to scientize agitation and politicize science

1. agitation means teaching

what agitation says is not true in itself.1 what agitation says is true from someone for someone. agitation speaks because it has a goal in view, and when it speaks, it does not lose sight of that goal.

tretyakov coined the terms “operative” and “informative” to distinguish between literary genres. the agitation film, or any component of agitation, is operative. the informative film can speak of anything, of its own speechlessness as much as of a political issue. the operative film can only speak of what is or will become a component of the operation. the informative film cannot be judged in any binding sense. we cannot determine whether an informative film about a demonstration benefits the police or produces new demonstrators. who benefits from an informative film is decided by the organizational level of the parties engaged in the class struggle. an operative film about a demonstration decides for itself: it is a component of the operation of organizing a class. an operative film can be judged by the operation, by its outcome, and by the significance of the operation in class strategy. the theory of the operative film and the theory of the operation are intertwined.

the theory of agitation is essentially practical. the theory of subject matter is essentially practical. the teaching situation has a partial goal and a main goal. subject matter is no longer true in itself, but true from the teacher to the student. if one wishes to discuss a textbook, one discusses its operative dimension. one examines, for instance, whether the text is understandable for the given student. one examines the teacher, and one examines the student. teaching materials can be judged according to whether they help achieve the pedagogical objective. they can be judged according to their social teaching mandate. the theory of teaching is operative. the theory of teaching is essentially practical.

if one wishes to develop methods of agitation, one can draw on the methods of teaching and learning. the theory of teaching can be exploited for agitation.

2. teaching is more than the subject matter

when one judges a pedagogical text, one cannot be satisfied with it alone; one must take into account the teacher, the students, and the entire teaching situation.

in conventional film work, including political film work, the film author does not know his audience; at most it is the object of obscure speculation for the producer. the film for agitation must know its students. the educational film, the agitation film, can neither be produced nor criticized without knowledge of the students.

“to produce relevance, the socialist film must be produced by a project group (formerly author, director) for a target group (formerly an anonymous consumer class, audience).”

the agitation film is not produced in the film’s sphere of production; it comes into being only in agitation. it compels the filmmaker to concern himself with distribution just as much as with production. the producer of agitation films must ask:

who sees the film (for instance: bourgeois or worker)?

where is the film seen (for instance: in an apartment via a television screen, in a cinema, or at the workplace)?

what does the film show? until now, this has been almost the sole object of film theory.

for what purpose is the film shown (for instance: is the agitation of which it forms a part long-term, or intended to stimulate participants to short-term action)?

by what means can the agitation be conducted? in the broadest sense, the division of labor has thus far decided in favor of the professional filmmaker: he makes films. in agitational practice, he must be prepared to write poems or look after children, or to allow poems to be written and children looked after instead of a film being made.

in the narrower sense of the question “with what?,” he must inquire into film technique.

five questions, the answers to which describe an agitation. only one of them, the one about the question of “what,” has thus far been the object of film work. agitation is a situation described by five components (dimensions).

Copyright: Harun Farocki GbR.

the theory of teaching, pedagogy, especially when it strives for formalization and systematization, likewise divides its field of investigation into five parts. it asks about:

the psychostructure of the addressee: who learns, what are they capable of, why do they learn?

the sociostructure of the addressee: in what situation does learning take place—individually or in a class setting?

the subject matter: what is taught?

the goal of instruction

the medium: how is the subject matter conveyed—through books, audio tapes, or films?

five questions, the answers to which describe a didactic system. formally, at least, the fields of investigation of agitation and those of pedagogy are identical. the teaching situation of agitation can be described using the five aforementioned categories; the agitational situation of “societal instruction” can likewise be described using these five categories.

