Makingitpublic-report

Makingitpublic-report
Name	Making it Public
Start Date	Monday 2nd November 2015
End Date	Wednesday 4th November 2015
Organisers	Annet Dekker, Andre Castro
Guest speakers	Aymeric Mansoux, Amy Wu, Sandra Fauconnier, Michael Murtaugh, Pia Pol, Florian Cramer
Thematic Project page link	https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Thematic-Making_It_Public

---

Introduction

The thematic workshop looked at modes of public distribution and the difficulties faced in shifting private sources of knowledge into the public terrain.The prospect of knowledge sharing within the public sphere presents the idealistic model of free education, open culture and equality of opinions.The term “private” entails the right to express one’s subjective opinion and upholds the validity of one’s own voice and interpretation. As a consequence of the attempt to move the “private” into the public sphere, the original intention becomes impinged through the process of distribution. The nature of publicising content involves acts of distortion, corruption of intent, curatorial and editorial censorship and filtration. In order to present a coherent order of discourse from the multiplicity of sources to promote apparent “objectivity”, it becomes necessary to undergo selection, exclusion and inclusion.

↓ See the list of texts below

Distribution Networks — Monday 2nd Nov

The Game

Based upon the above stated texts, we devised a game that we felt was representative of the readings.

We selected three objects to present to the class, each of which was meant as a representative of a larger ideology an Aloe Vera Plant (ecology/health) A Statuette with a plastic (culture) Bananas in a plastic bag (consumerism/property) The class was then asked to each select one object they felt somehow attached to and form groups around each. The groups were then instructed to discuss their shared appreciation of the objects - this instruction was given in hope of creating a sense of community. The groups were also asked to select a leader from the group as a public representative. Once these communities were formed, and leaders selected, we informed the class that one of the three objects had to be destroyed. The group leaders were given the responsibility to step forward and defend the preservation of their objects. After each leader presented a defence for their object to the class, the class was asked to vote on which object was to be destroyed. One object was destroyed With two objects remaining, we repeated the experiment and asked the class to yet again cast a vote for which object should be destroyed and which preserved. Ultimately the majority vote ruled for one object to remain, all others were destroyed.

Our intention for this assignment was to inspire the individuals of our class to form "communities", within the "society" which we existed in as a class. These communities would then naturally form into a "mainstream" majority as well as a diversity of "subcultures". These separate communities were then asked to cast a vote which would decide upon which communities "ideals" would survive, in order to illustrate various democratic models.

Our expectations of the experiment were that the majority of the group would opt to be a part of the "BANANA COMMUNITY" This did occur although when asked upon a second vote, we found that a large section of the majority joined a "subculture" There are various possible explanations for this: 1. Persuasive campaigning 2. The individual's of the class are naturally inclined to make part of subcultures. Even in this experiment, having found themselves within the Mainstream, they ultimately opted for a subculture.

The minority group convinced other groups to join them. The convincing part is similar to media publishing and it was persuasive.

The culture being preserved is the propaganda's choice....

Speakers

Making it public for who? – Aymeric

Beginning with a short summary of the historical evolution of Free Software and Free Culture, Aymeric questioned the blurring borders of private and public concepts both in socio-political and digital space. Between the years '99-'03 (the good years) digital intellectual property could be released under various branches of licence, which offered legal variations on release and authorship rights. Richard Stallman developed the concept of the General Public Licence, which was intended as a common space for collaboration, to share knowledge and exchange ideas through the WorldWideWeb. The GPL was later divided into two fractions; Free Software and Open Source Software, the two segments standing in opposition to the dominant ideology of Neo-Liberal Privatisation. These two communities, albeit sharing a similar approach, were unable to come to a consensus on a legal model for sharing and releasing intellectual property, as their ideologies strongly differed.

Eric Raymond, advocating the OSS ideology, focusses primarily on economic Interest. This argument supports the concept of Open Source Software as far as its potential to improve products. Richard Stallman, stands in opposition as a 'software freedom activist', envisioned an ethical model, which would respect the users' freedom and community. Allowing them the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.

