GENESIS AND PURPOSE
GENESIS AND PURPOSE
In 2020 the philosopher Bernard Stiegler wrote Archipelagos of the Living (Archipel des vivants), summoning here six territories – most of them islands – to come together and form what he called a “territorial laboratory”. This particular laboratory was meant to be one of many laboratories united together in a trans-national group, which, by a collective constituted of academics, had been named an Internation. The primary objective of this Internation was to experiment a new macroeconomic model, which through units of researchers, professionals and inhabitants would identify local problems and, by associating private and public institutions to the project, invent new local jobs to address them.
In its ambition and bravado, the text is emblematic of many western philosophical projects. It offers a counter-model to current transnational politics, where localities, much like companies, are pitted against one another in the fight over educated brains and foreign investment. Against such mutual impoverishment, Archipelagos of the Living was imagined as a forum where knowledge and experience would be shared freely between territorial actors working to experiment new economic models empowering local populations. Here, in this forum, benchmarking would be replaced by new, commonly agreed-upon indicators of value. Here, participants would pull each other up instead of racing to the bottom.
With Bernard Stiegler passing shortly after the text had been published, Archipelagos of the Living could easily have ended here. However, in the meantime, the text had been integrated into a European Project, Networking Ecologically Smart Territories (NEST), which in September 2020 was chosen as a Marie-Sklodowska Curie program by the European Research Council. A pool of money was attributed to this program. With this pool of money arose an opportunity to enact parts of a project that still existed exclusively on paper.
Almost exclusively on paper. In the last part of the text, Bernard Stiegler lists a number of encounters: he describes going to the Galapagos islands, to Cres and to Corsica, and speaking to people from l’Ile-Saint-Denis, Sherkin Island and the city Dabrowa Gornicza. If there was no group of territorial actors in place when Archipelagos of the Living was published, most of the actors mentioned in the text had exchanged with Bernard Stiegler, if only briefly. These meetings had been significant enough for most of them to continue a dialogue with the Institute of Research and Innovation, which was made responsible for keeping the project going. In the autumn of 2020, a number of meetings were put in place. They were called workshops, which was a way of saying that, in terms of the concrete actions to be organised under the project title, most things were still to be ‘worked out’. The sessions took place in the midst of COVID. Over zoom, actors from each territory presented their island in turns. The presentations were insightful and generous. Sometimes, the different actors would listen in on one another’s presentations. Those who could participate in more than one, testified to a number of similarities that were becoming apparent. Concerns would be repeated, sometimes down to the word. Participants would speak about fragile economic systems, about mono-economies, and especially about an overreliance on tourism, further highlighted by a pandemic still raging. They would reflect on the overreliance on imported goods too, on basic things like food and water, only exacerbated by the disappearance of traditional agricultural knowledge, and the price of the food-stuff produced locally, often exorbitant for the local population. Some focused on the disruptions caused by invasive species introduced to delicate ecosystems, whether in the form of boars, seeds or tourists, and on how one might regulate their presence, while also – at the same time – interrogating perceptions of what is foreign and what is local. There is, many argued, a real danger of ending with unmoving ideas of what a territory is and can be. Some spoke about waste, the incapacity to absorb and discharge matter sustainably, what on several occasions was referred to as ‘sick metabolisms’, and almost everyone worried about wildfires, droughts and rising sea levels, the acutely felt precarity of existing at the forefront of climate warming. Many questioned how to regenerate a territory – different, it was argued, from the preservation of a territory. How could islands, it was asked, become desirable to younger generations that are often migrating towards bigger cities? A few could testify to problems associated with imported knowledge systems, and imported social models, and parachute academics, who come to rural territories to extract information without giving anything back. There was, many concluded, a need to recentre knowledge production, to come up with solutions in the places that need them and together with the people that need them – not due to some a priori hostility against imported ideas, but because situated solutions are often more sustainable in the long term. When discussing how to work together, there was mention of antagonisms between academics and territorial actors, between seasonal and permanent residents, between local traditions and the laws imposed by supra-national institutions, especially the European Union. People decried the absence of spaces where these antagonisms can be addressed, the lack of public forums where the opinion and ideas of inhabitants can be voiced and mature.
Around the exchanges, something began to take shape. This something was not a clear sense of where the project was going. Rather, we might talk about a space, one marked by both empathy and defiance — an expressed interest in making (counter-)system of local initiatives. A space where despite the open-endessness of the project, the inability to say what the bottomline of Archipelagos of the Living was exactly, and some awkward silences where everyone was looking on their respective screens for someone who might set a direction, all expressed a desire to continue working together in one way or another. In a time where everything extracurricular feels tenuous, threatened by an all-pervading call for goal-driven actions and efficiency, that already felt quite extraordinary.
It is against the backdrop of all of this, this academy takes place. It stands on an important and far-reaching philosophical heritage. On a European Program with its own logic and commitments. It involves a group of people that are generous and patient and curious and that, for most parts, happen to live or work on islands. To some of these people, the identity of being an islander is acutely felt, while others aren’t islanders strictly speaking. What ties everyone together is a feeling of existing on the periphery of traditional knowledge production, in areas that with the myopic glasses of urban dwellers are sometimes considered intellectual wasteland. Another thing associating these islanders-not-always-islanders is a lean towards practices that exist at the intersection of practice and theory, whether manifest in an interest in theoretical work leading to material structures, in social practices infused with more or less formalised philosophical interrogations, in reflexive activism or bastardised forms of theory.
