Common notions, part 1: workers-inquiry, co-research, consciousness-raising

[From European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies]

[Link HERE]

[Excerpt]:

Throughout contemporary history, it is possible to trace a persistent distrust, on the part of movements for social transformation, towards certain forms of knowledge production and distribution. On the one hand, a distrust towards those sciences that aid a better organisation of command and exploitation, as well as distrust towards the mechanisms of capture of minor knowledges (underground, fermented in uneasiness and insubordinations, fed by processes of autonomous social co-operation or rebelliousness1) on the part of those agencies in charge of guaranteeing governmentality. On the other hand, in many cases, there has been distrust towards those supposedly “revolutionary” ideological and iconic forms of knowledge and a distrust of possible intellectualist and idealist mutations of knowledges that initially were born at the heart of the movements themselves. This distrust has lead to impotence in some occasions. In those processes of struggle and self-organisation that have been the most vivid and dynamic, there has been an incentive to produce their own knowledges, languages and images, through procedures of articulation between theory and praxis, starting from a concrete reality, proceeding from the simple to the complex, from the concrete to the abstract. The goal is that of creating an appropriate and operative theoretical horizon, very close to the surface of the ‘lived’, where the simplicity and concreteness of elements from which it has emerged, achieve meaning and potential.