Continuing our labor-themed Summer Session, today we bring you an excerpt from “Yoga for Adjuncts: The Somatics of Human Capital,” a workshop led by Christian Nagler on April 19, 2014. The workshop was part of a daylong practicum at the Arts Research Center (ARC) at the University of California, Berkeley, entitled “Valuing Labor in the Arts.” This “prompt” was originally published on our sister site Art Practical on April 3, 2014.

Yoga for Adjuncts: The Somatics of Human Capital workshop, Valuing Laboring in the Arts practicum, April 19, 2014, UC Berkeley Art Museum. Courtesy of the Arts Research Center, UC Berkeley. Photo: Megan Hoetger.

Greetings, practitioners!
Let’s begin by balancing on one leg. Good. (Or if you can, try balancing on zero legs!)
Feeling shaky? Remember: Falling over is all right. Precariousness is the greatest teacher.
Let me start off with a simple fact: Art schools—which employ at intermittent, patchwork intervals a large number of urban cultural workers, teaching artists—have led the way toward loosening the rigid idea of the educator as a wage-earner.
Another fact: The private art schools are quantitatively assessed and overseen by tech-entrepreneur trustee boards and investment bankers with teams of consultants to translate their risk-management strategies into administrative policies.
Let’s accept this situation—let it sink in. Let it quiver under the fasciae.
We can’t go home again. We can’t go back. We have only what is now.
Or, to put it another way: Let’s find a new home in the floating world of today’s institutions, of managed, interlocking slots of short-term labor.
Let’s take some deep breaths.

Read the full article here.