The two segments became increasingly fragmented as they came into the era of pluralism, in which multiple modes of licensing were made available to users, seemingly tailored to the individual's needs. These were made available through the competitive climate created by the two parallel communities, both of which adhering to their own differing agendas. Agonistic model: competing, opening everything under differing licence - power struggle, more choice for users. The golden era of pluralism ended somewhere in 2003. Due to ideological and economic bankruptcy, the various licensing models withdrew and formed into two dominant blocks: CC and Free Culture. As the Free Culture movement is driven by ethical

Deliberative models: Wikipedia! Free Culture -

Aggregative model: Creative Commons

fair distribution democratisation of knowledge is impossible.[ well, it's difficult, and it's partial maybe] hi steve here hi steve! nice to see you yes inter-fearing (spl) ]

Zines Camp – Amy Wu

http://www.amysuowu.net/

Amy Wu, an alumni of the Piet Zwart Institute, currently co-organises Zinecamp 2015, the 'Worm' Fanzine festival. The festival is aimed at people who are interested in the activity of independent publishing and the DIY ethos. The routes of the Zine scene are firmly embedded within the American and British punk and anarcho-punk subcultures of the 70s. The process of publishing with minimal means by making fanzines provided the opportunity to various individuals and ostracised communities to express themselves and distribute amongst one other.

The second speaker that day was a former Piet Zwart student Amy Wu and the current co-organizer of the Worm Fanzine festival: Zinecamp 2015: (2nd time the event happens — in Worm) A festival aimed for people who are interested in the (once) underground activity of independent publishing and DIY ethos. Coming from the 70' U.S. and U.K. culture of punk and anarcho-punk subculture, the process of publishing with minimal means had made it easier for excluded communities or individuals to express themselves through making fanzines. It was a way for unheard voices, subcultures, or small communities to express themselves through writing and publishing. We also had the privilege to see original copies of the "beautiful" zines- a form of resistance to the social (and visual) order.

→ Continue with the next speaker: Sandra Fauconnier

Documentary: The Man Who Wanted to Classify the World

IMDB Synopsis:

The documentary The Man Who Wanted to Classify the World, 2002, illustrated the life and work of Paul Otlet. Paul Otlet's passion for classification led him to perfect the Dewey Classification system and developed it into 'the Universal Decimal Classification', a system still in use in most libraries today. Otlet firmly believed that in the distribution and accessibility of knowledge, mankind could reach peace. The Universal City, a life lone project, assisted by the American (posing as Danish) artist (posing as an architect) Hendrik Christian Anderson. This involved plans for an actual city, which would host the world's collected knowledge, for future generation to openly share, a focus for harmonious, pacifist and progressive civilisation. After several rejections

When Andersen in the mid-30's turned to the Italian dictator Mussolini for support to build the city, Otlet turned away in disgust, but soon found renewed support in the great architect Le Corbusier, who drew up plans and assisted him to until the very end.

Paul Otlet can be said to be among the chief architects behind the League of Nations (founded as a result of the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War), a unifying body of peacemaking among all nations, but even so his dreams of a permanent city of peace workers - politicians, intellectuals, scientist and artists working towards the abolition of war - was never recognized for real. And if it wasn't enough that two world wars brought whole societies to their knees, and with them the real-world effects of his firm belief in pacifism; petty thinking in his own nation also destroyed his library and collections of art and science. But even so his ideas of connecting all knowledge and making it accessible in images, audio and instant connections to anyone, anywhere, remained in the world. His is basically the modern version of the story of the difficult birth of the interconnectedness, which we today call "the Internet".

