Pirate Capitalism

Abstract for my talk at Besides the Screen 2015: Piracy in Theory and Practice, AHRC Network event, Coventry University, April 9-10, 2015.

 

In The Enemy of All, an account of the shifting place of piracy in the history of legal and political thought, Daniel Heller-Roazen shows that to be counted within what the Roman philosopher Cicero terms the ‘immense fellowship of the human species’, one is required to ‘belong to a community tied, like the Roman polity, to clearly delimited territory’. In other words, one needs to live precisely ‘a sedentary life on land’. If one does not do this, if one lives a more fluid life – say, at sea – then one is at risk of being considered a pirate, this being one name for those whom we cannot necessarily treat as proper political adversaries. ‘For a pirate is not included in the number of lawful enemies’, Cicero declares, ‘but is the common enemy of all’. In fact, according to the theory of monstrosity of the 17th century philosopher Francis Bacon, as ‘the common enemy of human society’ pirates are deserving of extermination.  Of course, today, it is multinational corporations that do not belong to a community tied to a clearly delimited territory and that remain stateless. Moreover, some of them (with a little help from banks in Switzerland), have proceeded to use their statelessness to avoid paying taxes in the UK – and have been dubbed ‘pirate capitalists’ because of it.

 

In this talk for Besides the Screen 2015: Piracy in Theory and Practice, I will show some of the ‘practical’ screen-based ‘pirate’ projects I am involved with, projects that are indeed often fluid and liquid in nature. I will also explain some of the ‘theory’ behind these projects: why a number of activist scholar collaborators, myself included, are willing to risk being considered monstrous as a result of acting something like ‘pirate philosophers’ in a context where it is the multinational corporations who now appear to be ‘the common enemy of all’.  

New Culture Machine Live interview with media theorist Federica Frabetti

New Culture Machine Live Interview with media theorist Federica Frabetti conducted by Janneke Adema. You can find it here:

 

http://culturemachinepodcasts.podbean.com/e/software-theory-federica-frabetti/

The interview focuses on Frabetti's recently published monograph Software Theory: A Cultural and Philosophical Study. Topics of conversation include the materiality of software, code and writing, deconstructive readings of technology, the originary technicity of the (post)human, and the politics and ethics of software. This interview was conducted on February 23rd 2015 at Oxford Brookes University. 

 

Culture Machine Live is a series of podcasts looking at a range of issues including the digital humanities, Internet politics, transparency, open access, cultural theory and the future of cultural studies and philosophy. Interviewees and speakers include Johanna Drucker, Chantal Mouffe, Geert Lovink, Alan Liu, Ted Striphas, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Visit http://culturemachinepodcasts.podbean.com 

 

This series is curated by Janneke Adema, Clare Birchall, Gary Hall & Pete Woodbridge. 

For more information about the online, open access journal Culture Machine, visit www.culturemachine.net

Radical Methodologies for the Posthumanities: Third Disrupting the Humanities seminar

The Centre for Disruptive Media presents: Disrupting the Humanities

 

A series of 3 half-day seminars looking at research and scholarship in a 'posthumanities' context, organised by the Centre for Disruptive Media at Coventry University. Disrupting the Humanities will both engage critically with the humanist legacy of the humanities, and creatively explore alternative and affirmative possible futures for the humanities.

 

http://disruptivemedia.org.uk/wiki/

 

The third seminar will take place on Monday March 9th at Coventry University (ET130) from 5:00-7:30pm

 

Radical Methodologies for the Posthumanities

Speakers:

 

Monika Bakke (Adam Mickiewicz University)

Lesley Gourlay (Institute of Education, UCL)

Niamh Moore (University of Edinburgh)

Iris van der Tuin (Utrecht University)

 

The event is free but registration is recommended to ensure a place http://disruptivemedia.org.uk/wiki/

 

Radical Methodologies for the Posthumanities

This seminar will focus on some of the radical methodologies that are questioning the established disciplinary forms, methods and practices of the humanities. It will explore how these emergent methodologies are finding ways of moving beyond the humanist emphasis in the humanities on the individualized creative human author, originality, intellectual property, the fixed and finished object, writing and the book.

 

In doing so this seminar will provide a space for thinking further about the distributed, heterogeneous assemblage of humans, nonhumans, objects and non-anthropomorphic elements that are collectively involved in the creation, circulation and performance of 'humanities' research and scholarship. To provide just one example, in the case of an ink on paper and card book, this would take in most obviously its publishers, editors, peer-reviewers, designers, copyeditors, proofreaders, printers, publicists, marketers, distributors, retailers, purchasers and readers. But it would also embrace all the other 'multiple connections and lines of interaction that necessarily connect the text to its many "outsides"' (Rosi Braidotti): those concerning the labour involved (e.g. that of the agency workers, packers and so-called 'ambassadors' in Amazon's warehouses), the financial investments made, the shipping and container costs, the environmental impact, the resources used, the plants, dyes, oils, petroleum distillates, salts, compounds, pigments and so on.