3. application of the deduced categories to an agitation

the technology project group undertook an agitation tour through the federal republic. in november 1968, it traveled to approximately ten universities and higher technical colleges in the frg [Federal Republic of Germany, aka West Germany]. in so doing, it employed a film. the agitation work will be described below in order to examine what the categories we have deduced are capable of accomplishing.

psychostructure of the addressee, motives

why do the students come to the film screening, and why do they come to the teach-ins and discussions? in the case of the higher technical colleges, the respective student union usually announced the event as a discussion on higher education reform (“improvement of the internal structures of training,” htl hannover [Higher Technical College Hannover]). in the previous semester, the students at the higher technical colleges went on strike for the recognition of their diplomas within the framework of the eec [European Economic Community]. they demanded their schools be granted equal status with the academies. through professional interests, they were led for the first time to engage in solidarity-based political action. the conflict with the training bureaucracy directed their interest toward training methods. their motivation for exposing themselves to agitation is therefore mediated through professional interests. the situation is different in the case of students at the technical universities; because scientific research is increasingly becoming a primary productive force, technical university students are overprivileged. higher technical college students allow themselves to be summoned to an event by their student union as though to a compulsory exercise. technical university students possess enough formally sanctioned autonomy not to feel bound to the university outside the framework of their studies. they attend political events only in very small numbers. what is lacking there is a collectively experienced contradiction, such as that between professional promise and professional reality, which occurs at the higher technical colleges. those who attend political events at technical universities have generally not been politicized through their workplace, but mostly through their free time; they have read about the left in the newspaper or taken part in demonstrations. at technical universities, the political cadres tend to come from the humanities faculties.

prior knowledge, language

the division of labor has separated the humanities from the natural sciences and thereby shaped stereotypes of both humanities scholars and natural scientists. to the image of the natural scientist are ascribed concepts such as reason, efficiency, diligence. teachers and parents separate, at an early stage—both materially and personally—everything that they regard as imagination, self-reflexivity, or critical awareness from the natural sciences and the natural scientist. the result of this socialization process is the engineering student. he distinguishes between a professional language and a private one. for him, political language is not the overarching aspect of his work and private life, but a third sphere: the public language of the mass media for the upper social strata. he prefers to speak in the tone adopted by politicians in their televised “analyses.” in the film shown during the agitation, there was a scene intended to express an idea by means of an example. one actor stood for several roles, which he named; one prop for several capital goods. there were students who did not understand the example. they had not been taught the essence of abstraction. they are accustomed to identifying signs with objects. when confronted with an icon (usually a film image), they do not recognize that the icon is merely a sign and not the object itself. when vacuum cleaners were mentioned—by which a specific part of commodity production was meant—they asked: why a vacuum cleaner? why an electrical engineer? i am a mechanical engineer.

social structure of the addressee

the sociostructure describes how psychological disposition is realized in agitation. at the same time, the sociostructure of didactics and agitation shapes the psychostructure of its addressee. the film used for the agitation was recorded on ampex magnetic tape—that is, electromagnetically. this makes the projection system portable. the film was shown on two television screens. television does not require darkened rooms.

thus it was possible for the film to run continuously, usually at a central site of student communication, such as in front of the cafeteria. it became evident that in a location that does not predetermine the viewer through memories of cinema and lectures, what is seen is more likely to enter into conversation. on the other hand, the motives that lead students to pass by a television installation in the open air differ from those that bring them to a teach-in. outdoors, spectators continually decided not to remain exposed to the agitation any longer, which was seldom the case in the auditorium.

Harun Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire, 1969. Copyright: Harun Farocki GbR.

in lectures and film screenings, the silence of the listeners is a sign of their powerlessness or lack of consciousness. one can stimulate the willingness not to remain silent by speculating about the sociostructure. with the medium of film, however, one cannot initiate a dialogue free of domination—at most one can initiate a discussion about such a dialogue. in film, the flow is always hierarchical. it goes from one source to many recipients.

subject matter:

it would be too extensive to enumerate the entire material of the agitation, including that which was not captured on film. the film itself contained an agitational spot and a series of statements made by engineers in their professional capacity. they described their professional situation and, above all, career models. techniques of skill attrition. the engineers who spoke were able to recognize their problems, but could scarcely articulate them; they were unable to determine their position within the problematic of technology.

an impulse toward determining this position was provided by the agitational advertisement. it varied the old joke about the worker who continually steals vacuum cleaner parts and then assembles a submachine gun. the film showed a student who wished to expose a company’s war production, and who continually steals submachine gun parts and then assembles a vacuum cleaner. an engineer explains that the unity of action between workers and technologists redefines the concept of commodity production and its use. if workers, students, and engineers determine what is produced, vacuum cleaners could become weapons, and machine guns household items.

