not-seminar

What is not?
Research seminar, launch event and performance at the School of Education, Middlesex University, on the subject of art, education, and blank paper with Geoff Cox, Victoria de Rijke, Howard Hollands, Sophie Weeks.
This paper is intentionally blank
The absence within and around representation speaks if only people are prepared to recognise nothing as an echo of something. Walter Benjamin suggested there was a revolutionary strength in testing art for its authenticity by carefully considering the frame, "Just as a murderer's bloody fingerprint on a page says more than the words printed on it."
It has to be remembered that any representation (the sound, the word, the image) is not the thing itself. Brecht says: "the situation is complicated by the fact that less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality." In this way, to paraphrase Brecht, a photograph of a factory tells us next to nothing about the institution or of the relations of production. A 'Brechtian' solution is to reveal the devices of representation and make the process of production apparent, even transparent. In this way, it is believed that it is possible to see through ideological appearances to the 'real' forms behind them - to see reality as it really is. That's as maybe, but clearly it might be useful to consider Art as a form of production (like a factory) wherein "... work itself is given a voice".

To do that in an educational context would mean making those pedagogic devices transparent. For instance, this text relies on a set of pseudo-academic conventions with the author taking on an authoritarian position on the page in a prescribed organisation of space to legitimise what is said. To actively contest this in any form of cultural production becomes a significant oppositional strategy to the oppressive links of power and knowledge. However, the author and audience relationship is not fixed and need not reflect authoritarian politics. Walter Benjamin in his essay of 1936, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", argued that the meaning of art changes with the character of its technical reproduction, making art less authoritarian in character. He emphasises a politics of art production. So if we think of art and/or education as a process of reproduction: what is being reproduced? What do you see when looking at a blank piece of recycled paper? What is hidden?

'Cultural reproduction' is a concept introduced by Pierre Bourdieu in the 1970s in the context of education but later extended to include high culture and artistic practices. The function of the education system we are all a part of, is to reproduce the culture of the dominant classes thus ensuring their continuing dominance and power over the rest. In this way, those hidden relations of production are reproduced. This has been largely used to emphasise negative tendencies that affirm the ruling order in a system of 'symbolic violence' that repeats itself, as a copy of went before - not violence in the playground but in the classroom.
However, the metaphor of reproduction might suggest another reading that reveals the agency of social action and the possibility to fight back. We can think of the idea of the possibility of cultural production that reproduces itself anew through change, even, dare I say it, revolution - a process of renewal. This requires effort.

Reworking material has a critical and political function.
What happens when you recycle one word, image or thing into another word, image or thing? The idea is not to replace what went before but to rework it, transform it. For instance, according to Benjamin, history is a process of 'storytelling' that 'bears witness on the present'. As a historical materialist, he sees this approach as crucial in contesting the 'false continuum of history' that does not sufficiently recognise the conditions of its own production in the present. In some ways, recycling necessarily carries its material history with it in the present formed out of its own previous contents.
Neither teachers or the curriculum are fixed subjects, and certainly meaning is something negotiated and produced in the act of listening, reading or seeing. All ideas are recycled ones.
Despite the liberal rhetoric surrounding it, recycling what you consider to be rubbish or waste might be one way of articulating resistance - you might not be able to change the world but you can re-order its constituent parts.
[GC]
This is Not Blank Paper
Whenever we have a symbolic structure - such as art or education or art education- it is structured around a certain void; it implies the foreclosure of a certain key signifier (like what 'art' is). We may know what it is not ; it's not a pile of bricks, it's not a scribble, and so on. Any reading we make of it is only ever art in part.
According to Lacan: "The symbolic brings forth a lack in the real, creation brings forth something into being, where there was nothing before, nothing but a blank, which is not nothing."
Psychoanalytic methodology opens up new ways of accepting the uncertain intelligently, to avoid reductive, closed methods of understanding, to undermine compartmentalised notions of art and education. It's time we test critical limits, make bold assertions. This is not blank paper.

