POSTDIGITAL POLITICS:
or, How To Be An Anti-Bourgeois Theorist
Gary Hall
PART 1: ON THE
COMMONS AND THE CRISIS OF REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY
What Does Postdigital Mean and Why Is It Important?
I want to begin with a proposition. A lot of work in the arts, humanities
and social sciences of late has been taken up with the commons. It’s a fascination
that is only likely to increase following the coronavirus pandemic that began
in late 2019, early 2020. Attention will understandably be paid over the next
few years to the manner in which communities all over the world spontaneously self-organised
to fill the gaps in care left by the state and market.[1]
They did so by collectively providing those in need with critical resources: everything
from information and accommodation, through medical supplies (masks, hand
sanitizer, gloves, goggles, gowns), to financial aid packages, emergency
childcare, free meals for children, even companionship during periods of
lockdown and quarantine, be it by telephone or video call.[2]
As
we know from the Creating Commons project of Cornelia Sollfrank, Shuhsa
Niederberger and Felix Stalder, the commons, put very simply, can be understood as
non-proprietary shared spaces and resources – both material and immaterial – along
with the collective social processes that are necessary for commoners to
produce, manage and maintain them and themselves as a community.[3] My
proposition, then, is this: if we want to help transform society by actually
creating such commons, we need to work, act and think very differently from the
ways in which most of us do now. And I include in this ‘us’ many of those who are
well known in the fields of art and culture for writing about community,
collectivity and the commons. I’m thinking here not just of authors who address
the issue from within the liberal tradition of Garrett Hardin, Elinor Ostrom and Yochai Benkler. I also have
in mind radical theorists and philosophers such as Isabelle Stengers, Judith
Butler, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.[4]
How can we do this? How can we act
differently with a view to transforming society through the creation of more commons-oriented
ways of being and doing? It’s this question that I’m going to endeavour to answer
in what follows, as it’s one that together
with a number of collaborators I have been engaged with for some time.
Like the last group of writers on the commons I mentioned, a lot
of those I work with, as well as being media artists, activists or
practitioners, identify as being radical theorists. However, we’re theorists who are also exploring
ways of reimagining theory and what it means to be a theorist. We’re doing so by challenging
some of the taken-for-granted categories and frameworks concerning what critical
theory is considered to be, especially the highly individualistic, liberal-humanist
model that’s performed by most theorists and
philosophers today, regardless of whether they’re Marxists, post-Marxists, feminists, new
materialists, posthumanists or accelerationists.[5] Instead, we’re endeavouring to work, act
and think in terms of the commons by
experimenting with the invention of what can be called – rather teasingly,
I’ll admit – ‘anti-bourgeois theory’.[6]
This is theory that, in its ‘habits of being’, to borrow a phrase from bell
hooks, is:[7]
1)
more consistent with the kind of
progressive politics many of us in the arts, humanities and social sciences espouse.
It
is important to be aware that neoliberalism is not directly opposed to
liberalism. Rather neoliberalism is a version of it, as its name suggests, the
wider historical tradition of liberalism having provided the discursive
framework of modern capitalism. The singularized neoliberal homo oeconomicus is not necessarily
always struggling against the liberal-humanist rights and values that the vast majority of theorists
continue to adhere to in practice, then. Consequently, while most critical theorists
position themselves as being politically on the left – some even writing books
and articles about the importance of equality,
solidarity and the radical redistribution
of wealth and power – many end up operating as rampantly competitive,
proprietorial individuals nonetheless. Driven by a goal-fixated instrumentalism,
what’s important to them are the number of books published, grants captured,
keynote lectures given, followers acquired, or likes and retweets gained. (Elsewhere
I’ve associated this behaviour with being a ‘micro-entrepreneur of the self’.[8])
2) in
tune with the
changing political zeitgeist, especially the shift from representative to
direct forms of democracy.
In the U.K. this shift can be traced
at least as far back as the horizontal
groundswell against the ‘old politics’ of the liberal and neoliberal
establishments that was such a prominent feature of the 2014 Scottish
independence referendum. More recently, it’s been apparent in
the decentralised manner in which the Extinction Rebellion movement operates: the
refusal of top-down hierarchal organisation in favour of bottom-up ‘affinity
groups’. It’s not
just a progressive phenomenon (in a leftist sense), though. The move to more direct, participatory forms of
democracy is apparent in the rapid rise to a position of political influence
of the U.K. Brexit party (now rebranded as Reform U.K.) under the leadership
of Nigel Farage immediately prior to the 2019 general election.
In large part
this rise was
achieved through the adoption of the digitally savvy
electoral strategy of the Five Star Movement (M5S) in Italy, which entered
government in 2018, having
become the largest individual party in the Italian Parliament. It
used data gathered from the online activity of members to
help shape M5S’s direction and policy.[9] So
successful was the Brexit party’s adaptation of this electoral strategy that in
the run up to the election the ostensibly more mainstream, one-nation Conservative
politician Boris Johnson found himself forced to take up many of its more
radical right-wing ideas and forms of rhetoric (albeit on occasion in
detoxified form). And this in spite of the fact Farage himself has never won
election to Parliament in the seven attempts he’s made over a span of two and a
half decades.
3) a
more appropriate mode of engagement for today’s postdigital world than
are printed and closed-access books and journal articles.
We arguably find ourselves in the midst of a fourth great transformation in
communications technology. Crudely put, if the first transformation involved the
development of speech and language, the second writing, and the third print,
the fourth entails the change from analogue to digital that is associated with the
emergence of Facebook, Google and Twitter (not to forget Weibo, Baidu and
WeChat in China). In fact, it can be said that we are already living in a postdigital
era, if we take this term to name ‘a technical condition that… is constituted
by the naturalization of pervasive and connected computing processes… in
everyday life’, to the extent that ‘digitality is now inextractable from the
way we live while its form, functions and effects are no longer necessarily
perceptible.’[10] Historically,
such transformations have often been followed by social and political upheaval
and unrest, even war. The development of printing was at
the heart of the Protestant Reformation in sixteenth century Europe, for
example, resulting in the breaking of the religious monopoly of the Catholic
Church. A key figure was Martin Luther with his Ninety-five Theses. However,
although many book historians regard print as having subsequently led to the Renaissance,
the Enlightenment and the development of modern science and democracy, we need
to remember that print has its dark side, too. Given the anti-Semitic attack at
a synagogue in the East German town of Halle in October 2019, it’s worth recalling
that shortly before his death in 1546 Luther published a pamphlet called ‘Warning
Against the Jews’. Nor was this a one-off. ‘We are at fault for not slaying
them’, Luther proclaimed in an earlier 65,000-word treatise titled ‘On the Jews
and Their Lies’. The latter text was exhibited publicly in the 1930s during the
Nuremberg Rallies. (So it’s not that the
disruption brought about by print is good, while that inflicted by digital media
is bad.)
We’re all probably going to be long
gone before anyone knows if we’re currently living through a period of change
as profound as the Reformation – although some have heralded the Sars-CoV-2 outbreak, to give the virus
its proper name,
as a sign that we are. This is
because of the high degree of interconnectivity of global capitalism in terms
of travel, trade, tourism, migration, the labour market and supply chains, all
of which depend on postdigital information processing. Together with the associated destruction of biodiversity
accelerated by the climate emergency and human population growth, such
interconnectivity is held as having created the conditions for new, infectious,
zoonotic diseases such as Sars, bird-flu and Covid-19 to cross over from
wildlife to humans as a result of their greater proximity to one another. Nevertheless, it’s important to make an effort to come to terms with
the shift from analog to postdigital, not least for
political reasons, as the above examples drawn from
German history suggest. Of course it’s questionable
to what extent the traditional political division between left and right is still
applicable. (The origins of this divide can be traced as far back as 1789 and
the revolutionary assembly in Paris, where the antiroyalists were physically
located on the left side of the chamber.) The situation is complicated today by
the fact this division has been overlaid, at the very least, by that between populist
nativism and elitist cosmopolitanism. Both the U.K. Conservative party under
David Cameron, and the Labour party under Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David
Miliband were socially liberal, for example. Cameron has said that the passing of
the law enabling same-sex marriage in 2013 by the Conservative-led coalition
government was one of his most significant achievements in office. The main
difference between the two parties was that the Conservatives were even more economically
neoliberal than New Labour. This is why the rejection of significant elements
of both in the 2016 European Union referendum as primarily representing the interests
of the metropolitan liberal establishment came as such a shock to many
commentators. It revealed that the electorate was no longer voting largely out
of loyalty to either party on the basis of their class position, with the working-class,
and large parts of the Midlands and north, traditionally selecting Labour. People
were voting on the basis of whether they were nativist or cosmopolitan too. Actually,
what the 2019 general election made clear is that if you’re poor, working class,
older and less educated in England you’re increasingly likely to vote Conservative.
It’s
going to be interesting to see what changes there are to the public mood post-coronavirus.
Will the populist backlash against the liberal establishment continue, fuelled
by the economic fallout from the pandemic: mass unemployment, large-scale
public debt, and austerity in all but name? Or will a loss of trust in figures
such as Boris Johnson and his cabinet of all the Brexiteer talents see it being replaced
by a newfound respect for scientists and journalists, and for institutions such
as the NHS and BBC? Johnson’s charismatic performance – the blundering, the
laziness, the flippant frivolity, the obvious lack of preparedness right down
to the crumpled suit and unkempt hair – may be effective in setting him apart
from the business-as-usual politicians of the EU. Yet a certain level of Kier
Starmer-like – or indeed Joe Biden-like – sober seriousness and attention to
issues of professional competence (rather than the big transformative questions
facing society in Starmer’s case) begins to look rather appealing when there’s
a national emergency and its fall-out to deal with. Then, again, it was the
desire for something different to the professional political class and their
adoption of a centrist third way between left and
right in order to champion a modernizing
neoliberal consensus that led many people to vote for Johnson – and
Donald Trump – in the first place.
Retaining
the left/right political distinction for the time being, however, we can say that it’s mainly those on the populist,
nativist right who, to
date, have realised the
possibilities created by the new communication technologies. It’s as if they’ve read their Gramsci
and figured out that if you want to change politics, you need to begin by
changing culture.[11]
To return to an international frame for a moment, recent
years have provided us with examples such as: Trump, who was deemed a Twitter
genius (until he was eventually banned from using it) and the first meme
president of the United States; Jair
Bolsonaro, the first president of Brazil elected using the Internet, Google’s YouTube
especially, as his main means of communication; and the
Vote Leave campaign in the UK and its sophisticated exploitation of Facebook
data to intervene in the 2016 E.U. Referendum, as revealed by the Cambridge
Analytica scandal. What the
actors behind these developments have done is create a new model of political
communication by seizing on the opportunities created by the fourth great
transformation in media technology to precipitate the cultural crisis in
representative politics.
