Re: [-empyre-] Book Piracy and Alienated Labour
Hi Sean, Emmett and the empyre list, I'm one of the curators of the topic for this month, along with Morgan Currie and John Haltiwanger. Thought it’s a good time to introduce myself through some reflections on this topic of distribution. To pick up a number of issues flagged by Emmett around sustainability, I’m interested in asking Sean whether he can speak more about if there are plans to perpetuate the ethos of the RG.org experiment now that the site appears to be stalled? And on this point, I’m wondering more specifically whether RG.org has a politics, and how might that be defined. I understand that providing access to resources and extra-institutional education are aims, but what underpins this desire, is it an idea of radical democracy? A liberalism? An anti-capitalism? Of course, I’ve noticed that the way you speak about the project during interviews does imply a certain kind of politics of networking. Partly something out of your hands, not exactly based on critique, but about connective or reticular alternatives (“Rather than thinking of it like a new building ... imagine scaffolding that attaches onto existing buildings and creates new architectures between them.”). The relation between filesharing and intellectual property is itself a complex situation, however. I’m wondering about the point of indistinction with this logic of networking at the center of RG.org as an exchange economy. I'm thinking of Matteo Pasquinelli's recent work here, who has suggestively drawn attention to the parasitic dimensions of contemporary informational economies – utilizing the philosophy of Michel Serres – partly as a critique of free culture ideologies. A difficult point for radical thinking to grasp, he claims, “is that all the immaterial (and gift) economy has a material, parallel and dirty counterpart where the big money is exchanged. See MP3 and iPod, P2P and ADSL, free music and live concerts, Barcelona lifestyle and real estate speculation, art world and gentrification, global brands and sweatshops” (http://matteopasquinelli.com/docs/immaterialcivilwar.pdf). From this perspective, even liberated knowledge exchange-based sites like RG.org (or blogs like Monoskop, not to mention massive e-book trading forums like Gigapedia) are not only targeted as threats to the rise of e-Reader markets, but also paradoxically prepare the way for devices like the iPad or Kindle in the first place. Liberated resources here return to commodification, not directly, but on the side. Thinking about Emmett's post, I agree we need to seriously re-think the general impulse towards free, but also question the economics of this situation politically. We should definitely support, celebrate and fight for open access to resources, but it seems like there's no point being theoretically free, if there's no possibility of sustaining that autonomy. I'm wondering Sean if you have any thoughts on this paradoxical situation? -- Michael Dieter School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/research-students/michael-dieter.html ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Book Piracy and Alienated Labour
well I have to say that is seams we are coming around to issues of free, collaborative culture. I think it would be very interesting to have a question that does not once again get to this discussion. The notion that Free software, books, classes is all good, is fullish. for all of the academics defending dissemination of thought, how do they feel about on-line education. where schools make money off professors teaching sometimes to an empty classroom, while there ideas flow out,to students in there T.V. rooms, and into the pockets of the university or college. thanks goodness the book is not dead, but if paper starts to become untenable, at least we can create some kind of Itunes like way to share literature, so that writers can eat. Chris Quoting Emmett Stinson stins...@unimelb.edu.au: Hi Everyone: Michael has asked me to introduce myself, and I thought I¹d talk a little about my own research in relation to the posts so far. I think the question of what RG is (raised by Renate) is an interesting one. Sean, obviously, sees RG as an online library or archive, one that offers freely accessible digital copies of books that, by and large, are related to the tradition of continental theory and related disciplines. Others (notably, it would seem, Pan Macmillan), however, would see RG as simply a website for book pirates, which violates authorial copyright (and the copyright license owned by publishers). I¹ve just written an article offering a pragmatic analysis of so-called book piracy¹ for Overland magazine, and I have mixed and contradictory feelings about the practise. On the one hand, I am emphatically against any attempts to criminalise or penalise activities relating to not-for-profit book piracy¹ and am a staunch believer in copyright reform that enables a more free and open access to copyrighted material. But I also come from a publishing-industry perspective and strongly believe that both authors and their publishers (or other intermediaries) have a legitimate right to expect payment for their labour. The argument that books and information should be (monetarily) free to everyone is absolutely compelling for academics; since most academics have