We’re Not Going Back To Arguing From Evidence Anytime Soon, Deal With It: Postdigital Politics in a Time of Pandemics V

So far in Postdigital Politics in a Time of Pandemics, I have described some of the ways my collaborators and I are trying to operate differently to the individualistic, liberal humanist ways of working and acting traditionally associated with being a theorist in the fields of art and culture, especially of the ‘star’ variety. In part IV, 'How to Be An Anti-Bourgeois Theorist', I then proceeded to sketch  a few further dimensions to this mode of practicing commons-oriented, anti-liberal, anti-neoliberal, anti-bourgeois theory (ABT) that we’re experimenting with. Drawing on projects such as after.video, the Mandela27 DIY Exhibition, and Memory of the World, I showed how ABT is, among other things, post-literary, low key, performative and pre-figurative. 

I now want to continue by making two points that I realise some may find counter-intuitive. For all my emphasis on enactment, pre-figuration and the performance of theory, I would not like the commons-oriented initiatives my collaborators and I are involved with to be positioned in terms of concrete, material practices as distinct from, say, immaterial theory. In articulations like this it’s often forgotten that the practices that produce theory are always already concrete, while the theory that privileges the concrete and the material is often very weak. 

Although I can understand the temptation to do so, we should also take care when it comes to understanding such enterprises as ‘aesthetic practices’, no matter how much they may occupy the intersection between the commons and art, and for all art is another field with the potential to create such a space where new realities can tested and constructed. To be sure, we need to interrogate the manner in which art and culture in the twentieth century became, as intellectual historian François Cusset puts it, ‘on the one hand, the most thriving industry of the new capitalism, if not its laboratory of ideas; and, on the other, a collection of devices and situations that were mostly disconnected from the social and political field, a kind of refuge cut off from the exterior world’. Research commissioned by the Art Fund in 2018, for instance, shows that one of the main reasons those in Britain under thirty years of age give for visiting an art gallery or museum is ‘specifically to “de-stress”’. But this should only encourage us to ask: even if our commons-supporting projects can be perceived as expanding conceptions of aesthetics, so the two discourses (i.e. the commons and aesthetics) come into close contact and can potentially create something new, might there still be something conservative about interpreting the likes of after.video and Memory of the World primarily in artistic terms? Isn’t there a danger in doing so of going along too much with the belief that the right is interested in politics and power, while what the left cares about is art and (self-)expression? 

Nor is this an issue that can be resolved by ‘challenging established notions of contemporary aesthetic practice’ through the adoption of the kind of ‘truth and evidence’ approach that has been proposed as a means for artists to resist post-truth politics. Media artist and activist David Garcia offers as an example the ‘Evidentiary Realism’ of Lawrence Abu Hansen, Trevor Paglen, Lev Manovich and !Mediengruppe Bitnik. The ‘gold standard’ of Evidentiary Realism as far as Garcia is concerned, however, are the investigations into cases of state violence and human rights violations conducted by the Forensic Architecture art and knowledge research centre at Goldsmiths, University of London. Yet when it comes to engaging with postdigital political issues such a pro-evidence, pro-data stance is not without difficulties of its own.   

In response to a question as to whether ‘identifying their outputs as art might... “take the edge off the truth he is trying to show”’, Garcia quotes Eyal Weizman, leader of Forensic Architecture, countering as follows: 

Think about it. When the most important piece of evidence coming from battle fields world wide are video graphic. You need video makers to make sense of it…  And to understand how one piece of video might relate to another. Indeed aesthetic sensibilities. The sensibilities of an architect an artist or a film maker are very useful in figuring out what has taken place.

Weizman is surely missing the point here, though. The problem is not whether Forensic Architecture needs to include aesthetic sensibilities in their truth-seeking investigations – and let’s not forget their public art installations and exhibitions they put together using charts, diagrams, infographics, models, audio-visual installations, digital imaging and so on, which are arguably what they are best known for nowadays. The problem is that in positioning what they do in terms of art and aesthetics, Forensic Architecture get all the advantages that accrue from that, in terms of being nominated for the 2018 Turner Prize and so on. However, they get the disadvantages too. Not least among the latter is that Forensic Architecture’s projects are indeed vulnerable to being considered just art.

Nowhere is this danger more apparent than in the main example Garcia gives of ‘the role Evidentiary Realism can play in countering politically motivated obfuscation’: Forensic Architecture’s report to the parliamentary commission investigating the role of a state intelligence agent in the 2006 murder of Halit Yozgat in an internet café in Kassel, Germany. The day before they were due to submit this report Germany’s Christian Democratic Party (CDU) published a counter-report. The aim was to ‘de-legitimize’ Forensic Architecture’s findings on the grounds it was the ‘work of artists’ and, accordingly, ‘should not be taken seriously as evidence’. And, to be sure, the risk of de-legitimation is very real for aesthetic practices and sensibilities, no matter how much they may show truth to power, nor how reflexive their relationship may be to the complex systems we inhabit. This is one of the reasons the projects of my collaborators and I constitute a plurality of forms of intervention that are responding to specific issues across a number of different sites: forms of intervention associated not just with aesthetics and with the practices of artists, or even theorists, but also (where appropriate) with those working in the fields of activism, education, business, politics, technology or the media. 

