For a post-digital post-humanities

(This is the second part of a post on the MediaCommons front page - the first part is here. It's a response to their survey question: What are the major social/legal/professional stakes with sharing online? The original post and subsequent responses can be found here, where you are also invited to join in the discussion around this question.)

To illustrate what I mean as far as the author, originality, and the human are concerned, let’s take as an example Graham Harman’s Prince of Networks. This book is published on an open access basis by re.press using the kind of Creative Commons license that would presumably be considered by some to have been more suitable for ‘Declaration’.  In Prince of Networks, Harman extends and develops an earlier account of ‘The Importance of Bruno Latour for Philosophy’, in which he presents Latour as having given us ‘possibly the first object-oriented philosophy’. Harman does so on the grounds that ‘there is no privilege for a unique human subject’, for Latour. ‘Instead, you and I are actants, Immanuel Kant is an actant, and dogs, strawberries, tsunamis, and telegrams are actants. With this single step’, Harman writes, ‘a total democracy of objects replaces the long tyranny of human beings in philosophy’.  However, even though Prince of Networks is available open access, 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, any such act of rewriting would infringe his claim to copyright. This applies to 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 to Harman’s right of integrity, which enables him as a singular human being to claim the original ideas its contains 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.

Granted, there’s probably no quick or easy way of responding to this raising of the stakes for theory and philosophy. To be fair, such social/legal/professional blindspots are far from confined to Hardt and Negri, Harman, or Latour for that matter, who likewise continues to act as if he is a modern in this respect, even as he insists we have never been modern.  In fact, oversights and elisions of this kind affect the majority of those theorists and philosophers who are currently attempting to replace the tyranny of the human with an emphasis on the nonhuman, the posthuman, the inhuman and the multi-scalar logics of the ‘anthropocene’.  Thanks to the way in which they, too, have responded to the issue of the social/legal/professional implications of sharing – whether it’s on a ‘Copyright…All rights reserved’ or Creative Commons basis - such ‘post-theory theories’ and philosophies continue to be intricately bound up with the human in the very performance of their attempt to think through and beyond it.

Be that as it may, the high stakes raised by your survey remain - for hopefully this post, too, is more than merely a cheap shot.  So let me raise a question that’s also an exhortation: How as theorists and philosophers can we perform our work, business, role and practices differently – to the point where we might actually confront, think through and assume (rather than marginalise, repress, ignore or take for granted) some of the implications of sharing online for our ideas of authorship, subjectivity, originality, the text, the book, intellectual property, copyright, piracy – and, indeed, the human?

In other words, can we work towards the development, not of a digital humanities, but rather what might be called (rather clumsily, I admit)  a post- digital post-humanities. What would something of this kind look like? What forms could it take? Would such a post-digital post-humanities not likewise call for 'new modes of address, new styles of publishing and authoring, and new formats and speeds of distribution', to borrow the words of Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook from their Critical Climate Change series regarding the possibility of extinction?

One possible starting point for thinking about how we might address this issue is provided by Lawrence Liang in his essay ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Book’, which appeared in Gaelle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski’s edited collection from 2010, Access to Knowledge In the Age of Intellectual Property. There Liang recounts how ‘Indian culture does not draw a distinction between an agent who performs an action and the action that the agent performs'. Instead, 'an agent is constituted by the actions that he or she performs, or an agent is the actions performed and nothing more’. Translating this idea into the context of Western thought we can see the focus now, rather than being on what a theorist or philosopher writes about the nonhuman, the posthuman, the inhuman, is much more on the theory and philosophy of the nonhuman, the posthuman, the inhuman - or the commons, commoning and communism - that he or she acts out and performs.

How we remain modern

Writing on his Occupy 2012 blog, Nicholas Mirzoeff begins a post on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s ‘Declaration’ in ‘the manner of Derrida in Limited Inc., … with the inside matter’. He does so to tease the authors of Multitude and Commonwealth for having published their pamphlet on the global social movements of 2011 using a ‘Copyright…All rights reserved’ license. ‘For a project about commoning, wouldn’t a copyleft or Creative Commons license be more appropriate?’, Mirzoeff asks. ‘OK, it’s only 99 cents on Amazon but you have to have a Kindle-friendly device: why not just put out a free PDF?’  