The academy inherits a number of paradoxes and blind-spots too. The difference between now and the beginning of this project is that there’ll be no attempt to hide them away or pretend to promote an infallible economic project just waiting to be applied. The academy makes it its right to ask questions. In fact, the academy will in many ways be about asking questions. One question is: what to do with the philosophical project that has been bestowed on these territoires? Throughout history, many projects have been ‘bestowed’ on territories. These projects have sometimes been called christianity, civilisation, democracy, human rights, democracy, a free market. Often, they’ve been used to justify war, colonization, imperialism, epestimicides and other forms of systemic violence. There are, in other words, plenty of reasons to be suspicious of a project that speaks on behalf of one or several places. There will be moments reserved during this academy to address such suspicion, notably during the first evening’s discussion and the reading sessions scheduled during breakfast on the 28th and 29th of September. Here, we will comment on key texts that have led to the genesis of this project. By scrutinizing what has been promised and holding it up to the desires of those who are meant to carry the project, we will consider which ideas are worth keeping, which ones need revision and which ones ought to be discarded. To get the most out of these sessions, we ask that everyone reads and annotates the texts that have been uploaded here.
There is also a whole series of questions we might ask the European project NEST, which generously funds this project but which shouldn’t be followed blindly for this reason. In the project description, it is written that the program will bring about a network of territorial laboratories. We might ask what it entails to become a territorial laboratory, and if anyone is interested in becoming one. It says that it will mobilize “fishermen, farmers and inhabitants of insular territories”. We might ask what fishermen, farmers and inhabitants will get out of a still largely academic project, how to avoid, more generally, that a collaborative gesture doesn’t turn exploitative. It says these actors are meant to conduct “processes of contributory research”. We might ask if anyone actually knows what contributory research is, and inquire about the conditions and knowledge required to experiment the method on the ground.
These questions are not rhetorical. Answers will be attempted. This last question in particular will structure some of the discussions during the academy. Here, the territories will be called upon to respond to different intentions implied in the method of Contributory Research, which was meant to accompany the new political economy as it was promoted by Internation. During four sessions, we will consider how know-how and lived experience of territorial actors might help us imagine the actual forms Contributory Research can take. Descriptions of each session can be found as you hover around this page.
So far I’ve employed the pronoun ‘we’ in the text, getting ahead of myself. For now, it is still only I – my name is Elvira Hojberg – who is writing. While having had the privilege to talk to almost everyone who will be present at the academy, and while these territories have been brought into the consciousness of one another, there still doesn’t exist a ‘we’ – not properly speaking. The academy is also – and perhaps especially – about remedying this fact. If participants are meeting on Cres Island, it is also to do exactly that. To – for the first time – meet and speak, the condition for developing a shared language and vision. A small number of people are getting together, which means that, during each session, there will be plenty of time to discuss freely, to get to know one another and one another’s preoccupations, to digress and to deviate. Some moments have been dedicated to this specifically, in the program they are called break and lunch, but otherwise the idea is that in between and even inside the moments planned, there will be time for the unexpected, what Bernard Stiegler on many occasions called the incalculable.
When arriving on the island you will be able to check in to your rooms reserved for us at the Moise palace, located at Zagrad 6, 51557 on Cres Island. A recently renovated cultural heritage site, the Moise palace each year welcomes a series of educational and cultural activities programmed by the University of Rijeka. Besides the dorms, this 16th century Renaissance palace is composed of a conference hall and a small kitchen, which will frame most of our activities during the four days on the island.
This introductory session serves to map out the different strains, ideas, and people that make up, precede or frame this academy. It will begin with an overview of the events leading to the genesis of Archipelagos of the Living, and of the institutional and financial structures that underpin the project. Rendering the mechanisms of a project transparent is the most basic step towards reassuring that no one who participates feels misled or exploited; it is the prerequisite for analysing the possibilities and limits of a series of proposed undertakings, to engage in what Michel Foucault has called Criticism, and Emmanuel Kant has called Aufklarung. Discussing the context of the project also sets the tone for the rest of the academy, which will favour moments of autoreflection, understood here as a consideration of how we work together, for whom we work and towards what end. Such reflection is important to any research process, but especially to processes that wish to promote the participation of many diverse actors with different interests and motivations. The latter part of the session will be reserved specifically for the mapping of such motivations, what psychologists Bergold and Tomas in their work on participatory practices call the ‘personal and biographical attributes’ of a research project. While resembling an introductory round in its form and content, this moment should not be thought of as an automated formality. Besides hearing the names, professions and affiliations of everyone present, we will work to outline the kinds of knowledge participants might hold and which they are likely to draw on during discussions, what we might think of as the epistemological make-up of Archipelagos of the Living.
