This hit a nerve (the pleasure nerve we tried to reach in college experiments using mice). I was just reading a book called Marxism and Philosophy (1923) by a guy named Korsch, who argues that the bourgeois history of philosophy cannot account for what historians of philosophy see as a sudden lack of interest in Hegel after about 1850. Korsch seems to suggest that we can understand this phenomenon only by applying a dialectic understanding of this history. The explanation is not available to those involved in the separation of thought from practice (bourgeois "idealist" thought), those who do not follow Hegel's (and Marx's) method. What is missing is not simply something that hasn't come up on the radar. It's not as if, once acknowledged, we can identify that which has been overlooked, peering as before from a conceptual distance. I am intrigued by the suggestion that only through something other than this familiar practice of analysis, of phrase turning and the application of
concepts, can progress be made. And I would be interested in the dynamics of a project like that described below.
Bernie RoddySrdjan Normal <srd-*at*pobox.upenn.edu>; wrote:
Dear Trebor, Dear Geert
and Freecooperation,
We would like to submit a proposal for a brainstorm session (in-person) on the topic of the missing.
The knowledge that slips through traditional and singular disciplines seems to flow freely in an unbound space and networks, however it takes a collaborative practice to excavate it, sort of scout for it, rather than wait for it. The missing is then understood as a generative condition for people to collaborate without mere exchange of services. The case study that we would like to use as a jumping off point is the ongoing project School of Missing Studies - SMS, imagined as series of events in collaborative and experimental education. How do you accumulate knowledge, histories that linger etc. and how do you postone, or avoid traditional critical forms until what may be accumulated as information can unfold on its own?
The brainstorm session would be an opportunity to discuss and generate a fluid, and wide, theoretical scape for the notion of the missing.
Ideally, we would like to have a session with 10-12 people who could a. get a sense of a simple ambition and a complex process in the search for the missing and b.participate in initiating a collaborative theory of the missing.
As a background:
School of Missing Studies (SMS) provides a flexible educational platform and a network for international study and exchange on cultural issues related to the urban environment in cities marked by or currently undergoing political, social, and cultural transition. SMS will provide productive research and project opportunities for young professionals in architecture and art who are dealing with what is "missing" in their studies with regard to processes of local urban change. Participants in SMS will explore the smooth area among established disciplines such as architecture, art, sociology and cultural studies to bring to light the missing phenomena of urban transition in Belgrade, Munich, Rotterdam and Zurich.
For example, Looking for October (LFO) is an SMS workshop investigating the contemporary meaning of the partisan liberation of Belgrade during The Second World War on October 20th 1944. This investigation is triggered by the fact that this will be the first year that the holiday of October 20th was not celebrated. SMS found this act to be quite significant; this missing holiday has over the past 50 years left important traces in the form of institutions, buildings, streets, poems, cultural events, films, magazines, songs, factories, awards and neighborhoods. Participants will work with these traces to create interdisciplinary projects (in architecture, art, creative writing, media, sociology) on the topic of the contemporary meaning of urban liberationPlease, tell us what you think.
Srdjan Weiss and Katherine Carl
(for SMS)