Beyond Available Alternatives: An Interview with Rob Scott by Matthew B. Dineen

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Portland, Maine, United States of America (Free-Press-Release.com) July 22, 2011 --

"What are you for?" Variations of that question were constantly hurled at the early global justice movement that erupted, in the U.S. at least, in Seattle during the actions which shut down the WTO meetings in 1999. This was often an attempt by the corporate media to discredit the movement as a group of aimless idealists protesting just for the sake of protesting. But in recent years, particularly with the rise of global and regional social forums, activists within the movement have taken that question seriously by prioritizing the need for visions of the kind of worlds that we want to live in.

Nearly a decade before the Seattle uprising, a school opened in Urbana, IL dedicated to making those worlds a reality. The School for Designing a Society invites its students to ask the question: "What would I consider a desirable society?" and spend an entire semester designing projects toward realizing that desire. Recently I had a chance to sit down with Rob Scott who is one of the School's full-time instructor's specializing in cybernetics and ecological design. He came on my radio program "Passions and Survival" where we discussed what it would be like to live in a society beyond the one we have now.

Let’s start with the School for Designing a Society. Can you describe what it is and how you got involved with it?

The School for Designing a Society is a project started by activists and artists, composers, poets, people interested in language, politics, economics, and social change. It is aimed at trying to create a space for people to talk about the world as they would like it to be rather than only talk about it as it currently is. So it was taken as a point of departure that people already have a critique of the current society and that’s well known. Just because one has an articulate critique there’s no evidence, that I’ve seen, that one can go directly from the critique of the existing society to one that they prefer. Some space, some time, some environment has to be set up where people can speak with each other about, “What would we put in the place of the system that we disapprove of?”

So we get students that are interested in living in a different society. And rather than start off commiserating with each other about what we don’t like, we try to put a temporary suspension on the discourse of criticism and complaint and encourage people to make proposals as to how they’d like to see the world be otherwise. And to that, the semester unrolls itself in a set of classes, seminars, often discussions and readings, aimed at generating projects, generating activities, works of art, political campaigns—whatever it is that would meet the desires of the women and men who come to the school hoping that society could be otherwise. And looking to generate evidence, because the society we prefer doesn’t sit before us and ask us to simply just hit a button on it. You actually have to sort of make up the language to talk to about it. So that’s mainly what the discussions are aimed at.

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