Symposium Information

This symposium on potentiality invites teachers, artists, and academics to contemplate the following questions for ourselves, practices, and professions:

What is our potential to act? (Agamben, 2019, 1999)

What can, cannot, and can Not be saved? (Agamben, 2013)

How much use is enough? (Ahmed, 2019)

What worlds can we make and un-make together? (Berlant, 2020; Mūnoz, 2009)

This is an invitation to make our work together; to remain receptive to the spaces we share; open to experimentation and invested in becoming with others without knowing what might happen next through conversation, making, and play. This symposium invites presenters and attendees to be co-makers and co-presiders in a group conversation to grapple with our potential to act. In this symposium we will consider what gives; what takes; states of being; and modes of festivity. The philosophy for this symposium is described below.

We invite presenters and artists to bring their ideas to an in-process conversation without attachments to what is made. We will provide a place to unravel and re-entangle in the space of a weekend. Our artist collective would like to engage with other practitioners on equal footing, moving through the symposium themes (states of being, working with the broken, and joining in festivity––or modes of non-production). This is an invitation to be in process together––to be an ellipsis, a blinking cursor. Festivity is the innovation. Respite from finishing work provides space for community to develop; time for making together, and time for listening.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACH TO THIS SYMPOSIUM

WHAT GIVES?

The existence of potential according to the philosopher Giorgio Agamben (1999) must involve the potential not to actualize, to be one’s own lack, and to be in relation to one’s own incapacity (p. 182). In our practice, we work with Agamben’s contemporary examination of Aristotle’s concept of potential. Aristotle addresses two forms of potentiality, generic (acquiring knowledge/capacities) and effective (knowledge/capacities one has already attained e.g. an architect). Aristotle’s concept of ‘effective potentiality’ is concerned with potential in the act that gives to itself. Actualization of potential cannot exist in a space where all potential is used. Not realizing potential is the space of impotential or not-being. This is what gives potential back to itself.

WHAT TAKES?

What remains persistently true today as a force in the North American context is the compulsive and systematic thrust of capitalism as a mode of capture that must move into unused territories (land use, human labor use, resource use) to take possession of potentials for maximum extraction (Brown, 2015; Garoian, 2014; Harvey, 2005). Neoliberal educational reforms belonging to this mode of capture can and do extract teacher and artist potential towards maximizing use, often without ethical considerations of how much use is enough. This symposium contemplates and celebrates alternate ethical dimensions: how teachers and artists might practice being with their potential (what they can, cannot do, and can Not do) to imagine worlds among the stultifying present, with its limitations and normativities (Muñoz, 2007).

STATES OF BEING, SIDE-BY-SIDE

While this symposium is not a cure-all or panacea for what ails our professions, nor is it a demand for teachers and artists to show up in the world with new ideas or problem-solving strategies, it does hold space for the irreparable––states of things being thus that they are. The

irreparable does not lament what cannot be repaired, rather; the irreparable is “consigned without remedy to their being-thus” (Agamben, 2013, p. 38). At this symposium, we work within Agamben’s philosophy of the irreparable describes the world as necessarily contingent; not postulated on oppositions and separations but on the mutuality of states of being what they are, side-by-side, happy, sad, atrocious, and blessed, together (2013, p 89.). Choosing this philosophical approach affords us the opportunity to back down from totalizing approaches to some of the challenges we face as artists and teachers today, expected to always be in a mode of production.

FESTIVITY

For Ahmed, festivity queers the everyday and puts into question uses of use. For Agamben (2019) festivity is to exist without purpose or goal, deactivating the necessity to always be in a mode of production. Focusing on what is broken is a queer way of working that starts with “the weighty, the heavy, the weary and the worn” (Ahmed, p. 227). This symposium is not an attempt to fix what is broken, but to work with what breaks, a break is “understood as part of the life of a thing” (p. 227). Instead, we find pleasure or festivity in what actions and inactions we can take as we work with what is broken, with the irreparable–what is thus. Queer theorist José Muñoz (2007) writes, “we must dream, and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world and ultimately new worlds” (p. 1). To consider how one might act does not happen in a vacuum. This practice requires the curiosity to think beyond the silos of our individual practices and connect with others, developing our ‘response-abilities’ to one another (Haraway, 2016).

LOOSEN, UNLEARN, AND UN-MAKE

The behavoralising and norm-making of the education scene, with extreme and narrow circumstances in which one can acceptably be a student, also applies to us as teachers and artists. To puncture these codes, we can “generate a nonreproductive theory” that displaces the “protocols and norms that got us here” (p. 24). One such strategy is to “induce transformation from within relations to the object”, as Berlant describes. We can “loosen an object to look to recombining its component parts....to unlearn its objectness” (2022, p.23). An object can be an idea, a dream, a need, or way of being to which we have a strong attachment and hope. The linkage between our attachments/objects and our sense of the world seems more or less enduring but when we loosen the object by opening it up, dissecting and removing parts for closer view, we open up the possibility of repurposing, for sitting in the gaps and breaks, for being with the irreparable. In their adaptations and new combinations, what might we make or un-make of objects such as authoritarian kinds of relation at work, school, and home?

WHO WE ARE

The Spaces for Possibility Art Collective uses a storefront space to practice deactivating the necessity (habit or obligation) to always be in a mode of production or use of potential as a teacher. Our practice provides a space and time for teachers to contemplate what they can, can not, and can Not do in challenging times of teaching. Having time and space to contemplate outside of the responsibilities of everyday teaching releases teachers to imagine, dream, and activate their potential as artists. In this space, teachers can choose how they wish to activate their artist selves, make a social bond with other teachers, and rest from family or teacher responsibilities, letting the materiality of the building invite forms of play, festivity, and contemplation. Inspired by various art making practices and scholarship such as the ephemeral nature of the Fluxus movement, the caring and thoughtful work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles (1969, 1973) “Maintenance Work,” and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s (2013) practices of reciprocity, our collective fosters making community, acts of care, and a shared sense of response-ability to imagine how we can make worlds together.

References:

Agamben, G. (1999). Potentialities: Collected essays in philosophy. (D. Heller-Roazen, Ed. & Trans.). Stanford University Press.

Agamben, G. (2013). The coming community. (M. Hardt, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. MN.

Ahmed, S. (2019). What's the use?: On the uses of use. Duke University Press.

Berlant, L. G. (2022). On the inconvenience of other people: Writing matters. Duke University Press.

Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism's stealth revolution. Zone Books. New York, NY.

Garoian, C. R. (2014). In the event that art and teaching encounter. Studies in Art Education, 56(1), 384–396. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2014.11518947

Haraway, D. (2015). Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene: Making kin. Environmental Humanities, 6(1), 159–165. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615934

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the chthulucene. Duke University Press.

Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions.

Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising utopia: The then and there of Queer Futurity. New York University Press.

Ukeles, M. L. (1969). Manifesto for maintenance art 1969! Proposal for an exhibition "CARE". [Artwork]. The Queens Museum.

Ukeles, M. L. (July 23, 1973). Washing/tracks/maintenance: Outside. [Artwork]. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.