A further concern with Evidentiary Realism’s pro-data approach relates to the way in which the liberal establishment has found the politics of figures such as Trump and Johnson difficult to deal with on the basis of the agreed facts. Now there is a perfectly good explanation for this difficulty: it’s because these right-wing populists are not actually operating on the level of consistent, reasoned argument. Consider Trump’s description of first the climate crisis and then the coronavirus as a ‘hoax’ – hardly an evidence-based response to the science and data on his part. (Bolsonaro likewise accused large parts of the media of ‘tricking’ the people over the dangers of the coronavirus, which he likened to a ‘little flu’.) Nevertheless, it’s a situation a lot of commentators still find hard to accept. Instead, they continue to insist that the anti-liberal right can be contested on a truth-seeking level. Witness the spectacle of Alan Rusbridger, ex-editor-in-chief of The Guardian, arguing that the way to counter Johnson’s evasions and lies is with good, responsible, ‘independent and decently crafted’ journalism, in which the ‘lines between truth and falsehood; facts and propaganda; openness and stealth; accountability and impunity; clarity and confusion; news and opinion’ are retained rather than blurred.

Similarly, many scientists and journalists resort to evidenced-based information and facts to counter rumours: that 5G networks lower people’s immune system to Covid-19, for example, a false claim that led to numerous mobile phone masts being set on fire in the U.K. and elsewhere. (A further academic variation on the theme has come from the social sciences. It concerns the idea that ’public faith in expert knowledge can only be regained not through reasserting the authority of facts but by rediscovering ways of knowing-in-common’ in order to make the case for what Noortje Marres – taking notions of both ‘democracy’ and the ‘public’ as her datum points in doing so – refers to as ‘knowledge democracy’.) Yet as we’ve seen with anti-vaxxers and climate-breakdown deniers, such an approach has repeatedly been found to be futile, counterproductive even, in that it often only succeeds in eroding social trust further. The trouble is, the roots of the current cultural crisis in democracy lie much earlier than the rise to power of the likes of Johnson and Trump: they stretch back, through the failure of the political class to hold those responsible for the financial crisis of 2008 to account, at least as far as the refusal to heed the 2003 protests against the invasion of Iraq. Both events left large numbers of people feeling they could no longer rely on professional politicians, the liberal establishment (to which Rusbridger is a fully paid up member), or the state to arrive at the correct decisions based on the evidence  (as opposed to, say, dodgy dossiers about weapons of mass destruction being ‘ready within 45 minutes of the order to use them’). 

It is this collapse of confidence in the processes of representative democracy and its valuing of truth and justice that the nativist right have capitalised on. They have thus been quite prepared to undermine any attempts to question their authority that privilege facts over opinion. This includes those that have come from the direction of good journalism – or indeed science, the media, academia and the judiciary. One way populists and their supporters have done so is by dismissing such challenges as hailing from the very partisan, city-dwelling liberal elite they denounce as being the ‘enemy of the people’; a people for whom they of course are speaking. Another is to undermine the veracity of the challenge by producing ‘alternative facts’. As late as February 26 Trump was claiming the total number of Covid-19 cases in the U.S. would be ‘close to zero’. ‘On February 28, Trump said that coronavirus will “disappear” like a “miracle”.’ He then predicted that the forthcoming spring weather would kill it off and prevent its spread. Together with the disbanding in 2018 of the National Security Council pandemic unit established by Obama – and indeed a deeply rooted antipathy toward both government intervention and systems of public health, welfare and infrastructure that is quite characteristic of the radical right – it’s an attitude that to led to an astonishing sluggishness to mobilise against Covid-19 on the part of the Trump administration. (Some have gone so far as to call it inept, incompetent and downright dangerous.)  ‘I think the 3.4%’, the World Health Organization’s calculated death rate for those with Covid-19, ‘is really a false number’, Trump told Fox News in March. ‘Now, this is just my hunch’, he said, clearly privileging his own guesswork over the research of the medical and public health professionals. ‘I think that that number is very high… personally, I would say the number is way under 1%’. While it’s effectiveness with regard to the coronavirus outbreak is certainly questionable – witness the reaction to Trump’s April 23 suggestion that injecting disinfectant could kill it, or his May 18 revelation that he was taking the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a preventive – the general strategy behind producing alternative facts is not so much to offer a counter-truth or even disinformation. It’s rather to spread confusion in order to convey the overall message that no truth can be believed. In the words of Hannah Arendt: ‘If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer’. Or as journalist Kai Strittmatter put it recently with regard to authoritarian leaders in both China and the West:  ‘If you’re a liar and a cheat, there’s no way for you to win in a world that is repelled by these things, a world that differentiates between truth and lies.’ What you need to do is ‘make everyone else a liar and a cheat, too. Then you will at least be their liar.’ 

