User:Tancre/Special Issue 9/notes

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

Special Issue's texts

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.

21: Spaces of appearance, politics of exposure

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

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.