Category: economy of contribution

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VIDEOS > Categorisation and processes of individuation – Stiegler

Simon Lincelles, apparently on behalf of the ‘indexation and editorialisation’ group at the Institute for Research and Innovation (IRI, founded at the Pompidou Centre by Bernard Stiegler), has posted some really interesting videos featuring edited excerpts from a seminar run at IRI cut together with relevant additional materials. There are English subtitles for the spoken French.

In particular, these videos offer an interesting and valuable introduction to how Stiegler conceptualises the idea of ‘categorisation’ in relation to processes of retention/protention (broadly – memory and anticipation) and how this is important to processes of becoming (co- and trans-individuation). This speaks more broadly to an understanding of how we share experiences within/of the world and how we might think about contributing to that sharing using various forms of technique/technology, which has become a significant concern for IRI and their focus on a ‘digital studies‘. Definitely worth a watch!

II 1 Categorization and transindividuation from Simon Lincelles on Vimeo.

II 2 Psychic Individuation and categorisation from Simon Lincelles on Vimeo.

II 3 Remarques sur l’expérience. from Simon Lincelles on Vimeo.

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Friction – an interdisciplinary conference on technology & resistance

Over on the Virality blog, Tony Sampson highlights this recent and rurally interesting call for papers for a conference concerning technology and resistance. I have reproduced the CFP below but see the original blog for Tony’s take…

Friction: An interdisciplinary conference on technology & resistanceUniversity of Nottingham
Thursday 8th May & Friday 9th May, 2014Keynote talk by Pollyanna Ruiz (LSE)

With workshops led by: Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey; University of Leicester Technology Group; Jen Birks and John Downey; and Rachel Jacobs (Active Ingredient).

Current workshop themes include: evil media; data, digital leaks and political activism; hacklabs and artistic uses of data.

More TBC

Workshop and talk abstracts, and information about speakers will be appearing on our blog in the forthcoming weeks: http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/criticalmoment/

Friction:
noun
[mass noun]
The resistance that one surface or object encounters when moving over another:
· the action of one surface or object rubbing against another
· conflict or animosity caused by a clash of wills, temperaments, or opinions

Oxford English Dictionary, 2013

We are now living in a frictionless economy in which money, jobs and products can move around the world in the blink of an eye. And yet we have not moved to a frictionless society. Rather, many of the technologies that support the frictionless economy create various forms of friction in society. Taking a lead from the University of Nottingham’s Centre for Critical Theory’s Technology and Resistance research strand, we are interested in proposals for papers and workshops that explore the concept/metaphor of ‘friction’ as a starting point for exploring the relationship between everyday technologies and resistance; with resistance understood in both a politically empowering and an inhibitory sense. On the one hand, we’re interested in modes of organised resistance: of activist movements making use of, or reacting against, technological developments. However we’re concerned with resistance in a second sense: of technologies resisting their intended function, breaking down, being exploited by hackers or triggering unexpected socio-economic complications.

We invite people to use the concept of ‘friction’ as a route into exploring these themes, with potential topics for discussion including (but not limited to):

· Data and ethics
· Cultural shifts relating to the capture of data
· The vulnerability of software to hacking and surveillance
· Resistance to surveillance and data harvesting
· Activist uses of data, particularly the circulation of leaked material
· The politics of hacking
· The exploitation of ambiguity in software design by hackers
· Activist and everyday contestations of technological developments
· The sociological and cultural factors required for technologies to ‘work’
· Everyday and/or activist reappropriations of technology
· Tensions between new technologies and existing infrastructures

We are an interdisciplinary group of researchers, including academics from Geography, Business, Critical Theory, Cultural Studies and Media & Communications: so we welcome a diverse range of perspectives and approaches to this theme.

We encourage interactive presentation formats, and will allocate longer time-slots to workshops to accommodate these, but also have space for shorter 20 minute position papers.

Extended deadline for proposals: 1st March 2014

If you are interested in participating please submit a 250 word proposal for a workshop or paper, along with your name and current email address, to centreforcriticaltheory@gmail.com

Please also feel free to contact us with more general enquiries, follow the Centre for Critical Theory’s Twitter account @criticaltheory

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The Digital Future of the University – Stiegler

Towards the end of last year, Mediapart (a cross between an association for co-learning and an online publisher concerned with digital media) published a blogpost by Bernard Stiegler concerning the role of digital technologies in the ongoing transformation of the university. This line of argument will be familiar to those that follow Stiegler’s work (especially if you read French) and if you have read some of the short pieces by Stiegler that I have previously translated concerning MOOCs and participatory education. What is heartening, especially if you are already in the open education conversation, and are a wee bit cynical about the hyperbole surrounding MOOCs, is that Stiegler argues for a debate around how to foster and open out education, not how to monetize it. As ever, the fundamental (pharmacological) relationship between ‘human’ and ‘technology’ is at the heart of the issue for Stiegler. As he argues in the final paragraph:

The question is not whether or not we should develop MOOCs in France (it is obviously necessary): it is to drive a dynamic for the rethinking of the relationship between knowledge and its media [supports] (of which MOOCs are a possible dimension) with the universities and academic institutions, and which, through research, will redefine their role in this new context.