A beautiful documentary, "The Man Who Wanted To Classify The World", was created by Francoise Levie for release by Sofidoc Productions in 2002, following almost 1 year of opening and cataloguing the remains of his personal papers: 100 mice infested crates and boxes documenting every little thing in a life full of dreams, theory, planning, and action. Paul Otlet threw nothing away. Even a torn up letter was saved in a separate envelope. But out of the boxes grew a full life, where almost no endeavour went awry:

He had found his voice and conviction in pacifism - springing from the innate need to classify and put in order everything, which mankind discovered, developed and thought - and this certainly carried him throughout the whole of his life. Not a Ghandi, not a Martin Luther King working among his people, but an intellectual working from a dream so large that one would almost call it a pipe dream, if not for his total conviction: That peace among all nations was possible, if only there was a common focus on peace for all to see and believe in.

Day 1 https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/day_1

Writing the archive — Tuesday 3rd Nov

http://stuff2233.club:9001/p/PZI-making-it-public-report-writing

The Game

Assignment Group: Colm, Pleun, Sara

In relation to the texts assigned for this day, we decided to focus on Mathew Fuller's hypothesis which takes McLuhan's statement, "A society is defined by its amalgamates, not by its tools". This was the starting point.

We collected a set of tools whose functions are very specific and uncommon among average users: an extension grip used for a cordless drill, two clasp rings meant to hold pages together, a bike chain link tool, a radiator key, and a disc from a label-making machine. We first split the classroom into two groups, asking one of the groups to step out of the room. We then instructed each member of the remaining group to choose one tool and prepare an instruction manual for it. As most of the people in the group didn't have any prior knowledge as to what the items actually were or what function they served, the instruction manual was left up to imagination.

Then, each member of the first group had to explain the instructions they had prepared to a person from the second group but without showing them the actual tool. Then, finally, the person receiving the information had to repeat it to the whole class. The objects described by the end of the exercise, of course, had nothing to do with the original objects: a bike chain link tool became a pinching device, and a label-disk became a device meant to communicate with aliens!

In this assignment, there were several layers of transmission: a first layer between us and the first group, then between the first group and the second group, and then between the second group and the whole class. And in each of those layers of transmission, a power structure revealed itself between those who behold information and those who receive it; those who are capable of revealing through concealing, and concealing through revealing, as Lori Emerson would describe in "Reading, Writing Interface".

Reflecting on the argument on tools and society, Fuller states that a program like Microsoft Word, for example, somehow defines our society; not only by providing an excess of tools, but also by providing the paths between those tools, how they intermix, the boundaries and correlations between their functions, and especially, their relation to the users. In this sense, Microsoft Office somehow offers a seires of interfaces or points of transmission on several levels. The result being, an over cluttered, illogical toolbox, with many overlaps and double uses, which just confuses users, and simply means they end up using a small handful of icons repeatedly, and never explore other functions.

We live in a computing world that drowns its users with an excess of tools, who's communications are locked in a 'user-friendly' yet closed-off interface; a strategy that places the user inside an ideology of obscured information, distorting reality by convincing the latter that this is exactly what the notion of "user-friendly device" actually is.

Speakers

Writing Wikimedia – Sandra Fauconnier

Sandra Fauconnier is a Wikimedian. This is the term employed to name contributors to Wikipedia. Sandra's career has always involved net art / media art in some way, between the introduction that Annet gave and the very beginning of Sandra's presentation, we hear briefly about her experience at V2 here in Rotterdam, but very quickly get into the topic of the talk.

How editing collective knowledge can be achieved by separation into language communities and functional splitting. Sandra gives an overview of the functionings of Wikipedia. She calls it an ecosystem. A scheme with multiple parts that interdepend on each other. One of the key features of the workings of Wikipedia, is that all tools are developed to be used inside and outside of the context of Wikipedia.org itself. The project constantly acknowledges it's origin by maintaining and developing the tools necessary to achieve collective and individual information banks, collectively. From Wikimedia itself:

Wikimedia is a global movement whose mission is to bring free educational content to the world. Through various projects, chapters, and the support structure of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia strives to bring about a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.