One condition for working well together is a shared set of references. For this session, we’ll ask you to read and comment on three texts that teach us something about Archipelagos of the Living. One text has already been shared with most of you. It carries the name of the project and describes the events leading to it. It was written in 2020, before the project was launched. As philosophy does sometimes, it announces an event yet to come. Attending to this text retrospectively, will allow us to analyse the original objectives from the sobering perspective of someone who’s meant to carry them out. We will do this, not to quell initial ambitions, but to find a compromise between these original ideals, potential new idea(l)s and what seems feasible in terms of concrete actions.
For those outside of philosophy, and even for those inside of it, the text might appear obscure. I don’t want anyone to feel like they ought to understand every single part of it. Instead, I encourage you to highlight nebulous concepts, so that we during this discussion can go over these difficult moments, and by way of collective intelligence come up with some working definitions together.
The other texts are two of the key texts describing the method of Contributory Research. In fact, except for a report written for the Digital Advisory Board in France in 2012, they are the only texts explicitly outlining the method. This means that after reading them, you’ll be in a good position to make valid value judgments about the methods strengths and shortcomings. It is this kind of judgment we will try to pursue together. Doing so will be useful in the sessions that follow, where we will look closer at some of the qualities – and problems – of Contributory Research, by holding it up to other types of empowerment-practices conducted in insular territories.
For those who wish to dive deeper into these method-questions, I’ve included a number of texts that have been important to the conception of Contributory Research, whether implicitly or explicitly. This list of texts isn’t an exhaustive overview. It is a selection, one which you might add to, now, or later, as we begin to determine the nature of Archipelagos of the Living. Any undertaking is, amongst other things, defined by the texts it references.
Find the texts here.
Presentations
Sara Baranzoni and Paolo Vignola (Lecco)
Glenn Louhgran and Fiona Collins (Sherkin Island)
Michal Krzykawski and Karolina Lebek (Silesia)
This session starts in the margins of hegemonic knowledge production. With defunded humanities and social sciences accused of lacking use-value and objectivity; with practices offering new theories about the natural world, challenging what biologists Ana Soto and Carlos Sonnenscheim have described as a generalised state of proletarianisation within the sciences, where for most parts, they say, scientist execute but no longer think. With marginalised territories – the south, the east, the rural – where for many decades theorists have fought bloody wars against epistemicides; where, as Boavnetura de Sousa Santos writes, practitioners have shown “that irrationality is not the only alternative to what is currently considered rational, that chaos is not the only alternative to order”; where Paulo Freire in 1970 would make the distinction between objectivity and objectivism to criticise a type of objectivity that denies subjectivity, in other words, the existence of people. Contributory research is a research of these margins. It strives for objectivity as defined by Freire, that is, an analysis of the world that recognises the people within it. Contributory research can be said to strive for universal knowledge too. Emphasis here on the striving. Acknowledging its unattainability, it promotes a kind of a universality that ties and reties links between local knowledge, prescribing general rules by moving between the lived and the abstract. Like laws, the relevance of this kind of universality depends on its capacity to renew. Only structures of renewal might counter stale and dysfunctional thought habits, the standardisation of practices and desires marking what Bernard Stiegler has called the The Entropocène. This session proposes to elaborate on the conditions of this universality, to imagine what kind of structures – institutional, technical or other – that might facilitate the movement between the general and the particular. What this session does not propose is to make the margins a new centre, to invert current hierarchies, which would only reinstall patterns of dominance and subjugation. Rather it wants to do away with the idea of margins and a center all together, to rethink the university as many situated hubs of local knowledge – as territorial laboratories collaborating on equal terms. We might call this university Archipelago, which before designating a group of distinct territories was used to describe the sea holding them together.
Time to see the island on which we are staying. The team from the Moise Palace has organised a trip around Cres, which includes a visit to a rehabilitation center for white-headed vultures. “A meeting point for scientists, researchers, ornithologists, nature lovers and enthusiasts, local people, and school children”, the centre is both a (contributory) research hub and a tourist attraction. As such, it provides potential answers to questions that have been raised in previous discussions. Noticeably: how to create an ‘erudite’ form of tourism, how to discover flora and fauna without degrading it, and how to present the biodiversity of a territory honestly – not as a glossy image but as a complex system, which is sometimes threatened, and always — always — changing.
Presentations
Carolina Velastegui (Galapagos Islands)
José Daniel Guerrero Vela (Galapagos Islands)
Robba Collective (Corsica)
In the work of Bernard Stiegler, tertiary retentions is described as the spill-over of prior generations’ accumulated knowledge. It is collective memory sedimented in material forms – in writing, music, film, art, buildings, tech, pottery, drawings on cave walls. In this sense, tertiary retentions do not simply populate the world – they can be said to constitute our world. Universities have traditionally made tertiary retentions their object of study. While carefully attending to worldly artefacts, there’ve been few systematic attempts within the academy to critically consider what kind of knowledge-objects the university produces. Contributory Research is in part a response to this lack of attention. It is a method that makes of tertiary retentions both a study and a practice. In this session, we’ll discuss what exactly it means to practice tertiary retentions, asking how and where the knowledge of contributory research might settle, what kind of traces it leaves behind. Considering the limits and possibilities of trace-making is all the more urgent in a time where the internet like no technique since the printing press has disrupted established rules of knowledge transmission. With everyone a potential content maker, the passing on of knowledge has never been more possibly democratic and never more potentially damaging for a democratic, rational debate. Guided by territorial actors who are inscribing collective memory into media in different ways, we will try to outline a new politics of publishing and editing, one fit for a method that explicitly embraces non-academic knowledge, like lived experience and know-how, and which never pretends to transcend time and space, but consciously reaches for the yet-to-come from inside the already-there.
