Specialists are known to know. They have authority, for which they are well paid, with which they can give solemn evidence in the courts. The position of the specialist, of the expert, is one of power…reaffirming common sense, the status quo - thereby silencing other distributions of knowledge and other voices.

Also: specialisation entails a certain national or international division of labour, a certain distribution of wealth (Who pays? Who gets paid? Who has an opportunity to specialise?), a certain approach to knowledge (bought, sold, susceptible to copyright – who has the right to speak?). Exclusive, immensely uneven, ridiculous; and, in one move, capitalism works to conceal this in the process of perpetuating it.

We need to expose the particular violences which are essential to this order (we need to do so for ourselves and for others) while actively trying to make something else. Non-specialisation, we hope, can be a part of this: learning to know differently can be a means of uncovering the ways in which we have been taught to know (we have been taught a calculated blindness, compelling us to be good respectable consumer-workers, to respect authority, to pay someone to fix things).

So, not the avoidance of specialised knowledges, but a means of harnessing them otherwise, distributing them through economies which exceed money and power (friendship, solidarity, sharing, practical learning…). Taking the tools of the dominant order and using them otherwise, against this order (this is the only choice we have): different distributions and uses of the knowledges of capitalism; that is, their transformation (transforming us, our convergences and divergences, our relations to knowledge and to each other).

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I think it is necessary to differentiate between a positive, creative specialisation of techniques that adds to ontic diversity i.e. forms of artistic practice in all the arts; and negative forms of specialisation as power/knowledge and social/political authority (ie. those figures who have knowledge of the Law in Kafka's novels).

The former, positive specialisation involves the individual's self-directed, creative engagement with matter and forms, and is a process that is ultimately self-taught and experiential. It is quintessentially unhistorical action- to use Nietzsche's definition of the unhistorical- and it is given over to the practice of life and becoming. The latter form of negative specialisation- i will use the latter’s relation to the former, positive kind as an example- is that of the 'expert', of the concreted episteme of a history, who use their discursive power- largely an 'historical' power, for it is knowledge of accumulated history and knowledge of the means of organising this clot of history as present hierarchies of legitimacy/illegitimacy, rather than the practice of life- as a means of 'triumphing' over the creative specialist eg. in the visual arts, curators, administrators, gallery owners and art-academics use their historical 'expertise' (and in this case their knowledge of theory is also historical) and the value accorded this knowledge as a form of social and institutional power wielded over artists.

Specialisation in-itself, as a human proclivity (although it is an abstraction to speak of it as separate from social practices) is not harmful, but rather is the result of fascination and the diversity of minds in becoming. What is harmful is its relation to power, and this relation is mediated by the role of the expert. A musical composer is, in a certain sense, a kind of expert. But what grants this expertise is the composer's self-relation to creative activity- she is an expert in creating music. Hence we could say that Luciano Cilio- an Italian composer who created pathically moving and unique compositions in the 70s, without much recognition in his own short life (he committed suicide at 30 years of age), was a kind of expert, despite never being considered as such in his lifetime. Who, in Cilio's lifetime, may have decided upon his status as a possibly 'great' composer?... the 'experts' of his time, namely being the music critics and historians who, being experts on history and having control of the journalistic and academic means of distributing and therefore creating discursive value, take as their 'task' the identification of 'history being made in the present'. The creative expert never creates history- it is the expert in history who creates history as historiography. Thus it is necessary to make a distinction, in harmony with the distinction between positive and negative specialisations, between the expert of life (creative, unhistorical action) and the expert of history (discursive/institutional, historical assertion).

If one studies the history of modern medicine, it becomes quickly evident that the many specialisations in the overall field bear a relation to changes in the practice of medicine from one-on-one doctor/patient relationships in the patient's home, to the birth of the hospital wherein the patient- now amongst a mass of patients- became a faceless collection of lesions and cells, whilst a competitive hierarchy was formed via the hospital administration, amongst which doctors had to compete for positions and varying degrees of power according to designations of 'expertise'. Thus the expert doctor, specialising in a particular field of medicine, was born, spilling over into the university medical departments where medical specialists, dedicated to pure research and publication, no longer had much need of doctor-patient experience... some cancer cells on a petri dish were now enough. On one hand, the competitiveness of hierarchical institutions did forward the application of techniques from biological science and physics (i.e. cellular models and physiology), leading to many medico-scientific breakthroughs. The division of medical labour meant that some doctors had the opportunity to follow their fascinations in a creative way- albeit one mediated by the demands of the market and institution. On the other hand, this specialisation signed the death certificate of the patient as a whole human, a patient subsequently reduced to a tangle of normal or abnormal cells. Where formerly all medical knowledge was transformed into a discourse that the patient could understand, with the specialisation of medical research the associated medical jargon also became highly specialised... to such an extent that today various branches of medical knowledge may be quite incomprehensible to each other. Language became exclusionary in accordance with this specialisation- a means of excluding patients and a means of excluding other medical practitioners from hierarchies of expertise. The coining of new specialised significations has attached to it the career aspirations of the coiner. Recognition means more funding and opportunity. Everyone is forced to play this game in order to follow their fascinations. Psychiatry- that turgid terrain- is full of practitioners leaping at any opportunity to coin a new psychopathology which they can attach to their name in a paper in one or another prestigious journal.

Thus specialisation as the exercise of social power has a distinct relation to the way language is used- a language that includes and excludes. Admittedly it seems inescapable that specific, specialised signifiers are often necessary when one must be precise with language. This seems unavoidable- a poetry of the limits is an example of a specialised flourishing, with Paul Celan's compounds providing a case in point. The task however is to be watchful of the exercise of power in ones use of language. If i were to use the term ontological to my father, he would have no idea what i meant, and would feel excluded. Now if i was to utter the term naively during some enthusiastic trail of thought, i would not be culpable of accusations of privilege. But if i was to use the term specifically as a means of exercising power over my father to silence him- a power of expertise- i would be culpable. This is relates to what one may term the Lenin conundrum- Lenin, having almost complete executive power, must be trusted by Leninists as a Lenin who will willingly relinquish party power when the time is 'ripe' for prole self-determination. One who occupies a specialised language must equally be trusted to act ethically- with Aristotelian virtue- and not abuse the exclusionary power of their specialised language. On the other hand- the path of direct democracy- the interlocutor who may feel excluded by the use of specialised language can merely refuse to take the power of that language seriously- my father could tell me to fuck off, and the proletariat could overthrow the party. But in order to do this, the one yelling fuck off must understand the real illegitimacy of the language wielding power over her.

In summary, specialisation in-itself is not a bad thing. In fact, in the best of all possible worlds, each individual would diversify the experience bestowed by their heterogeneity of physiology, genealogy, fascinations and becomings. To quote Vaneigem 'I live on the edge of the universe and i don't need to feel secure'. The question to ask here is a Nietzschean question- why do we feel impelled/compelled to state a truth? What do we assert when we assert a 'truth', and what is the situation that this will to state the truth responds to? Equally, why does one feel compelled to recognise a 'truth'? Would not true specialisation mean that one could resist this compulsion to be the caretaker of 'the columbarium' of history- and thus liberate the caretaker from his employment by the master as caretaker? Specialisation would then equate with diversification, and the only valuation remaining would be the specialisation/diversification of becoming itself, mutually recognised by all in a relation to the incommunicable.

On the other hand, specialisation in present society is used as a means of asserting social power and hierarchy, and is distilled in the form of 'the expert', who uses language in such a way as to compel others to recognise his power over them via excluding them in some manner. The expert may be an expert because, in the gaze of an institutional, they have been granted a position (i.e. manager) of expertise- therefore of power- over others wherein they use language in a certain way according to the provenance of their role; or they may be an expert because of the way they autonomously organise and assert a particular history over both the present and over others less well versed in that history.
"Everything that distinguishes man from the animals depends on this ability to volatise perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. For something is possible in the realm of these schemata which would never be achieved with the vivid first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations and clearly marked boundaries..." Nietzsche.

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Notes on non-specialist

• Sharing specialised knowledge that would take years to learn.

• Sharing information that institutions cannot teach us.

• Self taught knowledge

We live in a society today, which is becoming more and more specialised. General knowledge of how things work barely exists now. The older generation seem to possess a greater general knowledge of the world. Is it because of age and experience or because the younger generation have grown up in an age of specialisation?

• Sharing knowledge for free not for money. This challenges the capitalist system by not
participating in monetary exchange.

• Specialists can charge exorbitant amounts for exchanging their knowledge.

• It’s a way to gain experience in something you would otherwise pass up.

• The idea that we are interdependent as people and the more we gain skills and knowledge from
each other the more chance there is to survive in this world

I don’t think there is anything wrong with specialising in something. People specialise in what they interested in. I believe it to be a sovereign act to follow what one is drawn to. To challenge power structures of knowledge we can pass on what we know and understand freely to people who wish to know about what you are interested in.

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Some possible ways to engage with this material:

[…] too often the promotion of leading intellectuals by the media and publishing houses has had the effect of inhibiting the inventiveness of collective Assemblages of intellectuality which in no way benefit from such a system of representation. Intellectual and artistic creativity, like new social practices, have to conquer a democratic affirmation which preserves their specificity and right to singularity. This being the case, intellectuals and artists have got nothing to teach anyone. To return to an image that I proposed a long time ago, they produce toolkits composed of concepts, percepts and affects, which diverse publics will use at their convenience

--- Felix Guattari Chaosmosis 129

*** For all activities write down/ record/ videotape your reflections/ responses which you can share around later if you want to. Also feel free to map things out, write lists, diagrams etc visually, which can then be scanned and put onto the website if you like ***

Activity suggestion

Arrange space into format for conceptual speed dating
(2 rows of chairs inner and outer – facing each other: inner person moves every 5 mins.
Spend about 5 min on each term and move once, so each person talks to two people about each term – each term gets 10mins altogether)

Sit facing each other in pairs, each pair should talk about how you understand these terms (also keep in mind how they might relate to one another):

Knowledge
Discourse
Specialist and Expert
Public
Layperson

Activity suggestion

For whole group together.

Discuss how specialised conceptual and theoretical terms and vocabularies come out of particular institutional contexts: universities, political spheres, philosophy etc.

Engage with these questions if you would like to:

How do these institutions operate/ how are they organised? What determines participation in these institutions? How do discourses get produced in these institutions? What are the parallels/ differences in how institutions and discourses are organised (accessibility (who has access); visibility (who and what is seen/ heard as dominant); structure (hierarchies: who has knowledge/ power); etc)?

What are the effects of this in terms of accessibility to discourses/ vocabularies? How does this effect the person or group who is able to participate (and then become an expert) and the person or group who does cannot or doesnt want to participate (who is then seen as the layperson)? How do we value particular institutional ‘intelligences’ and ‘knowledges’ in relationship to others; for instance cultural, social, affective etc?

How does the way we write/ speak (the terms/ vocabularies/ discourses/ gestures we use etc) underpin and reproduce relationships and ways of being in the world? What does this imply for the ways in which we might relate our ideas and work to people who have had different access to educational resources from us, and/ or who utilise non-dominant types of discourses and knowledges?

How might we produce vocabularies that challenge or rupture hierarchical ways of relating? How might we use the access to resources and discourses we have to create new relationships with people of solidarity and mutual aid without reproducing relationships of expertise or hierarchy?

Activity suggestion

Break into small groups of 4-5 which can break into pairs if you like

Discuss these questions:

What is an expert or specialist to you? What qualifies them or defines them as such in your opinion? Do you consider yourself as an expert or specialist? Why or why not? What do you think about the role of experts and specialists in public life?

Consider this quote in terms of the specialist and the dominant discourses/ ways of learning and speaking they may use:

The painter has many things in his head or around him, or in his studio. Now everything he has in his head or around him is already in the canvas, more or less virtually, more or less actually, before he begins his work. They are all present in the canvas as so many images, actual or virtual, so that the painter does not have to cover a blank surface, bur rather would have to empty it, clear it, clean it.

--- Gilles Deleuze Francis Bacon – the logic of sensation 86.

If you are an expert or specialist how might it be possible to clear your preconceived ways of operation? How might it be possible to work around the discourses, vocabularies and concepts you usually appropriate to discover new ones?

How might we understand the nonspecialist in the sense of someone who originally comes from a position of education/ specialisation in one field or another? Is the nonspecialist opposed to the specialist? Can we think of the nonspecialist as a process of unlearning? What might be some of the benefits of this? What about some of the drawbacks?