For
populist politicians this new model has two important features. The first is that
it allows those who don’t already have control over their state
media (à la Jarosław Kaczyński and Mateusz Morawiecki in Poland and Viktor
Orbán in Hungary) to sidestep
the old, established forms of political communication that rely on the major
newspapers and influential TV and radio programmes. They
have thus avoided being held to account by journalists, even when they have fabricated,
lied, doctored blogs and videos and rebranded fake ‘fact-checking’ websites.[12] Consider
Boris Johnson’s keeping of his live interview appearances to a minimum during
the 2019 U.K. election campaign; and, once in power, the attempt of his
government to select which news outlets were allowed to cover it by barring
critical journalists from official briefings and boycotting leading BBC news programmes
such as Newsnight and Today. Until the need to keep the population informed
about Covid-19 made such a rigid stance untenable, that is.[13]
The
second important feature of this new model is that it nonetheless provides populists
with a means of overcoming the apparent disconnect between professional
politicians and ‘the people’ – the latter being constructed antagonistically as
a self-identical and essentialised mass that is prevented from reaching its
full potential by an establishment elite, also homogenised, which of course
doesn’t include these populist politicians themselves. The nativist right have overcome this disconnect by using
the repetition of slogans – most famously ‘Make America Great Again’, ‘Take
Back Control’, ‘Get Brexit Done’, ‘Levelling Up’, ‘Build Back Better’ – to link the grievances of a number of different sections
of society. These are grievances that have arisen over a long period,
stretching from the so-called ‘migrant crisis’ of 2015, through the 2008
financial crash, at least as far back as the 9/11 attacks in the U.S.. They include
a sense of abandonment and betrayal by elites, resentment against women,
Muslims, immigrants and the ’woke’, along with a general lack of control over
their lives felt by many of those living through late-stage capitalism together
with an anxiety about the future. (Trump’s stronger than predicted showing in
the 2020 US presidential election indicates that these are still the important
issues for nearly half of all Americans.) By articulating such sentiments with
a patriotic pride and sense of cultural nostalgia and loss – consider the fake
reports that Rule, Britannia! and Land of Hope and Glory were to be dropped
from the BBC’s 2020 ‘Black Lives Matter Proms’ as result of pressure from
movements for racial justice – the radical right have been able to create chains of
equivalence across those parts of the population that have been adversely affected by the results of
neoliberal globalization.[14] In this way populist politicians have managed to mainstream
their ideas by tapping into those affective forces –
those drives, desires, fantasies and resentments – that motivate people to
become part of a group such as precisely ‘the people’, and constitute the basis
of collective forms of identification.
Reactionary
nativists have been aided
and abetted in the creation of this new model of political communication by Silicon
Valley companies. The latter are aware it’s not logical reasoning and verified information
and evidence but extreme displays of dopamine-generating emotion
that keep audiences hooked, and so drive their profits by maximising attention.
Not only do Facebook, Twitter and YouTube render indistinct the difference
between making carefully thought-out comments on the current issues of the day, and hastily announcing one’s unconsidered feelings about them, they
actively amplify and reward expressions of anger, hatred,
insecurity and shame. Contributions to these platforms don’t need to be true to
get a reaction and go viral, just hugely captivating. Being controversial,
intrusive, crude, vulgar, moralistic, narcissistic, sentimental, contradictory
all works.
Similarly broadcast media often prefer adversarial
debates. In the U.K., the BBC
regularly invites speakers with explicitly opposing views to discuss a given
topic. It does so partly out
of an attempt to provide journalistic balance (although what it frequently ends
up delivering is false equivalence: just because someone is on the opposite side
of an argument doesn’t make them qualified to speak about it). But the
corporation also opposes contributors in this fashion because reputable professional
journalism outlets and other high-quality mainstream sources such as Sky News
and the Guardian constitute only a low
percentage of where the public receives its information in the era of
smartphones and social media. The situation is similar in the U.S. where two
thousand local newspapers have closed in recent years. So the issue is not just
Russian interference or false news. It’s that the mediascape is now highly diverse and disordered. What are needed therefore are combative debates that can cut through the
chaos to be heard and get attention. (Piers Morgan’s entire career as a presenter on ITV’s Good Morning Britain has been built precisely on his ability to
offer provocative opinions, be they about racism, gender fluidity, Meghan
Markle or the response of the U.S. to Covid-19, in contrast to the more
nuanced, easy going approach of his co-host, Suzanna Reid.)
All of which goes some way toward explaining how small numbers of people have been able
to use communication technologies to move large numbers of others in the
direction of nativist forms of populism characterised by an emphasis on authority,
group insecurity and an exclusionary nationalist pride. How
much any of Trump, Bolsonaro,
Johnson et al actually understand the
implications of the shift from analogue to postdigital media is
another question. No matter, they have certainly profited from it. Indeed, such was the impact of Trump’s presidency
that almost immediately after his 2020 defeat commentators were already labelled
this new way of conducting politics Trumpism.
Of course, in a situation of chaos and confusion there’s often a desire for a strong
authoritarian leader who doesn’t play by the rules and who can get things done
regardless. Yet the media’s emphasis
on hyper-emotionalism has played straight into the hands of the reactionary right, which defines itself
negatively against those it considers ‘the other’. Hence the rise in sexism, racism
and white supremacism we’ve experienced in recent times, both online and off,
together with the presentation of the coronavirus as a ‘wartime’ (Johnson) or
‘invisible enemy’ (Trump), and description of it as the ‘Chinese disease’
(Trump again). (Even a pandemic is seen as national emergency, not an international one.) Indeed, those on the anti-liberal right
have been so successful in making their ideas acceptable – many produce brilliant
viral videos and memes, often containing language and images that are full of
humour, irony and ambiguity as well as ‘frightened bitterness’[15]
– that they can be said to have completely transformed the political landscape.
As a result, we find ourselves living in a ‘post-truth’ world of ‘alternative
facts’, ‘deepfakes’, Holocaust deniers, climate-breakdown deniers, pandemic minimizers,
lockdown sceptics, COVID-truthers, Q-Anon social activists and people who are
anti-immigration, anti-LGBT+ rights and (albeit indirectly perhaps)
anti-diversity in terms of the biosphere too.
If We Can Have Disaster Capitalism, Why Can’t We Have Emergency Marxism?
Granted, the left has its own
affective-emotional themes and tropes. (When it comes to theory you just have to say
words like ‘commons’, ‘collaborative’, ‘Anthropocene’, ‘environment’,
‘material’ or even ‘affect’ at an arts event such as Transmediale to realise this.)[16] Yet
whereas the right has succeeded in
using affect as a mobilizing political force, the (non-neoliberal)
left has been conspicuously bad at turning its representations into
actions that are compelling enough to make different people, especially those in
the mainstream of society, want to constitute themselves as a group –
a ‘we’, an ‘us’ – around issues such as community and the commons. Sure, both
before and during the coronavirus outbreak a spate of large-scale youthful street
protests unfolded in places such as Hong Kong, Chile, Ecuador, Lebanon, Iraq,
Egypt, Barcelona and Poland, orchestrated by ‘the children of the financial
crisis of 2008’, as they have been called. Some have gone so far as to claim there
have been more mass movements calling for radical change in the period since
2010 than at any time since WWII. Little of this rebellious energy has fed into
a mainstream political change of the kind the populist right have achieved,
though. On the contrary, research shows that far right parties in Europe have
tripled their share of the vote in the last three decades, with one in six choosing
them at the polls.[17] (Meanwhile,
in 31 countries across Europe ‘social democratic
parties that once commanded over 40 percent of votes have collapsed to the low
twenties, teens, or lower’.)[18] Even the impact of the Extinction
Rebellion (XR) protests, Greta Thunberg and the global wave of Friday school climate
strikes have so far been mainly cultural. XR has yet to achieve its goals of
getting the U.K. government to tell the truth about the climate and ecological emergency,
commit to reaching zero net carbon emissions by 2025, and set up a citizens
assembly to provide leadership on the issue. (While parliament has convened a citizens assembly on
climate, there is as yet no clear means by which its suggestions can be turned
into policy.) Nor have the school strikes translated into ‘real action’ from
governments, according to Thunberg, speaking in 2019. In effect they have ‘achieved
nothing’, she insists, greenhouse gas emissions actually rising 4% in four
years after the 2015 Paris accord was signed.[19] (Again, it’s going to be
interesting to observe how
much anything changes in this respect following Covid-19, given that pollution
levels in cities such as Bangkok, Beijing and Bogotá dropped dramatically thanks to the lack of traffic and closing
of industry and airports during lockdown. The election of Biden and his signing
of an executive order to pause and review all fossil fuel activity on public
land and offshore waters also seems to bring some hope.)
Don’t get me wrong:
the left has its memes. Witness the one-time popularity of the ‘Oh, Jeremy
Corbyn’ chant in the U.K., and the fact terms like ‘gammon’, ‘centrist dad’ and
‘bullshit jobs’ have now entered the language. The pink pussy hats, Handmaid’s
Tale-style cloaks and Un Violador en Tu Camino (A Rapist in Your Path) performance
piece adopted by various groups of feminist protestors around the world are
also worth mentioning in this context. Still, there’s arguably been no really
successful progressive equivalent of the kind of forceful play
found on ‘White Boy Internet’ platforms such as 4chan, 8chan and Reddit.[20] The left
has been conspicuously lacking in such politically effective ‘meme magic’. It seems significant that, as yet, neither
the #MeToo nor the Black Lives Matter
movements have led to considerable reforms of the law, for instance. By
contrast, Trump as president signed an executive order enabling protesters
who damage a public statue to be jailed.
Perhaps this is not
surprising. Generally speaking, the left is less concerned about the kind of extremes of emotion that drive the reactionary right,
and more about social justice, hospitality and mutual
aid. Because it’s starting point is the position that things need to change,
radically, it’s also harder for the left to convince large numbers of voters it
understands their existing values and beliefs, let alone shares them. Moreover societies
are so diverse, pluralistic and fragmented these days it’s far easier to
unite people nationally and internationally around what they are not than around what they are.[21]
The protests in Hong Kong, for instance, after
initially calling for the withdrawal of an extradition bill introduced by
China, were widened to a demand for democratic reform, and subsequently to push
back against the Chinese government’s introduction of a new national security
law during the pandemic. The demonstrations in Chile, however, started after an
increase in metro fares and subsequently took in a broad range of demands for
‘better pensions, education, health, a minimum wage; but also water rights and
action on environment degradation’.[22] Meanwhile,
those in Tunisia and Algeria were about price and tax rises; those in Beirut
about a tax on users of messaging apps such as WhatsApp; and those in Poland
about a patriarchal and religious state introducing a near-total ban on abortion.
In Barcelona the protests were different again: there they were about
independence for Catalonia from Spain. The
problem is, unless these different passions, and the heterogeneous demands and conflicts
they give rise to, have a legitimate democratic means of expressing themselves
– which is precisely what did not happen in the period of austerity, during
which many social groups felt ignored and ‘left behind’ by the city-dwelling, multi-cultural,
liberal elites – there is a danger that a ‘confrontation between essentialist
forms of identification or non-negotiable moral values’ will take their place,
with all the attendant negative consequences.[23]
The latter is what we have seen with
the rise of populist right-wing political figures and parties in many countries: not just Trump in the U.S. and Johnson
in the U.K., but Geert Wilders and Thierry Baudet and
the Forum for Democracy in the Netherlands, Marine Le Pen and the National Rally
in France, Beppe Grillo and the Five Star Movement in Italy, along with Matteo Salvini, former deputy prime minister
and leader of the far-right League there. Indeed, as Timothy Garton Ash notes, for
the first time in the 21st century ‘there are now fewer democracies
than there are non-democratic regimes’
when it
comes to those countries with populations of over a million.[24]
Radical right politicians also lead or have led three of the world’s four
largest democracies: the U.S., Brazil and India. They are at the head of two
members of the European Union: Poland and Hungary. The third largest parties in
a further two – Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany and Vox in Spain –
are also far right, with populist parties having entered government in almost twelve
European countries all told.
