The Onslaught of the New: Extracurricular Activities as Malleable Structures

Essay written for an upcoming book on the extracurricular activities of Design Academy Eindhoven, edited by Pete Fung.

I pick up an old gray tome, and as I open it, a chill crawls down my spine: the words I wrote in 2010 could have been written yesterday. Then it is true that, as someone once said, the ideas developed over the course of a lifetime are those you had at twenty – or twenty-five, as in this case.

The book, entitled Futuroscopio, is an assortment of past futures, starting from the premise, sadly still relevant, that the future is long gone. It includes excerpts from short stories and novels (Cervantes, Buzzati, Ballard), design projects, dissertations, as well as reports on meetings held by the various curators. Among my favorite contributions: Corinne Mazzoli’s bell tower of St. Mark’s Square submerged in the lagoon water (only later would I discover a Venice-Atlantis in the sci-fi music video for Rondò Veneziano and a drowned Florence in the collages of Superstudio); the legendary origin of floppy disks according to a nine-year-old Simona Materazzini: “One day all the writing rebelled (sic)… what a chaos!”; a photomontage from a 1985 issue of Ebony magazine, showing a new-millennium version of Michael Jackson looking like some yuppie entrepreneur.

Futuroscopio was an unsophisticated and somewhat disorganized publication, but it was genuine. Why am I talking about it? Because it would have never existed without the financial support of the university I attended along with many of the other 45 participants in the project. I don’t recall the exact amount we received, but I believe it was around 500 euros. The sum, small but not symbolic, was used to print the book in about fifty copies, bound by hand (our hands). What was perhaps the most “entrepreneurial” experience of my entire professional career produced a temporary network leading to lasting bonds (I met a contributor after more than a decade, and the first thing he mentioned was the book), a resource freely available to everyone, but above all a situation in which the participants could independently organize a structure, and reorganize it if they no longer liked it.

Christian Raimo, an Italian author and educator, remembers a comparable experience: “What I will never forget is the freedom that the public university gave to those in their early twenties for so long, providing modest but intelligent funding and, above all, granting a space to create and invent an independent magazine. An independent magazine that was, at its core, a school of literary training: we learned on the job, recommending books to one another, exchanging bibliographies, and, above all, doing the militant work of reading and revising other people’s texts.” Raimo, however, also remarks on the exceptional character of his experience: “At the time, I assumed this was the normal course of affairs at public universities. Only later did I realize that I had been lucky: I had witnessed a brief interlude that would soon come to an end, as the university succumbed to funding cuts and neoliberal regression.”¹

I picked up Futuroscopio after being invited to reflect upon the community micro-grants at Design Academy Eindhoven. Through a simple form, this extracurricular initiative allocates a contribution of 300 euros to a student or group of students to launch radios, labs, roundtables, sports clubs, yoga classes, etc. Some of these activities continue after education and even get prizes. Interestingly, a relatively small cluster of them are devoted to “Dutch culture”. At a time when the far right is weaponizing the art and design world’s shallow cosmopolitanism, I find this promising. In recent years, there has been a universal push toward “internationalization” (and for good reasons, since most DAE students come from abroad), though it has often felt generic and bureaucratic. Of course, the aim is not to make classes Dutch-only, but to acknowledge and make use of the fact that the school is in Eindhoven, and Eindhoven is in the Netherlands. In other words, the point is to situate internationalization precisely to avoid “restorative nostalgia”.²

As I browse the photos of the activities, I notice that they invariably show people together in space: the emphasis is, of course, on community-building. That has genuine value. In fact, the micro-grants foster what enables community-building, as they strengthen the glue that keeps a small community together. This glue is structure: your group meets every Wednesday at 5pm? Structure. Everyone brings a snack? Structure. The dishes need to be washed before leaving the space? Structure. So conceived, structure is at once the foundation and the object of redesign and renegotiation by the community. As Ezio Manzini argued in a recent lecture, “operational proximity can generate relational proximity” because “collaboration and mutual care cannot be designed or made mandatory by law, but the conditions can be created to make it possible and probable.”³

Expedients such as micro-grants, physical spaces entrusted to students, canteens, etc. allow a school to do what, in principle, cannot do: offer an almost total degree of structural plasticity. Why can’t a school do that? Because education is either structure, or it isn’t. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that a school is more about structure than content. This is particularly clear in primary school, where what is taught first is not the alphabet or arithmetic, but remaining seated for a while, and then standing when the teacher enters.⁴ Within higher education, the structure might (and should) be more flexible, more open, but it is still there: a professor launches a debate, and although the students participate with a degree of informality, it is still the professor who decides (hopefully in advance) when to end it. I realize this might all sound a bit “disciplinary”, but the alternative is worse, leading to what Jo Freeman, a political scientist and a feminist, called “tyranny of structurelessness”, which is a structure, still present yet illegible, that privileges the strong or the charismatic. “‘Structurelessness’ – explained Freeman – is organizationally impossible. We cannot decide whether to have a structured or structureless group, only whether or not to have a formally structured one.”⁵ And a formally structured one is not necessarily oppressive, as the “structureless rap group” believes.