Coming.
Presentations
Stéphane Berdoulet and Carla Brunet (Île-Saint-Denis
Théo Sentis and Vincent Loubière (Seine-Saint-Denis)
Giacomo Gilmozzi (Lecco)
Contributory Research forms part of the aspiration to found a real knowledge-based economy: an economy put at the service of knowledge production – and not, as is the case today, an economy that instrumentalises knowledge to wage economic global warfare. This real knowledge economy has been called a Contributory Economy. It is a macroeconomic model meant to valorise types of knowledge that can counteract personal, social and environmental disintegration. Thinking economics as an intrinsic part of a research method has been a way of reckoning with two basic principles, one epistemological and one ethical in nature: 1) that research is defined by the funding models available and 2) that if people contribute to a research project, you ought to pay them for their contribution. Today, no real Contributory Economy is on the horizon. To face up to this reality, we propose in this session to return to the question of how one might render processes of contributory research financially sustainable without compromising scientific integrity and without exploiting people. To lead the discussion, we’ll invite territorial actors who’ve come up with models to sustain local knowledge production, knowledge understood here as transformative knowledge, what economist Amartya Sen and philosopher Hannah Nussbaum call capabilities. These models look less like the local Management Institutes imagined to administer a Contributory Economy, and more like hacks of current local systems, whether in the form of inventive public or private partnerships, experimentations with alternative currencies, or bids to reclaim money generated within the data economy to redirect it towards local interests. The bet we make here is that to move past idealised models and towards a real real knowledge economy, we have to set aside for one second the Contributory Economy, and look instead to a number of possible, imperfect but functional, contributory-like economies.
One of the objectives of the Archipelagos of the living as it’s defined in the NEST program is to develop a platform. A platform can mean something very vague and something very specific. Within computer science, it is a basic standardised framework that can accommodate many different applications. Outside of computer science, a platform can be a ground above water, a raised level surface on which people or objects can stand, a place where people get on and off trains, a declared policy of a political group, a pair of chunky shoes. Before deciding what kind of platform should be developed, it is worth discussing the meaning we ascribe to the term. Guided by a number of examples, we will since go on to discuss the functionalities which might be worth experimenting on this platform, which ideally will be of use for everyone contributing to it.
Presentations
Sarah Czerny and Anna Colquhoun (Crès and Istria)
The objective of contributory knowledge is always double: to 1) produce new knowledge by looking at the relationship between the physiological, technical and social organs that make up a given situation and 2) to consider the technical objects used to forge said knowledge. This session will pause on this latter point, on knowledge as its delimited by the techniques at our disposal. Given the particular context of this project, we will ground our discussion in practices that create, demonstrate or rely on a certain knowledge about the living. Many argue that such practices are in decline. Since the industrial revolution, which instigated a wave of migration towards urban centres, fewer and fewer people are in regular and conscious contact with non-human life. Arguing that such ignorance makes us insensitive to the systematic destruction of life systems, the philosopher Baptizte Morizot has called for a new and veritable culture of the living – what he imagines as a ‘network of knowledge, interpretations, significant anecdotes, stories of invisibles relation, [and of] lived familiarity’ – to relocate the living at the center of collective spaces and our political consciousness. Reflecting on the techniques of the living is complementary to this effervescent call to arms. If Morizot highlights the importance of producing more knowledge about the living, we suggest that it matters how this knowledge is produced – whether it’s pursued through a microscope or satellite data, through models or lived experience, whether it’s passed down through generations or developed in science labs, whether it’s supposedly neutral or decidedly invested. The practices we will consider here are of various nature – from techniques of cooking and agriculture to techniques of monitoring and tracking, from ancient rituals to digital technologies. If we find it important to ask how we know the living, it isn’t just because different techniques reveal different characteristics about an object or phenomenon. Following Gregory Bateson’s assertion that ontology (the way things are) cannot be separated from epistemology (the way we know things), you might say that different knowledge-techniques give rise to different types of living entirely.
To conclude three days of activities, each participant will in this last session be invited to talk about what they have retained from the academy. Criticism or praise, professional or personal enrichment, the hope is that everyone after two working days will feel safe to share what has marked them personally, even if it isn’t positive strictly speaking. Knowing if certain elements did not feel right – too complex or too slow, too closed in on themselves or too porous – is the only way to correct them moving forward – to become more in tune with one another, which is something this project strives for.
If retentions is that which has been captured by consciousness, and which we would recognise as memories, protentions look towards the future. They are, in the vocabulary of Ars Industrialis, ‘the desire (and expectation) of that which is to come‘. After considering the impressions stuck with us, we will ask which direction this ground of experience and knowledge opens up to. How do we see Archipelagos of the Living developing into the months and years to come?
