'Towards an (under)common(s) statement for collective study' - Tent City University, Occupy London, 12/11/11 On June 18th 2011,

the The Free U Resistance Committee issued a statement in response to the Danish Government's outlawing of autonomous universities, calling for the establishment of free universities everywhere. This call emerged from the background of the valuable work done by the Copenhagen Free University in seeking to critique and question the neoliberal university and the accelerated marketisation of the universities across the world. In late 2010 the University for Strategic Optimism was set up in response to the material conditions with which we were presented in the UK, in terms of the Government's neoliberal assault on universities and the public sphere. We have always sought to question and critique this agenda, but we also think that we should question the university itself as it stands as well as the various autonomous responses to it, to critique the critique. Just what is the university we are fighting for anyway? And what perhaps could it be? What are the problems and potential inherent within the university as it exists today, its hierarchies and power-relations, its possible politicisation? What are the pitfalls and possibilities entailed in the autonomous search for collective study? Can a knowledge commons ever be created without effacing important political considerations and the inherent division of labour upon which it rests? Can we build a new university beyond the ruins of the old? Who cares about the university anyway? What does the university even mean? What could it mean? In the context of this discussion, the wider context of the occupation and the context of the nascent free, autonomous university we find ourselves in, what is there to learn, what is there to study, what is there to question in this appropriation of a common space for collectivity and discussion? We will seek to present a series of short statements, opening them to dialogue, discussion and contradiction, with the aim of bringing and building together some ideas. We do not expect to learn a great deal from any conclusions we arrive at, but rather perhaps to learn from the process of arriving at them. Statements for discussion: D: We want to get to a common project of study. Getting to a common project of study involves getting down into the undercommons. The UFSO wants to teach all the wrong things. We also want all those wrong things to teach. We want those black, brown, latino and asian things which run the university and never get credit for it to teach all the wrong things. UFSO wants students of colour only. We work on the principle that everyone has a colour. UFSO have no interest in owning anything. We have no interest in being accommodated anywhere. Any connection to any university or any department makes us want to run. Yet we are firmly committed to that degraded thing called social life. We want all the wrong things living on the street, drinking on a Tuesday morning in the Wetherspoons, on the bus at 6am to go to a cleaning job, selling mobile phone credit outside the off licence to teach and study. It is in these places where what we think of as study happens. This is a form of study where you get no credit, but always remain in debt. To get this common project underway we need to think about some things. Firstly we need to think about whether we need to shut down the current university or simply leave. We can leave, it's easy. It's just a matter of having the will to do it. Then we can get on with getting together and start studying all the wrong things. If we want to shut down the university then that's a project we are hip to as well. But if we shut it down, then that can only be the first step to making it more open. Any shut down, any occupation must move towards a non-exclusionary improvisation of the current university. Secondly, we need to think about how academics get involved in this common project of study. For academics to get involved we need to ask ourselves what is the minimum they can do to assist us, to become common with us. Once we work that out, if they can't do it, then we don't think they have any stake in our common project. This is something like the common project of study UFSO want to get to. We have the feeling this might be the right way to go. We have the feeling this might generate the feeling we want every wrong thing in our common project to feel. We guess it might be the time to start doing it.

Prof. Johannes Effra: Why are we always on the back-foot? The notion of resistance is based on being on the losing side, of struggling to oppose the progress of some nefarious force that might overwhelm us. I dont think we need to resist. We need to instead create anew entirely, abandon the rot of the old. But our concern here is with the university. What was the university? For the university as has been understood, the past tense is now appropriate. A recap of what we already know: research funding cuts, trebling tuition fees and redirected business-friendly state priorities with the Research Excellence Framework: the university is being privatised. Flexible temporary lecturing work, shrinking wages for everybody except the management overseeing privatisation, increasing admin and self-auditing, carried out by teachers as university administrators are sacked. What else? The critical edge of the university is likely to be softened into further moribund mediocrity as courses are increasingly refigured towards event management and business interests, or deleted altogether. The whole community of students and teachers is over. Even the role of the university to speak the truth, to offer education and good counsel freely is terminally jeopardised. The privatisation of the university acts in real terms as a form of censorship, as areas that do not support the capitalist ontology of profit and self-promotion are cut. The changes to the university are paradigmatic of the wider violence of privatisation occurring throughout all social life. Like the development of unpaid internships in the arts before, the indebted student is another neoliberal experiment, proletarianizing the educated youth whilst forcing them to internalise the values of capitalism, with the fear that by not taking on and successfully performing these values, they will fail to find work and fit in a circular and self-perpetuating alienation. Work itself in our digitized societies is increasingly stressful, demeaning, precarious yet superfluous, as any bar staff, debt administrator, call-centre droid, shop assistant, child-minder, cleaner or pay-per-hour junior lecturer will know. But in a sense our generation are lucky: there really is nothing to lose, and possibly something to gain. The most effective anti-depressive medication we have is within education. We need to start creating and expanding new centres of cooperative free education: reading groups, study groups and writing groups. Aaaarg.org is one key resource of sharing research and ideas: reading groups are increasingly based on the free access to texts. Free education spaces can be opened up in terms of access, meeting in cafes, pubs, social centres places already public or reclaimed by the public. But with the prospect of bankrupt universities and boarded-up libraries, a more realistic proposal is for students to reclaim existing old public institutions, ones not even the most tasteless property or PFI-redevelopers will touch. Mutually taught, these new university spaces meet in evenings or weekends, so that those working or with children can come, with further networks spreading online. The Public School.org offers one international approach, but instead of just exchanging expertise, these free spaces are intrinsically radical by virtue of being free, free-thinking and public. They offer a key tool for radical workers to group together, use for critique, shared writing, dreaming and plotting. On the other hand, our critique needs to get popular and re-enter, and recreate, the public sphere. By education spaces linking up with other communities and communes, we need to make our critique simple and public. Theory itself is fine, but with more effective organisation, charisma and a sense of fun, we might find that we can reach and empower the public. Finally, effective resistance cannot be afraid to step beyond legal restrictions and ideas of propriety, both psychological forms of control on effective struggle. Two-day pickets, one-day union walkout, or a Saturday afternoon stroll to Hyde park via Fortnum and Masons: good feel-good fun yes, but there is more at stake and so much more to lose, and we need to act knowing this. Strategic Optimism is one weapon against the psychological control of fear and depression held against us today. As the university and the promises of academic Marxism go to seed, new mutually educational spaces of critique and resistance flourish, the public forms together, and out of the demise of the old a new creative counter-violence emerges. The university is dead. Long live the university! Jacques Mashup: Society is not at a cross roads: before us there do not lay routes from which to choose, rather there exists space to command. Recent struggles are about much more than austerity, they stand against the eviction of democracy from politics and simultaneous eviction of people(s) from the public sphere and from common space. We are engaged in a continual arms race against the forces of perpetual enclosure. We do not seek detachment, observation, anonymity in crowds, to visually consume the city, we are inherently antiindividualist, privileging neither reason nor chance, a collective practice that takes its cues from non-human actors.