If we focus specifically on the design school, I would argue that one of its fundamental structures is what is variously called a tutorial, a “crit”, or a feedback session. If done well, the tutorial moment encourages a master-apprentice relation (where the master should be “ignorant”⁶), rather than a judge-culprit one. Because a teacher is expected to know this, what matters is that the student understands it early on. This relationship helps shape a student’s character, who gains confidence and autonomy – precisely because their character is not the focus: shyness, impulsiveness, even stubbornness are set aside, since there is a problem at hand to address. This is also why I believe the tutorial should be a moment neither of praise nor of reproach. For some years now, I have made a habit of drawing on paper while talking to students. At the end of the tutorial, I hand the sheet to them – usually filled with indecipherable diagrams. Again: structure, more or less.

The tutorial, even in its quasi-horizontality, remains a school structure, and therefore not fully open to student reorganization. To experience true structural malleability, students need structures of their own. Through the micro-grants initiative, the school enables such structures and temporarily reconciles the tension between authority and autonomy, obedience and insubordination, rigidity and plasticity. This is a valid alternative to the school turning into its own anti-school, producing a context where chaos is mistaken for freedom, and informality becomes a new formalism. For its part, alternative education can draw more or less antagonistically from institutional education, but the two are not the same. As I wrote some years ago:

The Field isn’t a school and the School isn’t the Field, but they benefit from each other (collaborations with local collectives, self-organized spaces, etc). What the School gains from the Field is a sense of specificity and purpose; what the Field gets from the School are financial resources and the opportunity to reach new publics. But the exchange is asymmetrical. The Field is in a less stable position: collectives come and go, and their sustainability is currently put to the test. The occasional workshop fee is not enough to maintain the Field alive. And yet, given its ambitions and limitations, the School is increasingly dependent on a lively Field. Without the energies of a surrounding Field, the School is doomed to become a managerial graveyard.⁷

In a 1954 essay on the crisis of education in the United States – an essay that in my opinion every educator should read –, Hannah Arendt discusses, among other things, the role of authority and tradition.⁸ Arendt’s focus is on childhood education, but I believe most she says can be extended to adult education. To begin with, she points out that there is a fundamental difference between the world and school: “Now school is by no means the world and must not pretend to be; it is rather the institution that we interpose between the private domain of home and the world in order to make the transition from the family to the world possible at all.” As a side note, I argued the exact opposite in my book What Design Can’t Do. There, my claim that school is the real world was meant to highlight the fact that higher education is no longer shielded from the forces of the real world (competition, cost of living, forced entrepreneurship) and thus increasingly regarded as nothing more than an economic investment.⁹

Since school and the world are two different things, the educator bears – according to Arendt – a double responsibility, both to the pupil and to the world: “the child requires special protection and care so that nothing destructive may happen to him from the world. But the world, too, needs protection to keep it from being overrun and destroyed by the onslaught of the new that bursts upon it with each new generation.” In the case of adult education, the student does not need this special protection, but the world still does, precisely because “the onslaught of the new” has already gained strength. To protect the world – that is, their world – educators must rely on both their qualifications and their authority: “The teacher’s qualification consists in knowing the world and being able to instruct others about it, but his authority rests on his assumption of responsibility for that world.” Now, authority was already out of fashion when Arendt was writing, and it is even more now: “Authority has been discarded by the adults, and this can mean only one thing: that the adults refuse to assume responsibility for the world into which they have brought the children.”

I believe that what Arendt calls authority – that is, the explicit commitment to one’s world – is not only embodied by the educator, but also inscribed in the artificial, “designed” environment of the educational institution: it lies in its very structure. The partial inflexibility of such structure is how authority speaks, for leaving everything to structureless chance would amount to a withdrawal of responsibility. But, far from being a cage or a trap, structural authority – structure as authority – is really the school’s gift: even if the student dislikes it, they must clarify what they dislike and why, and then carry that insight into a different structure elsewhere. Arendt made this clear in another text: “We educators must have faith in our students and leave the work of revolution to them.”¹⁰ If not confronted with a formal, legible structure, students will take freedom for what is in fact mere befuddlement. This is why the problem of education is not linear but dialectical, involving both freedom and authority, not only within the school but also beyond it: “The problem of education in the modern world lies in the fact that by its very nature it cannot forgo either authority or tradition, and yet must proceed in a world that is neither structured by authority nor held together by tradition.” In other words, the challenge is to protect a fragile old from a vigorous but partly unaware new:

Exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child, education must be conservative; it must preserve this newness and introduce it as a new thing into an old world, which, however revolutionary its actions may be, is always, from the standpoint of the next generation, superannuated and close to destruction.

Following Jo Freeman, we might say that our world is not structured by formal authority, and traditions affect it informally. In an age of mythical conservatism, nostalgic longings for origins, and illusive dreams of past glories, what the school can offer is the “maintenance work” of what is still good in the dying world we grew up in, and to which we inevitably belong. It is from the frail, brittle world of ours that the new may emerge. Extracurricular activities serve as an interface between the former and the latter.