Each of these
contexts is of course different and needs to be analysed in its specificity. Authoritarian
nationalism is combined with neoliberalism in some more than others. Orbán, for example, used the coronavirus
breakout to assume ‘emergency’ powers that enable him to rule Hungary as an
autocrat by decree. Meanwhile it was perhaps only Trump’s inconsistent coupling
of authoritarianism with libertarianism that prevented his politics from descending
into fascism proper. We also need to remain alert to the difficulty those of us
who are European have with reading any political script other than the one with
which we have traditionally translated the world. It’s a trait that often leaves
us blind to the need for a new political language and ‘radical transformation
of the regime of knowledge’ when it comes to understanding ideas and events generated
outside the ‘global North’.[25]
(I’m placing this term in quotation marks as I’m aware it’s not without
problems.) Nevertheless, I want to take the risk of saying that something of a global
trend does seem to be at play here. For
these are all parties and politicians that by one means or another are placing
liberal democracy under threat, along with its values of truth, civil rights
and rule of law. Taken together, what this shows is that the 2019 election of
Boris Johnson in the U.K. cannot be attributed simply to the shortcomings of
Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party (e.g. the failure to deal with anti-Semitism,
to unite both the left and centre of the party, or to a form a collation with
the Lib Dems, Greens and SNP):
the phenomenon is larger and more international than that. Could we even go so
far as to suggest that, Trump’s narrow 2020 defeat notwithstanding, those on
the nativist right have been successful in utilising communication
technologies to transform the political landscape in recent years, ironically, by acting as many on the progressive left
say people should: that is by operating as cosmopolitan communities with the shared
goal of collectively redistributing knowledge and ideas in order to build
alliances and coalitions? (While there has not been just one form of nativist
response to Covid-19 anymore than there is just one form of populism, there was
nevertheless a period in 2020 when Trump, Salvini and Farage all seemed to be working
to deflect blame for the coronavirus pandemic onto the Chinese government.) It’s
certainly interesting that, almost in a reverse of the situation with New
Labour under Blair and the Conservatives under Cameron, many of these
governments are combining right-wing cultural polices with left-wing economic
ideas such as nationalisation and welfarism. This is true of Poland’s Law and
Justice party, and was increasingly the case with regard to the Johnson
government in the U.K., even before Sars-CoV-2 rendered (temporarily) uncontroversial
the kind of state interventionism, deficit spending and general veneration of welfare and the
public sector that would previously have been condemned as Marxist.
PART 2:
INFRARED
Fuck
Business As Usual
How
are those of us who are on the left to challenge this dominance by the populist
right? Can we employ communication technologies for more radical purposes that are attuned to today’s rapidly changing
political landscape?
As we’ve
seen, over the decades the left has found it difficult to devise
collective forms of identification that
are able to successfully counter the two main kinds of neoliberalism dominant in
much of the West: the global technocratic neoliberalism of Barak Obama, David Cameron,
Angela Merkel, Emmanuel
Macron and Joe Biden, which depends on a rule of law-based system of economic
governance; and the libertarian neoliberalism associated with Donald Trump and
Boris Johnson that wants to destroy much of this rules-based system, as
embodied by the E.U., NATO and WHO, in order to generate new, disruptive business
opportunities free from regulation out of the ensuing chaos and confusion. ‘Fuck
business’ here means fuck the existing business.[26]
Of late, however, there have been signs that a practical and relevant left
alternative, capable of capitalising on the possibilities created by the fourth
great transformation in media technologies to shift toward more direct forms of
democracy, may (just may) be beginning
to emerge. As reasons for optimism we can point to phenomena such as the grassroots upsurge against the political
establishment associated with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
in the U.S. and her use of social media, the rise of the platform cooperativism
movement,[27] and calls for the
monopolies of Google and Facebook to be broken up and for people and
communities to control their own data. The latter idea is being explored in
Barcelona by housing-activist-turned-city-major Ada Colau.[28]
Nor is Barcelona the only city interested in engaging its population in mass participatory
politics. Places as different as Porto Alegre in Brazil, Preston in the U.K.
and Reykjavik in Iceland are experimenting with forms of municipal socialism, many
aspects of which are made possible by online tools such as open consultation
forums for citizens.[29]
More recently still, there have been the self-organised collective responses to the coronavirus
epidemic, as I say. These have included a hackerthon
held in Germany in late March 2020 under the title #WirVsVirus (Us v. Virus).[30] 42,869 participants
collaborated remotely for 48 hours to come up with 800 different technological
innovations for combating the virus. Popular themes included: ‘How can we
organise neighbourhood assistance through helper platforms?’ (#58 projects); ‘How
can food be provided to all citizens?’ (#50 projects); and ‘How can we support
local businesses and protect them from insolvency?’ (#45 projects).[31]
It’s with this kind of emphasis on engaging
with postdigital technologies
for purposes grounded in principles of social responsibility, solidarity
and mutual care coupled
to the collective redistribution of knowledge and resources that
my collaborators and I align ourselves. And since a number of us are
theorists, as I say, one of the issues we’re interested in as part of this is reimagining
theory in the aftermath of the digital. In contrast to the worlds of music,
film, TV and even politics, it seems to us that the transition from analogue to
postdigital has really only just begun as far as many of the practices of the arts,
humanities and social sciences are concerned. In this respect, one of the questions we’re raising
with our work is: might exploring new modes of
authorship, ownership and reproduction that are more in tune with this fourth
great transformation
in communications technology have the potential to lead to non-neoliberal – but
also (and this is extremely important) non-liberal – ways of being and doing as
theorists? Ways that are more consistent
with the kind of progressive politics many radical theorists advocate, in their
writings on community, collectivity and the commons especially?
Over the last twenty years we’ve been involved in a number of bottom-up
projects for the production and sharing of free
resources, infrastructure and knowledge (objects). To briefly take my own
trajectory as an example: in 1999 Dave Boothroyd and I
launched Culture Machine, one of the first open access
journals of critical and cultural theory. In an attempt to avoid limiting the
geopolitics of our work to that of the global North, this journal has recently
been relaunched out of Mexico, under the editorship of Gabriela Méndez Cota and Rafico Ruiz, complete with a
redesign by the hackerspace El Rancho Electrónico.[32]
In 2008 Culture Machine became a founder-member of
Open Humanities Press (OHP).[33]
Directed by myself and two colleagues based in Australia, Sigi
Jöttkandt and David Ottina, this initiative involves multiple semi-autonomous,
self-organising groups around the world, all of them operating
in a non-rivalrous fashion to make works of contemporary theory
available on a non-profit, free/gratis open access basis using Creative Commons
licenses. Open Humanities Press currently has twenty-one
journals, forty plus books distributed across nine book
series, as well as experimental, libre texts such as those in its Liquid Books and Living Books
About Life series.
OHP
in turn became a founder member of the Radical Open Access Collective, a community of international
presses, journals and other projects formed after the 2015 Radical Open Access
conference.[34] Now consisting of over seventy
members, this collective seeks to build a progressive alternative ecosystem for
publishing in the humanities and social sciences, based on experimenting
with a diversity of non-profit, independent and scholar-led approaches.
Meanwhile, in the Centre for Postdigital Cultures (CPC) at
Coventry University, we’re working on reinventing knowledge infastructures, especially
those involved in the production and sharing of theory.[35]
Since its launch in 2018, the CPC has brought together many people involved in
such ‘aesthetic’ practices. They include myself and
Janneke Adema from OHP, and Samuel Moore who works with us as part of the
Radical Open Access Collective.
The
latest of these initiatives is the Community-led Open Publication
Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)
project, which emerged in 2019 out of a consortium of six open access presses
called ScholarLed.[36] An international partnership
involving universities and libraries as well as infrastructure and technology
providers, COPIM is designed to realign open access book publishing by moving it
away from the surveillance capitalism model of competing commercial service
providers. Its aim is to respond to the fact that companies such as Elsevier
and Springer are increasingly looking to monetize not just academic content,
but the ‘entire knowledge production workflow, from article submissions, to
metrics to reputation management and global rankings’ and the related data
extraction.[37]
COPIM represents an alternative, more horizontal and collaborative,
knowledge-sharing approach. Here the scholarly community collectively owns, manages
and governs infrastructures, systems and revenue streams for the common good in
such a fashion as to enable a
diversity of initiatives – including small, non-profit, independent
and scholar-led presses – to
become part of the publishing ecosystem.[38]
How to Be An Anti-Bourgeois Theorist
Hopefully, the activities I have described go some way
toward explaining how and why my collaborators and I are trying to operate
differently to the individualistic, liberal humanist ways of working
and acting traditionally associated with being a theorist in the fields of art
and culture, especially of the ‘star’ variety. There are a number of further dimensions to this mode
of practicing commons-oriented, anti-liberal, anti-neoliberal, anti-bourgeois
theory (ABT) we’re experimenting with. I don’t have space to go into any of the
related projects in depth. Besides, engaging with these ventures in their contextual
site-specificity is actually the most interesting way to understand and
experience them. But I would like to
quickly sketch a few here, albeit more in the spirit of an artist’s talk than a
full-blown philosophical argument.
ABT Is
Post-literary
In the era of YouTube, Instagram and Zoom, ‘Gutenbergian’ media technologies such as the
written and printed text are
no longer the natural or normative means by which knowledge is necessarily generated
and research communicated. Accordingly,
while my collaborators and I still publish conventional print books and journal
articles, our theory might not
take the form of a piece of writing at all. We are increasingly involved
in opening knowledge and
research up to being not just postdigital, but post-grammatological or
post-literary too.
We’re doing this by creating, publishing and sharing work in the
form of films, videos and virtual,
augmented and immersive media environments. Take Oliver Lerone Schultz et
al.’s collectively produced after.video.
Published by OHP in 2016, this is a collection of annotated digital video
essays that explore the future for theory after both books and video.[39] It
does so in two different instantiations: a freely available online version; and
an offline version produced as a distinct physical object in its own right:
namely, an assembly-on-demand video book stored on a Raspberry Pi computer and
packaged in a VHS (Video Home System) case. after.video
is therefore both an analogue and digital object manifested, in a scholarly
gesture, as a ‘video book’.
after.video also points
to another way in which my collaborators and I are endeavouring to open theory to
being post-grammatological: this is through the reinvention
of hardware, software and network infrastructures. Included in this reinvention
are facilities concerned with the production and circulation of research on a
radical open access basis: books and journals, for example, as with Open Humanities Press and
COPIM. But we are involved in cultural/artistic projects that operate at a larger scale, too, such as museums,
galleries and archives.