Only little people are held responsible for the consequences of their actions. Dominic Cummings, chief adviser to Boris Johnson, gives a press conference in the Downing Street rose garden, 25 May, 2020

Dissembling like this and getting away with it has the further advantage of making such authoritarian figures look strong. They lie, cheat and break the law because they know they can. The rules don’t apply to them. Only little people are held responsible for the consequences of their actions. This explains how Trump is able to continue in his role as president, despite having made what the Washington Post, at the time of this writing has calculated to be 19,127 false or misleading claims in his first 1,226 days in office. It also explains why the attempt to counter Johnson’s constant fabrications during the 2019 election campaign with endless fact checking did little to prevent his ultimate victory. Indeed, it can be argued that the reason many people vote for such populist politicians is not because they actually believe their lies, or because they are necessarily right-wing nativists. It’s because they know doing so is the best way to get back at a cosmopolitan liberal establishment that has ignored them for so long. 

Of course, it’s not an either/or (more of a Deleuze-and-Guattarian ‘“and… and… and”’). Anti-fake digital literacy initiatives, such as that set up in Finland to teach people ‘how to counter false information designed to sow division’ by recognising and adopting a critical attitude to fake news, are incredibly valuable. (A study of thirty-five countries has ranked the population of Finland as the most resistant to anti-knowledge politics). This is especially the case in a time and space of contagion when rumours are rife (e.g. that Sars-CoV-2 was engineered in a lab by Bill Gates so he could profit from a vaccine, or by the Chinese government as a bioweapon). Also important are the projects and investigations of Forensic Architecture and others associated with the Evidentiary Realism movement in art. I’m thinking in particular of the former’s reconstruction of the events of August 1, 2014, when Israel launched 2,000 bombs, rockets and shells against the Palestinian city of Rafah.

Multiple images and reconstructed bomb clouds are arranged within a 3D model of Rafah, Gaza. (Forensic Architecture)

Forensic Architecture’s investigation contributed to a subsequent change in policy on the part of the Israeli government and military: namely, the withdrawal of the ‘Hannibal Directive’, whereby the Israeli army was authorized to kill any of its soldiers taken prisoner ‘with maximum available firepower’, rather than risk them being used as hostages. Still, the above concerns go some way toward articulating why, in the present postdigital conjuncture, many of my collaborators and I have taken the decision not to focus on resisting the hyper-emotionalism of post-truth politics by opposing it with empirically-based evidence presented aesthetically. When it comes to our anti-bourgeois theory-performances, we are more interested in tapping into some of the left’s own affective-emotional themes and tropes – encapsulated by words such as ‘commons’, ‘community’, and ‘collective’ – in order to help create specific institutional and infrastructural projects that are capable of acting as a political force. 

This involvement on our part with actuating some of those ‘left’ affective forces that motivate people to become part of a group and form the basis of collective forms of identification, is also why I wouldn’t want any of what I’ve said to be taken as somehow shifting the focus from an emphasis on community to an emphasis on the provision of shared knowledge objects and resources. The majority of the resources I’ve pointed to are created and maintained by communities working collectively. In fact, I’d argue these communities are among the most import ‘resources’ we produce. One of the motivations behind our production of free, radical open access or ‘pirate’ resources and infrastructures is to encourage other initiatives and movements around the world by showing what can be achieved – how things might look if the transformed habits of being and doing I’m talking about were accepted. Another is to make it possible for chains of equivalence to be established between our projects and a diversity of other struggles locally, nationally and internationally. In addition to those I drew attention to earlier (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, platform cooperativism, municipal socialism etc.), these struggles include those for a four-day working week, Green New Deal, Unconditional Basic Income and Flat-Pack Democracy. There are also those featured in our Pirate Care project, the last of our initiatives I’m going to mention in 'Postdigital Politics in a Time of Pandemics'. 

We use the term ‘pirate care’ to refer to two processes that are particularly prevalent today. First, to the way in which basic requirements for care of a kind that were once regarded as essential to society – such as public libraries, which in the U.S. are now not allowed to buy digital books – have been driven towards illegality thanks to the commercialisation of social services. Second, we use pirate care to refer to those ‘technologically-enabled care networks’ that have sprung up ‘in opposition to this drive toward illegality’ around a range of issues, from housing and healthcare provision to education and income support. Some of these networks deliberately run the risk of being considered illegal. 

Sea-Watch is a non-profit organization that conducts civil search and rescue operations in the Central Med

To confine myself to those that took part in our 2019 Pirate Care conference, I can mention in this context: SeaWatch, which tries to save as many people as possible from drowning in the Mediterranean in defiance of European border policy which criminalizes both migrants and rescuers; Planka.nu, a group of organizations in Sweden that pays the fines of any of its members caught ‘fare-dodging’ as a means of advocating for free public transport for all; and the Docs Not Cops campaign group of healthcare workers in the U.K., who refuse to enforce immigration checks and charges on patients. Other such ‘pirate’ networks have decided to operate in the ‘narrow grey zones’ of ambiguity ‘left open between different technologies, institutions and laws’ in order to expound care as a collective political practice: 

For instance, in Greece, where the bureaucratic measures imposed by the Troika decimated public services, a growing number of grassroots clinics set up by the Solidarity Movement have responded by providing medical attention to those without a private insurance. In Italy, groups of parents without recourse to public childcare are organizing their own pirate kindergartens (Soprasotto), reviving a feminist tradition first experimented with in the 1970s. In Spain, the feminist collective GynePunk developed a biolab toolkit for emergency gynecological care, to allow all those excluded from the reproductive medical services – such as trans or queer women, drug users and sex workers – to perform basic checks on their own bodily fluids.