GENESIS AND PURPOSE
In 2020 the philosopher Bernard Stiegler wrote Archipelagos of the Living (Archipel des vivants), summoning here six territories – most of them islands – to come together and form what he called a “territorial laboratory”. This particular laboratory was meant to be one of many laboratories united together in a trans-national group, which, by a collective constituted of academics, had been named an Internation. The primary objective of this Internation was to experiment a new macroeconomic model, which through units of researchers, professionals and inhabitants would identify local problems and, by associating private and public institutions to the project, invent new local jobs to address them.
In its ambition and bravado, the text is emblematic of many western philosophical projects. It offers a counter-model to current transnational politics, where localities, much like companies, are pitted against one another in the fight over educated brains and foreign investment. Against such mutual impoverishment, Archipelagos of the Living was imagined as a forum where knowledge and experience would be shared freely between territorial actors working to experiment new economic models empowering local populations. Here, in this forum, benchmarking would be replaced by new, commonly agreed-upon indicators of value. Here, participants would pull each other up instead of racing to the bottom.
With Bernard Stiegler passing shortly after the text had been published, Archipelagos of the Living could easily have ended here. However, in the meantime, the text had been integrated into a European Project, Networking Ecologically Smart Territories (NEST), which in September 2020 was chosen as a Marie-Sklodowska Curie program by the European Research Council. A pool of money was attributed to this program. With this pool of money arose an opportunity to enact parts of a project that still existed exclusively on paper.
Almost exclusively on paper. In the last part of the text, Bernard Stiegler lists a number of encounters: he describes going to the Galapagos islands, to Cres and to Corsica, and speaking to people from l’Ile-Saint-Denis, Sherkin Island and the city Dabrowa Gornicza. If there was no group of territorial actors in place when Archipelagos of the Living was published, most of the actors mentioned in the text had exchanged with Bernard Stiegler, if only briefly. These meetings had been significant enough for most of them to continue a dialogue with the Institute of Research and Innovation, which was made responsible for keeping the project going. In the autumn of 2020, a number of meetings were put in place. They were called workshops, which was a way of saying that, in terms of the concrete actions to be organised under the project title, most things were still to be ‘worked out’. The sessions took place in the midst of COVID. Over zoom, actors from each territory presented their island in turns. The presentations were insightful and generous. Sometimes, the different actors would listen in on one another’s presentations. Those who could participate in more than one, testified to a number of similarities that were becoming apparent. Concerns would be repeated, sometimes down to the word. Participants would speak about fragile economic systems, about mono-economies, and especially about an overreliance on tourism, further highlighted by a pandemic still raging. They would reflect on the overreliance on imported goods too, on basic things like food and water, only exacerbated by the disappearance of traditional agricultural knowledge, and the price of the food-stuff produced locally, often exorbitant for the local population. Some focused on the disruptions caused by invasive species introduced to delicate ecosystems, whether in the form of boars, seeds or tourists, and on how one might regulate their presence, while also – at the same time – interrogating perceptions of what is foreign and what is local. There is, many argued, a real danger of ending with unmoving ideas of what a territory is and can be. Some spoke about waste, the incapacity to absorb and discharge matter sustainably, what on several occasions was referred to as ‘sick metabolisms’, and almost everyone worried about wildfires, droughts and rising sea levels, the acutely felt precarity of existing at the forefront of climate warming. Many questioned how to regenerate a territory – different, it was argued, from the preservation of a territory. How could islands, it was asked, become desirable to younger generations that are often migrating towards bigger cities? A few could testify to problems associated with imported knowledge systems, and imported social models, and parachute academics, who come to rural territories to extract information without giving anything back. There was, many concluded, a need to recentre knowledge production, to come up with solutions in the places that need them and together with the people that need them – not due to some a priori hostility against imported ideas, but because situated solutions are often more sustainable in the long term. When discussing how to work together, there was mention of antagonisms between academics and territorial actors, between seasonal and permanent residents, between local traditions and the laws imposed by supra-national institutions, especially the European Union. People decried the absence of spaces where these antagonisms can be addressed, the lack of public forums where the opinion and ideas of inhabitants can be voiced and mature.
Around the exchanges, something began to take shape. This something was not a clear sense of where the project was going. Rather, we might talk about a space, one marked by both empathy and defiance — an expressed interest in making (counter-)system of local initiatives. A space where despite the open-endessness of the project, the inability to say what the bottomline of Archipelagos of the Living was exactly, and some awkward silences where everyone was looking on their respective screens for someone who might set a direction, all expressed a desire to continue working together in one way or another. In a time where everything extracurricular feels tenuous, threatened by an all-pervading call for goal-driven actions and efficiency, that already felt quite extraordinary.
It is against the backdrop of all of this, this academy takes place. It stands on an important and far-reaching philosophical heritage. On a European Program with its own logic and commitments. It involves a group of people that are generous and patient and curious and that, for most parts, happen to live or work on islands. To some of these people, the identity of being an islander is acutely felt, while others aren’t islanders strictly speaking. What ties everyone together is a feeling of existing on the periphery of traditional knowledge production, in areas that with the myopic glasses of urban dwellers are sometimes considered intellectual wasteland. Another thing associating these islanders-not-always-islanders is a lean towards practices that exist at the intersection of practice and theory, whether manifest in an interest in theoretical work leading to material structures, in social practices infused with more or less formalised philosophical interrogations, in reflexive activism or bastardised forms of theory.
