The Experience of the Us

Espai en Blanc is the name of a project created in Barcelona in 2002. The goal, as we said at the time, was to “make thinking passionate again”. By “passionate” we meant that we put our lives into it. And that happens when thinking becomes collective, when it affects our very way of living and challenges the clichés on which our everyday reality is founded.

A project like this has to have a broader aim than simply creating a critical discourse to hold up to the world. From the outset, we felt there was a need to experiment with the conditions of such production: the places, relationships and tools of its creation, communication, education and intervention. As well as creating a collective author, we also wanted to set in motion a whole machine of thought; a device which, by altering the recognisable maps of theoretical production, would lead to a new politicisation of thought. The crisis in the traditional forms of political affiliation and organisation have invalidated the old idea that politicisation requires consciousness and the transmission of a proper discourse. In a globalised world, everything is visible (injustice, lies, cruelty, exploitation, etc.), yet nothing happens. Disclosure and denunciation is valuable in the ambit of information but not in that of social transformation. The enlightened proposition of illuminating consciousnesses—subsequently taken up by the worker’s movement as class consciousness—has thus lost its subversive potential. What then does the production of critical and shared thinking consist of? How do political transmission and formation occur today?