Guest post by Dr. Jacques Valentin, UfSO.
The University for Strategic Optimism is the synchronisation of multiple lines of thought and practice and one of the points around which this synchronisation occurs is that of space.
The ’68 comparison continually drawn with the recent student movement that the UfSO has been caught up in is fuelled not only by nostalgic commentators struggling for an ordering frame of reference but, we would also contend, from the specific spatial and temporal dimensions of this flame of rebellion. The Situationist colouring of the ’68 events is well-known and arguably one of the most consistent legacies of this has perhaps been the reimagining of urban space through concepts such as psychogeography and dérive. It is just such a reimagining that the UfSO seeks itself to reimagine. We are not merchants in the psychogeography industry, writing tourist guides or newspaper columns in a cynical commodification of symbolic urban space, rather we would contest that the spatio-temporal dimension of this recent wave of protest is a rehabilitation of what was radical about psychogeography, namely the potential political resignification and re-ordering of space.
Read the entire piece here: ufso and the spatio-political performative
UfSO site here.
