What does it mean to be ANTI-FRAGILE for GEN Z?
Have a care, here is something that matters
— Alfred North Whitehead, ‘Civilized Universe’
Lecture Six in Modes of Thought
New York: Macmillan (1938)
This video work made up part of an installation at the School of Media
and Communication, LCF for the Anti-fragile Take over. It was produced
by a collective of first year fashion communication students in response
to their philosophical, political and aesthetic inquiry to the term ‘The
Personal is Political’.
Credits: Jan Marcin, Perzyna Matthew Higby,
Nicola Sclano, Alma de Ganay, Talita Leite,
Victoria Ho, Youyi Ding and Hugo Taylor
This issue discusses a series of teaching and learning events during 2019–
2020 that explores radical and creatives pedagogies and its impact on student
and staff wellbeing. Working practically with Nassim Taleb’s key philosophy,
the Antifragile, which is the theory that things gain with disorder, we co-
investigated these ideas politically, philosophically and psychologically through
art and design practices at the School of Media and Communications, LCF and
also through a teaching intervention at a secondary school in Stratford with
a group of 14-15 years olds using PSHE (Personal, social, health and economic
(PSHE) education )Curriculum drivers. The issue is designed by Oliver Dickson
at Future Impose and was made possible by the Teaching and Innovation Fund
awarded to me from the school of Media and Communications, LCF.
From the Preface: ‘Crucial to my pedagogic brief has been a persistent
recognition of the term, ‘the personal is political’ coined by feminists of the
1970s, and borrowed by theorists such as Mark Fisher et al, which is this
consideration that mental health is not strictly a personal issue, ‘The self
is formed by social practices and effects of power’ (Atkinson, D. 2018),
we are subjects of our socio-political and physical environment and collective
responsibility needs to be taken as we move away from the entrenched
neoliberal ideas that privilege the competitive individual and the idea that
education should be considered as the primary exercise of climbing out of
a particular socio-economical status as spurned by late capitalism. What if
the fundamental goal of education was Joy, a productive joy as discussed
by Spinoza and Badiou, where this “expanded” capacity to act facilitates
a creative understanding of self that we experience as “infinite potential”
that Deleuze states as ‘relating to the increase in power through the affect
of joy that produces the new individual.’ (Atkinson, D 2018) What this
generation needs is opportunity to consider big egalitarian ideas where
the wider community both locally and globally are seen, considered and
valued; the current COVID 19 situation is offering that perhaps. They are
the generation who will be able to lead on making these changes from the
micro to the macro, the local to the global; and the theoretical and practical
work we share with our students offer, I hope, inspiration to consider these.
The development of our subjectivity both individually and collectively can
be dynamic if we find ways to practice being human and expand into our
potential. Foucault said ‘Life as a work of art’ I stand by this, to commit to
the path of creatively in all our affairs, to take creative risks, to explore,
to apply ourselves to what we believe in, this is where growth lies.
The Anti-fragile Collective if nothing else is exactly that, solution based
philosophy in action.’ —
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