Part of the idea behind the pirate care project is to offer these practices ‘some degree of protection by means of visibility’.

A Virtual Book Stand

ScholarLed/ROAC Virtual Book Stand

Available at (and, with thanks to Samuel Moore and Janneke Adema, taken from): http://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org.uk/latest-publications/

Established in 2015, the Radical Open Access Collective (https://radicaloa.co.uk/) is an international community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals and other open access projects. Now consisting of more than 60 members, we promote a progressive vision for open publishing in the humanities and social sciences. 

Formed in 2018 ScholarLed (https://scholarled.org/) is a consortium of five academic-led, not-for-profit, open access book publishers. Individually we comprise Mattering Press, meson press, Open Book Publishers, Open Humanities Press, and punctum books, and collectively we are developing powerful, practical ways for scholar-led open access presses to grow and flourish.

The ScholarLed Pop-Up Book Stand

Pop-Up Book Stand

As part of the 2017 OpenAIRE project, New Platforms for Open Access Book Distribution, ScholarLed developed a shared book stand, designed to promote open access publishing and to present our collective catalogue at conferences, fairs and events. The book stand was designed as a pop-up platform able to be easily transported to and rapidly deployed at relevant conferences attended by conference members. This allows one press to represent the entire collective at a conference, increasing the reach of all participating presses as well as introducing the collective as a non-competitive association of presses. The design of this book stand is available under a CC BY-NC licence, which allows other not-for-profit presses and publishing projects to use our step-by-step guide to adapt and develop the stand according to their own needs. The Radical Open Access Collective adapted this low-cost, portable book stand to promote ROAC and ScholarLed members and share our publications at conferences all over the world. As part of this book stand we cross-promote each other’s publications, and promote the ideals and values that sustain our projects: these concern open access, not-for-profit and scholar-led publishing, experimentation and an ethics of care. Our aim is to advocate these forms of publishing within our academic communities in order to showcase the existence of alternative models for open access publishing. We also want to make a public and political statement about how not-for-profit presses can start to collaborate through these kinds of projects.

A Virtual Book Stand

Now that due to the Covid-19 pandemic many of our events and conferences have been moving online or are increasingly being completely realised online (such as the Open Publishing Fest), we feel the book stand needs to be reimagined too. In many ways, the argument can be made that, as our open access publications are online and openly available for free, our virtual book stand already exists. For example, the function of a virtual book stand is represented through essential organisations such as the DOAJ, the DOAB, and OAPEN (which also hosts the ScholarLed Collection, which is currently the second largest collection in OAPEN). However, where these discovery platforms and repositories are crucial for the promotion of open access content, they do not necessarily replace the function of a book stand, and the specific targeted promotion that book stands can deliver at conferences and events. As such we want to explore what a virtual book stand could be for the ROAC and ScholarLed, and we hope to do so together with our community. So please get in touch if you have any ideas or suggestions on what a virtual book stand could look like and what it should encompass for you. For now we have made a start by updating the ROAC’s Latest Publication page and rebranding it as our Virtual Book Stand. You can find our virtual book stand here: http://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org.uk/latest-publications/

Anthropocene Back Loop by Stephanie Wakefield: new from Open Humanities Press

We are delighted to announce the latest title in the Critical Climate Chaos, Irreversibility series: Stephanie Wakefield's very timely Anthropocene Back Loop: Experimentation in Unsafe Operating Space. 

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Anthropocene Back Loop is available for free: 

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/anthropocene-backloop/

In the face of climate chaos, post-truth politics, and growing tribalisms, it’s clear that liberalism’s old structures are unraveling. Drawing on resilience ecology, Stephanie Wakefield suggests we understand such phenomena to be indicators that we are entering the Anthropocene’s back loop, a time of release and collapse, confusion and reorientation, in which not only populations and climates are being upended but also physical and metaphysical grounds. Anthropocene Back Loop takes us on a journey though different responses and manifestations of the back loop, exploring urban resilience infrastructures, post-apocalyptic imaginaries in fiction and critical theory, and a range of everyday practices from survival skills and physical fitness to experimentation with one’s soul. Rather than returning to liberalism’s safe operating space, what is needed and what can be seen in many contemporary practices, Wakefield argues, are forms of experimentation geared toward charting autonomous modes of living within the back loop’s new unsafe operating spaces. Such efforts often let go of old frameworks, hubristically experiment with new uses, cultivate an allowance for the unknown, and embrace a confidence in exploring one’s own pathways. What these iterations suggest is that the back loop, long imagined in the singular, is spiraling out into myriad trajectories. After all, if we take seriously the idea that liberalism’s single world order is unraveling, we have the opportunity - one many have long fought for - to create our own new codes, if not new worlds. Being in the back loop means that we have already crossed various tipping points, and that in doing so, everything from social practices, technologies, and truth to plants, animals, and places have become shaken out of their normal frameworks. We are free to move on new planes.  

