Against Value?

http://occursus.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/against-value-23-2-2012/

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Justification for education, in particular post-secondary education,
and more specifically justification for post-secondary education in the
arts and humanities, relies on two primary measures: economic benefits
to costs; and value as determined by the discourse of the humanities.
This holds true for the ways in which the arts are justified
politically in the UK. What justification do the arts and humanities
require? Are the arts and humanities, or should the arts and
humanities, be fundamentally opposed to value?

The authority of value: Who has the right to determine value, and for
whom do such values speak? The ever-increasing desire to re-affirm
already magnified hierarchies is at odds with principles of knowledge.
Knowledge works laterally, passed person to person, as much belonging
to the receiver as the giver. It is fundamentally, therefore, generous,
a generosity that is being too easily conscripted into economic models
of accumulation.

The teleology of education: The end-point of education (knowledge)
cannot (must not?) be determined in advance. In part this is a response
to the psychology of commodification and rule by audit. The first is
the expectation that knowledge, too, might prostrate itself for
consumption. Instead should knowledge be understood as in some sense
intractable, finally unknowable. The world provides infinite resistance
to the presumption of a totalizing comprehensibility. The second is
that knowledge should be set against the ever more prevalent logic of
audit cultures.

The teleology of values of audit cultures – closing the loop between
policy (aims) and audit (outcomes) – operates as a feedback loop
against what Marilyn Strathern describes as an “open-ended and
ambiguous enquiry in the most serious sense”. The audit presumes
self-knowledge as the determinant of knowledge. The critique of audit
cultures is the knowledge that a defence of values academics generally
hold dear, trust, “responsibility, opennness about outcomes and
widening of access” (3), might best be achieved by working precisely
against the auditing of those values.

Dada’s protest was not only against a system of value, but was
also a refusal to participate within the methodology, the rationality,
that underpinned that system. How might art making today, and forms of
argument, similarly have to refuse to participate on the ground
belonging to a system of values as well as to the values themselves?






Notes on Discussion


Value - as use value, as commodity value (Marx) (Exchange value)


Ait. water earth as use value but no exchange value


Distribution of surplus
Knowledge - c.f market (production/consumptions)


Re humans as  pattern identifying creatures 
Von Kleist
the gradual completion of thoughts while speaking


teliology unknowable - autopoeisis self gene ratio of ideas out o ideas...
comlexity... its nothing complicated... but academia insist on complexity to protect itself from
reductionism...?   its emergent 


Yashinov


Types of discussion:
I piece of work > hove add to expand contrast
2 7 pieceshow add more not the same use one to frame others etc
3 blocks
4have some ewwsnt other
5 anything else
6 isanything possible


Blancho
Pestalozzi
 ignorance




re Black Mountain College