No doubt, for many, there is indeed something hypocritical about radical theorists and philosophers advocating a politics of the commons, commoning and communism, yet letting little of this politics impact on the decisions they make regarding their own work, business, role, practices and actions as authors. And all the more so when a good number of them end up supporting ‘feral’, profit-maximising corporate publishers as a result, despite the wide range of more commons-orientated and politically radical alternatives that are available.  (Hardt and Negri brought out ‘Declaration’ with Amazon, who are included on the list of privately-owned companies that aggressively avoid paying the standard rate of 26% corporation tax in the UK, along with Apple, Facebook, Google and Informa plc, parent company of both Taylor & Francis and Routledge.) Yet what’s so interesting about the question of the social/legal/professional stakes of sharing online, is the potential it contains to raise the ante for theory and philosophy even higher than Mirzoeff’s comments on ‘Declaration’ ‘as a form of copylefting’ - which he hopes ‘isn’t just a cheap shot’. For would addressing this question rigorously and responsibly not require us to also pay close critical attention to some of the ideas and practices that many initiatives associated with online sharing and the commons have themselves taken too much for granted, repressed, ignored, or otherwise relegated to their margins: ideas and practices to do with authorship, subjectivity, originality, the text, the book, intellectual property, copyright, piracy, and even the human?

(The above is the first two paragraphs of a slighly longer post on the MediaCommons front page. It's a response to the survey question: What are the major social/legal/professional stakes with sharing online? The rest of this piece can be found here, where you are also invited to join the discussion around this question.

It is also available on Media Gifts here)

Publishing futures for the arts and humanities

Introduction: 'Future Publishing: Visual Culture in the Age of Possibility'

This is Project 5 of the International Association for Visual Culture (IAVC). It is constituted as a collaborative and Open Access forum on the possible futures of publishing. The project is published on-line and simultaneously across a number of distinct scholarly, creative, and critical research platforms: the College Art Association’s Art Journal website, the open-access journal Culture Machine, The Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture (IMCC, University of Westminster), the IAVC, the journal of visual culture’s satellite website, Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, and the Modern Language Association Commons.

Project 5’s origins are in a panel we organised in New York City in June 2012 for Nicholas Mirzoeff’s ‘Now! Visual Culture’ event, the Association’s second biennial conference.

In this event’s network of relations and expectations – in the places between NYC, this non-conference, and Occupy - we watched the fermentation of something that felt new and offered new ways forward in our understanding of visual culture, and also in the ways in which it is distributed, accessed, engaged with and acted upon.

The ‘future publishing’ that we discussed coalesces around the emerging moment in the history of technologies and the adaptive strategies deployed by the disseminators of information to accommodate them. The opportunities and challenges they seed have extraordinary implications for the distribution and consumption of information; perhaps the most radical since the development of moveable type and its consequent market in reading.

The release of easy to utilise, freely available publishing software presents both challenges and possibilities for publishing as a practice and an industry. The ability to develop and distribute multi-touch interactive ‘text books’ at no cost through iTunes, for example, at once supports and restricts ‘open source’ publishing projects and is symptomatic of developments across the sector. The development of new technologies and new platforms for dissemination like the Kindle/tablets means that both traditional formats and networks require rethinking.

Some of the questions we consider include:

 How will changes in format impact on content – the medium is the message?
 What are the challenges for the publishing industry in generating sustainable business models that support author activity?
 How will these new market conditions impact and inflect ‘open source’ publishing models?
 What are the consequences for the distribution of research and how will it maintain or re-imagine its integrity across and through less formalised, deregulated networks?
 How will authors generate income?

The panellist’s engagement with these and other questions are appended here, and we extend a huge debt of gratitude to Katherine Behar, Gary Hall, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and Tara McPherson for their insights, as well as their willingness to formulate and realise Project 5 as a model of a paradigm for future publishing.

The contents list for Project 5 is as follows:

'Some Theses on the Future of Humanities Publishing, Scholarly and Otherwise', Tara McPherson
'Toward a Digital One-Of'f, Katherine Behar
'Scholarly Communication and Scholarly Societies', Kathleen Fitzpatrick
'The Philosophical Impossibility of Unliking the Cultural Industries in the Mind of Someone Writing', Gary Hall

*

On 11th January 2013, Aaron Swartz was found dead in his New York apartment, having apparently taken his own life. He was 26. A web programmer, co-founder of Reddit, and advocate of free-data, Swartz had been arrested in July 2011, and was being sued for downloading and attempting to release 4.8 million academic articles from the digital library JSTOR. He was arrested in July 2011, charged with data theft-related crimes, and was due to stand trail in April 2013. If convicted he faced over 30 years in prison. On January 9th 2013, JSTOR announced that the archives of more than 1,200 journals were now available for, as Library Journal puts it, ‘limited free reading by the public’. Such free reading amounts to three articles every two weeks. We have a long way to go.

