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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.