goal:

the goals of the agitation were redefined during the agitation itself. at first, the project group believed it could propagandistically refer technical students toward their regional political organization. the local group, named esg, gsg, or sds,2 could thereby gain a political foothold and, for the first time, establish a broad university public.

the project group then settled instead on preparing the ground for political work at the respective university. the project group discussed the goal, or rather the subgoal, of their agitation with representatives of the respective university on a daily basis. the goal is one of five components of a didactics or an agitation; an altered goal requires an altered didactics or agitation. the project group attempted to take the altered goal into account by steering the event differently. the component “goal” was therefore the only variant that consciously drove the project group to change the agitation. other variants—altered psychostructures, altered sociostructures—changed the course of the agitation without the project group becoming aware of it.

even a minimally formalized representation of an agitation such as this one is suitable for helping teachers-agitators. the five subgroups of the discipline of pedagogy can help separate the difficulties of agitation and thereby render them manageable.

if the difficulties are not separated, then the goal appears to be the only variable, and all other components of the agitation become its function. the agitator does not have it in his power to determine what in his agitation is variable and what is constant. first, because the methods by which one describes or speculates about the psychostructure of students are not precise enough. the psychostructure of the addressee in an agitation is variable, if only because the terms used to describe it are not constant. second, the agitator does not have control over the agitated. he does not even bind them to the agitation situation by means such as compulsory school attendance, and even the teacher cannot compel the attention of his students with the help of the police. the agitator must therefore be able to handle his means variably in a variable situation, that is, the agitation. in order to be able to use them variably, he must be able to construct a model of their structure.

the organizational schema of didactics is not only formally important for the agitator. the agitator can also adapt much of the research content of the schema; on subject such as “the linguistic capacities of the addressees” and “class-specific capacities for abstraction,” the agitator can learn substantively from pedagogical literature. it is precisely the weakness of the preceding description of an agitation that it does not fully exploit the current state of bourgeois research in this area. it is the task of all those interested in agitation to do so: to raid and exploit bourgeois pedagogical science.

4. differences between agitation and left agitation

an agitation may be identical with didactics formally and in content, theoretically and practically. left agitation cannot be. it is evident that left agitation falls short of the emancipatory claim of the left if it retains the teacher-student schema that has shaped pedagogical practice. precisely because of its formal similarity to didactics (agitation, like didactics, initiates, directs, and regulates learning processes), the theory of agitation must include a critical theory of learning. a materialist art or film theory asks: how does a work relate to the relations of production? does it stand in reactionary opposition to them, or does it intend their disruption? with regard to film in left agitation, one may initially answer: it aims to disrupt them. to disrupt them is one of the distant goals of left agitational work, but how is the long-term goal reflected in present practice? this is the question that a left with emancipatory claims continually poses.

walter benjamin proposed that one inquire into the techniques used by writers, asking how these techniques relate to the relations of production; the techniques of agitation have a place within the history of learning; the techniques of left agitation must represent the highest possible stage in the development of learning techniques. to in order to judge the techniques of agitation, one must examine the history of techniques of learning. the following excursus into history attempts to do this.

excerpt from the history of learning theories  

the theory of conditioning is widely known; it goes back to pavlov’s theory of reflexes. we know pavlov rang a bell before feeding the dog. later, the dog salivated when it heard the bell. in its memory it had linked eating with the ringing sound; the unconditional stimulus “eating” was replaced by the conditional stimulus “bell signal.” early learning theories derived two conclusions from this and similar experiments. first, the idea of using “unconditional” sensory needs to generate the will to learn—motivation, as it is called in their terminology. second, that association is more successful when the response, the reduction of the need-tension, is more direct. animal experiments also showed that association succeeds best when the signal is presented as uniformly and repeatedly as possible. some of these notions were incorporated into the first teaching machine, which sidney i. pressey presented at a congress in 1925.

Hartmut Bitomsky and Harun Farocki, The Division of All Days (Die Teilung aller Tage), 1970. 16 mm film still. Copyright: Harun Farocki GbR.

Hartmut Bitomsky and Harun Farocki, The Division of All Days (Die Teilung aller Tage), 1970. 16 mm film still. Copyright: Harun Farocki GbR.