salaried positions, they don¹t need royalties from books to survive. But for other kinds of writers, the idea of free culture may simply result in more alienated labour (i.e. people who say things like I write advertising copy during the week, but I¹m a novelist on weekends¹). Book piracy is clearly a huge problem for the industry (much bigger, I think, than most publishers realise), although I think publishers themselves can partially solve this problem¹ simply by acknowledging that ebooks require a different form than print books. This goes beyond ebooks that include value adds¹ (i.e. audiovisual content); publishers need to radically rethink the form of ebooks by creating books that can be customised by users and include user feedback/interaction in order to make the book a dynamic process rather than a static artefact. An artifact can be pirated, but an evolving process can¹t. On a final note, last week I spoke with two librarians in charge of major Australian research libraries; interestingly, they were both strong advocates of significant copyright reform, and very much believe in something like the creative commons mode of copyright. Ironically, they argued that electronic providers of copyrighted content are currently the biggest barrier to a more free and open information exchange. Most Australian research libraries spend far more money on electronic resources than they do on print, and very few digital providers offer reasonable single-use or single-user fees. So digital publishers, themselves, are not in anyway inherently more open or free. -- Emmett Stinson Lecturer, Publishing and Communications School of Culture and Communication The University of Melbourne Parkville, Victoria, Australia 3010 Ph: 613-8344-3017 Christopher Sullivan Dept. of Film/Video/New Media School of the Art Institute of Chicago 112 so michigan Chicago Ill 60603 csu...@saic.edu 312-345-3802 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Book Piracy and Alienated Labour
Hi Nick, I would somehow say the opposite here: that if we're going to talk about alienated labour we need to see the problem beyond the academy. I think this is Emmett's point - the situation with academic journals at the moment is truly ridiculous, but one with some obvious solutions in the open access movement. This is possible precisely because this specific kind of academic labour has, to a certain extent, already been accounted for through either publicly funded grants or from the salary of an academic. That's why is so easy to argue for it being free and open. Of course, the 'impact factor' complicates things because it works to consolidate and structure the field in particular ways, but the issue with these governmental checks and balances is not just exclusive to access and non-corporate publishing (the legitimacy of the techniques being deployed are also highly controversial and contested). We could also mention entrenched cultures against open access, people still suspicious of this mode of publication for whatever reasons (legitimate or not). These are some of the things that are being fought against, but they do not so much concern the broader problems with free culture that Emmett is referring to, I believe. Perhaps some of these points are worth discussing during the open access topic with Gary Hall, David Ottina, Sigi Jottkandt and Paul Ashton who are all founders of Open Humanities Press. Also, I'd be interested to hear more about your project! - M. If we're going to talk about alienated labour within this space, then we need to see the issue beyond books; the problem is more acute when we add journals to the mix. I am working on a project that will launch later this month that, in part, examines the exorbitant pricing of too many academic journals. Journals that cost libraries thousands of dollars per year each; money that goes directly to for-profit corporations and not to the authors, reviewers, editors, etc., who work _for free_. Authors are required to sign over copyright to their own labor, sometimes needing to choose which journal to publish in based on numerics such as the impact factor, a number that is itself copyrighted information and can't be redistributed! Open access journals are thankfully changing the landscape, yet there are still millions of pages that are locked behind restrictive paywalls (with per-article, pay-per-view rates upwards of $30 or more, as much or more than than complete books!). With the growing consolidation of the journal publishing landscape (and with corporations such as Elsevier, John Wiley Sons, Taylor Francis, Sage, and Springer each owning _thousands_ of journals each) the situation of for-profit journals only seems to be getting worse. Projects like rg, as well as the development of sustainable, open/free/libre access publishing platforms (such as OJS), are necessary to provide a real counterweight to the behemoths of the academic publishing industry. More later in the month when the project launches... nick Emmett Stinson wrote: Hi Everyone: Michael has asked me to introduce myself, and I thought I’d talk a little about my own research in relation to the posts so far. I think the question of what RG is (raised by Renate) is an interesting one. Sean, obviously, sees RG as an online library or archive, one that offers freely accessible digital copies of books