Again, an argument that thoughtful practitioners of ‘open education’, like Martin Weller, will be very familiar with.

The sharp-eyed reader will pick up something else from this article too. The Institute for Research Innovation (part of the Pomipdou Centre in Paris), directed by Stiegler, are now using their online tools for collaboration ‘in the wild’. So, the vidéolivre that Stiegler points us to, towards the end, is more sophisticated than the embedded YouTube video and is a kind of online mini-course (unfortunately, only in French) hosted on the Digital Studies website (on which you can read the ‘call for Digital Studies‘ in English). Another interesting tool mentioned is Polemic Tweets: a kind of add-on to twitter through the use of basic syntax (much like RT, MT, etc.) in order to amplify, disagree with or question things (see the explanation in English here). For example, you can see the use of these tags in combination with the documentation of a recent conference Entretiens du Nouveau Monde Industriel [#ENMI13] (something like: ‘Investigations into the New Industrial World‘), where there is a recording of the video stream with annotations that temporally synchronise tweets (with the hashtag and ‘polemic’ syntax) in a timeline below – worth a look, here.

This starts to get at some of the pedagogical tools Stiegler and IRI are offering as a means of beginning to think about what it might mean to ‘rethink knowledge and its relationship with its media/supports’ within the domain of (open) education. It is in this context that one might read the article that follows…

As usual, original French and clarifications are in square brackets. I am indebted to Patrick Crogan (former colleague, translator of some of Stiegler’s work, and a speaker at the conference mentioned above) for his proof-reading.

The digital future of the university

07 November 2013, Mediapart

The digital constitutes a new épistémè: it is the very nature of knowledge in all its forms that will be affected. This technology will function for our epoque in the same way that writing did for antiquity (and it is in this way that we can say that it put antiquity into decline). This was suggested thirty years ago in The Computerisation of Society:

“From the moment that Sumerians wrote the first hieroglyphs on wax tablets, they embodied, probably without realising, a decisive mutation of humanity: the appearance of writing. Yet, it was this that changed the world.”

It is inconceivable that universities and large research organisations do not have at their core of their concerns and the top of their priorities the digital transformation of knowledge: the deployment in all disciplines, as in all dimensions of human existence, of what Clarisse Herrenschmidt has called reticular writing clearly constitutes the major challenge for 21st century knowledge.

As for online university courses, they have become at Harvard small private online courses, which has led Robert Lue to suggest that “we are already in the post-MOOC era“. This statement testifies to the fact that the transformations at the sidelines of education are the visible effects of the mnemotechnical milieu of knowledge, which is in the process of changing its nature, is upsetting [bouleverse] knowledge itself, from research all the way through to the most elementary aspects of education.

Whether we consider these issues from massive open online courses, small private online courses [both in English in original], or the many other already existing or possible models of digital education they all constitute a major issue. But this issue logically comes after research and digital studies–which the Minister, and the National Research Agency under his purview, have furthermore adopted in their agenda under the name of ‘digital studies’ without which this could have remained unnoticed.

It is only possible to implement new forms of education related to the development of digital technologies and to experience them collectively on the condition that they are designed and practiced in a close and explicit relation with a policy for researching the deeper layers of epistemic becoming and the new disciplinary epistemologies required by digitisation. Without such a structured and openly acknowledged connection, the initiatives taken in all areas alongside [established] education can only emerge as superficial fashions and effects, subject as ever to all of the ebbs and flows of media excitement in the contemporary world: they always seem to belong to an age that has already been superceded by the lastest novelty in an area where there is no lack of imagination–sometimes at the risk of lacking reflection, if not knowledge.

The university appeared a little over one thousand years ago, conditioned then by the copying of canonical texts, which led to the interpretation that is engendered in the process of copying, which experienced a second era with the republic of letters created by the printing press, which originated in the university of Berlin, and which lasted until the 20th century.

In 1993 the university entered a new age, with the arrival of the web making reticular writing accessible to all. It is this important, if not massive and amazing, fact that necessitates the development of digital studies. Whatever its form, knowledge is a form of memory shared by a community, according to the rules practised, and sometimes explicated and theorised, by that community: which is thus, in general, a community of peers. These scientific and critical knowledges appeared with alphabetic writing, which, in all its forms, creates a mnemotechnical and techno-logical milieu that conditions [conditionne] the development and transmission of knowledge based in peer review.

Neither for knowledge in general or scholarly institutions in particular, are the written alphabet, the printed word, data, algorithms and digital networks simple mediums of education or research: these are the domains [milieux] of knowledge in which is founded the open and constant criticism of the rules of interpretation in which the knowledge formed by these communities of peers consists.

The digital deeply transforms such forms of knowledge principally because it constitutes a new means of recording [surface d’inscription] and publicly formalising the debate between peers by which all rational disciplines are constituted, through conflicting interpretation and scientific controversy. The characteristics of the digital (automation, speed of calculation, vast planetary access, cooperative networks, new processes of formalisation, new models, visualisations, interactions and simulations etc.) constitute new possibilities for knowledge, for significantly widening accessibility to more diverse audiences, which will redefine the conditions for equal access to knowledge [qui redéfinissent les conditions de la parité], which also involves the requirements for certification as a form of legitimation.

Peer-to-peer, which is increasingly discussed since the advent of software and websites described as P2P, appeared over 27 centuries ago with the first land surveyors [géomètres]. This is why amongst the announcements made by the minister for higher education and research, the most significant was the support for research into the impacts and opportunities of the digital in the development of knowledge as a form of emancipation [comme de telles parités est la plus significative]. The digital mnemotechnical milieu makes possible and requires new heuristics, new hermeneutics, and new epistemologies which must foster teaching and pedagogies in which the purpose is precisely the enrolment of the maximum number of students into these communities of peers.

From the infinitely big (astrophysics) to the infintetly small (nanoscience), physics is reconfigured by digital instrumentation through mathematics and statistics notably in the guise of “big data“. Linguistics is under the effect of what Frédéric Kaplan has called linguistic capitalism. Geography is in the era of geographical information systems and GPS, through which territory becomes functionally and normatively digital. Genetic biology that made possible computerised biostations, etc. No form of knowledge escapes the new demands [nouvelle facture] of the contemporary mnemotechnical milieu configured by the categorisation machines that are networked computers.

This digital categorisation totally redefines the conditions of production of the rules of categorisation, which form the foundation for what is ultimately knowledge produced through peer review: this is a fundamental point that it is not possible for me to develop here, and it is for this reason that the reader can consult a short interactive video [vidéolivre] which has been prepared to complete this article, and which focuses more extensively on these concerns in order to illustrate how the Institute for Research and Innovation (IRI), which I run, designs and practices investigations of these issues.

This interactive video–designed to become a social book [in English in original], by which I mean a support for a network of readers constituted as a community of plural interpretations-is one example amongst many (such as polemic tweets, also developed IRI and implemented by Mediapart in the recently organised debate about the rise of the National Front), which are all new forms of editorial media that have emerged since the arrival of the web.

These digital media will become new apparatuses [dispositifs] of public debate which always come from university learning, and with which it is essential to enrol and involve the students as much as possible. For over a thousand years, universities and research activities as well as the teaching thereby developed were made possible originally by manuscripts and then by printed books. Which is why a thesis, regardless of the discipline in which it is submitted, is always presented as a book. This situation will fundamentally change in the course of the coming years. This does not signal the disappearance of the book: it means that, like the knowledge they carry, they will transform.

New conditions of publication, disputation [confrontation], certification and editorialisation of knowledge are coming into place. They correspond to new regulations and new methods for heuristics, interpretation, teaching and pedagogy, which are arising, forming and capturing the 21st century épistémè. This is taking place through a dynamic process that the public authorities should strongly encourage, pushing academic institutions, industry and the markets to cooperate in the production of a long-term vision–which must be a vision of the role of France in Europe in the 21st century.

The question is not whether or not we should develop MOOCs in France (it is obviously necessary): it is to drive a dynamic for the rethinking of the relationship between knowledge and its media [supports] (of which MOOCs are a possible dimension) with the universities and academic institutions, and which, through research, will redefine their role in this new context. This is a good question for which it is not only healthy but essential that a public debate is held–providing that the grounds for that debate are not the claim that everything should be left to the market nor the denial of the very need for such a debate.

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“Ethnographies from [a] future” and the co-production of knowledge

Its strange when you come across work that significantly overlaps your own and both the author of that work and you have been doing the work for a while and yet not consciously encountered one another… something about particular disciplinary contexts or discursive regimes going on perhaps (which is quite sad).

Anyway, through the wonders of twitter, I ran across the work of Laura Forlano in the guise of an article on ethnography matters, who is at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology and, of course, has done the obligatory visiting scholarship with the Comparative Media Programme at MIT (discursive regimes, see?). Forlano attempts to conduct ethnographic research around future technologies. In many ways Forlano’s work echoes that of ‘futurologists’ like the commercial researchers at Institute for the Future, sniffing out ‘signals’ of potential futures and then working these up into articulations of a possible world. What is interesting about where Forlano goes with this work is that she is looking towards how to engage prospective ethnographic work around emergent practices and technologies with speculative design practice.

At the end of the article in ethnography matters Forlano makes some interesting assertions about the uses of ethnography and political importance of making one’s work relevant to, or the basis of, interventions in the world – its worth quoting at length here:

As ethnographers, it is not enough to describe social reality, to end a project when the last transcripts and field notes have been analyzed and written up. We must find new ways to engage and collaborate with our subjects (both human and nonhuman). We need better ways of turning our descriptive, analytical accounts into those that are prescriptive, and which have greater import in society and policy. We may do this by inhabiting narratives, generating artifacts to think with and engaging more explicitly with the people formerly known as our “informants” as well as with the public at large.

This is not to suggest that every ethnographer should do it all, or that ethnographers are not already traversing the boundaries between analyst, activist and artist. Most likely, our best work will be (and is already being) done in teams where description and analysis can inform design but at the same time, we can innovate within our own skillsets and practices. We can compare across our many field sites and topics and create design fictions that interrogate the issues and themes that come to the fore.

This will require new venues for publication (targeting both scholarly audiences and the broader public) and new criteria for gaining credit for our work. For example, how will an ethnographer’s work of design fiction be presented, peer-reviewed and published? Will it be in the form of a textual narrative, a series of photos or an exhibit of artifacts? As ethnographers from the future, it is our responsibility to find ways to move beyond existing social realities through the probing of alternative socio-technical realities in order to affect positive change in society and this, it seems, is a perfect job for speculative design.

What strikes me about Forlano’s interesting provocation here, beyond the echo of Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach, is two things:

1) I think this work is definitely already being done, which is in and of itself quite interesting. Design fiction and other speculative work has a good foothold in the academy around the world. For example, Anne Galloway’s recent work concerning speculative design practice for the New Zealand wool industry (see Anne’s own contribution to ethnography matters) and Chris Speed’s formulation of what he calls ‘design informatics‘. Furthermore, work by Lucy Suchman and others (who have worked in both/between academic and industrial research) around ethnomethodologies of prototyping and other speculative design practices offers a fairly rich conceptual basis to explore. Equally, this has fed into (activist) pedagogical innovation like the work of my colleague Ian Cook et al. with “follow the things“.

2) To ‘move beyond existing social realities… in order to affect positive change in society’ does, very much, need alternative means of engaging with the world, the means by which it is delineated and disciplined and this is requires more than dissemination and publishing of research results. To take Forlano’s provocation seriously we need more co-design, more contributive systems of working together, bridging disciplinary and other delineations, to forge action-research and knowledge exchange projects. I would suggest that this is exemplified in the working methods of the Pervasive Media Studio. Rapid, collaborative projects that act as a means of co-producing knowledge and new things in the world blur the kinds of disciplinary and discursive boundaries by which people and activities can be commonly categorised and separated. The co-production of knowledge in this way is more than ‘just’ publishing articles or patents, it is about making that knowledge operational [Both Simon Moreton and Jon Dovey have blogged about this on the Research and Enterprise in Arts and Creative Technologies (REACT) knowledge exchange hub website].

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Bernard Stiegler on MOOCs and education

The website Inriality has published a brief interview, in French, with Bernard Stiegler on the theme of the digital requiring us to, collectively – as a society, rethink education. In particular, Stiegler addresses the idea and implementation of MOOCs, with the charge that current uses of the technology are insufficient–being primarily concerned with distribution–and do not play to the strengths of networked technologies as a medium: namely interaction. Stiegler’s contention is that the digital is principally a means, or ‘affordance’, of research behaviour and in this way challenges us to rethink education as a more inquisitive and discursive endeavour, in which we encourage one another as peers (in the sense that, for example, the ‘gold standard’ of knowledge production and dissemination is ‘peer review’). He seems to suggest a fairly institutional approach, with the research-intensive university as its model.

Please find below a translation of the interview. I have followed usual conventions of adding clarifications or original French terms in square brackets. I have retained the links included in the original interview, which largely point to French language websites, with the exception of having changed the link to the French wikipedia article on Stiegler to the article in English.

Bernard Stiegler: “The digital obliges us to rethink education”

To introduce our series devoted to the theme of “how the digital changes education”, we asked the philosopher Bernard Stiegler* to reposition the debate in a broader context, that of our societies and their future…

* Bernard Stiegler teaches philosophy at the universities of Compiègne and London, he is president of the Ars Industrialis Association, he is Director of the Institute for Research and Innovation (IRI) at the Georges Pompidou Centre, and he is a member of the National Council for the Digital.

Why must education change?

Education must change because knowledge has changed. This profound change is visible in the sciences such as mathematics, astrophysics and nanoscience to name but a few… It is also true in the realm of language as in knowledge, insofar as Google is upsetting the traditional structures [of language] as shown notably by Frederic Kaplan.

And it’s not just academic knowledge that is changed in this way: our know-how [savoir-faire] is being revised, by the ecosystem of fablabs for example, and this is equally so with our life skills [savoir-vivre], they are both simultaneously destroyed by social networks and rebuilt on those new foundations…

In passing, I note that my position concerning all technics is that it must be considered as both good and bad [–a pharmakon]. A technique cannot be good when it has not been cultivated, it requires a purpose, a technique is wrong if we are not educated in it. We are therefore obliged to rethink education, because the digital changes all forms of knowledge, including family education.

Why should familial education be rethought?

Quite simply because it is difficult for parents to educate their children in the digital age! So this area is worth giving thought to because it is actually a very big problem, which risks being poisoned by massive anti-digital reactions that the Snowden case, and others, seem to attract. There is a fear, I think, that the positivity that surrounded Internet until recently will be compromised in the near future.

What can we expect from the MOOC platforms for delivering open courses over the Internet?

I am actively interested in MOOCs [Massive Open Online Courses], particularly in the key group [cadre] that includes Plan FUN (France Universités Numérique ~ France Digital Universities) – having myself experienced this type of platform for over three years (see www.pharmakon.fr).

On the theme of MOOCs, I have noticed that the [pedagogical] problem is often taken the wrong way round. The process is this: we have [existing] courses and use the digital domain for their distribution. This is indeed necessary but not sufficient, because digital technology is primarily a research tool – which includes even philosophy.

I am a philosopher – that is my job – and on a day-to-day basis [au quotidien] I work on many textual sources: the digital has completely changed the way I work. I produce further texts, and not at all in the same way. I share them on networks with many people that I frequently have never [physically] encountered. Intellectual objects themselves are profoundly changed…

As a consequence, in the case of MOOCs and within the framework of higher education, it should be understood that MOOCs can only be properly developed through research activity. I have therefore undertaken to petition the Ministry [of Education?] to support those research activities – in large numbers and in all disciplines – specifically devoted to the digital in a given discipline. In all disciplines, it is no longer possible to conduct research as in the past.

In summary, it is necessary to conduct research on digital technology at the very same time it transforms knowledge itself, and precisely because it is an instrument to conduct research and communicate about it. I think we need to mount institutional responses to these issues.

What support mechanisms are best suited to these developments?

We need to create rapid [knowledge/technology] transfer processes [processus de transfert rapide], of an entirely new kind(1). I work at the Compiègne University of Technology, which has had a [knowledge/technology] transfer centre since its establishment – for about 40 years. We believe that this is a basic function of a university. But it also requires new models, such as the one we offer here at the Institute for Research and Innovation (IRI) at the Georges Pompidou Centre, on the theme of contributive research.

This framework for research and action also reaches beyond the academic sphere, with the ability to involve teachers and pupils, for example. So there may be transfer across the scholarly world, which has great need of the digital…

What do you think about digital technologies in schools?

The introduction of digital technologies [du numérique] into schools is certainly a good thing… but the reality is that what goes into schools today with digital technologies is the market! Digital knowledge [la savoir numérique] comes from the universities and not the market. But as universities themselves do not produce it, there is a gap that the market comes to fill.

It is therefore necessary to create action-research processes [processus de recherche-action] that would produce very quick [knowledge/technology] transfer and acculturation [l’acculturation]. Support processes that bring together parents, teachers, elected officials…

More generally, most of the value of this contributory approach rests outside the field of education, in particular economically, with vocational training etc.

What relationship do you establish between education and the economy?

I recently spoke about this at the ministry [of education?]: knowledge and education, more generally rational knowledge, only works if it is exposed to critique that enables Reason. This applies to many areas where the logical argument is central, and which range from political debate, art criticism to [legal] justice… This practice of argumentation is formalized with the advent of a technics of publishing – writing – that made the comparison of points of view possible. Everyone knows that the printing press proliferated this phenomenon and its influence on science, economics and modern democracy was crucial. Thus the digital as a new space for publishing enables radically new capabilities.

One can, for example, create a television channel – which I have done with my wife, without technical difficulties and without any investment. In the online school that I have created more than 17,000 people are interested in courses, seminars and summer schools, thousands of people have regularly visited the collection of courses since its creation, and a hundred researchers from fifteen different countries have participated in the online seminars and the summer school… This is possible precisely because the digital opens out public debate. And I emphasize that science is primarily a public debate – between peers.

It seems necessary to me to open today a new organology of knowledge [organologie des savoirs]. This is because the digital tools used in this field are designed and owned by major economic players, such as Google, YouTube, Facebook … I use them but of course they are insufficient. For example, they do not allow you to organize and trace the confrontation of ideas – even though the processes of categorisation that are fundamental to science are based in such disputation, and the computer is primarily a technology for categorisation. Search engines that are capable of mapping, creating historiographies and organising responses [to research] that could nurture debate constitute the future of the web and should become the basic tools of a digital university.

It seems very likely to me that the reinvention of digital tools from an educational perspective will lead to a reinvention of the web itself. Because it is the debate – of ideas, knowledge , businesses , etc. – Which is the source of dynamism and progress. That’s why I think Europe should aim to support a new industrial politics based on digital a new politics of education.

Translation notes

1. I am not familiar with the term ‘transfert’ but the use of ‘transfert de technologie’ seems to map on to what is called technology transfer in the anglophone academy, thus I have made the assumption that ‘transfert’ gestures towards something like knowledge or technology transfer. I use this translation throughout.

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Economies of Contribution, RGS-IBG 2013 session

Along with Matt Wilson and James Ash, I am co-convening (and chairing) a session at the RGS-IBG annual conference concerning the ways in which we might theoretically and empirically address what Bernard Stiegler has called the economy of contribution. Following James’ post, I thought I’d post the blurb and the running order here.

Economies of Contribution, Paper Session

‘Rather, a pathway to genuine growth must be refound, a growth running counter to the mis-growth [mécroissance] that consumerism has become, and a growth which would consist in a renaissance of desire. Such a rebirth would be achieved by implementing an economy of contribution, an economy for which “to economize“ means “to take care,“ and an economy within which care cultivates associated milieus.’ Stiegler 2010, For A New Critique of Political Economy, p. 108, original emphasis

How might growth be re-imagined as a ‘taking care’? What are the particular spaces and spacings in which such economizations are already occurring? How are re-imaginings of value, consumption, contribution and production re-configured through networked and spaced activities, communities, and infrastructures? We invite papers and other provocations exploring emerging social, political, cultural, economic and biophysical geographies with a particular focus on shifting conceptualizations of technological-mediated consumptions and productions.

Taking an impetus from the work of Bernard Stiegler, this session concerns the rapid changes brought about by networked technologies within economic arenas and how such changes demand broadened and/or revised understandings of consumption, production and value. Of course, a number of economic commentators and theorists have raised the advent of the internet, and particularly the world wide web, as a socio-technical phenomenon that demands that we rethink our understandings of economics. The conjunction of consumption and production, the distribution of the means of production, and the growth of positive externalities have all been raised as benefits of a new technically enabled economy (Benckler, Lessig, Shirky). Equally, the effectively infinite reproducibility of digital media has troubled the economic models of established creative industries, from newspapers to record producers and film studios (Leadbeater, Lessig, Zittrain). New modes of technical interaction between consumers, service providers and industry also ask questions about the bases of value and cost of products and services (Beller, Marazzi, Stiegler).

Novel forms of economic model and activity are active in a range of settings, but it is also important to note these economic paradigms, practices and social theoretical accounts do not always or easily gel. By inviting a range of positions to be collected together in this session we aim to interrogate their geographies and promote not so much a revision of economic geography, but rather a sense of opportunity for an expansive and inclusive engagement with the political economy.

Papers:

Enforced Flexibility: The Opportunities and Challenges of Changing Models of Distribution and Contribution Daniel Cockayne (University of Kentucky)

New economies of residential energy demand reduction Heather Lovell (University of Edinburgh), Martin Pullinger (Lancaster University / ESRC Sustainable Practices Research Group / ARCC-Water Project), Nigel Goddard (University of Edinburgh)

Contributing urban space: a genealogy of the High Line Ate Poorthuis (University of Kentucky)

Online Artmaking and Community Building Ruth Catlow (Furtherfield)

 

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Stiegler – Open data and the economy of contribution

I recently came across an interesting interview with Bernard Stiegler on the ‘Views on the digital’ (Regards sur le Numerique)  blog by Microsoft France, from 2011. The interview focusses on the rise of open data, as a movement and a phenomenon.

Stiegler suggests that ‘open data’ is a singular and important aspect of a ‘change of epoch’ taking place through the sociotechnical capacities of internetworked digital technologies. It is the capacities for making information public and sharable that we realise with and through digital technologies that are making possible a social and political shift. This is, of course, not without risk — in Stiegler’s terms these new capacities for becoming (or in his terminology – transindividuation) are pharmacological, the particular ways in which they play out in the world can be both a ‘poison’ and a ‘cure’ (following Plato’s argument that writing is a pharmakon). Elsewhere, Stiegler argues that such an economy of ‘pharmka’ is a therapeutic — it is possible to resolve the poison/cure relation either way — that is not dialectical (i.e. an opposition) but rather a composition of tendencies that emerge in the relations of a milieu.

Open data, as ‘grammatised’ (discrete) forms of externalised memory (or hypomnemata), are compositional not least because of their ‘openness’ to use and reuse. Metadata, as the organisational forms that facilitate the composition of complex structures of information, generate the possibility of new organisational forms (a new ‘organology’ in Stiegler’s terms) that facilitate the ‘pollination’ of new ideas through forms of collective intelligence. These are the bases for what Stiegler considers to be the positive economic (therapeutic) model that he describes as the economy of contribution.

An economy of contribution facilitates a ‘de-proletarianisation’ of those contributing to the economy by maximally recognising their contributions, above and beyond the short-term imperative for financial profitability. This enables all of us to re-engage of capacities for critical knowledge, our life skills (savoir vivre), our practical capacities and techniques (savoir faire), and ultimately our care for one another and for our shared world. It is through (open) metadata and clever digital systems that such recognition of ‘positive externalities’, Stiegler argues, can be achieved. All of this is not easy, as the activitist association that Stiegler heads-up, Ars Industrialis, acknowledge in their manifesto, but that doesn’t mean to say its not worth pursuing…

Readers may also find of interest two other interviews with Stiegler I have translated: Bernard Stiegler: “We are entering an era of contributory work” and Overconsumption and the economy of contribution.

I hope this is of interest to people. It is a fairly quick translation so it may need a little more work and, as usual, I’ve added some clarifications in square brackets. All of the emphasis is original.

Bernard Stiegler: Open data is “an event of a magnitude comparable to the appearance of the alphabet”.

To accompany the reflective workshop concerning the phenomenon of open data that we organised for the 17th of March [2011], we are sharing a series of articles, reports and analyses around the question of the liberation of data. We offer to you here an interview with Bernard Stiegler, philosopher and director of the Institute for Research and Innovation (IRI, Pompidou Centre) concerning the values of the open data movement.

RSLN: What does the development of open data represent in the great adventure of the digital?

Bernard Stiegler: This is the culmination of a major rupture already well under way, and which has never been previously seen. All of the technologies monopolised by the culture industry, in the broadest sense of the term, for a century, are now moving into the hands of the citizens.

It is an event of a magnitude comparable to the appearance of the alphabet which, as a technics of publication, which is to say that which renders public, is the basis of the res publica, just like what took place after Gutenberg and the Reformation, generalising access to the printed word and knowledge.

Today, all industrial, cultural and scientific digital activities leave a digital trace that everyone can use thanks to tools which are becoming increasingly accessible. This is more than a major issue: this is a change of epoch. And to think about the phenomenon of open data, which is a singular aspect of this change, it is necessary to consider metadata: which is what makes data active.

RSLN: Open data is only part of this revolution…

Bernard Stiegler: Every one of us now is not only using digital tools, but participates through their practices in the production of metadata. However, metadata have played an important role in human destiny since prehistory: in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries clay tablets were discovered that were covered with cuneiform that describes the content of other tablets – these are the first known index systems: the first metadata.

Whoever masters the production of metadata has a power over collective memory: it can condition public debate and learning. With the digital, what was once top down production becomes bottom up, which changes the production and dissemination of knowledge, which is no longer the sole preserve of established powers (political, religious, industrial…) – the typical example of this transfer [of agency] being Wikipedia.

Of course, the movement is very disorganised and remains little analysed, furthermore, while some [people] consciously create metadata, many do not realize that they are made the objects of calculation via the cookies that “deposit” themselves on their computers or [they] self-index themselves on the web via Facebook or their blogs.

Different ideologies

RSLN: How can this disorder become virtuous?

