User:Tancre/Special Issue 9/notes

Archive, Activism & Copyright Notes on the texts of Special Issue 9

Special Issue's texts

Interface, Access, Loss | Sean Dockray

End of property > for the cyber-utopian account of things, when digital file sharing and online communication liberate culture from croporations and their drive for profit. Share digitezed versions of their objects, producing a different common form of ownership. This produce a crisi (ex. Napster). But anyway subsequent undoing of property of both the private and common kind. Here a story of the cloud, post-dot-com bubble techno-super-entity, which suck up property, labour and free time.

Object, Interface
Debated if automation leads to unemployment (Marx analyzing 19th century gas-works,telegraph, photography, steam, railways..), but promise that if the robots do the work, humans are free to be creative. Kautsky > growth of clerks, bookkeepers, banking system, credit system, insurance and advertising.

In Marx's days, industries were incredibly important, but small number of employed VS today raise of internet + deindustrialization, increased migrant and mobile labor and jobs made obsolete by computation.
Computation on the workplace > robots can replace worker or algorithm determining when to hire, for how long according to fluctuating conditions.
In computation:

• reuse > reusability and OOP with private and public/social parts 'concatenated'.
• 'Encapsulation' > which spread outwards than the software object, encapsulating and abstracting things as external computers and programs, banking institutions, people... as objects with input and output. Reduction of complexity of reality but partial because relationship with one another as networked computation where objects are integrated.
  

Ex decentrilezed file-sharing object/person - info/book >> public library
but need to talk to each other (form Californian Ideology's vocabulary) >> platform whihch enable without directly producing it. Tools and resources so you don't need your owns. A way to externalize and reuse labor but necessity of conformity to the platform. Not only interface object-object but also object-platform, defining what kind of interactions are possible. It maps the public face of the object in a way that is legible and accessible to the others. Every coupling between objects require and interface which obscure as much as it reveals, establishing the boundaries between what is public and private, visible and not. Dominant aesthetic of interface design as 'good design' based on simplicity, cleanliness, and clarity.

(garbage collection ??)

Cloud, Access

Capture, Loss

Book Bloc's Genealogy

2010 Rome, mock books as banners and shields vs police Wu Ming > it is culture itself that’s resisting the cuts; books themselves are fighting the police + Q novel

new strategies of art activism and guerrilla

Interviews with E-Book-Pirates

The book publishing industry is repeating the same mistakes of the music industry

MP3, Napster and portable audio players in music industry, as EPUB e-books readers in the book publishing.

• TorBoox - 40000/buy and post on their own/payment-based model/ problem of amount of traffic
• Imperial Library of Trantor - 11000/tor/users can post/donation
• Reading Club - 450/tor/buy and post on their own/donation

The book publishers fail to understand and adapt to the digital world. 'is missing and attractive digital offer', publishers insist on old ideas of copyright ignoring digital realities. Critique of Digital Rights Management (DRM).

Dispossession: The Performative in the political | Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou

20: The university, the humanities, and the book bloc
Corporization of higher education from the conception of knowledge as property, commodity, and measurable commercial asset. The University became a corporate government through regimes of knowledge commercialization, quantitative assessment, auditability, benchmarking, and the critical thinking in humanities and social science represent an economical and political risk, surplus to the entrepreneurial university. Humanities are rendered redundant. How can we imagine a future in these anti-intellectual times? What kind of critique to claim for alternative humanities (high culture and what counts for human)?
Reclaim the uncommodifiable unconditionality of the university although have been always places of power, hierarchy, inequality...so what exactly to reclaim? Which kind of critical scholarship of humanities and post-humanities?
Protests as 'book bloc', fight for our books, with our books.

Butler > Before the problem of effectivity of Derrida's books in politic. Now the problem of which institution to have that kind of debate? It may be that knowledge will go outside of the university, displacement of the university as the center of knowledge. A loss for the university to become a privatized industry to trains its students for marketable pursuit. Where and when to engage a criticism of market and neoliberalism?
Conundrum where to prove the importance of critical theory and thinking we have to prove their marketability. We are waging a fight over values in a field in which the market seeks to be the only measure of value. Not only critical thinking but also basic rights and entitlements. refashioned as 'investments' and 'disposable goods'.
Non-tenured academic workers as a bridge between institutional crisis of knowledge and the production of disposable populations. Humanities, languages, or critical thinking as classes of workers that are substitutable. Universities are actively participating in deciding which population of workers will be disposable, and which will not. Students are recognizing that their lives and educations are being sacrificed for a set of market calculations. University reproduces and hardens rigid class stratifications.
>> students and workers alliances into the street and university buildings are being sized or occupied to draw attention to the media. Who can afford university and to teach there when knowledge is becoming a market standard? Result rage but a question on how to make sense to occupations and gatherings?