Mark Little and Marquard Smith

#MySubjectivation IV: The university as academic subjectivation machine

If the university, like the school, is ‘becoming less and less a closed site differentiated from the workspace as another closed site’, the same can be said of another important aspect of how the control economy and its media technologies is inventing us and our own knowledge work, philosophy and minds: academic publishing.  This can likewise be seen to be undergoing a process of transition: from the walled, disciplinary gardens represented by scholarly associations, learned societies, university presses and so on, to more open, fluid environments. 

Witness the emphasis currently placed by governments, funding agencies and institutional managers on the more rapid, efficient and competitive means of publishing and circulating academic work associated with the movement for open access. Publishing research and data on such an open basis is heralded as being beneficial by these key players as it facilitates the production of journal and article level-metrics for national research assessment exercises, international league tables and other forms of continuous control through auditing, monitoring and measuring processes (including the REF in the UK, the panels of which now include members drawn from the business community). It also helps to expand existing markets and generate new markets and services. (Tools for metrics and citation indices are frequently owned by corporations, as in the case of Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science and Elsevier’s Scopus.) The push for open access and open data on the part of governments, funding agencies and institutional managers can thus be said to dovetail all too seamlessly with the neoliberal philosophy that assigns universities the task of carrying out the basic research the private sector has neither time, money nor inclination to conduct for itself, while nevertheless granting the latter access to that research and the associated data to enable their commercial application and exploitation. (This explains why David Willetts, the UK Minister of State for Universities and Science, is so willing to support a version of ‘Gold’, ‘author-pays’, open access, even though there exist many more radical and responsible ways of achieving open access, as I have argued elsewhere on this site.)
 
Further evidence of a movement in academic publishing toward the kind of open and dispersed spaces associated with Deleuze’s thesis is provided by the large number of researchers who are currently taking advantage of the opportunities to acquire authority and increase the size of their ‘academic footprint’ that are offered by the dominant corporate social media and social networks. As with other areas of the control economy, social networks such as Facebook and Google+ are characterized by a ‘compulsory individuality’ (a term Beverley Skeggs adopts with reference to reality TV).  You can’t use a pseudonym on Google+, unless you are a celebrity known by such a pseudonym. The only way to join and take part in such corporate networks is through one’s own personal profile. By taking responsibility on themselves for managing, promoting and marketing their work, ideas and ‘charismatic’ individual, authorial personalities in this way using networked digital media technologies,   academics can be seen to be caught in modern capital’s subjectivation machine just as much as the workers ‘Bifo’ and Maurizio Lazzarato describe:

Capitalization is one of the techniques that must contribute to the worker's transformation into ‘human capital'. The latter is then personally responsible for the education and development, growth, accumulation, improvement and valorization of the ‘self' in its capacity as ‘capital'. This is achieved by managing all its relationships, choices, behaviours according to the logic of a costs/investment ratio and in line with the law of supply and demand. Capitalization must help to turn the worker into ‘a kind of permanent, multipurpose business'. The worker is an entrepreneur and entrepreneur of her/himself, ‘being her/his own capital, being her/his own producer, being her/his own source of revenue' (Foucault)…
This idea of the individual as an entrepreneur of her/himself  is the culmination of capital as a machine of subjectivation.

(Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘The Misfortunes of the “Artistic Critique” and of Cultural Employment’, in Gerald Raunig (ed.), Critique of Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative Industries’, London: MayFlyBooks, 2011, p. 47)

Consequently publishing today is not an activity academics take part in just for and at work: they publish, and act as entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs of themselves, in all aspects of their life, in all their ‘relationships, choices, behaviours’.   

(Mez Breeze recently gave an example of how such entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship of themselves works in an art context, using the example of James Bridle and his attempt to promote the idea of The New Aesthetic via a panel at the 2012 SXSW, and on Tumblr:

The more I think about NA, the more I'm inclined to ponder whether Bridle is using it as an adjunct promotional strategy that mimics start-up/entrepreneurial frameworks: grab a manifest-yet-still-edge-worthy-to-some spinable idea, run it through a concept grinder and link it with a delivery system (in this case, the dangling carrot-bait of merging digital concepts with physical that theorists/academics/creatives/intellectuals just can't resist, with high profile figures being drawn to pontification + publicizing). This 'debate bait' then actualises as an emergent discourse with assured (built-in) funding/exposure strategies through clever generation of its own marketing/PR machine - complete with monetisation through conference creation + academic publications/hype/circuit creation - rather than it acting to ideologically frame a legitimately culturally relevant paradigm that highlights 'new' corresponding forms of cultural interpretations regarding the fusion of the digital and physical?