Travelling largely by night, we do not give primacy to the visual above the visceral, our cartography is embedded and embodied, not Cartesian, its investigations are not conducted with the scrutinising gaze of bourgeois possession, but with a playful inhabitation of the everyday. We do seek not the production of individual subjectivity as an accumulation of experiential fragments but rather the production of space. Where the bourgeosie consumes space, we produce it. Subjectivities and spacetime are mutually and dialectically co-productive. We seek to encounter and to diagram, precisely as open, the spatial technologies of power, those configurations of a milieu that act to produce subjectivity. The flaw in Foucaultian formulations of govenrnmentality is to understand them arising spatially but space itself as static formations. If rather than fixed and given, we understand space as relationally and dialectically produced, 'spatial practices' become not only articulations of power, but also a potential site of appropriation, diversion and ultimately agency. However, because space is socially produced, different configurations of space can only arise in different configurations of social relations. What limits the possibility of agency therefore is the closing down of social relations. This is the specific function of 'spatial practices' within capitalism. Capitalism intrinsically produces a homogenising abstraction of space that in turn closes down the possibility of a heterogeneous political, precisely as would be required to challenge and alter society's 'spatial practices'. Taking a conception of the political that transcends institutional politics, a genuine democratisation of space is incompatible with the liberal and neoliberal legal ordering of universalising spatial frameworks. Such a broader understanding of the 'political', distinct from party politics, points to a susceptibility for spatial practice and subjectivity to by reorientated in common. The commons however, on some level effaces the political. The UfSO in intervening in public spaces acknowledges the contradictions in the evident division of labour between the users of this space and invasive resignifiers, it is a conflict that illustrates the division of labour upon which the project of the intellectual commons rests. The project for the free universities of the future must instead rest in the erasure of the division of labour. In the meantime, the performative intervention in space, must not so much speak but also act, it must derive its symbolic meaning through its position within incongruous space and yet must also performatively transform this space into a visibly political and public arena through the excess of meaning. By turning spaces of instrumentalisation into spaces of experimentation, spaces of accumulation into spaces of collaboration, spaces of exchange into spaces of use, we can performatively enact a common reinscription of enclosed space. The act of interjecting bodies into a space, in dissensus with its declared function becomes the constitution of a counter-space, one that is inherently counter-intuitive to the architectural mechanisms of capital accumulation and the maintenance of controlled order. This redirects the consumption of space, our ultimate goal however must be to redirect the production of space also. We therefore call forth such eruptions: a laboratory cast adrift upon the stormy seas of a 'broken' society for the experiments of a cast of indignados, enrags, feral youths and discontents. Let us play out the latest feature-length psychotic episode of that crisis that goes by the name of capitalism. Explore, ignore, work and play with these ideas off the rails and on the wrong side of the tracks, across borders, beyond boundaries, with a schizophrenic mix of collaboration and resistance. We call for an assault that is widely encompassing, a wildly spinning compass at the corner of a constantly changing map of international catastrophe. We believe this lumbering, slumbering nightmare demands a waking daydream, both obscene and extreme as a conduit to circumvent and short-circuit those repellent elements shortselling us down the river of ur-banality. We believe these words have no definitive meaning, rather we see in them a seminal, fluid starting point for creative and destructive intercourse. We do not limit our far from immaculate conception of revolt to words, we are demonstrably not simply concerned with theoretical ejaculations or name-dropping dead white men. We want to drop the dead wood and the well re-hearsed interplay of words for a real play, grafting a copse of living concepts onto the contemporary urban jungle. This is not simply a semi-necronautical attempt to generate a degenerate 'art of revolt' but rather to artfully, if not artificially, attempt to transcend and ascend the boundaries of decency and farcical, hierarchical glass ceilings, attempting an in vitro cross-disciplinary, cross-border cross-fertilisation between emergent and nascent agents. This is not simply a passively re-posed response to a historical material concept but an active provocation and interrogation of the contemporary situation. It sets us upon a creative

collision course with the entirety of existing conditions, a course that could be a big bang, the beginning something beautiful, but conversely could be a car crash.