The academy inherits a number of paradoxes and blind-spots too. The difference between now and the beginning of this project is that there’ll be no attempt to hide them away or pretend to promote an infallible economic project just waiting to be applied. The academy makes it its right to ask questions. In fact, the academy will in many ways be about asking questions. One question is: what to do with the philosophical project that has been bestowed on these territoires? Throughout history, many projects have been ‘bestowed’ on territories. These projects have sometimes been called christianity, civilisation, democracy, human rights, democracy, a free market. Often, they’ve been used to justify war, colonization, imperialism, epestimicides and other forms of systemic violence. There are, in other words, plenty of reasons to be suspicious of a project that speaks on behalf of one or several places. There will be moments reserved during this academy to address such suspicion, notably during the first evening’s discussion and the reading sessions scheduled during breakfast on the 28th and 29th of September. Here, we will comment on key texts that have led to the genesis of this project. By scrutinizing what has been promised and holding it up to the desires of those who are meant to carry the project, we will consider which ideas are worth keeping, which ones need revision and which ones ought to be discarded. To get the most out of these sessions, we ask that everyone reads and annotates the texts that have been uploaded here.
There is also a whole series of questions we might ask the European project NEST, which generously funds this project but which shouldn’t be followed blindly for this reason. In the project description, it is written that the program will bring about a network of territorial laboratories. We might ask what it entails to become a territorial laboratory, and if anyone is interested in becoming one. It says that it will mobilize “fishermen, farmers and inhabitants of insular territories”. We might ask what fishermen, farmers and inhabitants will get out of a still largely academic project, how to avoid, more generally, that a collaborative gesture doesn’t turn exploitative. It says these actors are meant to conduct “processes of contributory research”. We might ask if anyone actually knows what contributory research is, and inquire about the conditions and knowledge required to experiment the method on the ground.
These questions are not rhetorical. Answers will be attempted. This last question in particular will structure some of the discussions during the academy. Here, the territories will be called upon to respond to different intentions implied in the method of Contributory Research, which was meant to accompany the new political economy as it was promoted by Internation. During four sessions, we will consider how know-how and lived experience of territorial actors might help us imagine the actual forms Contributory Research can take. Descriptions of each session can be found as you hover around this page.
So far I’ve employed the pronoun ‘we’ in the text, getting ahead of myself. For now, it is still only I – my name is Elvira Hojberg – who is writing. While having had the privilege to talk to almost everyone who will be present at the academy, and while these territories have been brought into the consciousness of one another, there still doesn’t exist a ‘we’ – not properly speaking. The academy is also – and perhaps especially – about remedying this fact. If participants are meeting on Cres Island, it is also to do exactly that. To – for the first time – meet and speak, the condition for developing a shared language and vision. A small number of people are getting together, which means that, during each session, there will be plenty of time to discuss freely, to get to know one another and one another’s preoccupations, to digress and to deviate. Some moments have been dedicated to this specifically, in the program they are called break and lunch, but otherwise the idea is that in between and even inside the moments planned, there will be time for the unexpected, what Bernard Stiegler on many occasions called the incalculable.
Arrival on the Island
When arriving on the island you will be able to check in to your rooms reserved for us at the Moise palace, located at Zagrad 6, 51557 on Cres Island. A recently renovated cultural heritage site, the Moise palace each year welcomes a series of educational and cultural activities programmed by the University of Rijeka. Besides the dorms, this 16th century Renaissance palace is composed of a conference hall and a small kitchen, which will frame most of our activities during the four days on the island.
Mappings (Welcome to the Academy)
This introductory session serves to map out the different strains, ideas, and people that make up, precede or frame this academy. It will begin with an overview of the events leading to the genesis of Archipelagos of the Living, and of the institutional and financial structures that underpin the project. Rendering the mechanisms of a project transparent is the most basic step towards reassuring that no one who participates feels misled or exploited; it is the prerequisite for analysing the possibilities and limits of a series of proposed undertakings, to engage in what Michel Foucault has called Criticism, and Emmanuel Kant has called Aufklarung. Discussing the context of the project also sets the tone for the rest of the academy, which will favour moments of autoreflection, understood here as a consideration of how we work together, for whom we work and towards what end. Such reflection is important to any research process, but especially to processes that wish to promote the participation of many diverse actors with different interests and motivations. The latter part of the session will be reserved specifically for the mapping of such motivations, what psychologists Bergold and Tomas in their work on participatory practices call the ‘personal and biographical attributes’ of a research project. While resembling an introductory round in its form and content, this moment should not be thought of as an automated formality. Besides hearing the names, professions and affiliations of everyone present, we will work to outline the kinds of knowledge participants might hold and which they are likely to draw on during discussions, what we might think of as the epistemological make-up of Archipelagos of the Living.
Breakfast Reading: Contributory Research
One condition for working well together is a shared set of references. For this session, we’ll ask you to read and comment on three texts that teach us something about Archipelagos of the Living. One text has already been shared with most of you. It carries the name of the project and describes the events leading to it. It was written in 2020, before the project was launched. As philosophy does sometimes, it announces an event yet to come. Attending to this text retrospectively, will allow us to analyse the original objectives from the sobering perspective of someone who’s meant to carry them out. We will do this, not to quell initial ambitions, but to find a compromise between these original ideals, potential new idea(l)s and what seems feasible in terms of concrete actions.
