Autonomy is not a fixed, essential state. Like gender, autonomy is created through its performance, by doing/becoming; it is a political practice. To become autonomous is to refuse authoritarian and compulsory cultures of separation and hierarchy through embodied practices of welcoming difference...Becoming autonomous is a political position for it thwarts the exclusions of proprietary knowledge and jealous hoarding of resources, and replaces the social and economic hierarchies on which these depend with a politics of skill exchange, welcome, and collaboration. Freely sharing these with others creates a common wealth of knowledge and power that subverts the domination and hegemony of the master's rule

--- subRosa Collective

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The question has always been organizational, not at all ideological: is an organization possible which is not modelled on the apparatus of the State, even to prefigure the State to come?

--- Gilles Deleuze Foucault

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For a brief time there was and continues to be a relief from capital’s tyranny of specialization that forces us to perform as if we are a fixed set of relationships and characteristics, and to repress or strictly manage all other forms of desire and expression.

--- Critical Art Ensemble Digital resistance: explorations in tactical media

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Non-specialisation

When you enter any classroom – be it at a university, public/ private school, language school, technical college, or kindergarten – look around the room. Note the organisation of the tables and chairs, the way they are positioned in careful linearity; line after line facing the blackboard, the segregation between the desk of the teacher and the desk of her students. The podium of the lecturer perched like the apex of a pyramid, rows of chairs saluting the hierarch of education. The fairly regimented schedule of breaks and pauses. This material manifestation, this material environment of the institution of knowledge, makes visible those widely unchallenged power structures that legitimate and mobilise a division of labour, a division of expertise, a division of authority. The teacher and her pupil co-constitute the subjectivities and roles of one another. Even in those most progressive institutions, inspired (implicitly or explicitly) by radical pedagogy, these relationships can be seen to be played out. The expert and the novice. These divisions and these relationships – this very classical ecology of knowledge generation – formed the impetus for us to begin speaking about non-specialisation.

Non-specialisation is a term we use to describe experimental critical interventions in hierarchical systems of value that underpin how we produce, and relate to, knowledge. Because we ourselves come from contexts informed by a state-education system – schools, technical and art colleges and universities – non-specialisation looks at those uni-directional relationships of learning (teacher-expert imparting knowledge on her student-novice) paradigmatic of these institutions. Such traditionally one way methods of transmitting and receiving knowledge are taken by us as a site from which to investigate how the relationships engendered through this process are reproduced outside of the classroom, in all facets of everyday life.

Central to the concept of non-specialisation is questioning the socio-political and economic role played by the specialist or expert, who is often considered to be more “valuable” than a non-expert in terms of what kind of knowledges they possess. The specialist commands power based on her legitimation through, and production of, specific kinds of knowledge. That said, it is not the act of gaining expertise or experience within a field that we see as the problem. What we are critical of are the ways in which hierarchies of knowledge are judged based on what kind of education/ degree/ qualification/ resources/ vocabularies and experiences someone has had access to. This way of distributing merit is integral to the definition of the expert as such. We understand this as problematic because it disqualifies and devalues individuals and groups who are excluded not only from dominant institutions and their resources, but also from any kind of “meritocracy”: whether due to gender, class or racial reasons, or because of different desires and lines of interest.

This is why non-specialisation acknowledges the importance of initiating all analysis through a critical examination of the relationships between the nation-state, class and neoliberal capitalism. What may be shown through such a method is how these relationships impact upon the possible attainment of recognised expertise. We propose that this is a necessary way to start our analysis because institutions of state education increasingly engage in commercial enterprise and private partnerships with economic industry. For us, what this indicates is a need to incorporate both the philosophical and the political into questions around specialisation and hierarchies of knowledge: what might comprise expertise outside of qualification? How might the structure of authority which places the teacher over her student reflect other state-organisational and socio-political structures? What is the dynamic between capital and expertise, and how has this affected the historical conceptualisation of labour? How do the discourses of neoliberalism, that adopt rhetorics of “horizontality” and “equality”, repeat hierarchical categories of value in knowledge production? How does specialisation affect the specialist and what impact does it have on her? Why do cultural/ social knowledges, practical skills, and affective/ desiring and haptic knowledges still remain marginal in comparison to institutionalised knowledges? How might we question and transform our understandings of knowledge through recognising our own motivations and privileges? And how can we do this without falling back into the power and value structures, the ways of speaking and acting, that we want to move away from?

By committing to both critical inquiry and direct action, we understand that the basis of non-specialisation must be not only in questioning and reflecting but also in practical experimentation. Our objective is to try out different, creative methods of organisation as a way to transverse both discursive and material elements of knowledge production and distribution. Crucial to the praxis of non-specialisation is self-reflexivity, and we try to maintain an awareness of alienating ways of speaking, behaviours and environments that must be negotiated through. Such negotiations may inform different kinds of learning and teaching that explicitly encourage reciprocality, relationality and dialogue. These kinds of education might draw, for instance, upon tactics such as skill and resource sharing, public conversations, and trans-community collaborations and research. Within such education events, modes of facilitation and self-organisation that focus on non-representative principles of participation may be practiced. While such principles often feature in these events, non-specialisation cannot be limited to known forms of organisation and must retain a responsibility to experimenting through praxis (both conceptual and empirical). In this way, for us, non-specialisation thus acts as an ongoing process of questioning and responding, unmaking and remaking, that through this very process performs the relationships of knowledge that we desire to see.