21: Spaces of appearance, politics of exposure
Question of critical agency in multiple forms: in doing, undoing, being undone and becoming + multiple forms of giving and giving up.
Seeking to map a differential, multi-sited topology of radical transformational action. How present regimes of dispossession are displaced into trying to create an alternative to the present. In dispossession, a commonality of political resistance and transformative action. The main concern is the process of erasure of the embodied subject through the violence of neo-colonial, capitalist, racial, gendered, and sexualized regulatory schemas. Taking into account the politics of precarious and dispossessed subjectivity to claim right and desire to apolitical otherwise.
Multi-sited aggregations, not as nostalgic communitarian politics, but to displace conventional conceptions of the 'public sphere' (polis) as the particular spatial location of the political life. Affective politics of the performative resonating with Arendt's 'space of appearance' through political action. But from space of appearance to spacing appearance, not fixed space but a performative place of 'taking place'. 'Appearance' not as a surface phenomenality but it opens up to concern what is performed in ways that avow the unperformable. How 'appearance' relate to 'spacing', 'taking place' when bodies in the street? How appearance is related to exposure(the violence of the polis, others, other places, other politics)?
If no appearance apart from social normativity and imposed invisibleness, the challenge is to mobilize 'appearance' without taking for guaranteed its naturalized epistemological premises (visibility, transparency) used to reify political subjectivity. Through stabilizing norms the subjects fulfill their appearance to be recognized as human. Can anybody appear? How certain forms of corporeal engagement become available to normative cultures? The problem of appearing when face to face to strangers, dissonance. Openness to possibility as crucial to the radical, agonistic democracy.

Butler > There are all kinds of assemblies. When people take to the streets, they form a body politic that even if it doesn't speak, is still forms asserting its presence as plural and obdurate bodily life. What is the political significance of assembling as bodies, not individuals but social movement? No need to be organized (Leninist assumption) or have a single message (logocentric conceit) to exercise a certain performative force in the public domain. 'we are here' of the collective body as 'we are still here', 'we have not yet been disposed of'. Collective assembly of bodies is an exercise of the popular will, a way of asserting in bodily form, a presupposition of democracy, that political and public institutions are bound to represent the people, in ways that establish equality as a presupposition of social and political existence.
When dispossession of commons for a population, the assemblies fulfill not only rage but the very social organization of principles of equality. Bodies on the street are precarious, but also obdurate and persisting, insisting on their continuing and collective 'thereness' and recently without hierarchy exemplifying the principles of equal treatment that they are demanding if public institutions. Those bodies enact a message performatively. If there is a crowd there is also a media event across time and space, some set of global connections, a global different from the 'global market' + some set of values in the form of a collective resistance: defense of collective precarity and persistence in making equality and refusing to become disposable.

Why Science Is Better with Communism? | Alexandra Elbakyan

not only poor but also schools don't have access >> knowledge for all + donations problem of the business model of publishers but for first dissemination of knowledge
Piracy because violate copyright but the rights of intellectual property (publishers), turning them for free is like theft according to the law
debate because some are trying to forbid the free distribution on the web but focus on the debate on censorship and privacy. Defense of intellectual property in the web requires censorship so is a violation of freedom of speech + interference in private life by the government which monitors users who violate copyright.
The very concept of copyright, intellectual property, is never questioned. Knowledge can be someone property?

