We are Passeurs

We are Passeurs D. T. Ferrando We Are Passeurs, in J. HILGEFORT, M. BEDIR (ed.), Re-Living the City, Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture, Shenzhen 2017, pp. 90-92. Passeur is much more than a role, it’s a way of being, an attitude. Passeurs are curious for everything, read everything, keep nothing for themselves and transmit the best to as many people as possible. Once considered that, in our Post-Internet society, the process of learning is not confined anymore to traditional academic structures, but rather colonizes our everyday life by means of the pervasiveness of digital media (Aformal Academy is a very good example of this), we also have to consider that, paraphrasing Artie Vierkant, we now live immersed in digital communities of people producing emancipatory objects not intended as teaching propositions, and not applying themselves with the label of teachers1. In such frame, teaching takes place with different degrees of self-consciousness and intentionality, but in general, it can assume the form of rapidly consumable fragments of knowledge being permanently and sparsely transmitted via social platforms throughout the hours of the day. The kind of learning this unsolicited teaching stimulates is one “rooted in communication and exchange, rather than education or pedagogy”2, and although its expansion is problematically paralleled by the decline of fundamental acts such as book reading, it is well worth a couple of thoughts. Passeur is the professor whose class makes you immediately want to run to the library. Passeur is the bookseller who initiates his young clients to the mysteries of classification, who teaches them to travel among genres, subjects, authors, countries and centuries... who transforms the library in their universe. What kind of learning can be produced through the act of sharing ready-made contents on a Facebook or Tumblr dashboard? Little or none, most probably, if such act is “undesigned”, in the sense that its repetition in time is not organized and oriented towards a more or less specific object of knowledge, temporarily excluding all the others. Learning, in fact, comes not only from the acquisition of new information, but also from the making sense of experience: from putting things into meaningful relation, “connecting the dots”. It is a moment of revelation in a process of searching that is always self-defined. 1 Learning, in this sense, entirely depends on its context: we only learn what we look for. It is for this reason that web and social media-based projects gathering comparable information on specific themes, such as Socks3 or OfHouses4, stimulate spontaneous learning processes through mechanisms of familiarity and expectation. Just like Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne, these image-based web archives impulse a connotative kind of knowledge – one that unveils what things have in common by associating them – by turning social media from tools for narcissism into tools for learning. Passeurs are academics who aim at forming stimulators of knowledge, activators of marvel. The transformation of social media into tools for learning is meaningful in at least two ways. First, it operates a reinvention of these platforms (which are originally intended for sharing personal data to be sold to private companies) in the same way Michel De Certau praises the reinvention of the everyday through “the long poem of walking”, which “manipulates spatial organizations, no matter how panoptic they may be”. Such practice, writes De Certeau, “is neither foreign to [spatial organizations] (it can take place only within them) nor in conformity with them (it does not receive its identity from them). It creates shadows and ambiguities within them. It inserts its multitudinous references and citations into them (social models, cultural mores, personal factors)”5. At the same time, the light and informal language that social media demand, autonomously produces the kind of simplification that discourses need in order to become operative. Just as Stefano Rodotà and Ugo Mattei had to recur to a simplified language that allowed them “to meet the activits [of Teatro Valle in Rome] halfway through the deployment of practices of occupation, protest and appropriation”6, so too a generous use of social media can 2 potentiate the commoning of knowledge and its actualization in the urban environment, by making it accessible to a wider public. As Nietzsche famously wrote: “to be sure, we need history [...] but we need it for life and for action7”. Passeur is the editor who refuses to invest exclusively on best sellers, but doesn’t lock himself in the ivory tower of experimentation. Passeur is the critic who reads everything, discovers and invites to read the young novelist, or brings back to life the glorious, old forgotten pen. Finally, a characteristic of many independent editorial projects based on web and social platforms, is that contents indifferently taken from the present, distant or recent past, are all gathered in one same container, thus recombining time in a way that Kazys Varnelis, interpreting the work of Andrew Kovacs8, relates to the concept of “atemporality”. As a corollary to this fight against the value of “the new” (that still propels mainstream publications due to its intrinsic relation with the market’s commodifying logic), independent editors tend to provide contents in ways that seem more academic than journalistic, being that the diachronic analysis of a theme is one of the traditional strategies of teaching. Passeur is the reader whose library contains only horrible novels or fourth-rate essays, because he’s lent all the best books and no one has returned them to him. After all, reading is by definition an act of cannibalism, therefore it’s absurd to expect a loaned book to be given back. Supreme passeur, finally, is he who never asks your opinion on the book you have just read, because he knows that literature has little to do with communication.9 Yes, we are passeurs. We are Passeurs Notes 1. Artie Vierkant, The Image Object PostInternet, 2010: http://jstchillin.org/artie/pdf/ The_Image_Object_Post-Internet_us.pdf 2.. Jack Self, Time Confetti, in “Volume” n. 45, September 2015, pp. 130-134. 3. Socks is a digital archive curated by Mariabruna Fabrizi and Fosco Lucarelli, where references taken from different artistic fields (art, architecture, illustration, design, etc.) are gathered and commented: http://socks-studio. com/ 4. OfHouses is a collaborative digital archive curated by Daniel Tudor Munteanu, gathering drawings, pictures and critical essays on little known houses built before the end of the past century: http://ofhouses.tumblr.com/ 5. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 1984: https://chisineu.files.wordpress. com/2012/10/certeau-michel-de-the-practiceof-everyday-life.pdf 6. Michele Vianello, New Rights and the Space of Practices: Italian Contributions to a Theory of the Urban Commons, in “Footprint” n. 16, 2015: http://footprint.tudelft.nl/index.php/ footprint/article/view/898 7. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, 1874: https://records.viu. ca/~johnstoi/nietzsche/history.htm 8. http://varnelis.net/microblog/this_is_one_ of_a_large_number_of_plans_from_archive_of 9. From the discourse given by Daniel Pennac in the occasion of his honorary degree ceremony at the University of Bologna, now published in Una lezione di ignoranza, astoria, Milano 2015. 3