‘Announcing the apocalypse is easy. But doing something constructive with planetary catastrophe is rare and precious. Stephanie Wakefield’s repurposing of the ecological 'back loop’ for the badlands of the Anthropocene will not only fire your imagination, it will wind you up and send you out to slash, burn, pump, hammer, rivet and rewire a liveable world into existence.

- Nigel Clark – Chair of Social Sustainability, Lancaster University

Are we just survivors? Is our fate to endlessly – and aimlessly — govern the climate crisis? In this unexpected and inspiring book, Stephanie Wakefield reclaims the Anthropocene ‘back loop’ as a time for experimentation rather than fear, a time to probe possibilities rather than desperately cling to a ‘safe operating space’ that is safe only for a few. Anthropocene Back Loop returns to a key insight: Being is a question, not a blueprint. What other modes of life can we invent?

- Bruce Braun – Professor, University of Minnesota 

Author Bio

Stephanie Wakefield is an urban geographer and teacher. She is currently an Urban Studies Foundation International Postdoctoral Research Fellow based at Florida International University in the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies and Institute of Environment. She writes frequently for popular, art, and academic journals.

How to Be An Anti-Bourgeois Theorist: Postdigital Politics in a Time of Pandemics IV

In part III of Postdigital Politics in a Time of Pandemics, I looked at some of the ways those of us who are on the left can employ communication technologies for purposes grounded in principles of social responsibility, solidarity and mutual care. In doing so I raised the question: might exploring new modes of authorship, ownership and reproduction have the potential to lead to ways of being and doing that are more consistent with the kind of progressive politics many of us advocate, but don't necessarily perform ourselves? To show that this might indeed be the case I included in my examples some of the bottom-up projects for the production and sharing of free resources, infrastructure and knowledge that my collaborators and I have been involved with over the years. 

Hopefully, the activities I have described go some way toward explaining how and why my collaborators and I are trying to operate differently to the individualistic, liberal humanist ways of working and acting traditionally associated with being a theorist in the fields of art and culture, especially of the ‘star’ variety. There are a number of further dimensions to this mode of practicing commons-oriented, anti-liberal, anti-neoliberal, anti-bourgeois theory (ABT) we’re experimenting with. I won’t have space to go into any of the related projects in depth. Besides, engaging with these ventures in their contextual site-specificity is actually the most interesting way to understand and experience them. But I would like to quickly sketch a few, albeit more in the spirit of an artist’s talk than a full-blown philosophical argument.

ABT Is Post-literary

In the era of YouTube, Instagram and Zoom, ‘Gutenbergian’ media technologies such as the written and printed text are no longer the natural or normative means by which knowledge is necessarily generated and research communicated. Accordingly, while my collaborators and I still publish conventional print books and journal articles, our theory might not necessarily take the form of a piece of writing at all. We are increasingly involved in opening knowledge and research up to being not just postdigital, but post-grammatological or post-literary too. 

We’re doing this by creating, publishing and sharing work in the form of films,  videos and virtual, augmented and immersive media environments. Take Oliver Lerone Schultz et al.’s collectively produced after.video. Published by OHP in 2016, this is a collection of annotated digital video essays that explore the future for theory after both books and video. It does so in two different instantiations: a freely available online version; and an offline version produced as a distinct physical object in its own right: namely, an assembly-on-demand video book stored on a Raspberry Pi computer and packaged in a VHS (Video Home System) case. after.video is therefore both an analogue and digital object manifested, in a scholarly gesture, as a ‘video book’.

after.video also points to another way in which my collaborators and I are endeavouring to open theory to being post-grammatological: this is through the reinvention of hardware, software and network infrastructures. Included in this reinvention are facilities concerned with the production and circulation of research on a radical open access basis: books and journals, for example, as with Open Humanities Press and COPIM. But we are involved in cultural/artistic projects that operate at a larger scale, too, such as museums, galleries and archives.  

Mandela27 DIY Exhibition

Let me provide an example of one such initiative that can be copied and reproduced relatively easily (unlike after.video perhaps, which requires a certain amount of technical know-how). Mandela27 is a website and digital platform created in 2014 by Jacqueline Cawston and her partners for the Robben Island Museum in South Africa. Included in the project is a hybrid physical/digital DIY Exhibition of the prison cell in which Mandela was held for the majority of his 27 years on the island. The exhibition consists of a few pieces of standard wood and plywood, arranged to form the exact dimensions of the space, together with a bucket, blanket, bench, plate and cup – the items the prisoners were allowed to have with them in their cells. The wood frame is also used to hold ten specially designed posters addressing topics such as colonialism and apartheid, along with a number of screens linked to the digital platform and its content. The latter features an interactive cultural map of Europe and South Africa, a 360-degree experience of the prison, images from the UWC Robben Island Museum Archives, video interviews with a former political prisoner and a prison guard, a crowd-sourced timeline and a digital game about life in Robben Island Prison. The original Mandela27 DIY Exhibition has toured South Africa, the U.K. and Europe and has been visited by over 170,000 people. However, Cawston and her colleagues also put together a kit containing details of how to construct the DIY Exhibition, and made it available on an open access basis, along with the contents of the digital platform and the ten posters. Because the physical materials are extremely low cost (all that’s needed really is some wood, a bucket and a blanket), this means any school or community can create their own pop-up version of the Mandela27 DIY Exhibition easily and cheaply – they don’t need to travel to a traditional bricks-and-mortar museum or art gallery to experience it. 