Psychoanalytic readings tend to look for missing parts, or hidden traces, where the ego rejects and erases psychoses, as if they had never been there. Where there are gaps, the ego covers them over in seeming blank paper, creating a false reality. Yet however well the ego tries to mislead you into thinking that paper innocently blank, anyone or any text bears traces. You can even see marks of the old National Curriculum on the new blank paper that it made.
Death cannot be represented in Freud's unconscious but only imprinted, by spacings, blanks, discontinuities, and yet it is what we most desire to articulate, to fill the void.
According to Briony Fer's study of Eva Hesse & Minimalism entitled "Bordering on Blank" blank space lies both inside and outside the symbolic and therein lies its power:
"And blank space is a metaphor which suggests both invisibility and lack, which can usefully serve to dramatise the problems of art and its relation to language. Of course, the metaphor only comes about by being put into language. It is articulated in language, but also comes to refer to a psychic space prior to language."
The blank recycled paper comes to represent , in Lacan's words, 'to signify the annulment of what it signifies'.
Who wrote the National Curriculum ? Are they alive? The author is a kind of secret character in the text.
Some writers have played on this- in Nikolai Gogol's short story The Nose , the hero, a smug, ambitious Major, looks at himself in the mirror one morning and discovers he has lost his nose, and there's just a blank space left where it used to be. He searches the streets for it and finally discovers it- in the form of a whole object- a civil servant, in fact.
Is this nose a metaphor? If metaphor is where something stands for something else what does this nose represent? What might we imagine in place of the blank where the nose used to be? Is it a sexual symbol? Is it Gogol's castration complex? Set free in the streets, what might a Major's nose do? Much has been written about this nose, as you might imagine, not least because the story was censored in Gogol's time by the State, on the grounds that the nose visited a Cathedral. (Gogol had to make the nose visit a shopping arcade instead.) My preferred reading is: if you want to search for a prick you will find it, probably in the form of an education minister.

The necessity of its own repression, the repression of its message, will return in the symptom. What are these symptoms? Tired, ill, jaded, cynical teachers who fill blank paper, who colour it in for the purposes of display because Ofsted are coming and who allow the separation of art and education until they split into real illness: schizophrenia. Lacan suggests an answer to 'this hole, this split, in the gap so characteristic of cause', though it is 'non-realised'. He controversially calls it: 'the abortionists relation to limbo'.
I recognise educationalists -myself included- consider ourselves the opposite of the abortionist;- the educationalist is purposeful, constructive, fills and colours in life, as it were, but if all of this was an illusion, merely papering over the cracks, then we are closer to limbo than we smugly think.
From where does the repressed return? Paradoxically, from the future. Symptoms are traces, not evacuated from the past but constructed, transformed. The blank is rewriting history.

Like child's play or a dream, "This is Not" and "Blank Paper" are transposed, and far less cunning than either. Freud said: "My patients told me their dreams...and so taught me". Learning through the unreliable, the very non-authority of literature, dreams, children, play. A knowledge that does not know what it knows and thus is not in possession of itself. You read the National Curriculum as fiction; it's the biggest compliment you can pay it.
These projects use the same Primary thought processes as the fictional world of the dream: displacing, condensing, reversing (this is not the N.C. for art) and substituting (new paper from old).
Lacan's aim for psychoanalysis was to listen to what was said, de-toxify the material and return it in the form of an interpretation. Casting the toxic waste of 750 million pound's worth of defunct National Curriculum paper into the shredder, pulper, ironer and cutter of the recycling mill and giving it back to classrooms cured of its neuroses is our interpretation, and I hope you'll agree that this is not blank paper.

"... a vacant signal of that which isn't in fact vacant, a blank such as you might find in a book across which an author's hand inks an inscription implicating its own abolition: O, vain papyrus, drawn back, unavoidably back, into its own blank womb, a tract of a non-tract... a distraction, an omission both disguising and boasting its own invicibility, a canyon of Non-Colerado, a doorway that nobody would cross... a blank word put out of bounds, a word now null and void, always just out of sight, always contriving to avoid scrutiny, a word no mispronounciation can satisfy, a castrating word, a flaccid word, a vacant word connoting an insultingly obvous signification, in which suspicion, privation and illusion all triumph, a lacunary furrow, a vacant canal, a Lacanian chasm... but also a mad authority, a craving for a purity ...a Void, a Blank, a missing sign prohibiting us on a daily basis from talking, from writing, from using words with any thrust or point... a Blank into which all of us will go missing in our turn..." (Georges Perec).
[VdR]