Let me provide an example of one such initiative that can be
copied and reproduced relatively easily (unlike after.video perhaps, which requires a certain amount of
technical know-how). Mandela27 is a website and digital platform created in 2014 by Jacqueline
Cawston and her partners for the Robben
Island Museum in South Africa.[40] Included in the project is
a hybrid physical/digital DIY Exhibition of the prison cell in which Mandela
was held for the majority of his 27 years on the island. The exhibition consists
of a few pieces of standard wood and plywood, arranged to form the exact dimensions
of the space, together with a bucket, blanket, bench, plate and cup – the items
the prisoners were allowed to have with them in their cells. The wood frame is
also used to hold ten specially designed posters addressing topics such as
colonialism and apartheid, along with a number of screens linked to the digital
platform and its content. The latter features an
interactive cultural map of Europe and South Africa, a 360-degree experience of the prison, images
from the UWC Robben Island Museum Archives, video
interviews with a former political prisoner and a prison guard, a crowd-sourced
timeline and a digital game
about life in Robben Island Prison. The original Mandela27 DIY Exhibition has toured
South Africa, the U.K. and Europe and has been visited by over 170,000 people.[41]
However, Cawston and her colleagues also put together a kit containing details
of how to construct the DIY Exhibition, and made it available on an open access
basis, along with the contents of the digital platform and the ten posters.[42]
Because the physical materials are extremely low cost (all that’s needed really
is some wood, a bucket and a blanket), this means any school or community can create
their own pop-up version of the Mandela27 DIY Exhibition easily and cheaply –
they don’t need to travel to a traditional bricks-and-mortar museum or art
gallery to experience it.
What
after.video and the Mandela27 DIY Exhibition both show is
that, as far as we are concerned, postdigital culture
does not necessarily come after the
digital in any simple temporal sense. Open access and the postdigital are not just
to be associated with online communication technologies and the ‘digital
commons’, for instance. It’s important that
they are understood as being potentially physical, offline and analogue – as
well as hybrid combinations thereof – too.
ABT
Is Low Key
Another
dimension of our anti-bourgeois
mode of theory is apparent from the way in which,
although my collaborators and I may identify (or be identified) as radical theorists,
we don’t always function as virtuoso individual authors. In
a period when the self-organizing, leaderless mobilizations of the gilets
jaunes (yellow vests) and Hong Kong
protesters have experimented with new
forms of subjectivity and social relations, isn’t the cult of the highly
individualistic ‘rock star’ theorist or philosopher coming to an end? Even if
it isn’t, shouldn’t it be – especially after Covid-19 has made a shared sense
of social responsibility, solidarity and collaboration within a common struggle not
so much a matter of political persuasion but of survival for many people? In keeping with this notion, we often
refuse to occupy centre stage, preferring to operate in a more low-key, at
times anonymous manner as part of collectives and communities of thinking and
doing, such as the Radical Open Access Collective and WeMake. The latter is a
makerspace fablab in Milan, with whom our fellow members of the Centre for
Postdigital Cultures at Coventry, Valeria Graziano and Maddalena
Fragnito, have
been investigating the relationship between open technologies and healthcare.[43]
ABT
Builds, Develops, Maintains and Repairs
In
fact, our activities as theorists frequently don’t involve authoring at
all. Along with affective labour such as supporting, encouraging
and inspiring, they can on occasion involve operating in
the background to build, develop, maintain and repair more
than actually author – as with the
work of another collaborator as system administrator for the file-sharing
shadow libraries Aaaaarg and UbuWeb.[44] This
is because we see theory not
just as a means of imagining our ways of being in the world differently. It is a
means of enacting them differently
too.
(Staying in the shadows can of course also serve as a ‘defence
mechanism’ that enables a given project to ‘thrive and prevents its
destruction’, as the design collective Kaspar Hauser write of these and other
digital libraries such as Monoskop and Library Genesis.[45])
ABT
Is Performative and Pre-figurative
Many
of our projects are similarly performative,
in the sense they’re concerned not only
with representing the world, but also with intra-acting
with it in order to make things happen. Some have referred to this kind of approach
as hacking the situation or context.[46]
However, our theory-performances can also be understood in terms of the
pre-figurative practices Graziano has written about: of ‘being the change we
want to see’.[47]
As
I say, this often involves us in experimenting with the form of scholarly
communications in the shape of books and journals, and also lectures, seminars,
conferences, even the very gestures of reading and writing.[48]
When Clare Birchall, Joanna Zylinska and I wanted to explore the theory of books being liquid and
living, for instance (rather than finished and frozen or dead), we didn’t just
write about it. We actually made some liquid and living books that could be
continually rewritten and republished: two series’ worth, in fact.[49]
Janneke Adema and I took a similar intra-active approach to editing ‘Disrupting
the Humanities: Towards Posthumanities’, a 2016 issue of the Journal
of Electronic Publishing (JEP). [50]
What we wanted to do there was take on, as theorists, some of the implications
of the idea that a presentation isn’t simply a re-presentation of the written,
text-on-paper argument delivered by the author. It’s rather a relational and
processual meshwork of presenter, event organizers, facilitators and audience, along
with the associated cultural practices, technologies, institutions, buildings, materials,
tools, infrastructure and so on, all of which contribute to the presentation in its becoming. So we produced an
edition of JEP consisting of a selection of video-presentations/articles cum theory-performances.
Heavily annotated using the InterLace
open source software program developed by Robert Ochshorn, these were designed
to break down the divisions between the research and presentation, as well as between
the ‘real time’ and online or ‘virtual’ audience.
Other
projects we are engaged in concentrate on pre-figuratively reinventing the museum,
gallery, archive, library or university in
a postdigital context.[51]
Public Library: Memory of the World, for
example, launched by Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak in 2012, is an ‘artist-run’ online shadow or pirate library that
currently contains more than 150,000 titles that it makes sure remain widely
accessible without charge and without any other restrictions, including those
associated with copyright law.[52]
It consists of a network of private libraries that, although independent and
maintained locally by a community of ‘amateur librarians’, are connected with the project’s server through the ‘let’s
share books’ software
developed by Mars. The software
allows people to search all the collections in Memory of the World, discover a title they want and import it directly to their own virtual library
that, like the others, is organized using a version of the Calibre open source software for managing
digital books.
ABT Is Concerned with Infrastructure
Memory of the World, the Mandela27 DIY Exhibition and
COPIM are all also examples of our development of radically open and inclusive knowledge
infrastructures in support of commoning. Infrastructure is particularly important
to us in this respect because, as Leslie Chan emphasizes, it concerns the power
(otherwise hidden) to: set agendas and decisions – which are
never neutral but embedded with ideological assumptions and biases; mobilize
and accumulate resources; set standards and norms; set boundaries of
participation; discriminate – or not, hopefully; and control what gets built,
what’s possible.[53]
Given
the controversial nature of Memory of the
World, it’s perhaps helpful to say a little more about why, as
anti-bourgeois theorists, we’re interested in something like piracy (although Memory of the World can also be understood as a material
enactment of the Guerrilla Open Access
Manifesto attributed to internet hacktivist Aaron Swartz). Quite simply
it’s because one thing even the left finds it hard to question these days is the
idea of private property. Yet it’s private property that helps to construct and
shape our subjectivities as both possessive individuals and members of the
bourgeoisie. So-called piracy thus provides my collaborators and I with one
starting point from which to develop an affirmative critique of private property
and bourgeois subjectivity that is designed to help us be more consistent with the kind of radical
politics many theorists espouse (but don’t necessarily perform themselves) when
writing about the commons.[54]
Having said that, Memory of the World, like a number of
our other projects, does not, as Sollfrank points out, itself constitute a
‘commons in the strict sense of involving not only a non-market exchange of
goods but also a community of commoners who negotiate the terms of use among
themselves’ as equals in a voluntary, unforced, non-hierarchical fashion. That,
in her words, ‘would require collective, formalized, and transparent types of
organization’. It would also, I might add, require governance, including the
establishment of rules for resolving conflicts between individuals, the community
and society at large, and the agreeing of sanctions for those commoners who do
not comply. Moreover, most of the books that are made publicly accessible by Memory of the World are ‘privately owned
and therefore cannot simply be transferred to become commons resources.’ As Sollfrank
suggests, such projects are perhaps best understood instead as a ‘preliminary
stage’ in which commoning is
performed in an emergent, participative manner. They are moving us toward
a horizon of ‘culture as a commons’,
while at the same time providing the kind of ‘experimental zone needed to
unlearn copyright and relearn new ways of cultural production and dissemination
beyond the property regime.’[55]
Certainly, one of the shared aims of our pre-figurative projects
is to disarticulate the existing playing field and its manufactured common
sense of what it means today to be a theorist, a philosopher, an academic, an
artist or a political activist. They seek to foster instead a variety of
antagonistic spaces both inside and outside of states and capital – spaces
that contribute to the development of institutions and environments that are
able to counter the hegemony of the traditional,
liberal, public institutions such as the university on the one hand, and
private, for-profit companies such as Elsevier, LinkedIn and Academia.edu on
the other. This is the reason for our interest in the commons and commoning. Creating
commons is one way we have chosen to describe our work producing, managing and
maintaining such alternative, emergent spaces that are neither simply liberal
nor neoliberal, public nor private.
The fact of the matter is, ‘coming prior to
adequate legislation, we currently lack even a vocabulary to talk about’ the
commons in this sense, as the philosopher Roberto Esposito acknowledges. ‘It is
something largely unknown, and even refractory, to our conceptual categories’. (And
that includes communism, I would add.) Nevertheless, as Esposito insists, the
struggle for an alternative ‘must start precisely by breaking the vise grip
between public and private … by seeking instead to expand the space of the
common’.[56]
The
coronavirus event, with the huge systemic shock and suspension of business as usual it has delivered, provides us with a significant
strategic opportunity to do just this, if only we can take it. After all,
Covid-19 has made it clear that, as the climate emergency develops and we
continue to face health crises and other disasters, neither (globalist nor
libertarian) neoliberalism nor an highly individualistic liberal humanism is
going to be fit for purpose. Now more than ever it is important to experiment
with ways of working, acting and thinking that are different to both. For us, this is precisely what an (symbolic/functional)
entity such as the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, or indeed a
university, is for. One of
the purposes of a university is to
create a space where society’s common sense ideas can be examined and
interrogated, and to act as a testing ground for the development of new
knowledges, new subjectivities, new practices and new social relations of
the kind we are going to need post-pandemic, but which are often hard –
although not impossible – to explore elsewhere.
We’re
Not Necessarily Going Back To Arguing From Evidence Anytime Soon, Deal With It
I want to make two points that I realise some
may find counter-intuitive. For all my emphasis on enactment, pre-figuration
and the performance of theory, I would not like the commons-oriented initiatives
my collaborators and I are involved with to be positioned in terms of concrete,
material practices as distinct from,
say, immaterial theory. In
articulations like this it’s often forgotten that the practices that produce
theory are always already concrete,
while the theory that privileges the concrete and the material is often very
weak.[57]
Although I can understand the temptation to
do so, we should also take care when it comes to understanding such enterprises as ‘aesthetic practices’,
no matter how much they may occupy the intersection between the commons and art,
and for all art is another field with the potential to create such a space
where new realities can tested and constructed. To be sure, we need to interrogate
the manner in which art and culture in the twentieth century became, as
intellectual historian François Cusset puts
it, ‘on the one hand, the most thriving industry of the new capitalism, if
not its laboratory of ideas; and, on the other, a collection of devices and
situations that were mostly disconnected from the social and political field, a
kind of refuge cut off from the exterior world’.[58]
Research commissioned by the Art Fund in 2018, for instance, shows that one of
the main reasons those in Britain under thirty years of age give for visiting an art gallery or
museum is ‘specifically to “de-stress”’.[59] But this should only encourage us to ask: even if our commons-supporting projects can
be perceived as expanding conceptions
of aesthetics, so the two discourses (i.e. the commons and aesthetics) come
into close contact and can potentially create something new, might there
still be something conservative about interpreting the likes of after.video and Memory of the World primarily in artistic terms? Isn’t there a
danger in doing so of going along too much with the belief that the right is
interested in politics and power, while what the left cares about is art and
(self-)expression?