If everybody tries to contribute to all aspects of the building of a wikipedia page, the system does not work properly. A good page should be an amalgamation of multiple editors, multiple sources, and a discussion on the quality of the page. So, who writes Wikipedia? The speaker explains a list of techniques that the wiki community has designed for itself to continue its project. An interesting point is the one of The fundamental principles of Wikipedia summarized in five "pillars":

• Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and the community of people who build it
• Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view
• Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute
• Editors should treat each other with respect and civility
• Wikipedia has no firm rules

Ever changing, ever evolving, self-governed model of building has proven its power. Many issues still have to be resolved, for example, the monochromatic aspect of the community of wikipedia editors, who have a strong tendency to be young, white, western, male humans, explaining the lack of information available for Asian, African and oriental culture in general. The other issue that needs to be solved is the lack of space for original content. Typically a Wikipedia page is a record of available knowledge. An encyclopedia is tertiary in a certain manner. So for information to be accepted into Wikipedia it should have previous publication references. This is slowly becoming an issue because of the distributive nature of the platform, it could be interesting, in some cases, for original content to appear on Wikipedia, but this debate of the inclusionists versus the rejectionists on Wikipedia is long standing.

Active Archives; Erkki Kurenniemi: In 2048 – Michael Murtaugh

How should one go about sorting through Terabites of data generated by a document obsessed artist?

Erkki Kurenniemi has documented his life but not archived it in any traditional sense, and didn’t develop a systematic model for what he calls a template for all human life. In his profound techno-enthusiasm, he relies on future quantum computers to make sense of it all. By 2048, Erkki states that the technology will be ready for the advent of this new artificial form of intelligence. The quantum computer will sort by itself the documents he has been recording, capturing, filming, photographing, drawing, and talking about.

Usually when invited to work on an archive, the material has been already processed, ordered, and a classification scheme is more or less decided. Our role as “active archivists” is often to negotiate between the classifying scheme already in place and the resistance of the data to comply with it. In this case, however, it is left to us to investigate the material and try to understand its specific character and qualities.

Software as an interlocutor: By using file formats, we give the programs a taxonomy of objects with which it can interact. A text format will allow the processing of lines, verbs and expressions, while an image format allows the processing of colors, contours, shapes. On Erkki’s hard drive, we found many files saved in “historical” formats and regularly transformed and exported. Through the various transformations, the taxonomy of the file changes. A text can behave as an image or an image can masquerade as a text.

→ Continue with the next speaker: Pia Pol

Links

• presentation slides
• logbook
• dataradio

Digital & Hybrid Publishing — Wednesday 4th Nov

The Game

On of the key lectures of this day was Writing Machines (chapters 1,2,3) from Katherine Hayles. In this chapters, she states out the influence of materiality of text. She criticizes that the meanings of literary are generally still thought unrelated to the media in which they are presented. Especially electronic literature has an entirely other materiality then we had before.

Because the materiality of the text is not unimportant, the same text can work differently on different media. So as an assignment we decided to do a sort of remediation to show one idea in various materialities and media. To honour the survivor of the first day we decided to choose the plant as an object for the experiment. So the concept of the plant was the theme to put in the medium. We divided the class into pairs of two. Afterwards, the pairs had to pick a medium (we prepared a hat with folded paper in it. Each paper represented a medium like painting, coding, sound, video, performance, sculpture, text…). After every couple received a medium to work with the first team started to turn the idea of the plant into their medium. When they finished they passed their result to the next group and so on. Remediation.

It was interesting that with the team "coding" there occurred a sort of breaking point in the chain.

Speakers

E-Publishing – Pia Pol

Pia Pol, publisher at Valiz, talked about going digital from a publisher's perspective and her experience in this area. Valiz specializes in books mainly in the field of contemporary art, photography, design of architecture. In her talk, she addresses background of publishing, advantages and disadvantages about e-publishing and the role of digital books in modern reading culture.

