Wollstonecraft’s reading of Rousseau).
Texts for discussion week 2
• Theodor W Adorno – Minima Moralia (1951), paragraphs (Aphorisms): 1, 79, 84, 86, 90 and 91
• Pierre Bourdieu – The Forms of Capital (1986). Fiona has highlighted the pages she thinks
• TED talks by Ken Robinson (18 minutes each)
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_bring_on_the_revolution.html
Texts for discussion week 3
• Richard Buckminster Fuller – Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1968), Chapter 1: Comprehensive Propensities and Chapter 2: Origins of Specialization
• Paul K Feyerabend – Against Method (London and New York, 1993), Preface, Preface to the Third Edition, Chapter 16: pp 164-174 and Postscript on Relativism
Texts for discussion week 4
• Hannah Arendt – Labor, Work, Action (originally a lecture, 1964)
• Emile Durkheim – The Division of Labor in Society (New York, 1933), Introduction, pp. 39-46 and (part of) Chapter I: The Progress of the Division of Labor and of Happiness, pp. 233-243 (until the end of the first paragraph).
• Anton Vidokle – Art Without Work (article, e-flux Journal, November 2011)
Texts for discussion week 5
• Charles Esche – Include Me Out (extract from Steven Henry Madoff (Ed.) – Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century), Cambridge, MA, 2009)
• Marion von Osten & Eva Egermann – Twist and Shout: On Free Universities, Educational Reforms and Twists and Turns Inside and Outside the Art World (transcript of a conversation, extract from Paul O’Neill & Mick Wilson (Eds.) – Curating and the Educational Turn, London and Amsterdam, 2010)
• Florian Waldvogel – Each One Teach One (extract from Manifesta 6 – Notes for an Art School
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The texts for each session will be available in pdf-format one week in advance
The reading group is the first stage of a project on the subject of generalism, or a critique of specialisation, which will eventually result in an exhibition.