Nor is this an issue that can be resolved by ‘challenging established notions of contemporary
aesthetic practice’ through the adoption of the kind of ‘truth
and evidence’ approach that has been proposed as a means for artists to resist post-truth
politics.[60]
Media artist and activist David Garcia offers as an example the ‘Evidentiary Realism’
of Lawrence Abu Hansen, Trevor Paglen, Lev Manovich and !Mediengruppe Bitnik.[61]
The ‘gold standard’ of Evidentiary Realism as far as Garcia is concerned,
however, are the investigations into cases of state violence and human rights
violations conducted by the Forensic Architecture art and knowledge research group
at Goldsmiths, University of London. Yet when it comes to engaging with postdigital
political issues such a pro-evidence, pro-data stance is not without difficulties
of its own.
In response to a question as to whether
‘identifying their outputs as art might... “take the edge off the truth he is trying to show”’, Garcia
quotes Eyal Weizman, leader of Forensic Architecture, countering as follows:
Think
about it. When the
most important piece of evidence coming from battle fields world wide are video
graphic. You need video makers to make sense of it… And to understand how one piece of video
might relate to another. Indeed aesthetic sensibilities. The sensibilities of
an architect an artist or a film maker are very useful in figuring out what has
taken place.[62]
Weizman is surely missing the point here,
though. The problem is not whether Forensic Architecture needs to include
aesthetic sensibilities in their truth-seeking investigations – and let’s not
forget their public art installations and exhibitions they put together using
charts, diagrams, infographics, models, audio-visual installations, digital
imaging and so on, which are arguably what they are best known for nowadays.
The problem is that in positioning what they do in terms of art and aesthetics,
Forensic Architecture get all the advantages that accrue from that, in terms of
being nominated for the 2018 Turner Prize and so on. However, they get the
disadvantages too. Not least among the latter is that Forensic Architecture’s projects
are indeed vulnerable to being considered just
art. Nowhere is this danger more apparent than in the main example Garcia gives
of ‘the role Evidentiary Realism can
play in countering politically motivated obfuscation’:
Forensic Architecture’s report to the parliamentary commission investigating
the role of a state intelligence agent in the 2006 murder of Halit Yozgat in an
internet café in Kassel, Germany. The day before they were due to submit this
report Germany’s Christian Democratic Party (CDU) published a counter-report.
The aim was to ‘de-legitimize’ Forensic Architecture’s findings on the grounds
it was the ‘work of artists’ and, accordingly, ‘should not be taken seriously
as evidence’. And, to be sure, the
risk of de-legitimation is very real for aesthetic practices and sensibilities, no matter how much they may show truth to power, nor how reflexive their
relationship may be to the complex systems we inhabit. This is one of
the reasons the projects of my collaborators and I constitute a plurality of
forms of intervention that are responding to particular issues across a number
of different sites: forms of intervention associated not just with aesthetics and with the practices of artists, or even
theorists, but also (where appropriate) with those working in the fields of activism,
education, business, politics, technology or the media.
A further concern with Evidentiary Realism’s pro-data approach relates to the way in which the
liberal establishment has found the politics of figures such as Trump and
Johnson difficult to deal with on the basis of the agreed facts. Now there is a
perfectly good explanation for this difficulty: it’s because these right-wing
populists are not actually operating
on the level of consistent, reasoned argument. Consider Trump’s description of first
the climate crisis and then the coronavirus as a ‘hoax’ – hardly an
evidence-based response to the science and data on his part. (Bolsonaro likewise accused large parts of the media of ‘tricking’
the people over the dangers of the coronavirus, which he likened to a ‘little
flu’.) Nevertheless, it’s a challenge to knowing – what, borrowing a phrase
from the Rand Corporation, Barak Obama has referred to as ‘truth decay’ – that a
lot of commentators still find hard to accept.[63]
Instead, they continue to insist that the anti-liberal right can be contested
on a truth-seeking level. Witness the spectacle of Alan Rusbridger, ex-editor-in-chief of The Guardian, arguing that the
way to counter Johnson’s evasions and lies is with good, responsible, ‘independent and
decently crafted’ journalism, in which the ‘lines between truth and falsehood;
facts and propaganda; openness and stealth; accountability and impunity;
clarity and confusion; news and opinion’ are retained rather than blurred.[64]
Similarly, many scientists and journalists resort to evidenced-based
information and facts to counter false rumours and conspiracy theories: that 5G networks lower people’s immune system to
Covid-19, for
example, a false claim that led
to numerous mobile phone masts being set on fire in the U.K. and elsewhere.[65]
Yet as we’ve seen with anti-vaxxers and climate-breakdown deniers, such an approach has repeatedly been found to be
futile, counterproductive even, in that it often only succeeds in eroding social
trust further.[66]
The trouble is, the roots of the current crisis in both epistemology
and democracy lie much earlier than the rise to power of the likes of Trump and
Johnson: they stretch back, through the failure of the political class to hold
those responsible for the financial crisis of 2008 to account, at least as far
as the refusal to heed the 2003 protests against the invasion of Iraq. Both events
left large numbers of people feeling they could no longer rely on professional
politicians, the liberal establishment (to which Rusbridger, now head of an Oxbridge college, is a
fully paid up member), or the institutions of state to arrive at the correct decisions
based on the evidence – as opposed to, say, dodgy dossiers about weapons of
mass destruction being ‘ready within 45 minutes of the order to use them’.
It is this collapse of confidence in the
processes of representative democracy and
its valuing of truth and justice that the nativist right have capitalised on. They have thus been quite prepared
to undermine any attempts to question their authority that privilege facts over
opinion. This includes those that have come from the direction of good journalism – or indeed science, the
media, academia and the judiciary. One way populists and their supporters have
done so is by dismissing such challenges as hailing from the very partisan, city-dwelling
liberal elite they denounce as being the ‘enemy of the people’; a people for
whom they of course are speaking. Another is to undermine the veracity of the
challenge by producing ‘alternative facts’. As late as February 26, 2020 Trump
was publicly claiming the total number of Covid-19 cases in the U.S. would be
‘close to zero’. ‘On February 28, Trump
said that coronavirus will “disappear” like a “miracle”.’[67]
He then predicted that the forthcoming spring weather would kill
it off and prevent its spread. Together with the disbanding in 2018 of the
National Security Council pandemic unit established by Obama – and indeed a
deeply rooted antipathy toward both government intervention and systems of
public health, welfare and infrastructure that is quite characteristic of the
radical right – it’s an attitude that led to an astonishing sluggishness to
mobilise against Covid-19 on the part of the Trump administration. (Some have gone
so far as to call it inept, incompetent and downright dangerous.) ‘I think the 3.4%’, the World Health
Organization’s calculated death rate for those with Covid-19, ‘is really a
false number’, Trump told Fox News in March 2020. ‘Now, this is just my hunch’,
he said,
privileging his own guesswork over the expert
research of the medical and public health professionals. ‘I think that that
number is very high… personally, I would say the number is way under 1%’. To be
sure, it’s effectiveness with regard to the coronavirus outbreak is highly questionable,
to say the least. Witness the reaction to Trump’s April 23 suggestion that
injecting disinfectant could kill it, or his May 18 revelation that he was
taking the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine as
a preventive. Indeed, for some, the November 2020 presidential election revealed
the coronavirus to have been one opponent that Trump could not defeat by tweet.
Nevertheless, the general strategy behind producing alternative facts is
not so much to offer a counter-truth or even disinformation. It’s rather to
spread confusion in order to convey the overall message that no truth can be
believed. (That Trump subsequently claimed he knew about the threat posed by
the virus very early on but deliberately lied about it to prevent creating
panic among the American people only added to the confusion. Even when Trump
tested positive for Covid-19 in October 2020, the statements given out by the
White House about his health were conflicting and contradictory. The threats
and lawsuits about the election having been stolen issued by Trump after he
lost to Biden and his failure to concede had a similar effect.) In the words of
Hannah Arendt: ‘If everybody always
lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that
nobody believes anything any longer’.[68]
Or as journalist Kai Strittmatter put it recently with regard to authoritarian
leaders in both China and the West: ‘If
you’re a liar and a cheat, there’s no way for you to win in a world that is
repelled by these things, a world that differentiates between truth and lies.’ What
you need to do is ‘make everyone else a liar and a cheat, too. Then you will at
least be their liar.’[69]
(So strongly did Trump’s supporters feel this to be the case some of them stormed
the U.S. Capitol building in a bid to prevent Biden’s election victory from
being certified. It was an act of political violence that Trump
characteristically both encouraged and
condemned.)
Dissembling like this and getting away with
it has the further advantage of making such authoritarian figures look strong,
confirming their dominance and status. They lie and cheat and break the law because
they know they can. The rules apply to everyone else – they don’t apply to
them. Only little people are held responsible for the consequences of their
actions. The appeal of such calculated displays of transgression explains why
Trump was able to continue in his role as president, despite having made what
the Washington Post calculated to be 19,127 false
or misleading claims in his first 1,226 days in office;[70]
and how he got 70 million votes in
2020 regardless. That’s almost half of all those cast. It also explains why the attempt to counter
Johnson’s constant fabrications during the 2019 election campaign with endless
fact checking did little to prevent his ultimate victory. Indeed, it can be
argued that the reason many people vote for such populist politicians is not
because they actually believe their lies, or because they are necessarily right-wing
nativists. It’s because they know doing so is the best way to get back at a
cosmopolitan liberal establishment that has ignored them for so long.[71] It
thus remains to be seen whether over the longer
term it’s the libertarian neoliberalism of Trump and Johnson that turns out to
have been the blip, or the return to the global neoliberal orthodoxy represented
by Biden and Starmer (as compared to Corbyn).
Having said all that, none of this is an
either/or (more of a Deleuze-and-Guattarian ‘“and… and… and”’).[72]
Anti-fake digital literacy initiatives, such as that set up in Finland to teach
people ‘how to counter false
information designed to sow division’ by recognising and adopting a critical attitude
to fake news, are incredibly valuable. (A study of thirty-five countries has
ranked the population of Finland as the most resistant to anti-knowledge politics).[73]
This is especially the case in a time and space of contagion when rumours
are rife (e.g. that Sars-CoV-2 was engineered in a lab by Bill Gates so he
could profit from a vaccine, or by the Chinese government as a bioweapon). Also important are the projects and
investigations of Forensic Architecture and others associated with the
Evidentiary Realism movement in art. I’m thinking in particular of the former’s
reconstruction of the events of August 1, 2014, when Israel launched 2,000
bombs, rockets and shells against the Palestinian city of Rafah. Forensic
Architecture’s investigation contributed to a subsequent change in policy on
the part of the Israeli government and military: namely, the withdrawal of the
‘Hannibal Directive’, whereby the Israeli army was authorized to kill any of
its soldiers taken prisoner ‘with maximum available firepower’, rather than risk them being used as hostages.[74]
Still, the above concerns go some way toward articulating why, in the present postdigital conjuncture, many of my collaborators and I have
taken the decision not to focus on resisting the hyper-emotionalism of post-truth
politics by opposing it with
empirically-based evidence presented aesthetically. When it comes to our anti-bourgeois
theory-performances, we are more interested
in tapping into some of the left’s own affective-emotional themes and
tropes – encapsulated by words such as ‘commons’, ‘community’, and ‘collective’
– in order to help create specific institutional and infrastructural projects
that are capable of acting as a political force.