Publishing ebooks is not as easy or cheap as it may seem. Most of the time production costs are as big or even bigger than those of paper publications, if you take in account that the digital book market is only 5 percent of the entire market, there is a lot of discussions about the necessity of production an ebook as an addition to printed one. Nevertheless there are obvious advantages to ebooks, especially when it comes to distribution and accessibility. Various other advantages were mentioned, such as searchability of the content, its interactive potential and the nearly none-existing storage costs.

Valiz still tries to be a relevant publishing house in the Netherlands. For them, this means covering all the steps of production and to work closely together with all parties like the author and the designer. To achieve this and to reduce production costs projects like the hybrid publishing toolkit are very interesting for them. Designers can now work simultaneously with the author and the work of each party can influence each other. They also tried to coax the author to write his text in markdown language because this would encourage the connection of the parties even more. She stayed out that as a publisher they have to watch the progression of the digital book carefully and be need to adapt to the upcoming changes.

The Curator – Florian Cramer

Florian Cramer, theorist and critical researcher, presented his point of view on how changed the role of curator and the whole term of curation in recent days. In the beginning curator was an Invisible bureaucrat hidden away in offices far away protecting collections. Originally the word 'curator' was not connected to the art system, but to natural science museums. However, in the 1990-s the term 'curation' gained new meaning and curator became new type of cultural worker in the art business. As the result curating also became a subject in art education. Sometimes the role of the curator becomes even more important than that of the artist.

Curator as a collector of objects and ideas, who establishes the policies whether the piece fits the collection or not. The collection became a new type of artwork. As in the music industry, DJ becomes new rockstar mixing and curating content, rather than creating it. Nevertheless collection should be stored and preserved. In terms of digital store it online does not guaranty safety. Cloud services, new collectors networks such as Pinterest, Tumblr are dependent on politics of the owner companies and the economic profits. As a prominent example, Florian mentioned Geocities. A web-hosting service that was bought by Yahoo in 1999. Only a little later the company decided to shut the service down and to delete all the websites that were hosted on their servers.

An epub could be a handy tool for digital collections, providing various possibilities for different kinds of media and being independent of the internet.

Hybrid Publishing – Andre Castro

André Castro is a media artist focusing on e-pub, hybrid publication and offline libraries. His lecture was dedicated to various opportunities e-pub format and hybrid publishing offer for artists and writers.

The main feature of hybrid publishing is multiple outputs from a single workflow. One content source leads to many different formats as output. Another advantage of hybrid publishing is that work on the source and work on the design can be simultaneous. This means the interaction between writing and design is becoming more intense. The template can be reused this results in more flexibility and lower costs than traditional publications.

In terms of these features, numbers of hybrid publishing tools and viewers have come out, such as Pandoc and Calibre. And also, according to the feature of an open standard, publishers and/or designers are able to edit the content and styling with different languages like HTML and CSS. As a result, users could make their own e-books in an easy way.

[NS, STONE, MW]

Practice Epub

The class was given the task to create a document, that concatinates previous records of graduation projects. The epub output format was our single constraint. Three groups were devised, then each came up with their own approach for the task. We kept one keyword for each group: Automation, distortion and narration.

Automation

The group aimed for automation, sustainability and updatability. The output evolves because it can be updated; each type of media would be presented with certain rules. A template for each type of media the project would have to handle. The future book will arise from an analysis of the functions of each element of design for the purpose of navigation, orientation and representation. The central element is a reusable recipe for documenting projects, using different conventions and editorial decisions to form a publication.

Distortion

This group, being less technical and more theoretical, decided to look at the broader sense of this task of documentation. The act of documenting a documentation of a document seemed like a loop that carries within itself a series of distortions, extractions, and a continuous dialogue between revealing and concealing information. In this sense, despite the general belief that a document is meant to grasp or capture a work and give it a fixed space in memory, they felt that the document served as an apparatus of modulation and a continuous shift of meaning and form.

