I'd like to be a fly o the wall as this message is read by its recipients:
Sorry: I somehow failed to send this the other day when I actually
replied to it:
Thanks for the forward! W/out going into the details of this scheme, and
likewise Alan and me passed over Lessig et al.'s recent similar scheme
at Interactive Screen, which seems to provide a legal / licesning
infrastructure where this project is more focussed on technology - my
personal view's that the infrastructure is *already there* One of the
technological determinants of the re-emergence of this idea of 'commons'
- a shared 'space' of ideas,culture, cultural 'products', scientific
innovations, and so on - is the existence of the internet as infra- or
super-structure, and more recently, softwares/networks which go some
considerable way towards realising the essential distributed,
non-hierarchic nature of that -structure . The other is the fact of
digitality itself which, as we know, makes massive multliplication
something we have to labour to prevent, not to produce. Together, these
technological conditions are contributing to the production of a new
paradigm - in which issues of control, authorship, community and
property are all brought into question.
What is particularly exciting about this is that the shift from Fordist
to post-industrial economy has meant that so-called 'intellectual'
labour - the arts for example - have become criticald drivers of the
entire capital system, even of what might be called 'traditional'
industries; we could think of the crucial role of the 'creative' in
selling products, of artist communities in city 'regeneration', or more
generally of the massive role played by our cultural discourses (- what
Marx referred to as the General Intellect) in establishing what we 'buy
into' across the board. One only need to look at the stock market today
to understand that the intellectual labour that goes into 'representing'
a company, that labour undertaken by such as Arthur Anderson, Accenture,
by CEOs, by marketing companies and PR gurus, by city 'analysts' and
stock-pumpers the world over, is far more important to that company's
'value', really its 'stock value', than any 'honest' assessment of its
'bottom line', profit and loss account, or even projected earnings.
Therefore we can't and shouldn't theorise what we do 'as artists, as
theorists, as musicians, only after all other forms of immaterial
labour, as 'outside' of this structure - it is utterly essential to,
and - like the labour of the 'dishonest' Andersen accountant - often
complicit with, it - even the 'motor', looked at one way, that drives
desire, powers the signifier of a company, a city, a brand, a nation,
defines what we long for and will pay for, what we will trade, what we
will hold, where we will move to next.
From another orientation that 'motor', our cultural ' immaterial'
labour, takes on a rather more oppositional aspect. Might there be
things we could do that not only could not be co-opted, but which could
constitute a form of resistance or of outright revolt *against* the
prevalent social form?
Whatever, the thing is that with respect to OPUS, you can put whatever
front-end you like onto the superstructure that has already been built
(by the US military itself, no less: another indication of how capital
sponsors its own gravediggers!) - and sure, perhaps speed the process
along or help certain people to understand what they are anyway in the
midst of already . But your essential paradigm is already shifting.
Everything that OPUS discusses is already possible *w/out* OPUS: the Net
itself, or a local Wireless, network, for example, is already 'an online
space [in which] people, machines and codes [can] play and work
together - to share, create and transform images, sounds, videos and
texts.' And that is only one of the ways that it enables immaterial
labour. And we are already doing it, engaged in it there, in all its
forms. That is not really a critique of OPUS - I certainly support as
many avenues for co-operation as possible - but let's make one now.
'Opus is an attempt to create a digital commons in culture...' Let us
pass over the fact that this 'commons', for many (search James Boyle,
Yochai Benkler, for examples), is already upon us, that is, we already
*have* the shared space of ideas that this system claims to create - and
that our decision, currently, is whether to engage with it on a zeropaid
basis, or, for example, on models that allow us to stake later monetary
gains (from institutions, payments in kind, so forth) against acting in
what has been called the 'gift-economy'. (Incidentally it is here our
project comes in: I *think* we think the infrastructure - as the
development [rhetoric notwithstanding] of projects like OPUS kind of
shows - will take care of itself; we're more interested in establishing
a remuneration structure for artists, and I think this is mainly related
to the idea that if we can allow the *community* to function - in its
various modes - as arbiter of 'cultural production', then we may well
end up with art, writing, music, ideas that act in opposition to the
traditional centers of what some people call 'biopower' - the power,
that is, to define the ways in which life constitutes itself both as
lived subjectivity and as system.)
In my own personal view, this idea of 'commons' operates directly
against that. The Commons were the way in which the farmers of feudal
Europe subsisted, around a set of shared lands regulated by a complex
set of customary rights. Ultimately those right of custom, emedded in
local communities, were obliterated by the development of commerce and
industry during the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the rising class
of mechant farmers, and by the rise of what Hannibal Travis calls the
'propertarian' (or is it 'propietarian'?) ideology. Now people (Boyle,
Benkler, Travis, e.g.,) are arguing, like the Diggers once did in the
UK, that we need to protect our 'information commons' from 'enclosure',
the encroachments of big business and those who would Sue Our Asses Off
to (re)gain control of the media. And they substantiate this argument by
showing how well the Commons, as a 'protected' resource, functions as a
motor for scientific / cultural development. In other words, how well
the Commons - or General Intellect if your prefer - could, if
regulated-as-deregulated-zone, operate as a well-behaved motor of
Capital.
That, to me, is not a goal to work towards. Theorising our shared
immaterial labour as Commons is not only defeatist, it is also
dangerous. We have the potential, with our work as-community, in that
work's engagements with social structures that, no longer able to make
money from us directly, are now experimenting on the one hand with new
models of co-option and on the other with all-out confrontation - the
potential to begin to formulate ideas towards something which might, in
admitting that confrontation is really the only way forward, ever, dare
to constitute itself as weapon, as a phalanx, perhaps, or the detonator
for a set of bombs that we know are already ticking. The absolutely
crucial role that we all have, as intellectual or 'immaterial' labourers
in the current scene can not be underestimated. We don't need
protection; what we need is guts to begin to think aggressively, to form
an Army of Ideas.
Now then, I'm glad that's over and I bet you are too. For anyone who
got this far, what I really want you to know is that I'm currently
working on the development of a social center in East London, and so
very soon, fortune permitting, have a place that you can drop into /
stay at / work in - and that includes you.........