that, by and large, are related to the tradition of continental theory and related disciplines. Others (notably, it would seem, Pan Macmillan), however, would see RG as simply a website for book pirates, which violates authorial copyright (and the copyright license owned by publishers). I’ve just written an article offering a pragmatic analysis of so-called ‘book piracy’ for Overland magazine, and I have mixed and contradictory feelings about the practise. On the one hand, I am emphatically against any attempts to criminalise or penalise activities relating to not-for-profit ‘book piracy’ and am a staunch believer in copyright reform that enables a more free and open access to copyrighted material. But I also come from a publishing-industry perspective and strongly believe that both authors and their publishers (or other intermediaries) have a legitimate right to expect payment for their labour. The argument that books and information should be (monetarily) free to everyone is absolutely compelling for academics; since most academics have salaried positions, they don’t need royalties from books to survive. But for other kinds of writers, the idea of free culture may simply result in more alienated labour (i.e. people who say things like ‘I write advertising copy during the week, but I’m a novelist on weekends…’). Book piracy is clearly a huge problem for the industry (much bigger, I think, than most publishers realise), although I think publishers themselves can partially solve this ‘problem’
Re: [-empyre-] Book Piracy and Alienated Labour
Greetings all, Interesting topic. I think that it all comes down to what a locale shall decide is 'free' - (e.g. police or the fire department) - and then what shall not be free, like an ipod, no? In the end, we decide, through our actions, and willingness to demand certain actions from governing bodies, academic and otherwise, that certain objects and services shall be free. Most social systems, function as hybrid systems, that we tweak one way or another for different objects and services - rather than function as zero sum systems... Most people don't seem to care about the pimp and ho nature of mass media publishing...most writers and researchers assent, I imagine, as they want to write the 'hit' - and benefit from the strategy of corporate withholding and distribution, which creates and manages user demand and celebrity that is being criticized here...academics are probably the most collusively complicit writers in the world, in this respect... If academics, and other writers, truly wanted to take a more active role in the distribution of their work, they would withhold it from excessively corporatized outlets...and manage and distribute it themselves. NRIII Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D NRIII for Congress 2010 http://intertheory.org/nriiiforcongress2010.html Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org - Original Message From: Michael Dieter mdie...@unimelb.edu.au To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Thu, June 3, 2010 10:47:28 PM Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Book Piracy and Alienated Labour Hi Sean, Emmett and the empyre list, I'm one of the curators of the topic for this month, along with Morgan Currie and John Haltiwanger. Thought it’s a good time to introduce myself through some reflections on this topic of distribution. To pick up a number of issues flagged by Emmett around sustainability, I’m interested in asking Sean whether he can speak more about if there are plans to perpetuate the ethos of the RG.org experiment now that the site appears to be stalled? And on this point, I’m wondering more specifically whether RG.org has a politics, and how might that be defined. I understand that providing access to resources and extra-institutional education are aims, but what underpins this desire, is it an idea of radical democracy? A liberalism? An anti-capitalism? Of course, I’ve noticed that the way you speak about the project during interviews does imply a certain kind of politics of networking. Partly something out of your hands, not exactly based on critique, but about connective or reticular alternatives (“Rather than thinking of it like a new building ... imagine scaffolding that attaches onto existing buildings and creates new architectures between them.”). The relation between filesharing and intellectual property is itself a complex situation, however. I’m wondering about the point of indistinction with this logic of networking at the center of RG.org as an exchange economy. I'm thinking of Matteo Pasquinelli's recent work here, who has suggestively drawn attention to the parasitic dimensions of contemporary informational economies – utilizing the philosophy of Michel Serres – partly as a critique of free culture ideologies. A difficult point for radical thinking to grasp, he claims, “is that all the immaterial (and gift) economy has a material, parallel and dirty counterpart where the big money is exchanged. See MP3 and iPod, P2P and ADSL, free music and live concerts, Barcelona lifestyle and real estate speculation, art world and gentrification, global brands and sweatshops” (http://matteopasquinelli.com/docs/immaterialcivilwar.pdf). From this perspective, even liberated knowledge exchange-based sites like RG.org (or blogs like Monoskop, not to mention