Bernard Stiegler: The design of the society of tomorrow will depend on recognising the importance of this phenomenon. If this is insufficient, we will lay ourselves open to a veritable automation of society, in which only a few have control. It is therefore imperative to deliberate in a public and reasoned way.

It is in the context of this new democratic possibility that open data is constructed. A large number of powers hold data that they do not want to give up because their power is based on the retention of that very same information. At the same time, we know that secrecy may be necessary – whether protecting private life, or enabling the avoidance of war, and inscribing in the real-time of decision-making a time of delay which allows a moment of reflection.

Nevertheless, democracy is always linked to a process of publication – which is to say a rendering public – which makes possible a public space: of letters, print, broadcast, digital. The critique put forward by Plato of the use of writing by the Sophists shows us that this equally brings dangers.

A total re-establishment of public affairs will have to take place – and here we must not let this take place at the sole initiative of the economic world, which is to say only by private interests, the recent economic crisis shows us that they never coincide with the public good.

RSLN: The nascent open data movement nevertheless seems to meet very different objectives and sometimes even very different ideologies?

Bernard Stiegler: That is true. So, for Barack Obama and Al Gore, who advises him, it undoubtedly leads to the reconstruction of a critical power inspired by the Enlightenment and the “founding fathers” against the hegemony of the cultural industries. While in the neo-liberal spirit of David Cameron in Great Britain, the aim is instead to bypass the public services.

RSLN: Indeed, can the development of Open Data withstand the demand for profitability, which is not evident in the short term?

Bernard Stiegler: I have put forward the model of an economy of contribution, which takes into account what economists call positive externalities, where we come to value activities that take place outside of the market, and which also lead to development and empowerment, in the sense of Amartaya Sen. [For example,] During the baby boom period, the educational work of mothers which was conducted outside of the economic sphere was fully taken into account – and I do not think we can monetize this activity by turning it into a “service”.

Collective intelligence has become the main economic value. The best ideas are born in the fertile soil and common knowledge that are not generally in the model of immediate profitability but are a kind of “pollination.”

The result is much more interesting than what we can impose through a Jacobin state [a centralised republic] or large corporations, whose intelligence should [instead] be in the service of valuing and supporting new ‘green shoots’. The role of public power is, especially in the realm of public-private partnerships, to foster the creation of spaces that can support the recovery process.

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The Wager of Sublimation (translation), Petit on Stiegler

[Co-posted at technophilia]

In the book of interviews “The hypermaterial economy and psychopower” [Économie de l’hypermatériel et pyschopouvoir], Bernard Stiegler (with Philip Petit and Vincent Bontems) works through and explicates a range of the political-economic and socio-technical issues he feels are most pressing in the contemporary milieu. In the interviews Stiegler ties together his more ontological arguments concerning the co-constitution of the human/technology with his wide-ranging critique of political economy. At the heart of these arguments are the related issues of sublimation in a libidinal economy (the translation of libidinal energy into social objects) and the hypermaterial nature of our material supports (technology, taken in the broadest sense). Stiegler argues for a revitalisation of the economy by better translating our desires into more fulfilling outcomes, rather than submitting to mindless consumption. This is more an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary imperative, as can also be seen by the manifesto of the campaigning organisation Stiegler co-founded, Ars Industrialis.

At the beginning of the book, one of the interviewers in the book, the philosopher Philip Petit, has written an introduction to Stiegler’s project and to the areas of discussion covered in the three interviews. Petit’s short introductory essay, ‘the Wager of sublimation’ (Le Pari de la sublimation), is a useful, if playful, introduction to the life and work of Stiegler. I offer here a translation of Petit’s introductory essay: The Wager of Sublimation [PDF], I hope it is of interest and perhaps of use. I would like to particularly thank Patrick Crogan for his significant and invaluable help in honing the translation of this piece. Continue reading “The Wager of Sublimation (translation), Petit on Stiegler”

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Bernard Stiegler: “We are entering an era of contributory work”

The website Rue89 have published an interesting and accessible interview with Bernard Stiegler on the theme of an economy of contribution. In the interview Stiegler offers some general observations and examples of how contributory work might function. I have made a quick translation of the interview, below, I hope it is of interest. As ever, please do offer comments, corrections etc.

Continue reading “Bernard Stiegler: “We are entering an era of contributory work””

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Careful making – Stiegler’s Economy of Contribution

Following on from the fairly rapid translation I made of the Fondation Macif interview with Stiegler, a few emerging thoughts have been rattling around that I thought I’d post here. I want to think about the centrality of an ethos of care to Stiegler’s proposition of the economy of contribution and the kind of ethics this suggests for Stiegler’s philosophy. Continue reading “Careful making – Stiegler’s Economy of Contribution”