What after.video and the Mandela27 DIY Exhibition both show is that, as far as we are concerned, postdigital culture does not necessarily come after the digital in any simple temporal sense. Open access and the postdigital are not just to be associated with online communication technologies and the ‘digital commons’, for instance. It’s important that they are understood as being potentially physical, offline and analogue – as well as hybrid combinations therefore – too.  

ABT Is Low Key

Another dimension of our anti-bourgeois mode of theory is apparent from the way in which, although my collaborators and I may identify (or be identified) as radical theorists, we don’t always function as virtuoso individual authors. In a period when the self-organizing, leaderless mobilizations of the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) and Hong Kong protesters have experimented with new forms of subjectivity and social relations, isn’t the cult of the highly individualistic ‘rock star’ theorist or philosopher coming to an end? Even if it isn’t, shouldn’t it be – especially after Covid-19 has made a shared sense of social responsibility, solidarity and collaboration within a common struggle not so much a matter of political persuasion but of survival for many people? In keeping with this notion, we often refuse to occupy centre stage, preferring to operate in a more low-key, at times anonymous manner as part of collectives and communities of thinking and doing, such as the Radical Open Access Collective and WeMake. The latter is a makerspace fablab in Milan, with whom our fellow members of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry, Valeria Graziano and Maddalena Fragnito, have been investigating the relationship between open technologies and healthcare. 

ABT Builds, Develops, Maintains and Repairs

In fact, our activities as theorists frequently don’t involve authoring at all. Along with affective labour such as supporting, encouraging and inspiring, they can on occasion involve operating in the background to build, develop, maintain and repair more than actually author – as with the work of another collaborator as system administrator for the file-sharing shadow libraries Aaaaarg and UbuWeb. This is because we see theory not just as a means of imagining our ways of being in the world differently. It is a means of enacting them differently too. (Staying in the shadows can of course also serve as a ‘defence mechanism’ that enables a given project to ‘thrive and prevents its destruction’, as the design collective Kaspar Hauser write of these and other digital libraries such as Monoskop and Library Genesis.)

ABT Is Performative and Pre-figurative

Many of our projects are similarly performative, in the sense they’re concerned not only with representing the world, but also with intra-acting with it in order to make things happen. Some have referred to this kind of approach as hacking the situation or context. However, our theory-performances can also be understood in terms of the pre-figurative practices Graziano has written about: of ‘being the change we want to see’. 

As I say, this often involves us in experimenting with the form of scholarly communications in the shape of books and journals, and also lectures, seminars, conferences, even the very gestures of reading and writing. When Clare Birchall, Joanna Zylinska and I wanted to explore the theory of books being liquid and living, for instance (rather than finished and frozen or dead), we didn’t just write about it. We actually made some liquid and living books that could be continually rewritten and republished: two series’ worth, in fact. Janneke Adema and I took a similar intra-active approach to editing ‘Disrupting the Humanities: Towards Posthumanities’, a 2016 issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP). What we wanted to do there was take on, as theorists, some of the implications of the idea that a presentation isn’t simply a re-presentation of the written, text-on-paper argument delivered by the author. It’s rather a relational and processual meshwork of presenter, event organizers, facilitators and audience, along with the associated cultural practices, technologies, institutions, buildings, materials, tools, infrastructure and so on, all of which contribute to the presentation in its becoming. So we produced an edition of JEP consisting of a selection of video-presentations/articles cum theory-performances. Heavily annotated using the InterLace open source software program developed by Robert Ochshorn, these were designed to break down the divisions between the research and presentation, as well as between the ‘real time’ and online or ‘virtual’ audience. 

Other projects we are engaged in concentrate on pre-figuratively reinventing the museum, gallery, archive, library or university in a postdigital context. Public Library: Memory of the World, for example, launched by Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak in 2012, is an ‘artist-run’ online shadow or pirate library that currently contains more than 150,000 titles that it makes sure remain widely accessible without charge and without any other restrictions, including those associated with copyright law. It consists of a network of private libraries that, although independent and maintained locally by a community of ‘amateur librarians’, are connected with the project’s server through the ‘let’s share books’ software developed by Mars. The software allows people to search all the collections in Memory of the World, discover a title they want and import it directly to their own virtual library that, like the others, is organized using a version of the Calibre open source software for managing digital books.

ABT Is Concerned with Infrastructure

Memory of the World, the Mandela27 DIY Exhibition and COPIM are all also examples of our development of radically open and inclusive knowledge infrastructures in support of commoning. Infrastructure is particularly important to us in this respect because, as Leslie Chan shows, it concerns the power (otherwise hidden) to: set agendas and decisions – which are never neutral but embedded with ideological assumptions and biases; mobilize and accumulate resources; set standards and norms; set boundaries of participation; discriminate – or not, hopefully; and control what gets built, what’s possible. 