For those outside of philosophy, and even for those inside of it, the text might appear obscure. I don’t want anyone to feel like they ought to understand every single part of it. Instead, I encourage you to highlight nebulous concepts, so that we during this discussion can go over these difficult moments, and by way of collective intelligence come up with some working definitions together.
The other texts are two of the key texts describing the method of Contributory Research. In fact, except for a report written for the Digital Advisory Board in France in 2012, they are the only texts explicitly outlining the method. This means that after reading them, you’ll be in a good position to make valid value judgments about the methods strengths and shortcomings. It is this kind of judgment we will try to pursue together. Doing so will be useful in the sessions that follow, where we will look closer at some of the qualities – and problems – of Contributory Research, by holding it up to other types of empowerment-practices conducted in insular territories.
For those who wish to dive deeper into these method-questions, I’ve included a number of texts that have been important to the conception of Contributory Research, whether implicitly or explicitly. This list of texts isn’t an exhaustive overview. It is a selection, one which you might add to, now, or later, as we begin to determine the nature of Archipelagos of the Living. Any undertaking is, amongst other things, defined by the texts it references.
Find the texts here.
Thinking from the Margins: Which Univers(al)ity for the Entropocene
Presentations
Sara Baranzoni and Paolo Vignola (Lecco)
Glenn Louhgran and Fiona Collins (Sherkin Island)
Michal Krzykawski and Karolina Lebek (Silesia)
This session starts in the margins of hegemonic knowledge production. With defunded humanities and social sciences accused of lacking use-value and objectivity; with practices offering new theories about the natural world, challenging what biologists Ana Soto and Carlos Sonnenscheim have described as a generalised state of proletarianisation within the sciences, where for most parts, they say, scientist execute but no longer think. With marginalised territories – the south, the east, the rural – where for many decades theorists have fought bloody wars against epistemicides; where, as Boavnetura de Sousa Santos writes, practitioners have shown “that irrationality is not the only alternative to what is currently considered rational, that chaos is not the only alternative to order”; where Paulo Freire in 1970 would make the distinction between objectivity and objectivism to criticise a type of objectivity that denies subjectivity, in other words, the existence of people. Contributory research is a research of these margins. It strives for objectivity as defined by Freire, that is, an analysis of the world that recognises the people within it. Contributory research can be said to strive for universal knowledge too. Emphasis here on the striving. Acknowledging its unattainability, it promotes a kind of a universality that ties and reties links between local knowledge, prescribing general rules by moving between the lived and the abstract. Like laws, the relevance of this kind of universality depends on its capacity to renew. Only structures of renewal might counter stale and dysfunctional thought habits, the standardisation of practices and desires marking what Bernard Stiegler has called the The Entropocène. This session proposes to elaborate on the conditions of this universality, to imagine what kind of structures – institutional, technical or other – that might facilitate the movement between the general and the particular. What this session does not propose is to make the margins a new centre, to invert current hierarchies, which would only reinstall patterns of dominance and subjugation. Rather it wants to do away with the idea of margins and a center all together, to rethink the university as many situated hubs of local knowledge – as territorial laboratories collaborating on equal terms. We might call this university Archipelago, which before designating a group of distinct territories was used to describe the sea holding them together.
Visit to Cres Island
Time to see the island on which we are staying. The team from the Moise Palace has organised a trip around Cres, which includes a visit to a rehabilitation center for white-headed vultures. “A meeting point for scientists, researchers, ornithologists, nature lovers and enthusiasts, local people, and school children”, the centre is both a (contributory) research hub and a tourist attraction. As such, it provides potential answers to questions that have been raised in previous discussions. Noticeably: how to create an ‘erudite’ form of tourism, how to discover flora and fauna without degrading it, and how to present the biodiversity of a territory honestly – not as a glossy image but as a complex system, which is sometimes threatened, and always — always — changing.
Transmission, Editing, Publication: The Tertiary Retentions of Contributory Research
Presentations
Carolina Velastegui (Galapagos Islands)
José Daniel Guerrero Vela (Galapagos Islands)
Robba Collective (Corsica)
In the work of Bernard Stiegler, tertiary retentions is described as the spill-over of prior generations’ accumulated knowledge. It is collective memory sedimented in material forms – in writing, music, film, art, buildings, tech, pottery, drawings on cave walls. In this sense, tertiary retentions do not simply populate the world – they can be said to constitute our world. Universities have traditionally made tertiary retentions their object of study. While carefully attending to worldly artefacts, there’ve been few systematic attempts within the academy to critically consider what kind of knowledge-objects the university produces. Contributory Research is in part a response to this lack of attention. It is a method that makes of tertiary retentions both a study and a practice. In this session, we’ll discuss what exactly it means to practice tertiary retentions, asking how and where the knowledge of contributory research might settle, what kind of traces it leaves behind. Considering the limits and possibilities of trace-making is all the more urgent in a time where the internet like no technique since the printing press has disrupted established rules of knowledge transmission. With everyone a potential content maker, the passing on of knowledge has never been more possibly democratic and never more potentially damaging for a democratic, rational debate. Guided by territorial actors who are inscribing collective memory into media in different ways, we will try to outline a new politics of publishing and editing, one fit for a method that explicitly embraces non-academic knowledge, like lived experience and know-how, and which never pretends to transcend time and space, but consciously reaches for the yet-to-come from inside the already-there.