 

In the dynamic 'meshwork' (Tim Ingold) of 'intra-actions' (Karen Barad) between the human, the animal, the environment and technology that constitutes the University in the 21st century (including all the associated software, code, data and algorithms, their physical supports and material substrates: wires, chips, circuits, disks, drives, networks, airwaves, electrical charges etc.), who or what is it exactly that produces knowledge and that can know? What does the use of networked digital media, devices and platforms mean for our methods and the way we carry out research? How do they constitute and mediate its means of production and communication? And if knowledge and research are the result of complex processes involving both human and non-human objects and actants, what does this mean for politics and ethics? In short, how can we perform knowledge-making practices differently, to the point where we actually begin to take on (rather than take for granted, repress or ignore) the implications of the posthuman for how we live, work and act as academics and researchers? What can the humanities become in all these entangled constellations?

 

Monday March 9th

Coventry University

Jordan Well

Ellen Terry Building, Room 130 (ET130)

CV1 5RW Coventry

United Kingdom

 

http://disruptivemedia.org.uk/

How to Produce a Critique of ‘Open’ in 3 Easy Steps

The Automatic Academic Article and Book Generator™

 

No. 16. How to Produce a Critique of ‘Open’ in 3 Easy Steps 

Step 1)  Set up something you are calling ‘open’ as a straw man by projecting a narrow and weak understanding of openness onto it.

Step 2) Attack this understanding of ‘open’.*

  

Step 3) Present your own version of ‘open’ as an alternative. This allows you to be the hero of your own narrative by in effect saving ‘open’ from itself.  

 

No need to worry about your version of open having already been explored in a more nuanced and rigorous fashion within the movements for open access, open education, open knowledge and so forth. The beauty of this simple, easy to replicate 3-step process is that, by setting up open as a straw man and defining it in a way that serves your own interests, you avoid having to pay attention to any of this.  

References available on request. 

* Important: if your critique involves making a careful reading of thinkers from the history of openness, you absolutely must, must, must remember not to show the same kind of ethical responsibility and hospitality toward contemporary thinkers of what you are calling ‘open’. 

The Crossick Report and the Strange Case of the Missing Monograph Crisis

What are we to make of the somewhat eccentric understanding of the monograph crisis that is conveyed in Geoffrey Crossick's report, Monographs and Open Access, for HEFCE in the UK?

 

According to this report - and contrary to what had often previously been thought - the monograph crisis isn't so much about a decline in the number of monographs that are being acquired by libraries because said libraries can no longer afford them due to the high and rising costs of journal subscriptions. Nor is it about the impact this state of affairs has on the kind of monographs that are being published - more short academic/trade books, textbooks, introductions and reference works selected for commercial reasons; and fewer original, specialised research monographs chosen on the basis of their academic quality and value. Nor is it about the consequences of all this for the academy, and for early career academics especially. No, the monograph crisis is said to be more about the number of monographs that are being published. And since the latter is apparently growing in the UK (although it's worth noting that the term monograph is often used quite broadly in Monographs and Open Access to take in edited collections, critical editions and other longer outputs such as scholarly exhibition catalogues), then one of the report's conclusions is that it's not appropriate to talk about a monograph crisis. 

How has this (mis)understanding of the monograph crisis occurred? Is it a simple mistake? (Given the membership of the Expert Reference Group and the list of international experts consulted for Monographs and Open Access, it would be surprising, indeed shocking, if it had gone unnoticed.) Or does it have something to do with the fact that redefining the monograph crisis in this way has the effect of shifting the focus away from the policies and practices of those publishing companies that are responsible for the rising costs of journal subscriptions: i.e. precisely the state of affairs that is regarded by many as being one of the major causes of the monograph crisis, and therefore as something that needs to be taken fully into account if the issue is ever to be adequately addressed?  Is this the light in which the conclusion of the report's summary, which emphasizes the importance of 'working with the grain', and of ensuring that any future policies for open-access monographs 'sustain and enhance' how people currently produce and communicate research in the arts, humanities and social sciences, is to be read?

 

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For a more detailed analysis of Geoffrey Crossick's report for HEFCE, see Janneke Adema, 'The Monograph Crisis Revisited', on her Open Reflections blog. Geoffrey Crossick has replied at length to 'The Monograph Crisis Revisited' and provided a response to some of my questions in the comment section of Open Reflections.