TRAVEL DIARY

A weblog regularly updated by Jodi Rose.

Friday, May 25, 2007

11:11 AM
Posted by jodi rose

Attended the opening of Summit - non-aligned initiatives in education culture - last night, with inspiring ideas and questions about strategies for creating a new space to imagine the future; through confusion to clarity.

Some random notes:
to disturb the mechanics by which authority operates - with a slight delay or distortion.. to perform something, a dramatic laboratory that calls into question all that exists. 2 weeks before the next G8 summit deliberately - not to protest or lament; we feel the urge and desire to open up new fields. an impossible declaration and action plan.

open source radical activism, not satisfied by wikipedia or the button of creative commons. free knowledge is more than just free ingredients.
a new configuration of the self.
struggle against privatisaiont/capitalism of knowledge production - leave behind a common notion of individual mastery.

forget the eternal lamennt of how bad things are - how beauracratic, homogenised, underfunded etc etc

self organised and self authorised

eduction becomes a site of odd and unexpected comings together
congregate around promise of a subject, an insight, a creative possibility. a community propelled by desire and curiosity.

coming together in curiosity we then don't have to come together in identity. Potentiality and actualisation. The idea that there might be with us endless possibility, that we might never be able to bring to fruition. (gorgeous that makes me so much happiers!!)

To formulate our own questions, as opposed to those posed to you.
those who formulate the questions, perform the playing field.

Room for imagining another way of thinking, so we don't use up our energy in oppositional thinking, but imagining another way.

[This reminds me of what someone once told me about the Vietnamese idea of time. Past, present, future. The past is not behind you with the future coming up ahead, as in western thought. The past is known, it can be seen in front of you, and rearranged through memory and story. The future is coming at you from behind, and is unknown. The only moment you can possibly influence or change is the present. Be now!]

Education can be the release of our energies from what needs to be opposde to what can be imagined.

An experiment in collective self-inauguration.
The intimacy of distance and the patience of disagreement.

Historially, non-alignment explicitly refuses the bi-polar division between US/Russia, capitalism and communism, and denounces the nuclear threat. (1955 and 1961 Non-alignment movement)

This moment becomes every part a jumping off point to all those struggles. Oscillating between an inoperable history and a present becoming future without ever reaching equilibrium. A past potential future.

Some futures that were crushed, halted, or shut down stay with us. We are haunted by the shadows of those futures that did not come into being. They are with us as shadows that cast themselves across us.

Intimate with a defeated radicalism and a defeated future. No language to elucidate yearnings that exceed the desires of resisteance and a defeated radicalism. The exile of our longing for a non-sacrificial freedom. We feel ourselves to be at the dead end of the utopian imagination. That we live in a time at which the utopian imagination is not feasible. Potential of ideas has been captured by capital. The effective register of our relationship to the future has been shifted from utopia to fear without end. [ah, but hugo is building mini-utopias!]

Begin tentatively to imagine acts of a creative sabotage of the future.

To imagine a future outside the boundaries of property.

We learned something in this confusion, where our heads are spinning so fast, come moments of clarity. Focus on unexpected, unforseeable, non-directed. Creative situtations so unexpected they can produce something new. We want to confuse in order to open doors, to create something new.

***

Lovely. That was my mash-up of all the speakers, you can read them in a far more coherent form on the OPENING NIGHT summit site.

It's amazing to be in a moment where life is so completely up in the air. Nothing is fixed, nothing is known, nothing is certain. I love it.
Had a moment of despair yesterday, when retracing my steps still couldn't locate the missing dates and times of my past few months.
Dropped around to see James, he was watering roses on the balcony, made me vodka with passionfruit, lime and tonic, and helped fill out the first of my many forms. Easy, after all. This morning had a call from the official to make an appointment for the next stage, where I hilariously said absolutely everything you never want to say to a German official, but had him chatting and laughing by the end.

Stayed in Andrew's spare couch in his borrowed flat on Pappalallee.
Woke up to mango juice, turkish coffee and stories read to me.
It is possible to be anywhere in the world and be at home, with friends, food and community. I'm in love with my life again. It's fabulous.

You throw yourself into the ocean wholeheartedly, body and soul. Then at some point, you just have to let go. Let the waves wash over you, the sun warm you, feel the sand between your toes and the winkd across your skin. What remains is clarity. I crave the ocean today.