Error is the phenomenon that determines the order of events, draws the lines of life’s map. (Errorism bases its action in error)
Error is a negative affirmation, or a speculation about another possible outcome.
Traditional education teaches by examples; it uses error as a variable to measure knowledge. In traditional education error would be eliminated. Sanctioning, in a way, that which passes through the experience of error.
On one hand, it attempts to minimize to the maximum degree the idea that error is something positive, while, on the other hand, it lives off of the dialectic of trial and error in order to constitute the very matrix of the educational system.
When a child in school “is wrong,” he or she will be (depending on the guide at his or her side) encouraged, punished, ostracized, or criticized. In this society and educational system error condemns. But for the Errorists the experience of error is the experience of knowledge. So knowledge and experience are acquired, lived, and transmitted, like it or not, through the experience of error.
In a society where “erring” is criminalized, one attempts to structure one’s life under the martial law of the Market and concentration camps of consumption, in the same society that collapses in its search for the permanent application of “efficiency and optimization” to every relationship.
The presence of error in our lives is imminent.
Error is like death in relation to life: it (error) will always be present, including here and now as you are reading this text.
Its materialization and visibility depend only on the parameters with which we measure the scope and revolutionary potential of each small or large error. Error educates, but though a process of de-education.
Accepting the permanent presence of error in reality liberates, and it drives a new vision of, and a new participation in life. Error liberates. Error is a permanent source of inspiration.
Losing the fear of being wrong, of falling in error, impels a surpassing of limits and a creative potential that was latent, but inhibited by the moral structures that determine social values and behaviours under our traditional educational system.
Errorists affirm the urgent necessity of a general de-education. A sum of collective projects, of experiences in the transmission and exchange knowledge and practices, a self-formation of individuals and collective subjects that take life itself as their object of study.
Who assume an active, participatory, and empirical role in society to form spaces of struggle and resistance for de-education and the liberation of error.
For this specific space in Moscow, Russia, in 2006, we propose the following Errorist Experiment in De-Education:
“Genealogy of Error”-
Genealogy of error is a psycho-graphical experience in which you attempt to complete a genealogical map of your life’s errors, delineated by those errors that you consider to have subtly or powerfully affected the course of your life.
This map has its beginning in the present; from there it finds root in the past, passing through your childhood, until arriving at the moment of your birth.
(Some people who have done this experiment have found the “original error” in their own births.)
The “Map of the Genealogy of Error” will be created and distributed by the International Errorist with the collaboration of the group Etcetera…
Complete the map of your life’s errors!!!
(Or if not, IMAGINE yourself a wanderer. Your erring will determine a journey of survival and of fortuitous events that will mark out your uncertain path towards nowhere.)
The Errorist International
The “Errorist Internacional” was founded in November 2005 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It has members in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Canada, Croatia, the USA, and Japan; they came together in the framework of actions to protest the presence of President George W. Bush at the Summit of the Americas, a meeting of the leaders of all the countries of the American continent in the town of Mar del Plata.
The Errorist International took part in the international anti-summit, called “the People’s Summit,” whose participants included social organization, agricultural movements, leftist parties, NGOs and independent media, civil rights organization, syndicates, and student committees, which made various manifestations and cultural events.
This all took part in a town flooded by military and police. The center was closed and guarded by three police cordons. One could see US marines patrolling the streets and beaches. It was here that the Errorist International made its first declaration, which now heads off this manifesto: “WE ARE ALL ERRORISTS.” It was accompanied by a series of errorist actions during the manifestations of protest on the streets.
Errorism was born by accident: under censorship, we were forced to concentrate our linguistic means, to make our metaphors as tight as possible, to speak without calling things by their proper names. We cannot use words like “(T)errorism” and “(T)errorist” because of their unbelievable symbolic weight and “danger,” which is why we hide behind a play on words. This is how Errorism was born, by mistake. Someone who was writing a text forget to press one of the keys.
Today, errorism and its actions enjoy the broad support of the international community. Its practices and its philosophy are spreading, creating new autonomous cells of the Errorist International all over the world.
We need to give the System just a little of its own poison: YET ANOTHER MISTAKE!!
Join the ranks of the Errorist International!
Mistranslated from Spanish via Russian by David Riff