Re: [-empyre-] OSW: open source writing in the network
Dear All – I've tried to engage some of the points made in the last posts, if not always directly. As Marc argues, If publishing is rethought as a process of creating the 'stories than inspire others' which strikes me as a great objective, then the exercise of 'redefining one's or a group's place by finding an alternative space to have a publication made concrete, seen by others', seems like a fantastic objective for publishing as a form of action that can in fact reframe it not simply as a making public (with all its attendant problems) but as the building of networks of mutual recognition and support. However that suggests to me a more peer-to-peer style co-constructed network, which in turn means publishing actually becomes, again, something slightly different. That is a building of private, or at least bounded and protected spaces for discourse and exchange that, frankly (as Davin suggests) keeps the crap a bay (a reversal of its original sense). In public sphere theory this would probably be understood as something like a counter-public, but again the term public seems problematic here also as what we are really taking about us a interlinked web of interlocutors building, as Marc says, something particular and concrete - but also primarily in so doing, particular communities of interest. I think if this is the direction ‘publishing’ will be pushed this is no bad thing, but it does mean we are no longer speaking of a 'public' in publication, this may be unavoidable, and not at all elitist, but in fact progressive, given the historical and political roots of 'the public' and as Marc points out with regard to those conservative strands in Arendt's writings, perhaps good riddance! What this also suggests then is an agonistic form of politics/democracy and activism coming from such a re-tooled publishing agenda, a politics more in line with the radical democracy advocated by Laclau and Mouffe. Perhaps this is even an outcome of the technical character of distributed networks, which informs so much of our current social evolution. Anyway - might be best to set aside the semantic point and ask what this does as a challenge to the constituted power of capital? I would say publishing as a process of production via deliberating peers building networks of recognition is a direct challenge to the neo- liberal version of post-scarcity publishing (still having to use that term for convenience) based on automated reputation systems, algorithmic popularity filtering and so forth. I'm all for that. However do we likely loose here the right to claim anything like 'public opinion' or a general consensus? That has a certain price attached, so long as actually existing democracies maintain ‘public opinion’ as their primary source of legitimation how are we to anticipate being in any sense represented? Even if, needless to say, that narrative is wearing very thin and not too desirable, it's about the best one we have that provides actual levers to exiting political power. Perhaps it would be better to turn to an older term which seems to be gaining traction, the notion of the 'general will'? I need to have a think about that one! Some of these points pertain to a number of the very interesting comments from Davin. The gatekeeping, or pre-publication filtering in book publishing is also shot through with an attempt to predict what will sell - and this also has a an increasing algorithmic character to it. I'm agreed that filtering doesn't mean elitism if done carefully an openly, but is that what publishers generally do? Although given the position of different publishers in the market place there are variable possibilities for filtering based on other criteria than simply sales potential, though even, or perhaps especially, in my experience - and from anecdotal evidence - the marketing departments of academic publishers are increasingly dictating what gets commissioned. So here gatekeeping is still not to do with elitism or not, so much as the tyranny of markets, I would say that deliberative filtering in open publishing (or basically ‘peer review’), as long as its done constructively and openly, is one way of supplementing the need to somehow manage vast amounts of material without the worse elements of a ‘elitist’ gatekeeping, whether that’s through markets or a cultural elite. Of course this still requires time, in itself a resource unevenly distributed, the result of which is likely to lead to a core of individuals having more power and influence, but this is probably more desirable than the neo-liberal variation. Finally, As Marc says in latest post, referencing Michel Bauwens, the hope of an escape from the logic of capitalist production by in a sense eliminating the element of abstract labour from the production process is a worthwhile pursuit. The downside, as ever, how to make a living? What happens to good commercial publishers that still put
Re: [-empyre-] OSW: open source writing in the network
Dear Smita, Marc, Simon and everyone. Many thanks for inviting me to join this fascinating, rich and varied debate - I must confess so much so that frankly I'm not sure where to start. I am not an expert, or anything like it, on IP or collaborative authorship or open models but the context in which these issues have come up certainly raises questions close to my own research interests, which I guess is where I might be the best placed to offer a couple of initial thoughts that I don’t think have been directly addressed so far. One area which I have reflected on in some of my writing is the character of publicness in a digital and networked environment. It strikes me that the move into collaborative approaches that aim to overcome the notion of a single author (and all the baggage that entails) and ownership as a meaningful and useful legal concept (whatever the broader implication for subjectivity, economics, and society) raises real questions with regard to politics, as a process of making public. To publish, as a process of crossing a clear boundary between a private and public forum, that is to ‘make public’ assumes a distinct arena into which one can place private thoughts. This borderline has up until ubiquitous distributed computing rested with formal or quasi formal intermediary institutions that act as filters or gatekeepers - or in other words, publishers. Such a policing is indeed necessary to justify the very existence of pubic life as a distinct arena that ‘represents’ us, and in that sense is the essence of the democratic life of the bourgeois state. However, as the cost of publishing has been reduced to something close to zero for a good number of individuals and organizations, capital, and its concomitant bourgeois state, have significantly diminished in their ability to filter and legitimate the work of a professional class of public intellectuals and cultural critics. The presence of such gatekeepers is also needed to enable the creation of value sufficient that a class of public intellectuals can a) make a living and b) make themselves distinct from everybody else for whom public life only exists to the extent that they are consumers and/or processors of public knowledge or public reason. Yet now this process seems largely reversed, in that the filtering process takes place after ‘publication’.One clicks though to a recommended blog post as readily as story in The Guardian if it comes well recommended. One of the implications of the ‘massification’ of the Internet as discussed by Tiziana in an earlier post, is precisely the generalization of this post-public filtering. On the surface this suggests a form democratization, open publishing platforms, or even Twitter and such like, enabling anybody to chip in, in that sense I wonder to what extent this erosion - if developed far enough, can become a real radical and challenging political moment, simply in its undermining of a privileged realm of ‘representation’? However, I also wonder just as FLOSS in the realm of economics, as Dimit and others have argued in earlier posts, can readily be recuperated by capital, so - perhaps - new forms of what might be referred to a distributed publicness, can be readily recuperated by the ‘post-publication’ filtering mechanisms put in place to enable them to be manageable and shared, given the broader context of neo-liberal definitions of choice as little more than a market of ideas. In particular automated reputation systems that contribute towards power-law distributions in scale-free networks, clustering around ever more dominant hubs. In that regard for me the compelling question that this raises is whether the shift from an official policing of the boundary of publicness, towards an algorithmic cybernetic policing, indeed the disappearance of the notion of ‘public’ as meaningful term at all, requires a recalibration of thinking about publishing? Or its value as a term at all. This must also include ‘open’ publishing given that publishing itself is a concept that still contains a trace of the process of a filtered ‘making public’ and perhaps is becoming an oxymoron . Though at this point I’m a bit too tired to think this through properly. But I do also think this in itself requires a re-engagement with the key question of subjectivity, political subjectivity in particular, again an issue raised by Tiziana. What can it mean to express political agency, to ‘act’ or to make oneself present in the sense that Hannah Arendt uses it, in this context? One to sleep on I suspect. Apologies for a rather incoherent post but hopefully I can pick up some more of these points, and some more developed reflections on previous posts, in the next day or two. Cheers, Joss From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] on behalf of SK Edinburgh [skheriae...@gmail.com] Sent: 23 January 2012 09:39 To:
