Radical Education (http://radical.temp.si) discussing alternative education with Mehmet Behluli and Dren Maliqi of the School of Missing Identity and Rizoma / Prishtina, Kosovo

Just when we were finishing this interview we received news from Belgrade that the work of Dren Maliqi titled “Face to Face”, shown at the group exhibition of younger generation of artists from Prishtina, was destroyed by an ultra-nationalist group and the exhibition was consequently closed. Promoting the emancipatory practices in the fields of arts, education, and critical theory the following conversation should be considered as an act of solidarity and an open call to demand a reopening of the exhibition.

Knowledge Against Society

Twentieth century has been a century of knowledge production. It has also been a century of unprecedented violence. The knowledge that we produce is eventually turned against ourselves and against the whole society. While this was also true of the modern university, knowledge society that is in the making now seems to be singularly designed to appropriate knowledge and turn it against the producers of knowledge in the service of global capital and global machineries of violence.

The university in the modern era was the prime location of knowledge production, which claimed to take society out of the darkness of ignorance into enlightenment and from a regime of scarcity to a condition of abundance. While the university did produce a great deal of knowledge the motion of this knowledge was such that it ended up being a handmaiden of profit and domination. On account of its' sole authority in knowledge production, the university became complicit in suppression of society's knowledge. The bargain that the university made offered a space of pure enquiry, of knowledge for knowledge's sake, of pursuit of knowledge without interference from power. The university defended this privilege as much as it could. Now this privilege is being withdrawn.