This involvement on
our part with actuating some of those ‘left’ affective forces that motivate
people to become part of a group and form the basis of collective forms of
identification, is also why
I wouldn’t want any of what I’ve
said to be taken as somehow shifting the focus from an emphasis on community to
an emphasis on the provision of shared knowledge objects and resources. The majority of the
resources I’ve pointed to are created and maintained by communities working
collectively. In fact, I’d argue these communities are among the most import
‘resources’ we produce. One of the motivations behind our production of free, radical open access or ‘pirate’ resources
and infrastructures is to encourage other initiatives and movements
around the world by showing what can be achieved – how things might look if the
transformed habits of being and doing I’m talking about were accepted. Another
is to make it possible for chains of equivalence to be established between our projects and a diversity
of other struggles locally, nationally and internationally. In addition to those
I drew attention to earlier (platform cooperativism, municipal
socialism etc.), these struggles include those for a four-day working week, Green New
Deal, Unconditional Basic Income and Flatpack Democracy.[75] There
are also those featured in our Pirate Care project, the last of our initiatives
I’m going to mention.
We use the term ‘pirate care’ to refer to two processes that
are particularly prevalent today. First, to the way in which basic requirements
for care of a kind that were once regarded as essential to society – such as public
libraries, which in the U.S. are now not allowed to buy digital books[76]
– have been driven towards illegality thanks to the commercialisation of social
services. Second, we use pirate care to refer to those ‘technologically-enabled
care networks’ that have sprung up ‘in opposition to this drive toward illegality’
around a range of issues, from housing and healthcare provision to
education and income support. [77]
Some of these networks deliberately run the risk of being considered unlawful. To
confine myself to those that took part in our 2019 Pirate Care conference, I
can mention in this context: SeaWatch, which tries to save as many people as
possible from drowning in the Mediterranean in defiance of European border
policy which criminalizes both migrants and rescuers;[78]
Planka.nu, a group of organizations in Sweden that pays the fines of any of its
members caught ‘fare-dodging’ as a means of advocating for free public
transport for all;[79]
and the Docs Not Cops campaign group of healthcare workers in the U.K., who refuse
to enforce immigration checks and charges on patients.[80]
Other such ‘pirate’ networks have decided to operate in the ‘narrow grey zones’
of ambiguity ‘left open between different technologies, institutions and laws’ in
order to expound care as a collective political practice:
For instance, in Greece, where the
bureaucratic measures imposed by the Troika decimated public services, a
growing number of grassroots clinics set up by the Solidarity Movement have
responded by providing medical attention to those without a private insurance.
In Italy, groups of parents without recourse to public childcare are organizing
their own pirate kindergartens (Soprasotto), reviving a feminist tradition
first experimented with in the 1970s. In Spain, the feminist collective
GynePunk developed a biolab toolkit for emergency gynecological care, to allow
all those excluded from the reproductive medical services – such as trans or
queer women, drug users and sex workers – to perform basic checks on their own
bodily fluids.[81]
Part of the idea behind the pirate care project is to offer these practices ‘some degree of protection by means of visibility’.[82]
It’s Not a Bug, It’s a
Feature
I would like to end by bringing us back once again to the commons.
Notwithstanding our endeavours to establish chains of equivalence between our anti-bourgeois
theory-performances and a diversity of other struggles, it’s important for this network of
networks to remain multi-polar, antagonistic
and, to a certain extent, messy. ‘More often than not, the commons is allegorized as a
mythical ideal governed by principles of sharing, access and collaboration that
was lost after the first enclosure movement’, intellectual property expert Lawrence
Liang writes regarding the ‘metaphor of the modern commons’ and the danger it
is held to face from the ‘limitless expansion of intellectual property’. A
warning is then issued ‘against a similar enclosure movement in the realm of
information ecology that threatens to privatize every aspect of information,
thereby threatening creativity’.[83] Yet contrary to
the impression that is given in a lot of work on the commons, achieving some
kind of mythical unity, harmony or ‘oneness’
– a Kantian perpetual peace, as it were – is not what creating commons is actually
about, regardless of whether its the natural, social, civil, cultural, knowledge
or intellectual commons that’s being referred to. There is no common
understanding of the commons. The open access, Creative Commons, free software,
open source, copyfarleft and anti-copyright pro-piracy movements all have very different
and conflicting conceptions of the commons.[84]
That said, we have learnt from political
theorist Chantal Mouffe that the making of a decision in such an undecidable
terrain – the refusal, in this case, to take the commons as a given and decide what it is in advance of
intellectual questioning – is actually what politics is. Just as Facebook has
data points that it uses to target ads at its users, so the left has data or
datum points of its own; and often these givens
take the form of the very affective-emotional fantasies
and desires that constitute the basis of collective forms
of left identification.[85] Does saying the kind of words
that underpin most accounts of the commons – democracy, human, freedom, sharing,
caring, cooperation – not
produce something of a dopamine rush in us?
My
collaborators and I are aware challenging petrified positions around community,
collectivity and the commons (and also around our ideas of writing, the book,
the author, the seminar, university, library, museum, art gallery, copyright,
private property and so on) is difficult. The tendency is to lapse back
into what seems self-evident, taken-for-granted, common sense – for all one may
be aware doing so maintains the bourgeois, liberal humanist status quo, as Gramsci
makes clear. Retaining a
degree of plurality, multi-polarity and antagonism is therefore important. Such
diversality ensures no single project, platform or conception of the commons
becomes the one to rule them all. At
the same time, it provides affective drives and resentments with a means of
expressing themselves that helps avoid the kind of conflict between
essentialist, non-negotiable identities and values that, as we’ve seen, has led
to the rise of the populist right in so many countries around the world. This
is why it is crucial to keep the question of how to create non-proprietary shared spaces and resources, along
with the collective social processes that are necessary to manage and maintain
them, radically open. Doing
so enables the collaborative means of creating commons we're engaged in to remain
political, now and in the future.
An
earlier and shorter version of ‘Postdigital Politics’ was published in Cornelia
Sollfrank, Shuhsa Niederberger and Felix Stalder, eds, Aesthetics of the
Commons (Zurich: DIAPHANES): https://www.diaphanes.com/titel/aesthetics-of-the-commons-6419
[1] David Bollier,
for example, was doing so as early as March 26, 2020. For him, such actions can
be understood as commoning rather than ‘”volunteering”’ because they are ‘more
deeply committed and collective in character than individual “do-gooding””
(David Bollier, ‘Commoning as a Pandemic
Survival Strategy’, David Bollier: News
and Perspectives on the Commons, March 26, 2020: http://www.bollier.org/blog/commoning-pandemic-survival-strategy.
Similarly, by June 2020 Marina Sitrin and Colectiva Sembrar had already
published their edited collection, Pandemic
Solidarity: Mutual Aid During the Covid-19 Crisis (London: Pluto, 2020).
[2] For more
details, see ‘Flatten the Curve, Build the Care’: http://syllabus.pirate.care/topic/coronanotes/. This
is part of the Pirate.Care.Syllabus collective response to the coronavirus
crisis offered by my colleagues Valeria Graziano, Tomislav Medak, Marcell Mars,
Maddalena Fragnito and others: https://syllabus.pirate.care. I will come back
to say more about Pirate Care below.
At the same time we need to remember there were also
displays of racism against South East Asian people during this period, along
with sporadic instances of looting, violence and theft. And that’s without
mentioning the extensive use of the #covidiot hastag to publicly ‘corona-shame’
those not adhering to the advice about social distancing.
[3] This definition of the commons is
derived from the Creating Commons research project, run by Cornelia
Sollfrank, Shuhsa Niederberger and Felix Stalder. Launched in January 2017,
Creating Commons is based at Zurich University of the Arts: http://creatingcommons.zhdk.ch.
For more on the concept of
the commons as used in the context of this research project, see Felix Stalder, ‘The Notion
of the “Commons”’, Creating Commons, July
17, 2017: http://creatingcommons.zhdk.ch/the-notion-of-the-commons/.
[4] In ‘Learning From Shadow Libraries’, her
keynote talk at the launch of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry
University on February 7, 2018, Corneila Sollfrank provided
the following list
of radical theorists of the
commons: Isabelle
Lorey, Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, Paolo Virno, Isabell Stengers, Donna
Haraway, Judith Butler, Roberto Esposito, Maurice Blanchot, Giorgio Agamben,
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as well as Fred
Moten and Stefano Harney. To Sollfrank’s list I would add, at the very least,
the names of David Bollier, Massimo De Angelis, and Pierre Dardot and Christian
Laval.
If the
liberal approach focuses on the normative frameworks and principles of
governance and self-organisation that best allow a shared pool of spaces and
resources to be managed and maintained as a specific property regime, radical
theory is less concerned with associating the commons with things – land, sea,
water, air, music files, digital books, software, code – and more with the social relations of
commoning; with constructing the commons on the basis of shared political
activities, practices and principles. For a recent account of the differences between
liberal philosophy and radical theory when it comes to the commons, see Marek Korczysnki
and Andreas Wittel, ‘The Workplace Commons: Towards Understanding Commoning
Within Work Relations’, Sociology
1-6, 2020.
[5] Duncan Bell is just one of many
political theorists to have developed an argument to this effect. In ‘What is
Liberalism?’, a history of how liberalism has been variously understood as a
category
of
political analysis, he insists: “‘Thomas Nagel is surely right to
proclaim that “… most political argument in the Western world now goes on
between different branches of [the liberal] tradition.” … Most inhabitants of
the West are now conscripts of liberalism: the scope of the tradition has
expanded to encompass the vast majority of political positions regarded as
legitimate … and most who identify themselves as socialists, conservatives,
social democrats, republicans, greens, feminists, and anarchists have been
ideologically incorporated, whether they like it or not’ (Duncan Bell, ‘What is Liberalism?’, Political Theory, Vol. 42(6),
2014: 689; citing Thomas
Nagel, ‘Rawls and Liberalism’, The
Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: CUP, 2003) 62).
[6] I developed the concept of
anti-bourgeois theory, in part, through a critical (in the Foucauldian sense)
engagement with a text by the theorist McKenzie
Wark called ‘On the Obsolescence of the Bourgeois Novel in the Anthropocene’, Verso (blog),
August 16, 2017: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3356-on-the-obsolescence-of-the-bourgeois-novel-in-the-anthropocene). Wark’s text was published on the blog of Verso Books
as an addition to the collection of critical appreciations she provides in General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers For
The Twenty-First Century (London:
Verso, 2017). For more, see my 'Anti-Bourgeois Theory', Media Theory, Vol.3, No.2, December, 2019:
http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/91.
[7] bell hooks,
‘Postmodern Blackness’, Postmodern
Culture, Vol. 1 No. 1 (September, 1990).
[8] Gary Hall, The Uberfication of the University (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
[9] See Darren Loucaides, ‘Where Farage Learned His Digital Tricks’,
The Guardian, May 21, 2019.