What might the relationship of nonspecialisation mean in terms of rethinking interaction with people possessing different kinds of knowledges? How might you think about yourself and their processes of subjectivity in this exchange and how this is communicated and described? How might that be different from that of the specialist? What might be some methods for rethinking this in terms of material struggle?

Methods/ discourses/ social and political resistance:

We have spoken about the need for different types of discourses and vocabularies that are less alienating and hierarchising and more reciprocal and co-constitutive. But how is it possible to compose the dynamics that such mutual states are produced through and reproductive of? What kinds of relations can you draw upon and how might you think about the ways you discursively interact with other people in the production and dissemination of your work? In what follows you will find excerpts from two types of methods: “militant ethnography” and “militant research”. These are both methods that are more specific to the human sciences, but can also be useful to opening up how you think about some of the developmental processes to your creative praxis. Especially in terms of political and social networks, struggles and engagements.

Can be done in whole group or smaller groups whatever you feel most comfortable with.

Begin with reading out this passage:

What we are here approaching is the problem of the constitution of the researcher-
researched relationship. How, if at all, can research be a process of co-constitution
rather than one of objectification? To consider research as an on-going process of
dialogue and engagement, of creation and exploration, as the creation of the common
through engaged political action. Antonio Negri argues:

Action is a struggle to constitute the world, to invent it ... To act is at once a form of knowledge and a revolt ... [it] is precisely the search for and the construction of the common, which is to say the affirmation of absolute immanence. (2004: 19/28/27)

The task is not one of the researcher going bravely onwards into the field and through
Herculean efforts, coming back with findings. Nor is it to reverse the dynamic in the
name of auto-ethnography, a supposedly painful soul-searching that makes a virtue out
of narcissism, ironically re-inscribing authority with the author, the sovereign and
bounded subject (Clough, 2001). The task of creative mutual constitution is to explore
the relationship between researcher and researched in a manner that underlines the
moments where the assumed division between them collapses, revealing a necessary
inability for each to exist in and by itself.

--- Stephen Dunne, Eleni Karamali and Stevphen Shukaitis Editorial: Inscribing Organized Resistance 563.

Activity suggestion:

Start by considering these questions, they don’t need to be answered just to have in the back of your mind, as a contextualising device:

If we only have had the experience of speaking about social and political struggle in the language of dominant discourses what effect might this have on such struggle and its enunciation? How might the practices we engage in help to challenge the ways we frame struggle? What might our ethical imperative in terms of finding new ways of speaking and relating to one another? How might the production of imaginative and innovative vocabularies help this?

Read the following excerpts together from different methods around “militant ethnography” and “militant research” and engage with the questions after each section, if you feel them to be appropriate, and in relation to the questions posed above. The questions provided are simply intended as a means through which to spark conversation/ thoughts/ etc. Feel free to discuss any aspect of the section that affects you.
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Excerpts from: Practicing Militant Ethnography within Movements against Corporate Globalization
Jeff Juris

In order to grasp the concrete logic that generates specific practices, researchers have to become active participants. With respect to social movements, this means precisely becoming engaged activists: helping to organize actions and workshops, facilitating meetings, weighing in during strategic and tactical debates, staking out political positions, and putting ones’ body on the line during mass direct actions. Simply taking on the role of “circumstantial activist” (Marcus 1995) is not sufficient; one has to build long-term relationships of mutual commitment and trust, become entangled with complex relations of power, and live the emotions associated with direct action organizing and transnational networking. The kind of engaged ethnographic practice not only allows researchers to remain active political subjects, it also generates more penetrating analyses…

Questions:
- How might being an active participant challenge conventional modes of engagement? What might this mean for the kind of discourses you use in these situations?

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For the militant ethnographer the issue is not so much the kind of knowledge produced, which is always practically engaged and collaborative, but rather, how is it presented, for which audience, and where is it distributed? These questions go to the very heart of the alternative network-based cultural logics and political forms more radical anti-corporate globalization activists are generating and putting into practice. Addressing them responds not only to the issue of ethical responsibility toward one’s informants, colleagues, and friends; it also sheds light on the nature of contemporary movements themselves…

Questions:
- Who do you think about when you are writing/ constructing work? What role does the audience play in how you frame your work? How do you think about the audience when you adopt certain terminologies or ways of speaking and communicating ideas?