massive e-book trading forums like Gigapedia) are not only targeted as threats to the rise of e-Reader markets, but also paradoxically prepare the way for devices like the iPad or Kindle in the first place. Liberated resources here return to commodification, not directly, but on the side. Thinking about Emmett's post, I agree we need to seriously re-think the general impulse towards free, but also question the economics of this situation politically. We should definitely support, celebrate and fight for open access to resources, but it seems like there's no point being theoretically free, if there's no possibility of sustaining that autonomy. I'm wondering Sean if you have any thoughts on this paradoxical situation? -- Michael Dieter School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/research-students/michael-dieter.html ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Piracy as legitimate social practice
Hello all, Apologies for the late self-introduction, I wanted to construct something valuable to contribute other than simply saying Hi my name is John Haltiwanger and I am a New Media masters student at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. I am here first and foremost because I'm very interested in the future(s) of screenic publishing. As the transition from manuscript to printed book engendered changes in design and thus information, will the transition from print to screen likewise evolve our design? Perhaps it is simply personal taste, but I find it a curious case of remediation that the best option for reading text on a screen (for me) is available through PDFs that are typeset with the goal of being printed. The increasingly graphic nature of printed text (in newspapers, magazines) can be traced to the emergence of the Web, but I am more interested in what new styles and modes of presentation hide invisibly in the still developing world of screenic publishing. I am excited to read that Sean will have more news for us on the next stage of RG (or at least its spirit). As a cash-strapped student I often found RG an indispensible element in my writing workchain. I never got involved in issue-construction (basically collective curation of a topic or concern), but I enjoyed having the opportunity to upload new files onto the site and, later, to re-upload files to external sites to lessen the burden on AAARG's server. The issue of piracy as currently formulated is nothing more than a forced criminalization of one of the truly unique avenues for social interaction offered by the distributed nature of the Internet. To me the parallels between the rendering of file-sharing as illegal practice has historical parallels in the War on Drugs. It is not so far off to imagine a future where the talk happens between parent and child where it is explained that certain acts may have been performed by that parent but within a time and context where it is legitimized (everyone was doing it, we didn't know any better). Only this time it will be about sharing files between individuals in the 90s-00s, rather than about LSD or cannabis use in the 60s-70s. The parallels run even further in regards to cannabis: the illegality of both male and female cannabis can be traced directly to the lobbying efforts of the deforestation industry in the 1930s (with healthy doses of racist arguments/justification, of course). In both cases, then, the criminalization of the social act (sharing joints or sharing files) is rooted in the control of information. In the case of cannabis, the utility of hemp as a renewable source of paper directly challenged the deforestation (wood paper) industry. In the case of Napster, the utility of file sharing as the most effective means of distributing data directly challenged the centralizing mechanism of the record store. The material concerns of file sharing and drugs differ markedly, but is necessary to acknowledge that the material concerns of drugs as we know them today are in no small part the result of the legal policies towards drugs. We cannot easily say what other means of organizing vis a vis drugs would look like, much as we cannot easily imagine what the Web's landscape would look like if, for instance, users were accustomed to viewing videos through platforms such as Napster rather than through YouTube. The snap back from distributed to centralized means of publishing has visible and invisible effects. I'm curious if anyone here has similar concerns about the re-centralization of publishing we have seen and whether it can be seen as a direct result of the Napster ruling. John Haltiwanger ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Introducing Matthew Stadler: New Economics for the Social Text
