The new journal from the graduate students of the UCSD visual arts department, pros*, was released this week, and its awesome. It deals with questions of public culture, electronic media, the changing nature of public space and the question of the university as a site of political engagement. You can read the whole journal at http://pros.ucsd.edu and my article is here, with an excerpt below: http://bang.calit2.net/pros/?page_id=11

Occupy the University: Reconsidering the Local

Micha Cárdenas

In a conversation recorded for pros* journal, Teddy Cruz and Rick Lowe agree that socially engaged art has the ability to actually change the material conditions under which art is made and in which people’s lives occur. They seem to agree that the best way to change housing conditions is to engage at the level of local legislation, housing associations and city governments. I would like to intervene on this point. While I agree that socially engaged art can change people’s lives, my intervention, to be simple, is to say that the decision about how to intervene is not so simple. Cruz and Lowe urge artists to engage in local city politics, yet I argue that perhaps an even more local focus may be more beneficial. In her book When Species Meet, Donna Haraway describes a feminist approach to political ethics, which accepts our finitude, contingency and historical situatedness. Her approach acknowledges that from a position of a lack of certainty, “there is no outside from which to answer that mandatory question”[2] of what political action to take. Refusing to take a political action is still a political action, and so we are faced with “bearing the mortal consequences” of our choices of where to put our artistic energies in this expanded field where any artistic practice is apparently acceptable. My own affinity with a feminist ethics of uncertainty grew out of my work with Avital Ronell at the European Graduate School where I asked, “But how can we sit and discuss the deep meaning of this punctuation mark while bombs are being dropped on people?” Her response was, to paraphrase, that by introducing doubt into commonly accepted definitions of ideas and political strategies, that the decisions about dropping those bombs, or imprisoning people, may be stalled, changed or ended.

By considering the university institution in which this discussion takes place, with its framework of research and knowledge production, we can find ourselves implicated and complicit on a new level. While the rhetoric of humanist charities or of helping the poor children of the world may sound convincing as a call to involve artists in questions of social engagement, it also serves the institution to appear engaged in the communities. In fact, one could argue that reproducing this dialogue serves to entrench the existing conditions instead of changing them. I propose that a wide section of contemporary artists are concerned with shifting, altering, rethinking and recreating the material conditions of society and choosing very different approaches from Cruz and Lowe, a few of which I will outline here. These artists and activists question the structures that create and enable political and economic conditions, and structures of knowledge production, such as scientific dogma and medical definitions. The Electronic Disturbance Theater’s notion of Science of the Oppressed will serve as a useful guide for understanding practices which seek to re-imagine knowledge production in the service of social movements and oppressed peoples. The practices presented here seek to intervene in society at the level of the causes of social inequity, of the underlying knowledge structures, instead of working through local legislation, which could be seen as merely a symptom….

Read the rest at pros.ucsd.edu