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In sum, militant ethnography thus involves at least three interrelated modes:
1) collective reflection and visioning about movement practices, logics, and emerging cultural and political models; 2) collective analysis of broader social processes and power relations that affect strategic and tactical decision-making; and 3) collective ethnographic reflection about diverse movement networks, how they interact, and how they might better relate to broader constituencies. Each of these levels involves engaged, practice-based, and politically committed research that is carried out in horizontal collaboration with social movements. Resulting accounts involve particular interpretations of events produced with the practical and theoretical tools at the ethnographer’s disposal, and offered back to activists, scholars, and others for further reflection and debate…

Questions:
- What do you think about this concept of militant ethnography? What ideas does it give you? How might it effect your modalities of practice?

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Excerpt from: On the Researcher-Militant
Colectivo Situaciones. Translated by Sebastian Touza

According to James Scott, the point of departure of radicality is physical, practical, social resistance. Any power relation of subordination produces encounters between the dominant and the dominated. In these spaces of encounter, the dominated exhibit a public discourse that consists in saying that which the powerful would like to hear, reinforcing the appearance of their own subordination, while – silently – in a space invisible to power, there is the production of a world of clandestine knowledges (saberes) which belongs to the experience of micro-resistance and insubordination…

Questions:
- Regarding the statement: “In these spaces of encounter, the dominated exhibit a public discourse that consists in saying that which the powerful would like to hear” what might be the role of institutions of knowledge such as the state, universities, schools in the formation of a public discourse? How does the appropriation and cross-pollination of discourses outside of these institutions into different public arenas effect the way we compose social relations?
- What might “the production of a world of clandestine knowledges” mean to the work that you do? How might your work engage with these kinds of production?

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Thus, the universe of the dominated exists as a scission: as active servility and voluntary subordination, but also as a silent language that allows the circulation of jokes, rituals, and knowledges that form the codes of resistance.
It is this precedence of resistances that grounds the figure of the ‘researcher-militant’, whose quest is to carry out theoretical and practical work oriented to co-produce the knowledges and modes of an alternative sociability, beginning with the power (potencia)*(2) of those subaltern knowledges. Militant research works neither from its own set of knowledges about the world nor from how things ought to be. On the contrary, the only condition for researcher-militants is a difficult one: to remain faithful to their ‘not knowing’. In this sense, it is an authentic anti-pedagogy…

Questions:
- What might some examples of “silent languages that allows the circulation of jokes, rituals, and knowledges that form the codes of resistance” be? How do these gestures and events form a discourse? How might such discourses destabilize ways of relating to one another?
- How might you interpret the statement “research works neither from its own set of knowledges about the world nor from how things ought to be”?
- What might an “anti-pedagogy” look like? How might this relate to nonspecialisation?

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Militant research distances itself from those circuits of academic production – of course, neither opposing nor ignoring them. Far from disavowing or negating university research, it is a question of encouraging another relation with popular knowledges. While knowledges (conocimientos) produced by academia usually constitute a block linked to the market and to scientific discourse (scorning any other forms), what characterizes militant research is the quest for the points in which those knowledges can be composed with popular ones. Militant research attempts to work under alternative conditions, created by the collective itself and by the ties to counter power in which it is inscribed, pursuing its own efficacy in the production of knowledges useful to the struggles…

Questions:
- What might we understand as “popular knowledges”? How might they differ from specialized knowledges? What is the relation of popular knowledges to minoritarian knowledges?
- What might be knowledge that is “useful to the struggle”? How might the knowledges you generate in your work be useful to the issues you engage with?

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Militant research thus modifies its position: it tries to generate a capacity for struggles to read themselves and, consequently, to recapture and disseminate the advances and productions of other social practices…

Questions:
- How might we read struggles outside of the dominant modes of interpretation? What kinds of terminologies might we use to describe these? How can “struggles read themselves”? What effect might framing these in the discourses we use have upon their enunciation?
- What strategies can you think of to “recapture and disseminate the advances and productions of other social practices” in your own work? How does this relate to producing new vocabularies and discourses?

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