At this point it seems like a good time to introduce Matthew Stadler, a writer from Portland, Oregon, who has also been deeply involved with print and digital publication, as the former literary editor of Nest magazine and also co-founder of Clear Cut Press, among several other ventures that have in common a focus on publication in its fullest sense. On Publication Studio's website, Matthew says publication is not just the production of books, but the production of a public. This public, which is more than a market, is created through deliberate acts: the circulation of texts; discussions and gatherings in physical space; and the maintenance of a digital commons. Together these construct a space of conversation, a public space, which beckons a public into being. Toward this end Matthew also organizes social get-togethers and a user-driven digital commons in tandem with book production and circulation -- basically taking print beyond the page in the same sort of feedback relationship that is evident between RG and the Public School. In relation to this discussion of networked distribution, piracy, silos that leverage old-style copyright, and critique of the free, it seems worth bringing him into the conversation to talk about one of his more recent projects, Publication Studio. This is an on-demand book laboratory that seems to work within a gray zone, a functioning space of practice that might be an alternative to older economies of print, but one where everyone gets paid money for work. As he described it to me: We are actually making a couple deliberate changes to rights, including the non-exclusive rights (writer/artist retains control and the publisher simply gets permission to make their edition) and 'bootlegging' books with writers whose regular publishers are effectively embargoing their texts. I'm hoping Matthew will jump in here and describe his project for us. I'm especially curious to know how digital technologies allow new modes of dissemination and new economic opportunities for writers and publishers. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Book Piracy and Alienated Labour
If it helps, Emmett, I also have mixed and contradictory feelings about the practice. I know I've been playing too much chess recently - I'm imagining how discussions over book piracy seem to open up along fairly common lines: e4 - why are there restrictions on the movement of texts when it is technically possible to overcome geographic, political, or economic limitations? c5 - authors and publishers have put in real labor and deserve monetary compensation in return. The variations that might come out of this position? Attempts to prove that piracy actually helps book sales as opposed to reducing them. Arguments to settle for symbolic capital or other forms of valorization that can be cashed in elsewhere. Assurances that if piracy just went away the market would make sure that all those limitations were overcome. Proposals for micro-payments, creative commons, and other reforms. (This is obviously not the route chosen by Macmillan, who made news last year for standing up to Amazon over lower prices for digital books). Less common lines might be that piracy amounts to a strange form of unpaid marketing; that when it comes to art and theory, reading and writing doesn't break down so cleanly along the lines of consumption and production, or leisure and labor. Emmett's argument about alienated labor resonates with me at this moment in particular because I have had to wait until finishing my full-time day job (which is the equivalent of writing ad copy) each day to participate in this week's discussion! I'm assuming some in this discussion have a university job based in these issues, or are teaching a class on them, or are writing on the topics? Some are in the position to translate the knowledge or symbolic value from discussions on this list into real income. I'm conflicted when tenured faculty use RG to make a reader for their classes, to save themselves time. I completely agree with the calls to think about the unaffiliated, selfishly I suppose, because that's my camp! [ One thing that I'm wondering is, should these discussions be based on the assumption that each download represents quantifiable lost income for publisher and author? Obviously this has legal precedent, where people end up owing a few million dollars because of the music they downloaded. But the zero-sum logic of it all frames the discussion in a certain way. The actual economics of publishing are a mystery to me and it isn't public, so I'm left with speculation (watch out!) based on anecdotal data. I spend roughly the same amount on books and art as what I make on sales, fees, and rentals (OK, I'm flattering myself a little bit here). Is this common? Is it the same thousand dollars passing through all of our hands? ] How might we pose our mixed feelings in a way that isn't point- counterpoint, but something less identifiable; or even how do we try and imagine possibilities beyond the capitalist framework, something that's not just turning the price dial down on a product until it hits the level where people start using their credit card again? Jumping over to Michael Dieter's post, which says that file-sharing, like gentrification, produces value that ends up in the pockets of those few who own the networks or buildings or whatever, I'd agree that Free Culture is not the road map or destination point or anything (and so I haven't argued for that anywhere). Looking at the specificity of RG, which is composed of people who are generally cognitive workers themselves, reading and referencing as a part of their practice, I see a space of confrontation over the very materials with which we produce; many of the authors on RG are also registered and several of them have expressed extraordinarily nuanced, ambivalent, and internally conflicted positions: Paul Gilroy, Jason Read, and Stuart Elden for example, on the site or on other networks. Publishers (doing