Given the controversial and potentially transgressive nature of Memory of the World, it’s perhaps important to say a little more about why, as anti-bourgeois theorists, we’re interested in something like piracy (although Memory of the World can also be understood as a material enactment of the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto attributed to internet hacktivist Aaron Swartz). Quite simply it’s because one thing even the left finds it hard to question these days is the idea of private property. Yet it’s private property that helps to construct and shape our subjectivities as both possessive individuals and members of the bourgeoisie. Piracy thus provides my collaborators and I with one starting point from which to develop an affirmative critique of private property and bourgeois subjectivity that is designed to help us be more consistent with the kind of radical politics many theorists espouse (but don’t necessarily perform themselves) when writing about the commons. 

Having said that, Memory of the World, like a number of our other projects, does not, as Sollfrank points out, itself constitute a ‘commons in the strict sense of involving not only a non-market exchange of goods but also a community of commoners who negotiate the terms of use among themselves’ as equals in a voluntary, unforced, non-hierarchical fashion. That, in her words, ‘would require collective, formalized, and transparent types of organization’. It would also require governance, including the establishment of rules for resolving conflicts between individuals, the community and society at large, and the agreeing of sanctions for those commoners who do not comply. Moreover, most of the books that are made publicly accessible by Memory of the World are ‘privately owned and therefore cannot simply be transferred to become commons resources.’ As Sollfrank suggests, such projects are perhaps best understood instead as a ‘preliminary stage’ in which commoning is performed in an emergent, participative manner. They are moving us toward a horizon of ‘culture as a commons’, while at the same time providing us with the kind of ‘experimental zone needed to unlearn copyright and relearn new ways of cultural production and dissemination beyond the property regime.’

Certainly, one of the shared aims of our pre-figurative projects is to disarticulate the existing playing field and its manufactured common sense of what it means today to be a theorist, a philosopher, an academic, an artist or a political activist. They seek to foster instead a variety of antagonistic spaces both inside and outside of states and capital – spaces that contribute to the development of institutions and environments that are able to counter the hegemony of the traditional, liberal, public institutions such as the university on the one hand, and private, for-profit companies such as Elsevier, LinkedIn and Academia.edu on the other. This is the reason for our interest in the commons and commoning. Creating commons is one way we have chosen to describe our work producing, managing and maintaining such alternative, emergent spaces that are neither simply liberal nor neoliberal, public nor private. The fact of the matter is, ‘coming prior to adequate legislation, we currently lack even a vocabulary to talk about’ the commons in this sense, as the philosopher Roberto Esposito acknowledges. ‘It is something largely unknown, and even refractory, to our conceptual categories’. (And that includes communism, I would add.) Nevertheless, as Esposito insists, the struggle for an alternative ‘must start precisely by breaking the vise grip between public and private … by seeking instead to expand the space of the common’. 

The coronavirus event, with the huge systemic shock and suspension of business as usual it has delivered, provides us with a significant strategic opportunity to do just this, if only we can take it. After all, Covid-19 has made it clear that, as the climate emergency develops and we continue to face health crises and other disasters, neither (globalist nor libertarian) neoliberalism nor an highly individualistic liberal humanism is going to be fit for purpose. Now more than ever it is important to experiment with ways of working, acting and thinking that are different to both. For us, this is precisely what an (symbolic/functional) entity such as the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, or indeed a university, is for. One of the purposes of a university is to create a space where society’s common sense ideas can be examined and interrogated, and to act as a testing ground for the development of new knowledges, new subjectivities, new practices and new social relations of the kind we are going to need post-pandemic, but which are often hard – although not impossible – to explore elsewhere. 

‘F**k Business’ As Usual: Postdigital Politics in a Time of Pandemics III

In 'Postdigital Politics in a Time of Pandemics II', I argued that, whereas the nativist right have been successful in utilising communication technologies to transform the political landscape in recent years, the left has been conspicuously bad at turning its representations into actions that are compelling enough to make those in the mainstream of society want to constitute themselves as a group around issues such as community and the commons.  

How are those of us who are on the left to challenge the contemporary takeover by the populist authoritarian right? Can we employ communication technologies for more progressive purposes that are attuned to today’s rapidly changing political landscape? 

As we’ve seen, over the decades the left has found it difficult to devise collective forms of identification that are able to successfully counter the two main kinds of neoliberalism dominant in much of the West: the global neoliberalism of Barak Obama, David Cameron and Emmanuel Macron, which depends on a rule of law-based system of economic governance; and the libertarian neoliberalism (or authoritarian entrepreneurialism) associated with Donald Trump and Boris Johnson that wants to destroy this rules-based system, as embodied by the E.U., in order to generate new, disruptive business opportunities free from regulation.

'Fuck business' was an aside made by Boris Johnson at a 2018 private reception

‘Fuck business’ here means fuck the existing business. It's a disruption that is accompanied by assaults on institutions such as universities, the civil service and the BBC that, from a liberal perspective, are designed to serve as a check on political power precisely by remaining separate from it. As early as 2014, for example, the New Frontiers Foundation thinktank directed by Johnson’s senior advisor, Dominic Cummings, was calling for rightwing politicians to challenge the standing of the BBC. This was with a view to creating a U.K. equivalent to Fox News in the U.S. that would not be constrained by rules such as those concerning broadcasting impartiality.