Narration

aims to create a storyline to make a relation between the projects. Thinking things along a narrative, a story. A more natural flow and relation between the items. This means that extra content is generated and that for example a story structure would be partially interpreted from the folder structure. Collective work and discussions brought us to understand that these approaches were not exclusive, and that parts of each could be used to create a strong and appropriate plan to handle all the data. While the poles seemed far apart at first, we soon discovered they weren't far apart at all and might even be two sides of the same coin.

With a broader overview, and what we had been reflecting on during the thematic project, we concluded that “Distortion [ is an ] inevitable consequence of Documentation” After two and half days of theoretical lectures and discussion sessions, we came up with the idea that combines all three approaches into one solid concept. We are looking at the process as our subject, which seeps into our method as well as design. Documentation of documentation of document creates distortion and buries original object and its attributes under the layers of documentation specificities and its media attributes. Nevertheless, our strategy does not condemn documentation as a negative thing. It simply considers documentation to remain in flux, and the values evolve, it becomes different without (necessarily) imposing a judgement.

Being focused on the process of documentation, we decided to pick scanning as a method and general strategy to work with content. Scanning as a process is very fragmented yet systematic with the aim of creating an entity. When you are scanning the scanner has no idea of the whole, the image is that of the fragmented images. Scanning as a concept could be implemented different ways on different types of documentation objects. To underline disruption while documenting, while we are scanning something, there exists the framework - even it is successful or unsuccessful - just doing it once.

List of texts

Monday:

• Dick Hebdige, Subculture: the meaning of style (chapter one, from culture to hegemony, pp.5-19) http://www.erikclabaugh.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/181899847-Subculture.pdf
• Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society (Book one, the argument, pp.17-21)

• Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony, Radical Democracy and the Political (Part III, for an agonistic model of democracy, pp.191-206)

• Vannevar Bush. As We May Think. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ original article scan

• Aymeric Mansoux. How Deep is Your Source. http://texts.bleu255.com/how-deep-is-your-source/

• Talk: Public Library / 2014 / Lecture Femke Snelting. Württembergischer Kunstverein https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PTrkUKUlT8

Tuesday:

• Geoff Cox, Nicolas Malevé, Michael Murtaugh, Archiving the Data-body: human and nonhuman agency in the documents of Kurenniemi. http://activearchives.org/wiki/Archiving_the_Data-body:_human_and_nonhuman_agency_in_the_documents_of_Kurenniemi ( Logbook http://kurenniemi.activearchives.org/logbook/ )

• Lori Emerson. Reading Writing Interface: from the digital to the bookbound. (Introduction, Chapter 4 - The Fascicle as Process and Product)

• Matthew Fuller, It looks like you're writing a letter: Microsoft, in: Behind the Blip. http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0009/msg00040.html

• Michel Foucault, What is an author? http://www.movementresearch.org/classesworkshops/melt/Foucault_WhatIsAnAuthor.pdf

• Matthew Kirschenbaum, What Is an @uthor? https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/uthor

• Shawn Martin. The Age of Erasable Books http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/how-monks-remixed-technology-in-the-middle-ages/373956/

Wednesday:

• Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (chapters 1,2,3) http://monoskop.org/images/b/bf/Hayles_N_Katherine_Writing_Machines.pdf

• Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists' Books. ( Chapters 1 - The artist's Book as Idea and Form, 7 - Self-reflexivity in book Form) in WdKA library

• Friedrich Kittler, Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter - chapter 3 Typewriter

• Alessandro Ludovico Post-Digital Print. http://monoskop.org/images/a/a6/Ludovico%2C_Alessandro_-_Post-Digital_Print._The_Mutation_of_Publishing_Since_1894.pdf
• Video: Books in Browsers 2014: Johanna Drucker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jz9aELG8aQs
• Jodi Dean, Sean Dockray, Alessandro Ludovico, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Nicholas Thoburn, and Dmitry Vilensky, Materialities Of Independent Publishing: A Conversation With Aaaaarg, Chto Delat?, I Cite, Mute, And Neural ([1])
• Matthew Fuller, In the Paradise of Too Many Books: An Interview with Sean Dockray ([2])