their job) surreptitiously register and send cease and desist letters about Marxist and anti-copyright texts. And of course the people who use the site think quite concretely about the nature of the site (what belongs?) and tactics for the project. What I'm getting at is that it's not my place to assign a politics to RG, that comes out of its use and out of the responses or activity it provokes, its life as a public space. Nevertheless, I personally see it aligned with the occupation movement, as something which is actively trying to produce conditions for critical thought, which itself is being downsized and subject to inane requirements to justify itself through results. Although I will fully support reform demands that come up here (for wage increases, better health insurance, favorable copyright laws, etc.) I feel most invested and interested in autonomous spaces and forms (things like Virno's defection modifies the condition
[-empyre-] Voracious consumption and Let's not Alienate any kind of Labour
Hi Sean, Just thought you would like to know that my students this past semester were obsessed with RG-- downloading all of the texts that they wanted to read especially historical ones revolving around their own thirst for theory and philosophy. So after assignments in the reader that I gave them NOT from AAARG,they would download other related texts from AAARG and consume them voraciously. The fear that RG might now be there tomorrow fueled their energies to download more. It was pretty amazing to witness. On another note, (I don't mean to seem school marmish here) but I want to encourage us to acknowledge the fact that we are all laborers. Some of us work with words, or images, or code but hopefully we are all lucky enough to get up in the morning and systematically work regardless of whether it is in academia or elsewhere. To draw distinctions I feel is unproductive on our -empyre list serve. By the way thanks for explaining the correlation between RG and The Public School. Renate On 6/4/10 8:55 PM, Sean Dockray sean.patrick.dock...@gmail.com wrote: If it helps, Emmett, I also have mixed and contradictory feelings about the practice. I know I've been playing too much chess recently - I'm imagining how discussions over book piracy seem to open up along fairly common lines: e4 - why are there restrictions on the movement of texts when it is technically possible to overcome geographic, political, or economic limitations? c5 - authors and publishers have put in real labor and deserve monetary compensation in return. The variations that might come out of this position? Attempts to prove that piracy actually helps book sales as opposed to reducing them. Arguments to settle for symbolic capital or other forms of valorization that can be cashed in elsewhere. Assurances that if piracy just went away the market would make sure that all those limitations were overcome. Proposals for micro-payments, creative commons, and other reforms. (This is obviously not the route chosen by Macmillan, who made news last year for standing up to Amazon over lower prices for digital books). Less common lines might be that piracy amounts to a strange form of unpaid marketing; that when it comes to art and theory, reading and writing doesn't break down so cleanly along the lines of consumption and production, or leisure and labor. Emmett's argument about alienated labor resonates with me at this moment in particular because I have had to wait until finishing my full-time day job (which is the equivalent of writing ad copy) each day to participate in this week's discussion! I'm assuming some in this discussion have a university job based in these issues, or are teaching a class on them, or are writing on the topics? Some are in the position to translate the knowledge or symbolic value from discussions on this list into real income. I'm conflicted when tenured faculty use RG to make a reader for their classes, to save themselves time. I completely agree with the calls to think about the unaffiliated, selfishly I suppose, because that's my camp! [ One thing that I'm wondering is, should these discussions be based on the assumption that each download represents quantifiable lost income for publisher and author? Obviously this has legal precedent, where people end up owing a few million dollars because of the music they downloaded. But the zero-sum logic of it all frames the discussion in a certain way. The actual economics of publishing are a mystery to me and it isn't public, so I'm left with speculation (watch out!) based on anecdotal data. I spend roughly the same amount on books and art as what I make on sales, fees, and rentals (OK, I'm flattering myself a little bit here). Is this common? Is it the same thousand dollars passing through all of our hands? ] How might we pose our mixed feelings in a way that isn't point- counterpoint, but something less identifiable; or even how do we try and imagine possibilities beyond the capitalist framework, something that's not just turning the price dial down on a product until it hits the level where people start using their credit card again? Jumping over to Michael Dieter's post, which says that file-sharing, like gentrification, produces value that ends up in the pockets of those few who own the networks or buildings or whatever, I'd agree that Free Culture is not the road map or destination point or anything (and so I haven't argued for that anywhere). Looking at the specificity of RG, which is composed of people who are generally cognitive workers themselves, reading and referencing as a part of their practice, I see a space of confrontation over the very materials with which we produce; many of the authors on RG are also registered and several of them have expressed extraordinarily nuanced, ambivalent, and internally conflicted positions: Paul Gilroy, Jason Read, and Stuart Elden
