What do slowing down and seeping in—as alternative temporal frameworks to art production—mean in the midst of the dominant construction of social struggles as environmental panic, refugee crisis, racialized and gendered hysteria, and class outrage? Who gets to define and govern the state of emergency, and what happens when the state of emergency has become permanent, normalized, and even depoliticized? How can a perennial model for artistic and knowledge production endure politically against the pressure (or desire) to produce a spectacular reaction to a state of emergency? How do these rhizomatic acts of social maintenance, repair, and transformation elude their feeding into financialized and militarized neoliberal capitalism? Can we propose systematic plodding as a method for measuring time and redefining the products of our works? How can we work through the urgency of collective fear, anxiety, chaos, and exhaustion by engaging with durable forms of life such as maintaining hope, constituting solidarity, and imagining political otherwise?
Letters: The classroom is burning, let’s dream about a School of Improper Education
KUNCI Study Forum & Collective
December 2020
How revolutionary is study? KUNCI's practices turn the world upside down and show us how to live together in the richness of our general antagonism.
Stefano Harney
Since its founding as a cultural studies group in 1999 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, KUNCI Study Forum & Collective has experimented with methods of producing and sharing knowledge through acts of collective study at the intersections of affective, manual, and intellectual labor. This pamphlet is a collaboratively authored epistolary essay that narrates the discourse behind the development of KUNCI’s School of Improper Education, an initiative that posits studying together as a tactical approach to creating the conditions for social movement. Founded in 2016, The School of Improper Education is an avenue through which unlearning can be practiced, where unknowingness can be transformed into a series of productive tools for understanding the contemporary social ecosystem and articulating the resourcefulness of an independent art and cultural organization.
This pamphlet is part of UDP’s 2020 Pamphlet Series: twenty commissioned essays on collective work, translation, performance, pedagogy, poetics, and small press publishing. The pamphlets are available for individual purchase and as a subscription. Each offers a different approach to the pamphlet as a form of working in the present, an engagement at once sustained and ephemeral. To view a full list of pamphlets, click here.
About the Author
KUNCI Study Forum & Collective experiments with methods of producing and sharing knowledge through acts of studying together at the intersections between affective, manual, and intellectual labor. Since its founding in 1999 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, KUNCI has been continuously transforming its structure, ways, and medium of working. Initially formed as a cultural studies study group, at present KUNCI’s practices emphasize collectivizing study by way of space-making, discussion, research, publishing, and school-organizing. KUNCI traverses and connects institutional, disciplinary, and geographical boundaries. KUNCI’S membership is informal and based on friendship, as well as principles of self-organization and collaboration.
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How revolutionary is study? KUNCI's practices turn the world upside down and show us how to live together in the richness of our general antagonism.
Stefano Harney
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Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-946433-50-3
Pamphlet
Staple-bound. 48 pp, 5 x 8 in
Publication Date: December 15 2020
Distribution: Asterism Books (US), Inpress Books (UK)
Series: 2020 Pamphlet Series