Breakfast Reading: Archipelagic Thinking
Coming.
From Extractivism to Territorial Investment: Reinventing the Knowledge Economy
Presentations
Stéphane Berdoulet and Carla Brunet (Île-Saint-Denis
Théo Sentis and Vincent Loubière (Seine-Saint-Denis)
Giacomo Gilmozzi (Lecco)
Contributory Research forms part of the aspiration to found a real knowledge-based economy: an economy put at the service of knowledge production – and not, as is the case today, an economy that instrumentalises knowledge to wage economic global warfare. This real knowledge economy has been called a Contributory Economy. It is a macroeconomic model meant to valorise types of knowledge that can counteract personal, social and environmental disintegration. Thinking economics as an intrinsic part of a research method has been a way of reckoning with two basic principles, one epistemological and one ethical in nature: 1) that research is defined by the funding models available and 2) that if people contribute to a research project, you ought to pay them for their contribution. Today, no real Contributory Economy is on the horizon. To face up to this reality, we propose in this session to return to the question of how one might render processes of contributory research financially sustainable without compromising scientific integrity and without exploiting people. To lead the discussion, we’ll invite territorial actors who’ve come up with models to sustain local knowledge production, knowledge understood here as transformative knowledge, what economist Amartya Sen and philosopher Hannah Nussbaum call capabilities. These models look less like the local Management Institutes imagined to administer a Contributory Economy, and more like hacks of current local systems, whether in the form of inventive public or private partnerships, experimentations with alternative currencies, or bids to reclaim money generated within the data economy to redirect it towards local interests. The bet we make here is that to move past idealised models and towards a real real knowledge economy, we have to set aside for one second the Contributory Economy, and look instead to a number of possible, imperfect but functional, contributory-like economies.
An Archipelagos Platform?
One of the objectives of the Archipelagos of the living as it’s defined in the NEST program is to develop a platform. A platform can mean something very vague and something very specific. Within computer science, it is a basic standardised framework that can accommodate many different applications. Outside of computer science, a platform can be a ground above water, a raised level surface on which people or objects can stand, a place where people get on and off trains, a declared policy of a political group, a pair of chunky shoes. Before deciding what kind of platform should be developed, it is worth discussing the meaning we ascribe to the term. Guided by a number of examples, we will since go on to discuss the functionalities which might be worth experimenting on this platform, which ideally will be of use for everyone contributing to it.
Knowledge as Techniuqe, Techniques of the Living
Presentations
Sarah Czerny and Anna Colquhoun (Crès and Istria)
The objective of contributory knowledge is always double: to 1) produce new knowledge by looking at the relationship between the physiological, technical and social organs that make up a given situation and 2) to consider the technical objects used to forge said knowledge. This session will pause on this latter point, on knowledge as its delimited by the techniques at our disposal. Given the particular context of this project, we will ground our discussion in practices that create, demonstrate or rely on a certain knowledge about the living. Many argue that such practices are in decline. Since the industrial revolution, which instigated a wave of migration towards urban centres, fewer and fewer people are in regular and conscious contact with non-human life. Arguing that such ignorance makes us insensitive to the systematic destruction of life systems, the philosopher Baptizte Morizot has called for a new and veritable culture of the living – what he imagines as a ‘network of knowledge, interpretations, significant anecdotes, stories of invisibles relation, [and of] lived familiarity’ – to relocate the living at the center of collective spaces and our political consciousness. Reflecting on the techniques of the living is complementary to this effervescent call to arms. If Morizot highlights the importance of producing more knowledge about the living, we suggest that it matters how this knowledge is produced – whether it’s pursued through a microscope or satellite data, through models or lived experience, whether it’s passed down through generations or developed in science labs, whether it’s supposedly neutral or decidedly invested. The practices we will consider here are of various nature – from techniques of cooking and agriculture to techniques of monitoring and tracking, from ancient rituals to digital technologies. If we find it important to ask how we know the living, it isn’t just because different techniques reveal different characteristics about an object or phenomenon. Following Gregory Bateson’s assertion that ontology (the way things are) cannot be separated from epistemology (the way we know things), you might say that different knowledge-techniques give rise to different types of living entirely.
Retentions, Protentions
To conclude three days of activities, each participant will in this last session be invited to talk about what they have retained from the academy. Criticism or praise, professional or personal enrichment, the hope is that everyone after two working days will feel safe to share what has marked them personally, even if it isn’t positive strictly speaking. Knowing if certain elements did not feel right – too complex or too slow, too closed in on themselves or too porous – is the only way to correct them moving forward – to become more in tune with one another, which is something this project strives for.
If retentions is that which has been captured by consciousness, and which we would recognise as memories, protentions look towards the future. They are, in the vocabulary of Ars Industrialis, ‘the desire (and expectation) of that which is to come‘. After considering the impressions stuck with us, we will ask which direction this ground of experience and knowledge opens up to. How do we see Archipelagos of the Living developing into the months and years to come?