[10] Maik Fielitz and Nick
Thurston, Post-digital Cultures of the
Far Right: Online Actions and Offline Consequences in Europe and the US (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2018).
[11] In the U.K,
Minister for the Cabinet Office Michael Gove has in fact been quoting Gramsci
in his speeches for some time. See, for one recent example, ‘The Privilege of Public Service’ given as
the Ditchley Annual Lecture, July 1, 2020: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/the-privilege-of-public-service-given-as-the-ditchley-annual-lecture.
Gove begins this lecture with the following quote from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks: ‘The crisis consists
precisely of the fact that the inherited is dying – and the new cannot be born;
in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’
[12] Of course some
populist authoritarians don’t have this problem: both Viktor Orbán in Hungary
and Jarosław Kaczyński and Mateusz Morawiecki in Poland having more
or less gained control over their nation’s media.
[13] How significant is it as far as its understanding of
postdigital communications is concerned that the Boris Johnson government is
lead by journalists? Johnson famously wrote for the Telegraph, Gove for the Times.
[14] For more in this context, see
Chantal Mouffe, For A Left Populism (London: Verso, 2019).
[15] Luke
Winkie, ‘I Was a Teenage 4chan Troll – Until I Learned to Change My Ways’, Daily
Dot, August 26, 2015:
https://www.dailydot.com/via/4chan-troll-white-boy-internet-sexism/.
[16] An early version of ‘Postdigital
Politics’ was presented as part of the Creating
Commons: Affects, Collectives, Aesthetics panel at the Transmediale Festival,
Berlin, February 1, 2019. This panel was hosted and organised by Sollfrank and
Stalder on behalf of the Creating Commons @Zurick ZHdK research project.
[17] Matthijis Rooduijn, Stijn
van Kessel, Caterina Froio, Andrea Pirro, Sarah de Lange, Daphne Halikiopoulou, Paul Lewis, Cas Mudde & Paul
Taggart, The PopuList 2.0: An Overview of Populist, Far Right, Far Left and
Eurosceptic Parties in Europe (2020): www.popu-list.org.
[18] Giacomo
Benedetto, Simon Hix and Nicola Mastrorocco, ‘The Rise and Fall of Social
Democracy, 1918-2017’, American Political Science Review, 2020: 1-12, 2.
[19] Greta Thunberg,
speaking at the UN climate change talks, Madrid, December 6, 2019; see ‘Irresistible Greta Thunberg Meets Immovable
UN Climate Talks’, Climate Home News,
December 7, 2019: https://www.climatechangenews.com/2019/12/07/irresistible-thunberg-meets-immovable-un-climate-talks/.
[20] Luke
Winkie, ‘I Was a Teenage 4chan Troll’.
[21] In
How To Be An Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century, Erik Olin Wright explains that
‘this is why the names for social protest movements so often have the prefix
“anti.” Antiwar mobilizations oppose a war. Anti-austerity protests oppose
budgets cuts. Antiglobalization protests oppose the neoliberal policies of
global capitalist integration with rules favorable to multinational
corporations and global finance. And even when a movement is named by its
positive aspirations – the civil rights movement, the environmental movement,
the women’s movement – the demands are often frames primarily as the end to
something: the end to Jim Crow laws; the end to housing discrimination; the end
to racial profiling by the police; the end to fracking; the end to gender
discrimination in employment; the end to restrictions on marriage for
homosexual couples’ (Erik Olin Wright, How
To Be An Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century, (London: Verso,
2019) 65).
That
it’s easier to be anti and unite
people around what they are not than be
affirmative and unite people around what they are also helps explain why the populist right have been so good at
campaigning to win power, but (with the exception of Orbán
and Kaczyński) so bad at governing once
they have actually achieved it. Instead, they have preferred to operate as if
they are still in campaign mode. That it’s not easy to govern if you’re anti-
most of the established elements of government that might prevent you from
doing exactly what you want – the civil
service, judiciary, the legal system and so forth – doesn’t help.
[22] Maisa Rojas,
‘The Climate Crisis Plus Inequality is a Recipe for Chaos’, The Guardian:
Opinion, December 9, 2019.
[23] Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Verso, 2005) 30.
[24] Timothy Garton
Ash, ‘The Future of Liberalism’, Prospect,
Winter Special, 2020, 19.
[25] Hamid Dabashi, Can Non-Europeans Think? (London: Zed Books, 2015) 21. My thanks to
Priya Rajasekar for
pointing me in the direction of Dabashi’s book.
[26] ‘Fuck business’ was an aside made by Boris
Johnson at a 2018 private reception. See Robert Shrimsley, ‘Boris Johnson’s
Brexit Explosion Ruins Tory Business Credentials’, Financial Times, June 25, 2018: https://www.ft.com/content/8075e68c-7857-11e8-8e67-1e1a0846c475.
The libertarian neoliberal disruption of existing business is accompanied by assaults on institutions such as
universities, the civil service and the supreme court that, from a liberal perspective,
are designed to serve as a check on political power precisely by remaining
separate from it. As early as 2014 the New Frontiers Foundation
thinktank, then directed by Johnson’s former chief adviser Dominic Cummings,
was calling for rightwing politicians to challenge the standing of the BBC, for
example. This was with a view to creating a U.K. equivalent to Fox News in the
U.S. that would not be constrained by rules such as those concerning
broadcasting impartiality.
[27] For more, see the Platform Cooperative
Consortium: https://platform.coop. For
a brief introduction to platform cooperativism and its history, see Maira
Sutton, Cat Johnson and Neal Gorenflo, ‘What is a Platform Co-op? A Shareable
Explainer’, Shareable, August 16,
2016:
http://www.shareable.net/blog/a-shareable-explainer-what-is-a-platform-co-op.
[28] https://decodeproject.eu.
For another example of a project designed to allow citizens
to retain control of their own data, see the MyData Global project in Finland: https://mydata.org/about/
Michel
Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis and Alex Paziatis take Barcelona as a case study of
radical municipalism in Peer to Peer: The
Commons Manifesto (London: University of Westminster Press, 2019). For more
examples of municipal socialism, see Barcelona en Comú, eds, Fearless
Cities: A Guide to the Global Municipalist Movement (Oxford: New Internationalist, 2019).
[29] See those resources for citizen
engagement made available by the Belgian ‘digital inclusion’ start-up
CitizenLab: https://www.citizenlab.co/resources.
[30] https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/themen/coronavirus/hackathon-der-bundesregierung-1733632.
[31] Dietmar Gattwinkel, ‘Fight Against Covid-19: Germany Organised "We
vs Virus" Hackathon’, JoinUp,
March 24, 2020: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/innovative-public-services/news/covid-19-we-vs-virus-hackathon-de.
[33] http://openhumanitiespress.org.
[34] http://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org.uk.
[35] https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/areas-of-research/postdigital-cultures.
[36] https://scholarled.org.
[37] Leslie Chan, ‘Platform Capitalism and the Governance of Knowledge
Infrastructure’, Digital Initiative Symposium, University of San Diego, April
29-30, 2019:
https://zenodo.org/record/2656601#.XNCUS-FR1Ta,%20consultado%206%20de%20mayo%20de%202019.
[38] https://copim.pubpub.org. COPIM
is funded in large part by Research England, as the project has as one of its
aims to show how open access books – and not just journal articles – can be
included in the U.K.’s 2028 Ref exercise. Again, it seems indicative of the
changing zeitgeist that Research England have chosen to fund a decentered,
horizontally organized, community-led and owned project, rather than the kind
of the top-down, ‘one platform to rule them all’ approach most funders have
supported in the past. For
more on COPIM, see the interview conducted with Janneke Adema and myself by
Paula Clemente Vega for the Open Library of the Humanities blog: 'Community-led
Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs: An Open Insights
Interview with Janneke Adema and Gary Hall', Open Insights, January 13,
2020: https://www.openlibhums.org/news/356/.
[39] Oliver Lerone
Schultz, Adnan Hadzi, Pablo de Soto and Laila Shereen Sakr, eds, after.video (London: Open Humanities
Press, 2016):
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/after-video.
[40] https://www.mandela27.com.
[41] A video of one of the exhibitions, held
at the Delft Civic Centre, Cape Town in 2015, is available here:
https://livecoventryac-my.sharepoint.com/:v:/g/personal/aa5237_coventry_ac_uk/ESeaLQJJuftMoMU9yWu1D80BgE_u5nVCUMlbMf7OzHrlsQ?e=agTufF.
[42]
https://www.mandela27.com/assets/downloads/Mandela27%20DIY%20Exhibition%20-%20Building%20Instructions.pdf.
[43] http://wemake.cc.
See also Valeria
Graziano, Zoe Romano, Serena Cangiano, Maddalena Fragnito, Francesca Bria, Rebelling With Care: Exploring Open
Technologies for Commoning Healthcare (Milan, Italy: We Make, 2019): http://wemake.cc/digitalsocial/cure-ribelli/.
[44] Operating like
this is actually closer to the etymological origins of the word ‘author’. As
Eva Weinmayr makes clear,
derived from the ‘Latin
"augere", to increase, to augment, the "auctor,"
"autour," "autor" was somebody "who causes to grow, a
promoter, producer, father, progenitor, an instigator, maker, doer – a
responsible person, or a teacher, a person that invents or causes
something"’’ (Eva Weinmayr, Noun to Verb: An Investigation Into the Micro-politics of
Publishing Through Artistic Practice, thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Artistic
Practice at HDK-Valand – Academy of Art and Design, Faculty of Fine, Applied
and Performing Arts, University of Gothenburg, 2020:
http://wiki.evaweinmayr.com/index.php/6_Analysis:_Micro-politics_of_Publishing#cite_note-etymology_author-28).
[45] Kaspar Hauser,
‘The Comforting Shadow of Knowledge’, Migrant
Journal, 6, 2020, 184.
[46] Mark Amerika, remixthecontext (New York: Routledge, 2018).
[47] Valeria Graziano, ‘Prefigurative Practices: Raw Materials for a Political Positioning of
Art, Leaving the Avant-garde’, in Lilia Mestre and Elke Van Campenhout eds, Turn, Turtle!
Reenacting The Institute (Berlin: Live Art
Development Agency & Alexander Verlag, 2016).
[48] For the latter, see Janneke
Adema and Kamila Kuc Unruly Gestures (2015): http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se/v11/a11/unruly_gestures.mp4;
and Janneke Adema and Kamila Kuc, ‘Unruly Gestures:
Seven Cine-Paragraphs on Reading/Writing Practices in our Post-Digital
Condition’, Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research, 11(1) 2019:
http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se/article.asp?DOI=10.3384/cu.2000.1525.2019111190.
[49] Clare Birchall
and Gary Hall, eds, Liquid Books (London: Open Humanities Press, 2008): http://liquidbooks.pbwiki.com;
and Clare Birchall, Gary Hall, and Joanna Zylinska, eds, Living Books About
Life (London: Open Humanities Press, 2016): http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org.
[50] Janneke Adema
and Gary Hall, eds, Disrupting
the Humanities: Towards Posthumanities’, Journal of
Electronic Publishing, Vol. 9, No.2, Fall, 2016: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jep/3336451.0019.2*?rgn=full+text.
