While we're waiting for Clive's remake of 'Ideals Die', perhaps I can
attempt some speculations (one could almost call them 'inventive
provocations' if they were more detailed) on what it might mean to think
both research and politics as 'the domain of those who do not know' in
the context of some of the contributions to the discussion so far. In
particular, I'd like to try to find a way of thinking this idea
affirmatively together with:

Clive's concern about having a 'common direction';
Ken Friedman's comments about the concept of The Eternal Network being a
concept of community, and about the apparent failure of artists to
create network systems that thrive and develop for longer than a year or
two;
and Helen Pritchard's reference to the common, for Hardt and Negri,
being discovered and produced through joyful encounters.

The latter brought to mind Nick Mirzeoff's disappointment with their
book Declaration, on the basis that, for Hardt and Negri:

'“living information” is said to be gained by physical proximity. Thus,
at the encampments "the participants experienced the power of creating
new political affects through being together." While that seems clearly
true, there’s a hint of Romantic nostalgia in the evocation of the
letter over the email and the distaste for social media. Entirely absent
here... is any mention of the role of photography and moving image
distribution. From the al-Jazeera feeds of Tunisia and Tahrir to the
Livestreaming of Occupy, web-disseminated video has indeed created a new
way of being together without which it’s hard to understand the
formation of global affinities that we’ve witnessed over the past 18
months.'[1]

That in turn made me think of how - as we know from the work of Dymitri
Kleiner and others [2] - the idea of the commons is a place where the
interests of a large number of diverse groups, movements, organisations
and constituencies – including network technologists, media theorists,
artists, activists and curators - come together, but also exist in a
state of 'tension' and are often demonstrably incompatible and
incommensurable. For example, some in the Free Software community argue
for copyleft which is a use of copyright law, but one that’s designed to
serve the opposite ends to those such a copyright or Creative Commons
license is usually put. Instead of supporting the ownership of private
property, copyleft defends the freedom of everyone to copy, distribute,
develop and improve software or any other work covered by such a
licence. Meanwhile, others question just how left politically copyleft
actually is. Rather than preventing access to information and source
code from being restricted, those on the political left tend to be more
concerned with developing a free, common culture, and promoting the
equal and just distribution of wealth among the creative workers who
produce it. To this end, Kleiner himself advocates for copyleft to be
transformed into copyfarleft, in which creative workers themselves own
the means of production, and only prevent use of their works which is
not based in the commons. Then again, many anti-intellectual property
advocates in the Pirate movement argue against copyright and the use of
licenses altogether, regarding them as remnants from a previous age.

Now all this could of course be taken as providing one illustration as
to why it is difficult for network technologists, media theorists,
artists, activists and curators to create durable, scalable network
systems that thrive and develop for longer than a year or two -
especially if we are attempting to understand the politics of the common
in terms of a known 'arbitrary closure' (such as 'continuity'
possibly?). Or, it could be taken as suggesting we should perhaps
approach the question of community, of being together and holding
something in common, a little differently - in terms of a certain
conflict, antagonism and incommensurability, and thus as being not the
domain of those who already know what community and the common are in
advance, but more 'the domain of those who do not know'. It is
something of this kind that Michael Bauwens seems to be pointing toward
when he talks about the larger cultural and social shift he associates
with peer-to-peer networks of production:

'The fact that the commons interfaces with capital is not necessarily
negative. It can be, but it is not necessarily so.... Critics ask you to
choose one or the other, and what I am trying to say is that it is not
either or, but both. They are both happening at the same time, we are
de-commodifying and we are commodifying. ... I find it really
interesting that, within the system we already have, communal dynamics
are actually happening. My point of view is not to take an
anti-capitalist view, but to take a post-capitalist view.... I think
that is what happened in the past as well, I do not think that the
Christians fought the Roman Empire or fought Feudalism as such; they
just created a world based on their new logic .... The people no longer
believe in the mainstream system. They may not know what they want, but
people in the French Revolution did not know what they want, and people
in the Russian Revolution did not know what they want.'[3]

All of which appears to provide another way of thinking community
together with performativity. For (and I'm just speculating here
remember) how might we set about creating such an (as yet) unknown
community or world - especially if we're concerned to try to avoid the
situation we've seen Stuart Hall fall into, where we're open to
questioning everything... except certain 'arbitrary closures' that
establish boundary lines around what we supposedly do know, such as
politics and the relation to the social formation in Hall's case.
Wouldn’t we have to try to performatively create such a community via
how we act as network technologists, media theorists, artists,
activists and curators? And do so ‘without any guarantees’ (Stuart Hall
again) that this would happen?[4]

Let me try to illustrate what this might involve with the example of
Graham Harman and his book on Bruno Latour, Prince of Networks (and I'm
referring to authors and texts that are part of the networks of networks
I help to curate and care for quite deliberately here).[5] Harman of
course is known for advocating a 'new logic' via Latour and others,
based on the argument that ‘there is no privilege for a unique human
subject’, and that with this ‘a total democracy of objects replaces the
long tyranny of human beings in philosophy’.[6] However, even though
Prince of Networks is available open access through re.press,[7] that
doesn’t mean a network of people, objects or actants can take Harman’s
text, rewrite and improve it, and in this way produce a work derived
from it that can then be legally published. Since Harman has chosen to
publish his book under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND licence, that would
still be to infringe his claim to copyright: both the right Harman
wishes to retain to be identified as the author of Prince of Networks,
and to have it attributed to him precisely as a unique human subject;
but also Harman’s right of integrity, which enables him as a human being
to claim it as his intellectual property, and which grants him the
privilege of refusing to allow the ‘original’, fixed and final form of
Prince of Networks to be modified or distorted by others, be they humans
or objects.

So how might we begin to think about how we could act differently in
this respect? Well, one starting point for doing so is perhaps offered
by Lawrence Liang's troubling of the 'distinction between an agent who
performs an action and the action that the agent performs.' Here, 'an
agent is constituted by the actions that he or she performs, or an agent
is the actions performed and nothing more. Interestingly, what this
means when it comes to written texts - and this brings us back neatly to
Helen's mention of joyful encounters - is that: 'to assert "This is my
poem" within the social imaginary of intellectual property is to make a
claim that sounds very much like "This is my pen", whereas in fact, it
might be more accurate to think of its claim as the same as "This is my
friend".'

Gary


[1]
http://www.nicholasmirzoeff.com/O2012/2012/05/09/on-hardt-and-negris-declaration/
[2] Dmytri Kleiner, The Telecommumist Manifesto, Amsterdam: Institute of
Network Cultures, 2010,
http://telekommunisten.net/the-telekommunist-manifesto/.
[3] Michel Bauwens in Sam Kinsley, ‘TOWARDS PEER-TO-PEER ALTERNATIVES:
An interview with Michel Bauwens’, Culture Machine, 2012,
http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/467/497.
[4] 'The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees', in D. Morley
and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds.) Stuart Hall : Critical Dialogues in Cultural
Studies (London/ New York: Routledge 1996) pp26-29.
[5] http://openhumanitiespress.org/new-metaphysics.html.
[6] Graham Harman, ‘The Importance of Bruno Latour for Philosophy’,
Cultural Studies Review, Volume 13, Number 1, March 2007, p.36.
[7]
http://re-press.org/books/prince-of-networks-bruno-latour-and-metaphysics/.
[8] Lawrence Liang, ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Book’, in Gaelle
Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski, eds, Access to Knowledge In the Age of
Intellectual Property (New York: Zone Books, 2010) p.286, 283-284.