Hartmut Bitomsky and Harun Farocki, The Division of All Days (Die Teilung aller Tage), 1970. 16 mm film still. Copyright: Harun Farocki GbR.

pressey devised an apparatus for a question-and-answer quiz system that dispensed a reward in the form of candy when a certain success rate was achieved. pressey has remained a forgotten avant-gardist in the field of teaching machines. It is however no coincidence that he proposed the mechanical use of the educational prop, candy, which plays a major role in childrearing. before the turn of the century, the early capitalist labor theorist taylor had proposed establishing a wage incentive system on assembly lines. children and women, he argued, were incapable of being motivated to work by the prospect of a daily wage. they had to be paid hourly, occasionally by the half hour, or after a few minutes.

women, children, animals, and workers. it seems as though mechanistic theories of learning and working can only be built on the basis of the defenseless.

skinner, who is considered the actual inventor of learning machines, also bases his learning theories primarily on animal experiments. he no longer mechanically transfers observations of animal behavior onto human learning. the reward system he introduces is called “reinforcement through success.” it is the appropriate reward system for wage earners who are no longer entirely defenseless and who are not satisfied with the mere costs of reproducing labor power. they are given cloze tests, sentence systems in which various keywords are omitted. the student must insert the missing word into the gap, only then may he check whether it was correct. the texts almost always proceed so slowly that the student makes no mistakes. it has been described as follows:

skinner employed the same method to introduce students to his teaching in the shortest possible time; his aim was to break down more or less complicated trains of thought into the smallest units of knowledge, presented in the form of simple statements and sequences of thought. each answer is evaluated immediately; in positive cases, the corresponding form of behavior is immediately reinforced …

these programs and teaching machines are widely used at harvard university; most students prefer to learn in this way. (correll)

skinner has overcome pavlov. he no longer works with candy, but with success as the motor. candy is supposed to provide partial oral or instinctual gratification, but what instinct is satisfied by success? skinner’s harvard students must have internalized the conditions of labor in order to understand the progress from chapter to chapter, from sentence to sentence, as success.

a word from the world of labor applies equally to skinner’s theory and practice of learning: alienation. skinner’s procedure subjects the learner to a movement in which neither goal nor content, but only the process itself, has validity. there is an instructional text based on skinner’s method that unintentionally parodies itself (zielinski). it deals with the advantages of programmed instruction. in the middle of the text, the author asks whether learning is better or worse under programmed instruction. if the student answers “better,” he is rewarded with success. if he does not follow the author’s argument, he is punished with failure. this example exposes skinner’s method as an expanded game of the goose. but the cheerful atmosphere of small successes is unknown in the world of labor. the demands that industrial labor practice place on qualified workers are different; it cannot spare workers frustration, and thus frustration is not spared the learner either. skinner’s model is therefore shaken by the insight that human beings also learn from failure.

more recent definitions of the concept of learning have therefore abandoned a mechanical or even refined stimulus-response schema and introduced abstraction as a subprocess of learning.

haseloff offers a contemporary cybernetic definition of the learning process. learning, he writes, has occurred when stochastic action passes over into planned action; or learning is the attempt to make a circumstance-conditioned readjustment to the environment. in this definition, he continues, there are only a number of empty slots that can be filled with different variables:

conditioning and substitution

reinforcement and feedback

internal representation

we have cursorily described the first two points. haseloff explains the third:

in contrast to the older and more widespread view that punished or useless stimulus-response connections are eliminated and deleted from the information and reaction potential, experiments have shown that punishment generates an internal reaction—for example fear—which in turn becomes associated, through learning, with certain internal stimuli. external reactions, such as those of danger-avoidance, can then be conditioned to these internal stimuli …

an entire layer of facts and events whose connection to learning research has until now scarcely been clearly perceived can be satisfactorily explained through the concept of internal stimuli and responses. internal stimuli can consist of words, other conventional signs, or more complex symbols. beyond the … relief function of this internal representation, they constitute variable construction elements for expectation and hypothesis, for projected action and planning. In this way a field of operations detached from immediate reality is constituted. within it, preliminary experiences can be gained and logical possibilities, even with incomplete information, can be provisionally translated into alternatives with differing probable consequences for action.