[51] With regard
to the university, see the account of Coventry University’s Open Media classes
provided in Pauline van Mourik
Broekman, Gary Hall, Ted Byfield, Shaun Hides and Simon Worthington, Open Education: A Study in Disruption
(London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014). These classes were also
featured in: Lou McGill and Tim Gray, Open
Media Classes at Coventry University, Jisc, July 2015,
http://repository.jisc.ac.uk/6069/1/JR0041_OPEN_EDUCATION_REPORT_V3.pdf; and to
a lesser extent, Massive Open Online
Courses: Higher Education’s Digital Moment?, Universities UK, May 2013 http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/Pages/massive-open-online-courses.aspx.
[52] Marcel Mars and Tomislav Medak, Public Library: Memory of the World: https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2015/05/27/repertorium_public_library/.
[53] This list concerning
the hidden power of infrastructure is taken and adapted from Leslie Chan, ‘Platform Capitalism and the Governance of Knowledge
Infrastructure’, Digital Initiative Symposium, University of San Diego, April
29-30, 2019:
https://zenodo.org/record/2656601#.XNCUS-FR1Ta,%20consultado%206%20de%20mayo%20de%202019.
My title for part two, ‘InfraRed’, is also linked to
the importance infrastructure has for us. ‘Infra’ is taken from infrastructure
and ‘red’ refers to the way in which my collaborators and I align our work with
the politics of the left, as I say.
[54] A different although related take on
ideas of the subject and the private can be found in the work of our CPC
colleagues Adrienne Evans and Miriam de Rosa on how the distinction between the
public, the domestic and the familial is changing with the transformation in
media communications technology from analogue to postdigital. See, for example,
their ‘Domestic, Private, Familial’ event, held at Coventry University on January
22, 2020; and also Adrienne Evans and
Sarah Riley, ‘“He’s a Total TubeCrush”: Post-feminist Sensibility
as Intimate Publics’, Feminist Media Studies, Volume 18, Issue 6, 2018. Here, TubeCrush and phenomenon such as
the #MeToo campaign show how aspects of
subjectivity, sexuality and gender inequality that were once kept private are
now being revealed on a public scale, thanks to the likes of Twitter and
Facebook.
[55] Cornelia
Sollfrank, ‘The Surplus of Copying—How Shadow Libraries and Pirate Archives
Contribute to the Creation of Cultural Memory and the Commons’, in Michael
Kargl and Franz Thalmair, eds, Originalcopy:
Post-digital Strategies of Appropriation
(Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019).
[56] Roberto Esposito, ‘Community, Immunity,
Biopolitics’, Angelaki, volume 18,
number 3, 2013, 89.
[57] For more, see my treatment of
new materialism in Pirate Philosophy
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).
[58] François Cusset,
How The World Swung To the Right: Fifty
Years of Counterrevolutions (California: Semiotext(e), 2018) 20-21.
[59] Art Fund, Calm and Collected: Museums
and Galleries: The UK’s Untapped Wellbeing Resource?, 2019: https://www.artfund.org/assets/national-art-pass/artfund_calm-and-collected-wellbeing-report.pdf.
[60] http://creatingcommons.zhdk.ch/about/; Tatiana
Bazzichelli, Truth-Tellers: The
Impact of Speaking Out, 10th event of the Disruption Network Lab, Studio 1, Berlin, November 25-26,
2016: https://www.disruptionlab.org/truth-tellers.
[61] David Garcia, ‘Beyond the Evidence’, New Tactical Research (blog), September 25, 2019: http://new-tactical-research.co.uk/blog/beyond-the-evidence-2/.
According
to Garcia, the term ‘evidentiary realism’ originates with the artist and curator Paolo Cirio and his 2017 group exhibition of the same name:
Evidentiary Realism, Fridman Gallery, New York, February 28 – March 31, 2017:
https://paolocirio.net/press/show_evidentiary-realism_nyc.php.
For an earlier engagement on my part with the work of
Lev Manovich, see ‘There Are No Digital Humanities’, Pirate Philosophy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2016).
[62] Eyal Weizman quoted in
David Garcia, ‘Beyond the Evidence’ (punctuation as in
Garcia’s original post).
[63] Josephine
Harvey, ‘Obama Says Trump Has Accelerated “Truth Decay” In America’, Huff Post, November 16, 2020: https://www.aol.com/obama-says-trump-accelerated-truth-061324918.html?guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9zZWFyY2gueWFob28uY29tLw&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAHrvtwHhtrDiNMIp70nAkBg0fKKtcM1YXHgE9qmWA9_98OgJ-DWqtrPwdTJ4455Cn9UKRM5bMdFu-DI8KLIxkLP9amZGWw7UkgoN6YIYdzjL_JK0chdIx-wxC5hchEpjNxu3ehZ8qXnVm4sKNgJtHtZlXXSBBkbVySk4RuM_-S73&guccounter=2.
[64] Alan Rusbridger,
‘The Election in the Media: Against Evasion and Lies, Good Journalism is All We
Have’, The Observer, December 15,
2019, 47.
[65] A further academic variation on the
theme has come from the social sciences. It concerns the idea that ’public
faith in expert knowledge can only be regained not through reasserting the
authority of facts but by rediscovering ways of knowing-in-common’ in order to
make the case for what Noortje Marres – taking notions of both ‘democracy’ and
the ‘public’ as her datum points in doing so (see below) – refers to as
‘knowledge democracy’. Eva Haifa Giraud and Sarah-Nicole Aghassi-Isfahani, ‘Post-Truths,
Common Worlds, and Critical Politics: Critiquing Bruno Latour's Renewed
Critique of Critique’, Cultural Politics,
Volume 16, Number, March 2020); Noortje
Marres, ‘Why We Can't Have Our Facts Back’, Engaging Science, Technology,
and Society, 4, 2018.
[66] Social Science
in Humanitarian Action, ‘Social
Dimensions of the Novel Coronavirus (nCoV) Outbreak and Response: Meeting Report’,
Roundtable at the Wellcome
Trust, London, February 3, 2020: https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/bitstream/handle/20.500.12413/15121/SSHAP_Social_Dimensions_nCoV_outbreak_response_meeting_report_Feb2020.pdf.
[67] Katelyn Burns, ‘Trump’s 7 Worst Statements on the Coronavirus
Outbreak’, Vox, March 13, 2020:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/3/13/21176535/trumps-worst-statements-coronavirus.
[68] Hanna Arendt, in Roger Errera, ‘Hannah Arendt: From an Interview’, The New York Review of Books, 26, 10,
1978.
[69] Kai Strittmatter, We Have Been Harmonised: Life In China’s
Surveillance State (Exeter: Old Street Publishing, 2019) 18.
[70] Glenn Kessler, Meg Kelly, Salvador
Rizzo and Michelle Ye Hee Lee, ‘The Fact Checker’s Ongoing Database
of the False or Misleading Claims Made by President Trump Since Assuming
Office’, Washington Post, May 29,
2020: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/?.
[71]
At the same time, a lot of those on the nativist right seem to believe that the
establishment rules don’t apply to them too. Which is why they’re not overly
concerned if a populist government, say, prorogues parliament or violates
international treaties on behalf of ‘us’, ‘the people’. What’s important is
that these politicians should continue to apply the rule of law with full
vigour to ‘them’, those considered to be the enemy ‘other’: the EU, minorities,
migrants, left-liberal elites.
[72] Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone, 1988) 25.
[73]
Eliza Mackintosh, ‘Finland is Winning
the War on Fake News. What It’s Learned May Be Crucial to Western Democracy’, CNN, May 2019: https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2019/05/europe/finland-fake-news-intl/.
[74] Forensic
Architecture, The Bombing of Rafah, July 31, 2015: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-bombing-of-rafah.
For more, see Eyal Weizman, ‘Hannibal in Rafah’, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability
(New York: ZONE, 2018). Significantly, Weizman begins this book with a warning
drawn from history, namely the 2000 libel trial launched by David Irving
against the historian Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books for
calling him a Holocaust denier. Weizman’s warning is that ‘an independent
forensics analyst challenging officially sanctioned truths with the typically
limited means afforded to activists is not a guarantee of progressive politics’
(20).
[75] ‘Flatpack
Democracy 2.0 – How the Independents for Frome Triggered a British and Global
Wave of Community Empowerment’, The
Alternative UK, October 3, 2019:
https://www.thealternative.org.uk/dailyalternative/2019/10/7/flatpack-democracy-two-zero.
[76] Marcell Mars, ‘Public Library’, interviewed by Cornelia Sollfrank, artwarez, Berlin, February 1, 2013: http://artwarez.org/projects/GWYDH/mars.html.
For
example, in June 2020 it was reported by Brewster Kahle that ‘four commercial publishers chose to sue
the Internet Archive during the global coronavirus pandemic’. This forced them
to close early the temporary National Emergency Library (https://blog.archive.org/national-emergency-library/)
the Internet Archive had set up to ‘provide books to support emergency remote
teaching, research activities, independent scholarship, and intellectual
stimulation’ over the course of the Covid-19 outbreak. For Kahle, it is a
complaint that ‘attacks the concept of any library owning and lending digital
books, challenging the very idea of what a library is in the digital world’ (Brewster Kahle, ‘Temporary National Emergency Library to Close 2 Weeks Early, Returning to
Traditional Controlled Digital Lending’, Internet Archive Blogs,
June 10, 2020: http://blog.archive.org/2020/06/10/temporary-national-emergency-library-to-close-2-weeks-early-returning-to-traditional-controlled-digital-lending/. In
this context it becomes easy to see why, for Sollfrank, ‘the emergence of pirate libraries has to
be considered as a systemic symptom, as the materialisation of social and
economic flaws... The global demand for learning and scholarship is not being
met by the contemporary publishing industry, all over the world, but especially
in Latin and South America, in China, in Eastern Europe, in Africa and in
India’ (Cornelia Sollfrank, ‘Learning
From Shadow Libraries’, Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University,
February 7, 2018).
[78] https://sea-watch.org/en/.
[79] https://planka.nu/.
[80] http://www.docsnotcops.co.uk.
[81] https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/about-us/research-news/2019/pirate-care/.
For more
on pirate care, see Valeria Graziano, ‘Pirate Care - How do We Imagine the Health Care for the Future We Want?’,
Medium, October 5, 2018:
https://medium.com/dsi4eu/pirate-care-how-do-we-imagine-the-health-care-for-the-future-we-want-fa7f71a7a21
; and also The Pirate Care
Project, a series of exhibitions, talks and reading groups organized by
Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak: https://pirate.care/pages/concept/; as
well as ‘Introduction to Pirate Care’, pirate.care.syllabus: http://syllabus.pirate.care/topic/piratecareintroduction/.
[82] Valeria
Graziano, Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak, ‘Pirate Care: Against the Crisis’,
Kunsthalle Wien, March-May, 2020:
https://kunsthallewien.at/en/pirate-care-gegen-die-krise/.
[83] Lawrence Liang,
‘Beyond Representation: The Figure of the Pirate’, in Lars Eckstein and Anja
Schwarz, Postcolonial Piracy: Media
Distribution and Cultural Production in the Global South (London:
Bloomsbury, 2014) 69-70.
[84] See Gary Hall, Pirate Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2016).
[85] Caitlin Dewey, ‘98 Personal Data Points
That Facebook Uses to Target Ads to You’, Washington
Post, August 19, 2016.