Response to James and several clarifications
Thank James very much for help to formulating what we want to say[see James - further concerns and support], also apologize for not being able to make things clear. To respond, doesn’t mean to defend, but to clarify. We do appreciate your criticism and your concern. So I will take this chance to respond as well as to clarify some misunderstandings.
Readers and staff’s works are two examples(I hope we are not going to stuck here) we want to illustrate a reflexive approach, I will say they are prototypes which we are/were all happy with, but these prototypes also become technically indispensable. But can we ask for more? What Hanna and I think want to raise is, how to create a situation or a platform that we are able to participate more, collaborate more, this has necessarily to do with a community, rather than thinking of changing certain gestures. When I am saying this, I am not discrediting the effort we have been doing in the Attack the Headquarter, even though I wasn’t able to attend all the sections, I did listen to the recordings, read John’s blog. This project can be seen as an immediate response to the AHQ, it also tries to make it as a practice. That is also why we say “abolishing the headquarter”
Which Headquarter?
But this “abolishing the headquarters” may also cause misunderstandings that we are making a revolt against the CCS staff (also with the example of staff’s work). We also have this worry before we sent out the email. It is definitely not what we want to do. We have no intention to deal with power, money, or similar interests. Then as you commented on Hanna’s comment, what is her connotation of headquarter? There is no such concrete thing call headquarter in our understanding. We don’t want to reduce ccs, goldsmiths college, university of London, cultural studies in general into a single word called headquarter, it remains a symbolic virtuality, which we, at least Hanna and I, think we are not able to tackle with such an abstraction. So we think maybe it reveals a better insight of the future if we abolishing this symbolic “headquarter” and lets rethink what ourselves can do to create a community which facilitate us to work together no matter it is our phd project, ma dissertation, or whatever other project (like the June 4th event we have done) Isn’t this practice at the same time theoretical? Isn’t it able to give us more insight of doing cultural studies?
Are we Red Guards?
We felt so uneasy to read a comment on John’s blog, which calls us red guards. Are we red guards? Unless there are bad guys, but we don’t think so. We are not directing against any person in CCS. For myself, I do respect my supervisors and fellow staff (considering I am also a centre staff) very much and I am very happy to work with them, not to mention they gave me so much support during my illness. Again what we try to propose is to take CCS as an example to rethink our way of being, of being together. We are all supposed to be cultural theorists, we know pretty well of body without organs, disorganization, but we are also more or less trapped in certain prototypes. We can definitely rule out these constrains and create a better structure for learning with each other(to my understanding it is the self-organization and collective endeavour you mentioned, actually we also talked about how new phd students can identify themselves and participate in our collaborate works as soon as possible). So if we think and do in this way, can we make something more out of it?
Two tones, two voices, more?
It is not a surprise that you and Julia identify the inconsistency of the tones in that article. Hanna and I wrote separately, then merged them together. Also we are not good at English rhetoric, so we hope this can be understand after the clarifications of our stance and the meaning of abolishing the headquarter.
At the same time, your voice and Julia’s voice are complements to this project, we use a wiki, so we can always edit the pages, track the histories, rewrite the sentences, keep the changes. We don’t have to agree with each other, our singular voices remain there, but we are working toward some where, this is what we want to initiate, but not to dominate, defend. From this moment, we hope our intention can be understood, this is not a project belong to Hanna Kuusela and Yuk Hui, but a project belongs to all those who are interested.
Yuk