I'm not trying to assert that Bridle is intentionally aping this entrepreneurial strategy, but just having a quick examination of his previous attempts to kick-start (using this term in an oldskool sense, not in the crowdfunding model sense) buzz-worthy/coinable frames of reference such as his 2010 labelling attempt: 'I want to give it a name, and at this point I’m calling it Network Realism' http://booktwo.org/notebook/network-realism/, or ideas evidenced on his 'hand-drawn' website: http://shorttermmemoryloss.com/moleskine/ to his audition 'tape' for TED2013: http://talentsearch.ted.com/video/James-Bridle-A-new-aesthetic-fo makes me curious?

(Mez Breeze, ‘The New Aesthetic: Seeing Like Machines, posting to the empire mailing list, September 13, 2012))

With as many as a third of scholars reported to be on Twitter, to provide just one example, the separation between work and non-work is becoming difficult for many academics to maintain.  Is it work, leisure or play when you’re monitoring Twitter steams, writing an entry on your WordPress blog, gathering Google+ ‘circles’ to network with, adding a bookmark to Delicious, tagging a photograph on Pinterest, or detailing your ‘likes’ on Facebook regarding the books you read? Even if these are forms of leisure, are they ways of spending free time, or of controlling it?

If Deleuze’s idea of the control society is to be taken seriously as a critique of political economy and of power relations between the social and the technical, then, as Stiegler suggests it is (although, as I will show in future posts, a question mark can be placed against just how seriously he actually takes this critique himself), it clearly has significant implications for academic work. The manner in which it is increasingly being formed, organised, categorized, managed, published, disseminated, marketed and promoted now appears as a  means by which the attention of academics, too, is captured and their thought and behaviour modified, homogenized and sold to entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, shareholders and advertisers along with governments, university managers and funding agencies. (Basically, the message is, you need to join everyone else and do this, you need to publish on an open access, open data basis, and contribute to the upsurge of user generated content on websites, mobile phone apps, social and mobile sites if you want to be up-to-date, keep in touch with what’s happening, network, build your career, increase your readership and citations, have ‘impact’.) Many of today’s university workers are thus left with very little time in which they are able to direct their attention free from these forms of control. The consequences are often not so different from the alienation, panic, depression, incivility and ‘I don’t-give-a-damn-ism’ ‘Bifo’, Stiegler and others have identified as being produced by the accelerated, over-stimulated, over-connected nature of daily life and work in other parts of modern capitalist society.

Another recent article in the UK academic press, this time lamenting the selfish and impolite behavior of many scholars at conferences who seem to be motivated more by personal ambition than public interest, testifies to this. It is a condition that apparently applies to keynote speakers especially, many of whom appear unable to keep to their allotted time, attend the whole conference (rather than just their particular session), or even craft a paper to suit its specific audience and theme:

The communities of practice that frame the world of academic production seem to have slipped into accepting an instrumental vision of paper-giving... It has been permeated by an acceptance of bad manners, poor self-discipline and limited commitment. … Perhaps this is just yet another manifestation of the corrosive impact of  an academic culture driven by performance indicators where individual scholars have come to be individually measured against a range of criteria (number and quality of publications, number of research bids submitted, amount of research income generated; amount of knowledge-transfer income brought in; number of supervised doctorates completed (on time); number of teaching hours; variety and extent of administrative functions; amount of esteem; extent of impact; student ratings; fit to the "university offer"). In pursuit of these targets, academics have become routinely instrumental in relation to their attempts to manage their time and their priorities.

(Charles Husband, ‘Discourse and Discoursity’, Times Higher Education, July 12, 2012, p.42)

('#MySubjectivation' I is below here, II here, and III here)

New from OHP: Timothy Morton's Realist Magic

OHP is delighted to announce the most recent title in the New Metaphysics series, edited by Graham Harman and Bruno Latour:

Timothy Morton's Realist Magic.

The open access version is available from http://openhumanitiespress.org/realist-magic.html

Print and downloadable pdf versions will be available soon.

About the book:

Object-oriented ontology offers a startlingly fresh way to think about causality that takes into account developments in physics since 1900. Causality, argues, Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), is aesthetic. In Realist Magic, Timothy Morton explores what it means to say that a thing has come into being, that it is persisting, and that it has ended. Drawing from examples in physics, biology, ecology, art, literature and music, Morton demonstrates the counterintuitive yet elegant explanatory power of OOO for thinking causality.