Perverting Felix Guattari’s analysis in Lines of Flight, FOPA is an attempt at doing collective equipment for para-academia (1). Collective equipment is the natural satellite of social-imaginary institutions. An obvious and relevant example being the institution of the University as such; the constellation of campuses, laboratories, presses etc. on the other hand, being its forms of collective equipment. 

Para-academia is an institution. It has been so since the time of Plato’s Academy (2). And yet, in the present moment, it is not obvious what collective equipment functions para-academia possesses. FOPA, in taking the off-the-shelf idea of a festival, is a first minimal attempt at doing collective equipment for para-academia in this way. 

Not in any way ironic, a critical and academic discourse emerged in the 1990’s concerning para-academia, para-academics, as well as ‘students’. This discourse relates to practices, methods, and forms of research. A primary finding of this enquiry was that para-academia is public forming (3). Put differently, para-academia simply occurs outside of official state institutions. 

Read no further than Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society and its withering critique of manipulative institutional formations (4). Bluntly put, the modern school is a place of incarceration and indoctrination that produces the naturalisation of hierarchies as well as the values of capitalist consumer society. On his institutional spectrum, Illich counterposes ‘convivial institutions’ to that of the manipulative type. We see para-academia very much in the light of conviviality. 

We must be wary of an overly Western cultural trajectory when it comes to problems arising from the question of para-academia in our situation today. So it is wise to adopt the Yolngu notion of ‘’connectedness in separation’’, a mode ensuring identity through difference (5). FOPA’s objectives are not defined by zero-sum logic. There ought to be a place for the public university, a university that approximates as best as possible the symbolic investments people have placed in its ideal. But first of all, it needs to be thoroughly decolonised (6). And para-academia must maintain a commitment to be constitutively aware of First Nations knowledges.

Thinking now, Fernand Deligny wrote that networks have one of two fates: oblivion or institutionalisation. Networks are sustained by tacit relationships. If those tacit relationships become formal and normative, then institutions emerge. If those tacit relationships simply run out of energy and creativity, then oblivion (7). Therefore, it is perhaps more apt to say that para-academia is a network in the sense that Deligny gives the term, rather than an institution understood through a long and arguably discontinuous history of counter-practices relative to official state education.

Which brings us to today. FOPA cannot  - it is beyond its scope - determine or overdetermine what para-academia might be or mean to someone. Diktats of that nature would be utterly foolish for we are confronted with the pitiable envelope called 21st century experience: identitarian politics, genocidal racism, techno-feudalism, perpetual war, the mental health crisis, planetary systems collapse etc. It is in the context of this experience that para-academia deserves its urgency and attention, given the complicity of state institutions in the perpetuation and promulgation of this very same experience which is nothing less than terror. 

These challenges require a collective effort from a responsible public. FOPA is an experiment in collective equipment for the set of tacit relationships that form the networks that compose para-academia. FOPA wants to keep communities-in-movement (8). We hope and trust that you will enjoy our events. That you will learn something. That you support, however you can, the entities participating in FOPA moving forward. This is what FOPA is really for: the continued success of the para-academic entities that exist today such that in the future more entities can emerge with your support.

The way we create flourishing in the sphere of para-academia may help us grapple with the poly-crises of the present. How we imagine futures together and how we educate our communities, are two sides of the same coin. Thank you for taking the time to read this. We look forward to your ongoing participation in para-academia. A series of talks, panels, exhibitions + more will occur in Naarm between Nov 21 – 24.