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(*unedited text)
Utopia 737
I’m currently in the business of utopia and now even literally sitting
in the wings of it. I‘m flying between Moscow and Berlin, doing
what mankind coundn’t barely imagine until recently. I’m traveling
high above the clouds between the two main capitals of utopian practices
in the 20th century in Europe, the one being Fascism the other Communisim.
Anti-gravitational laws transgressing airplanes seem to have little to
do with the ideological and social engeneering called Fascism and Communisim.
But both defied basic human rights, basic common sense and basic social
laws. May be it is due to the thin air up here, but I name fascism and
communism in the same breath and call them utopian. “Nationalsozialismus”
is a term that combines nationalism and socialism, suggesting that once
own nation comes first with a certain obnoxious way of social arrogance
and exclusivity. Nationalism and socialism are utopian in nature. When
confronted with feudalism and imperial domination and colononialism, nationalism
can also be looked at as a liberatory force. But when such utopian teleology
becomes expansionist and repressive the effects can be disastrous.
Lenin was a fierce intelligent critic of imperialism before he himself
embodied utopian dreams with power and decision making force. He understood
that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism and that nations area
all in competition with each other for markets and resources. Lenin warned
agiant the hypocrisis of nationalsim within sociallism already in the
first decade of the last century, 20 yeares earlier before national socialilsm
became such a powerful destructive force. Hitlerism was utiopian in nature
and practice since they were striving for new men, (a pure Arian race
Übermensch) and a thousand year lasting Reich, spanning all over
Europe and beyond. Like a Ferdinand Linee he wanted to recategorize and
police nature.
Lenin himself wasn’t any less utopian. His internationalism and
fight for the independence of each nation (see his texts – they
really are astonishing) was soon abandoned into a higher stage of a dialecitcal
processes of soviet making which in practice meant empre building. The
Soviet empire was based on Karl Marx (he studied in Berlin) and lasted
much longer then the National Socialism. Marxism is not only an analytical
device to understand and humand and social production but also an utopian
and teleological machine that strives for and predicts world domination
as the ultimate state of mankind defying as well social gravitation forces.
We are now asked to fasten seatbelts and are in decent to Berlin.
Today, I’m again in the air flying from Berlin to London, London
was the place Marx spent most of his time in libraries, save from the
prosecution of repressive German censors. In London Marx was to study
the production system called capitalism with all its many effects. This
German in colonial Great Britain was fascinated by captialsm and wanted
to have the highest stage of industrial production as a base for socialism
and communism. It is mostly ignored that Marx demanded advanced industrial
production as an indispensable condition for socialism, the reason why
Russia in the first half of the XXth century embarked on one of the most
vehemnt industrialisation process in the world embracing Fordism which
in Russian was named “Kord”. Marx, the thinker would have
been fascinated to fly in airplanes and read about the current conflicts
of airbus with its current nationalist spin. In these days, Airbus, this
wonderful company of gigantic dimenions is in free fall over national
quireling and its incapacity to make purely technical, and industrial-logical
decisions. Marx and Lenin understood that in defying gravitational forces
of any kind, technolgogies are instrumental and indispensable. Educational,
economic and social ingeneering had been central to turn utopia into practice.
(We are setting down again and I have to fasten my seatbelts)
I just made it through the clearly defined channels of barriers, closed
cirquit camera, metal detectors, chemical swatches, standard setups for
airport security. I passed escalotros, elevators, walked on horrizonal
mechanical runways and took the conductorless fully-automatited shuttle
train to the satellite boarding area where I purchased some tea using
a bank card that withdraws money from my NY account, something I can see
in the evening on my computer screen when banking online. Doesn’t
it that all sound like an utiopina landscape if we see it through the
eyes of Lenin? Or even more so through the spectre of Karl Marx? But the
19th century wasn’t any better when it comes to control and what
they call “security” today. Lenin himself is quoted saying
“Trust is good, control is better” initiating a century in
which control, social engeneering and human selection become a lethal
and systematic (utopian/distopian) idustrialized art.
As alluded earlier, our environment is already an utopian landscape with
people walking around in pacemakers, artificial organs and any other prosthetic
device. My seat belts are on and I’m arriving in a new destination,
Scotland, for an yet another exhibition, contributing my share to global
warming with a specific number of emission output per passenger. Flown
in water from France is waiting for me at the reception desk. I need it
and sum up quickly: Utopia is not a business for the future but one of
the past. We have lived through and are still living in the middle of
our utopian projections of the past that are producing more and more distopian
results on all levels. Therefore it is “utopian” - in the
classically euphemistic sense of the word - to ask for self-sustainabilty
and leave our formarly utopian highways behind. We have to get off our
motorized vehicles and flying jets and start looking at bicycles as the
ultimate utopian machine it already was in the 19th century bringing mass
mobility without much expense. The bicycle amidst many others is a wonderful
example of self-sustainability, the only “utopian goal” I
see worth aspiriing for. On a side note, bicycles would also help us cure
obeisity, working down the sedimentation of our body energy for which
there seems to be no scarcity in the countries that use and waste resources
the most freely.
