Dear Gary,
Many thanks for this. I'll look up the Bresnihan and Freeman references
- they sound really interesting and relevant!
And yes, I also think this list is a wonderful place to learn more about
each other's work - and find ways in which that work can be mobilised in
our conversations about OA and its politics.
Attached I send you our paper, which will appear in Social Studies of
Science. The context is of course very different, but some of the
empirical stories might resonate strongly with your City of Culture
experience. Any comments and suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
With best wishes,
Endre
On 11.07.19 07:43, Gary Hall wrote:
> Hi Endre,
>
> Thanks for pointing us to the Marisol de la Cadena piece on the
> uncommons. I enjoyed reading that.
>
> And just to add to what Eileen's already said, I remember Sam a while
> ago now telling me about the work of Patrick Bresnihan, whose work on
> the relation between the human and nature in the context of the commons
> is also interesting. (See, for example, Bresnihan's essay on 'The
> More-than-Human Commons: From Commons to Commoning' which is available
> online.)
>
> Endre, how would you and Michaela feel about sharing a version of your
> paper on the list? (Sorry, I don't mean to put you on the spot. Feel
> free to ignore this if the idea is not for you. I was just thinking
> maybe discussing our actual research on the list would be another way
> for us to 'get to know one another and to learn about each other’s
> practices and values'.)
>
> I do agree with you, work on community, the commons and common good
> often has a number of blindspots. And not just around the human.
> Concepts such as freedom, democracy and transparency are frequently left
> under-interrogated too, leading to a certain violence.
>
> To provide a specific example, Coventry, the city I work in, is going to
> be UK City of Culture in 2021. Naturally, there's been a lot of
> discussion about to how to approach this. One option would be to bring
> in some cultural event managers so they can decide for everyone what the
> city should do in 2021. However, this kind of top-down ('circus
> ringmaster') organisational structure seems to have been rejected in
> favour of consulting the community much more on what kind of culture and
> cultural events they would like to see. The latter, more open and
> democratic approach toward deciding what is for the common good is of
> course very appealing, for obvious reasons. However, it's also quite
> violent in its own way. Yet my experience of sitting in the seemingly
> endless 'city of culture' meetings is that it's not easy to get this
> across - it's very counter-intuitive.
>
> By way of explanation I've been trying to nudge various people toward Jo
> Freeman's 'The Tyranny of Structurelessness':
> https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm.
>
> To be honest, I'm not sure my doing so is having much impact with regard
> Coventry and the build up to 2021 - not at the moment, anyway. However,
> it might be interesting for us when we're thinking about a system of
> governance for the Radical Open Access Collective. I have in mind what
> Freeman says about the relation between formal and informal structures,
> for example, and about how 'structurelessness' often ends up creating a
> 'star' system.
>
> Best, Gary
>
>
> On 09/07/2019 22:14, Endre Dányi wrote:
>> Dear all,
>>
>> This is a fascinating thread - thank you, Janneke and Sam, for kicking
>> this off...
>>
>> I have mixed feelings about commoning, though. While I appreciate the
>> gesture, there has been a really interesting discussion in cultural
>> anthropology and STS about uncommons - see, for example, this text by
>> Marisol de la Cadena: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/uncommons
>> Along with a couple of others, de la Cadena suggests that there is a
>> certain sense of violence implied in claims about commonness and the
>> common good, and encourages us to explore better ways of being
>> uncommon together instead.
>>
>> Recently, Michaela Spencer (fellow Mattering Press editor and STS
>> scholar - not sure if she's on this list) and I have written a paper
>> about un/common grounds in democratic politics - in short, we have
>> argued for making it very clear in specific situations what is being
>> held as common, for whom, and for what purposes. This is a small but
>> important move, which offers an alternative to holding up commonness
>> as a general good. So if I could propose an edit, I'd say we're in the
>> business of continuous un/commoning...
>>
>> With best wishes,
>> Endre
>>
>>
>>
>
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