pressey wanted to organize learning the same way taylor wanted to organize work—and as it was in principle organized in early capitalism: infantilization and bestialization of wage earners, strict division of labor, short-term remuneration. pressey’s paper roll of instructional units followed the model of early conveyor belts, at which the wage laborers—and now also the knowledge worker—performed mechanical labor.

the learning techniques of skinner and other behaviorists correspond to the capitalist conditions of the early 1930s onward. socialism was confined to a single country; the economic crisis was being overcome. an integrative blurring of class relations replaced naked violence; the state, as agent of capital, formed the working class under slogans ranging from “new deal” to “cold war.” part of the heavy mechanical labor was performed by machine tools; wage systems became more complicated and obscured, through intricate bonus systems, the direct dependency of the employee that is visible in the daily wage. skinner outlines the utopia of consolidated capitalism: easy tasks, permanent wages through success, collective recognition, and reproduction of existing norms. a learning theory of the haseloff type, mentioned last, corresponds to the relations of production of late capitalism. it permits abstraction and distance from what has been learned. fully automated labor tends to eliminate the division of labor; it compels the worker to gain insight into the totality of the production process. a certain degree of autonomous activity in labor requires a certain degree of autonomous learning.

what do these three episodes show? they show that work determines learning. they show that there is a concept of socially required qualification. they show that complex learning—the precondition of autonomous intellectual labor—is compelled by the needs of industrial production. for those interested in left agitation, this implies:

1. learning theory is capable of providing information about complex learning processes. it deals with learning processes at the end of which students are capable, by means of abstraction, of gaining insight into larger units of production.

it deals with didactics that teach students autonomous activity.

however, autonomous activity as a pedagogical objective is not its substantive goal; the history of labor development has merely wrested it from learning theory. autonomous activity is a privilege granted by automation: learners have not fought for it. this privilege excludes those classes and strata that, for reasons of labor organization, do not require autonomy in the production process (the planned division into foundational studies and short-track studies makes this clear).

for left agitation, this means it must socialize privileges. when agitating engineering students, it must not reproduce, from an effect-oriented perspective, the stereotypes of the natural science student. it must analyze the components of his psychostructure: his language skills, his mental imagery. this must not lead to altering the goal of agitation so that it becomes formulable in the given language. if the engineering student cannot decipher icons, agitation must not confine itself to presenting indices. left agitation cannot develop a tiered system of states of consciousness. it must not speak to workers as imperialists speak to blacks.

2. the autonomous activity that is the highest stage of learning research and practice is a limited autonomous activity. it is an autonomous activity intended to enable the learner to oversee a production process. the trained worker is not meant to grasp the interrelations between the production process and society. he should be able to direct production, but not be able to disrupt the relations of production if he considers it necessary. left agitation can make use of materials concerning education for autonomous activity, because autonomous activity potentially enables the overturning of the relations of production. left agitation must transform formally sanctioned autonomous activity into self-chosen autonomous activity.

3. what was the method of pressey and skinner?

they were confronted with the complex practice of learning and teaching. they did not attempt to use theory as a tool to decipher the complicated process of learning. instead, they devised learning techniques which, structurally borrowed from industrial practice, merely imitated the learning process. with their techniques they sought to maximize the learning effect. in so doing, they adopted methods of profit maximization. left agitation must proceed methodically in the opposite manner.

4. left agitation cannot adopt the methods of didactics; it must transform them.

the following example is intended to demonstrate how a transformation of the ideas and models of pedagogical science can take place. presented here is the model of group schooling, developed primarily by pask.

the oldest form of schooling is individual instruction. this is followed by parallel instruction—teaching in classes. the larger the instructional unit becomes, the more contact between teacher and learner diminishes: in large lectures, for example, there is hardly any feedback from the learners to the lecturer. technical developments then expand school classes, and the structure of parallel communication, to immeasurable proportions. soviet avant-garde filmmakers pointed to the possibility of educating an entire country through the medium of film. in their films one sees groups of listeners gathered before radio loudspeakers. but the mass production of radio sets and tv sets dissolves these pedagogical formations. radio and television sets empty the streets and consolidate the household rather than collectivizing the class—and this occurs not merely in order to sell consumer goods. in parallel instruction, in systems with hierarchical information flows, communication among listeners is a disturbance.