Of late, however, there have been signs that a practical and relevant left alternative, capable of capitalising on the possibilities created by the fourth great transformation in media technologies to shift toward more direct forms of democracy, may (just may) be beginning to emerge. As reasons for optimism we can point to phenomena such as the grassroots upsurge against the political establishment associated with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the U.S. and her use of social media, the rise of the platform cooperativism movement, and calls for the monopolies of Google and Facebook to be broken up and for people and communities to control their own data. The latter idea is being explored in Barcelona by housing-activist-turned-city-major Ada Colau. Yet Barcelona is not the only city interested in engaging its population in mass participatory politics. Places as different as Porto Alegre in Brazil, Preston in the U.K. and Reykjavik in Iceland are experimenting with forms of municipal socialism, many aspects of which are made possible by online tools such as open consultation forums for citizens. More recently still, there have been the self-organised collective responses to the coronavirus epidemic. These include a hackerthon held in Germany in late March 2020 under the title #WirVsVirus (Us v. Virus). 42,869 participants collaborated remotely for 48 hours to come up with 800 different technological innovations for combating the virus. Popular themes included: ‘How can we organise neighbourhood assistance through helper platforms?’ (#58 projects); ‘How can food be provided to all citizens?’ (#50 projects); and ‘How can we support local businesses and protect them from insolvency?’ (#45 projects). 

It’s with this kind of emphasis on engaging with postdigital technologies for purposes grounded in principles of social responsibility, solidarity and mutual care coupled to the collective redistribution of knowledge and resources that my collaborators and I align ourselves.  And since a number of us are theorists, one of the issues we’re interested in as part of this is reimagining theory in the aftermath of the digital. In contrast to the worlds of music, film, TV and even politics, it seems to us that the transition from analogue to postdigital has really only just begun as far as many of the practices of the arts, humanities and social sciences are concerned. In this respect, one of the questions we’re raising with our work is: might exploring new modes of authorship, ownership and reproduction that are more in tune with this fourth great transformation in communications technology have the potential to lead to non-neoliberal – but (and this is extremely important) also non-liberal – ways of being and doing as theorists? Ways that are more consistent with the kind of progressive politics many theorists advocate, in their writings on community, collectivity and the commons especially, but don't necessarily perform themselves? 

Over the last twenty years we’ve been involved in a number of bottom-up projects for the production and sharing of free resources, infrastructure and knowledge (objects). To briefly take my own trajectory just as an example: in 1999 Dave Boothroyd and I launched Culture Machine, one of the first open access journals of critical and cultural theory. In an attempt to avoid limiting the geopolitics of our work to that of the global North, this journal has recently been relaunched out of Mexico, under the editorship of Gabriela Méndez Cota and Rafico Ruiz, complete with a redesign by the hackerspace El Rancho Electrónico. 

In 2008 Culture Machine became a founder-member of Open Humanities Press (OHP) Directed by myself and two colleagues based in Australia,  Sigi Jöttkandt and David Ottina, this initiative involves multiple semi-autonomous, self-organising groups around the world, all of them operating in a non-rivalrous fashion to make works of contemporary theory available on a non-profit, free/gratis open access basis using Creative Commons licenses. Open Humanities Press currently has twenty-one journals, forty plus books distributed across nine book series, as well as experimental, libre texts such as those in its Liquid Books and Living Books About Life series. 

OHP in turn became a founder member of the Radical Open Access Collective, an community of international presses, journals and other projects formed after the 2015 Radical Open Access conference. Now consisting of over sixty members, this collective seeks to build a progressive alternative ecosystem for publishing in the humanities and social sciences, based on experimenting with a diversity of non-profit, independent and scholar-led approaches. 

Meanwhile, in the Centre for Postdigital Cultures (CPC) at Coventry University, we’re working on reinventing knowledge infastructures, especially those involved in the production and sharing of theory. Since its launch in 2018, the CPC has brought together many people involved in such ‘aesthetic’ practices. They include myself and Janneke Adema from OHP; Samuel Moore, who works with us as part of the Radical Open Access Collective; and Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak from Public Library: Memory of the World. 

The latest of these initiatives is the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project, which emerged in 2019 out of a consortium of six open access presses called ScholarLed. An international partnership involving universities and libraries as well as infrastructure and technology providers, COPIM is designed to realign open access book publishing by moving it away from the surveillance capitalism model of competing commercial service providers. Its aim is to respond to the fact that companies such as Elsevier and Springer are increasingly looking to monetize not just academic content, but the ‘entire knowledge production workflow, from article submissions, to metrics to reputation management and global rankings’ and the related data extraction. COPIM represents an alternative, more horizontal and collaborative knowledge-sharing approach. Here the scholarly community collectively manages infrastructures and social systems for the common good in such a fashion as to enable a diversity of initiatives – including small, non-profit, independent and scholar-led presses – to become part of the publishing ecosystem. 

('Postdigital Politics in a Time of Pandemics I: On the Commons and the Crisis of Representative Democracy' is available here)