Re: [-empyre-] Book Piracy and Alienated Labour
Riffing on this, I really resonate to what you (Sean) are saying here about the increasingly diminished conditions for critical thinking-- just how you set up the Public School as a situation without a curriculum itself means that there can be no sure common space in which students/participants can fight to compete, or to jockey for the position of being the best or the most right or the hardest worker, etc , nor can folks establish a hegemonic group position except with difficulty, so that the nuances of the Other can always be at play in the space of learning this comes to nothing when there is no 'point' or 'results' to the 'education'. Thus we fly back into the flow of exchange, this is how generative new content arrives-- in the breach, in the very 'lack' of central idioms. I love Renate's vivid story of her students grabbing aarrggh content and building whole mini libraries. As you point out, who is it gets to build libraries! what is a library? I ask myself that too, which is why i'm working on the 'pharmakon' (the principle of critical reversability, proximity of poison to cure )... having lost my library card and my JSTOR too. It's been extraordinarily difficult (on this end anyway ) to teach criticality (in terms of writing-- i was teaching a graduate writing seminar most recently) within an embattled technocratic university so much fear there that finally the game (of the humanities, themselves) is up-- that the cultural pressure to 'make knowledge production' means that Brett Stalbaum's (echoing Robert Filliou, the French Fluxus artist) definition of 'research' as pretty much investigating and learning and making whatever comes out of that free investigation-- inimical to the needs of the administrators of universities. The admin as Micha has so tellingly witnessed is focussed on 'the right stuff' and the 'right' kind of labour as if there are sinister wrong kinds (like banglab's for example) that must cause people to think bad thoughts and maybe even act on them, saints preserve us! (Sarah Palin blames the environmentalists for the Gulf mess!). I 'm reminded of the beautiful insouciance of Mauricio Cattelan's 'The Wrong Gallery in the early 2000s which came along about the time of the Manifesta debacle (when the curators were chased out of Nicosia when they tried to set up 'school') and the evocative Utopia Station of around 2003Only, once, tenure could, probably did often, help keep the 'voracious' (to steal Renate's term) tendencies of administration in check. but now even this system is under severe stress as the march of 'knowledge production' forces a kind of surveillance over, even self surveillance to do production that fits within ideological schema that seem endemic yet flowing from 'above' . Sean you are so honest, I admire your nuanced resistance, we so deeply need this and must transmit to those who come after us... . (for more on Filliou, there's a terrific essay on him in a recent Art Journal (CAA)-- I think , maybe in print only. Christina naxsmash naxsm...@mac.com christina mcphee http://pharmakonlibrary.blogspot.com http://christinamcphee.net http://naxsmash.net On Jun 4, 2010, at 5:55 PM, Sean Dockray wrote: If it helps, Emmett, I also have mixed and contradictory feelings about the practice. I know I've been playing too much chess recently - I'm imagining how discussions over book piracy seem to open up along fairly common lines: e4 - why are there restrictions on the movement of texts when it is technically possible to overcome geographic, political, or economic limitations? c5 - authors and publishers have put in real labor and deserve monetary compensation in return. The variations that might come out of this position? Attempts to prove that piracy actually helps book sales as opposed to reducing them. Arguments to settle for symbolic capital or other forms of valorization that can be cashed in elsewhere. Assurances that if piracy just went away the market would make sure that all those limitations were overcome. Proposals for micro-payments, creative commons, and other reforms. (This is obviously not the route chosen by Macmillan, who made news last year for standing up to Amazon over lower prices for digital books). Less common lines might be that piracy amounts to a strange form of unpaid marketing; that when it comes to art and theory, reading and writing doesn't break down so cleanly along the lines of consumption and production, or leisure and labor. Emmett's argument about alienated labor resonates with me at this moment in particular because I have had to wait until finishing my full-time day job (which is the equivalent of writing ad copy) each day to participate in this week's discussion! I'm assuming some in this discussion have a university job based in these