In history, this discourse can appear in the idea of communism (struggle against inequality, the revolt of the suppressed classes, whose members don’t have any power against those who have concentrated basic resources and power in their hands, with the goal of redistributing these resources). Today there is still an informational inequality (access for students and employees but not for institutions and the general public).
The idea of communism works in the world of scholarship, however, revolution is different from the mass redistribution of property in society but VS theft. This is not a revolution but small protest against property right and unequal distribution of wealth

Theft as protest (robin hood, noble bandits, aldar kose.. ). If the state doesn't work well, people have to solve the problem themselves. Sci-Hub VS inequality of access to information.
Hermes as the god of boundaries and transitions, raise of the lower class in ancient Greece > property related to keep something within boundaries. Theft as boundary-crossing and trade.

Then Hermes becomes the god of knowledge and begin of science. Science begins from theft in its openness. (Adam and Eva and the tree of knowledge + Myth of Prometheus)

Scholarly journals as means of communication so paradox of closed access VS essence of communication
Science as the knowledge of secrets. Secrets as something private, the essence of private property. Disclosure of the secret as ceases of property. Communism as knowledge is shared. (Plato's caste of intellectuals)

>>Science, as a part of the culture, is in conflict with private property. Accordingly, scholarly communication is a dual conflict. What open access is doing is returning science to its essential roots.
+
Proudhon - 'property is theft' > anarchy and science as inseparable

• problem of the use of passwords to access documents but if in the wrong hands they could access personal info > passwords doesn't allow the use of private info
• problem of researcher labors cut out from earning money > compensation researcher/compensation publisher but system of donations, system for funding
• LibGen =/=SciHub > LibGen is a repository, doesn't download new articles but more to preserve the already downloaded

My texts

Constituting an archive | Stuart Hall | 2001

No archive from thin air, each archive has a pre-history, prior conditions of existence. Tribute to volunteers archiving (African and Asian visual art).
Constitution of an archive as a significant moment in which a collection of works start to be ordered and considered as an object of reflection and debate. End of creative innocence and beginning of self-consciousness, self-reflexivity in an artistic movement. The apparatus of 'a history' takes place. Not a museum of dead works but a 'living archive' as an on-going, never-completed project. The task is to take on the surface what existed, hitherto, only 'in solution 'as within the flow of the work itself.
'The Living archive' as the end of a phase of work and beginning for another. The idea of a living archive of the diaspora:

• living - present, on-going, continuing, unfinished, open-ended.

New work related to that body of book but only as it inflects or departs from it.
Living VS tradition, David Scott > tradition as a discoursive concept that performs to connect authotìritatively a relation among past, community, and identity. Not neutral but operate in tis own constructs.

Réponses a forum "Journalisme philosophique" | Wu Ming

Foucault > more journalist than philosopher but interconnected. The problem between event and actuality. Who are we in the actual moment?
What is the 'journalisme philosophhique', both for the journalist and the philosopher?

Wu Ming > also the historical novel face up the same question. Similar to philosophy and journalism.
the place where archive and street coincide:'Investigative report'. As the best contemporary journalism. The connection between walk (to places and interview) and the work on documents. The same for philosophy (Foucault as an example) between investigation in place and work in archives and libraries. Street = Archive.
Different events with their documents and the actual movement to get them, but a single event. Singularity. Repetition reveals the difference.

Foucault, libraries as a place where you get in contact with the 'powers of the impossible' which comes from the big number of words, documents, info, reproductions of reproductions...
Imaginary between the book and the lamp. Today in the same object, the screen, the computer connected to the web.
>> STREET - ARCHIVE - WEB
Web as the place where the archive/library and the street becomes the same thing.
Foucault's books or Saviano's Gomorra or Q and Altai as both historical fiction and philosophy.

Which is the role of the truth in philosophical journalism?

Foucault in 1983 Berkeley's conference, dichotomy between retoric/parresia, talk to persuade independently from the personal opinion of the speaker and talk to say the best as possible what you really think (Discorso e verità nella Grecia Antica).
A different way of say, so a different truth in journalism/philosophy/fiction:

• fiction as truth(parresia)+persuasion to suspension of disbelief. In literature, Foucault's discourse doesn't exist because of the multiplicity of points of view. But sometimes it expresses a truth of an epoch
• journalism, from 1950 American 'new journalism', use of fiction's technique as 'indirect free speech'. Sometimes the reporter disappears and multiplicity of voices. AìIt seems against the parresia but actually is an amplification of it.
• philosophy > Walter Benjamin's 'Passages', eliminate personal comments to let his materials to talk and create the structure.