Text Summaries

Dick Hebridge, Subculture

Hebdige begins his text Subculture with an introduction to the concept that all aspects of culture possess a double semiotic value that become recognisable on various cognitive levels when one attempts to fully understand the nature and hegemonic order of society. In relation to Barthes' theories, Hebdige claims that all cultural forms: art, education, ritual, as well as mass communication, are the primary carriers of ideology, which have been neutralised and hidden within mundane objects and 'ordinary' 'every day' behaviour. For most individuals, the ideology that dictates the idea of what is "normal" or "common sense" untraceably hides within the refusal to examine its own historical foundation. Hebridge proposes that these standards, common-place within advanced Western societies, are by no means neutral and that in fact, it is the dominant group within the hierarchy which indicates the material and intellectual hold over our otherwise culturally diverse society. This dominant group is then entitled to manipulate the entire domain of social and cultural life, by imposing itself through belief structures, perceptions, definitions, ethical values and present-day norms within society and through this same method maintains its own position of dominance. All social signs, having previously been manipulated, enveloped, and enforced by the dominant group, can alternately be stolen and re-appropriated by the subordinate group. Hebdige argues that this act of defiance through larceny constitutes the existence and function of every subculture. As subcultures seek to resist the hegemonic order by reversing the existing meaning imposed by the dominant group, and through it forms a contradictory code. OF REBELLION.

Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society

Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft focusses on the universal clash between small-scale, kinship and neighbourhood-based 'communities', in contrast to large-scale competitive market 'societies'. His argument considers human beings as social animals within their various habitats, with only secondary or oblique reference to the over-arching structures of political power. Tönnies believe that 'community' necessitated exclusion, and that it embodied concepts of rationality, property and individuality, which were fundamentally different from those of the market-oriented 'civil society'. His analysis marks a distinction between the 'old' organic locality of Gemeinschaft and the 'new' large-scale empire of the Gesellschaft. Claiming that the mechanically constructed concept of 'society' encapsulates the aspects of human activity that take place in the public sphere, in which individuals live independently, yet alongside one another. As opposed to the domain of the 'community', which is shaped by more familiar factors, such as language, domestic customs, and belief structures.

Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony, Radical Democracy and the Political

Chantal Mouffe begins her political analysis with a devastating critique of contemporary western liberal democracies. Mouffe considers the impossible cohesion of 'the liberal', as the independent individual, and 'the democratic', which acknowledges an equal validity in the contradiction of voices, needs and interests. In contradiction to Rawls and Habermas, who secure a strong link between democracy and liberalism through the deliberative model of democracy, Mouffe argues against such a model working effectively, and satisfactorily within society. Mouffe is also concerned with the present political system being built around the 'radical centre' with no clear distinction between 'the left' or 'the right' claiming that we are presently encountering and are subconsciously agreeing to a so-called 'aggregative' political model, which introduces the capitalist economic law/system as the ethical paradigm, a model which often makes use of moral aspects of humanity like religious belief, sexual identity, or biopolitics, to impose its suzerainty.In her critique, Mouffe proposes alternatives to both the 'aggregative' and the 'deliberative' models of democracy, "Why don't we all go for agonistic pluralism?" Arguing that the antagonistic recognition of 'them' vs. 'us' is inherent in human relations and constitutes what we consider as 'political'. The vibrant clash of diverse and opposing groups and identities that are eager to fight one another can be understood to be 'the political', whilst the search for order, and the need to organise these differing opinions is the 'politics'. The aim of the 'agonistic' democratic model is to transform antagonists into adversaries, in order to provide a terrain wherein passion, conflict and opposition can be mobilised around democratic objectives, such as equality and liberty. Freedom!