the idea behind group schooling, by contrast, is to integrate communication among learners as part of the learning process and to transform the quantity of many students into a quality.

in the experimental setup of group schooling, learners are to attain the respective intermediate results of the program through rivalry or cooperation. a computer controls the flow of communication among learners and between the program and the learners. communication among learners is no longer a disturbance, but a planned part of the program.

what can left agitation learn from this model? mass media, solely by virtue of their communicative limitation, are not truly mass media but media between an individual and a mass. with agitation, film has so far lagged behind verbal events. it must, as a rule, be received silently, whereas listeners can modify speeches or deliver them themselves. discussion with a film is impossible—at best there can be discussion about a film. in order to reduce the rigidity of film, left agitation has resorted to producing shorter film segments so that reception and autonomous activity can alternate more quickly. in the example of the technology agitation, attempts were made to mitigate the constraints of receptive absorption by intervening in the conditions of reception—with contradictory results, as described above. the idea of group schooling is suited to developing visual communication to the point where it can become a central component of agitation.

figure one shows the course that agitation with film has taken up to now. a film is received individually and discussed collectively. the experience of these events is that the long phase of reception paralyzes the viewers’ capacity and desire to articulate themselves.

figure two shows the course of an agitation that alternates short phases of intellectual reception and production.

figure three shows what can take place during the production phase. two (or more) groups can engage with one another through the agitation film and thus gradually produce a collective consciousness. the groups can consist of agitators and those being agitated. in the case of technology agitation, it could be a group of technical university engineers and a group of higher technical college engineers. the system of step-by-step production could then aim to establish unity of action between them; the film segments could take as their object the strata-specific contradictions of both target groups. figure four presents a model in which target group–specific films are shown. this does not require two event spaces or a complicated sound transmission system. two ampex systems set up in a single room could already implement the model. using technology as an example: the technical university group would then learn from the example of engineers engaged in basic natural-scientific research, and the higher technical college engineers from the example of engineers who control production processes. the individual learning steps would then have to be analogous.

all these models prescribe for the agitated a fixed sequence of phases from reception to production. the model mentioned above does not. in it, each individual learner can stop the program and establish communication with a fellow learner. to realize this model, a screen for each individual participant in the agitation and a sound transmission system are needed. the switching of connections and steps can only be handled by a computer system. if left agitation employs pask’s model, it will have to subject the flow of information to a different economy than the capitalist one. cooperation cannot be enforced through the difficulty of the material. a collective consciousness among learners must then determine the economy of progress. when agitation as a technique of consciousness has reached the highest stage of the relations of production, it becomes clear whether it disrupts those relations. in order to disrupt the relations of production, left agitation must not adopt the achievements of learning theory, but transform them.

5. methodological praxis

the resources available to the left for agitation are limited. it is difficult to cover even the production costs of simple films.

in this context, the proposal to experiment with computers may appear somewhat luxurious. it is not. what matters is that students establish institutional control over mathematics institutes and not merely over the chairs and tables of german studies institutes. the socialization of research and teaching can enable instruments of agitation at the highest technical level. because research and teaching are increasingly becoming a primary productive force, the partial automation of instruction is inevitable. american institutes already possess consoles and computers for instructional purposes. in karlsruhe, the technical university at least already has an ampex system. transforming the teaching system into an agitation system is the strategy at several institutes in the federal republic.

extending agitation of the university into society is the next methodological step.

this step-by-step model is not intended as an alternative to comrade minow’s proposals.3 here, the proposal is transformed into a strategy for theory formation. political needs compel the leap into practice: agitation must be carried out with leaflets and conventional film projects. in order to avoid historical stagnation, however, it must measure its work against a developed theory freed from repressive contexts of application: this theory is a learning theory in the broadest sense.

left agitation—and the film within it—must be produced by a collective of left scientists: by sociologists, linguists, psychologists, cyberneticians, mathematicians. by engaging in agitation, they must dissolve their role as specialized individual scientists.

the task is to scientize agitation and politicize science.