Now, I realize that I missed somehow the point on the subject I was invited
to write: utopian paedagogy. I’m inclined to throw this school bag
out of the window the same way I have just done it with the concept of
utopia for which I wouldn’t reserve much of a little a, or should
I say little u. Utopia is in essence a paedagogical proejct and therefore
also something we are already done with without ever getting over it,
getting through with it. Marx and Lenin as well as Hitler tried to educate
the masses, the workers and soldiers. Lenin wrote pamphlets for the liberation
of women from the “debilitating sclavery of house work” (Lenin
himself) and sounded like a radical feminist 60 years later in San Francisco.
But his real goal was to “educate”them and gain them for the
revolutionary process and defacto factor work, demandng that they hand
over their children to collectdive education from early on. Hitler too
developed an elaborate systsem of youth groups working kids hard from
early on so that they turned their parents in if they observed them listening
radio by the BBC or making critical comments at evening dinner. Any utopian
project comes with a pedagocial front: it is not by accident that the
modern school and university system developed in Europe was quintessentially
a nationalist project, creating national university, national literature,
national languages and national sport teams. Germany was with Humboldt,
Herder and the Grimm brothers the front runner in the formation of a national
education system which anticipated and tried to force national unificaton
that was realized only more then half a century later in the early 1870s.
This means that nationalism, sociailism and Nationalsozialismus had their
own pedagogical utopia, and we are still today dealing with the consequences.
By the way, these paedagogical programms were necessary so that workers
from one European coutnry could go and kill workers from another European
country in order to let a thin margin of people decide who should rule
over which colony and exploit other workers in which annexation. (Lenin
has very accurate things to say about this process). On the purely paedagogical
level my “utopian” project consists to work through the still
ruling utpian demands of the past that have come to be counter productive,
repressive, national- and Eurocentric and worse.
On the technological front any development is also ‘revolutionizing”
education and we can already download university classes from around the
world. Several of the big Ivey league school in the USA, including MIT
are offerenig their classes on line already even for free. In this process
there is also an utopian pedagogical screenplay at work even though it
is not formalized but we do all remember Steve Jobs and Bill Gates covetting
and courting the educational market. There is barely a classroom without
labtops or other technologies. And I’m not even talking about what
goes on in the mind of people who google the hell out of the net and see
Wikipedia as the gold standard of information brokering. Have they have
seen a library for longer then 30 minutes from inside? Do we need another
pedagogical utopia for these quick-fingered kids who now get first literate
on their thumbs working tiny intelligent mobile devices? Again, my “utopian
project” consists in the understanding of what goes with this new
technological spectrum in the field of education.
Last but not least, I want to remind you of one utopian project concerning
the quarrel over national languages – a fight that has been won
by English as the international lingua franca: Esperanto. This endeavor
was meant to escape the mass of many national languages to create yet
another language to compete with. Esperanto has more or less failed since
only bricoleurs and hobby linguists are studying it. It’s psydo-neutrality
is basically Eurocentric in nature with little excursions into other language
groups. We shouldn’t forget that the entire educational system is
a system of utopian grandeur mixed with national(ist) prerogatives. I
works and doesn’t work, it has failed and is still failing. (if
we have multiple genocides in Euoprea within a single century and x-millions
killed in wars and concentration camps – something can be assumed
not to have worked, isn’t it?)
My “utopia” consists in propagating a need to rethink, to
analize, to unlearn our past educational utopias and make them the topos
of our current and future paedagocial challenges so that distopia (and
not utopia) becomes a thing of the past. We ought not to fall out of touch
with given needs for an ever more complex society. This too means to deal
with the distopian effects and structures lived and forced upon us utopian
models have left us with. Our science is quite omnipotent and yet we might
lose a race against nature, against, the enviroment, against the self-preserving
aspects of life precisely because we have become so good, educated - copyrighting
even plants so that they don’t reproduce without the paid d’accord
by Montesanto.
Isn’t the atomic bomb, the airplane, the industrialisation in general
and anything else of that scale the product of a failed as well as a succeeded
educational paedagogical utopia? I’m sitting here at this airport
forever, my computer battery empty and some sheets of my own hand writing
I can’t read anymore: the computer erased, effaced or unlearned
my handwriting.
Rainer Ganahl, March 2007
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