#MySubjectivation: I

('#MySubjectivation' can be considered a companion piece to the article on 'pirate philosophy' published in the journal Radical Philosophy, 173, May/June, 2012. The full text of 'Pirate Radical Philosophy' is available as a FREE download from the Radical Philosophy website: http://fb.me/1DZmgrmNV)

‘The only way to change society is to produce and share differently’
(Kleiner, The Telekommunist Manifesto)

Over the last few years a number of radical philosophers and critical theorists, including Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Jodi Dean and Sherry Turkle, have positioned networked media technologies, and corporate social media in particular, as contributing to the formation of a new kind of human subjectivity. It is a subjectivity that is supposedly suffering from attention deficit disorders, and rendered anxious, panicked and deeply depressed by the accelerated, over-stimulated, over-connected nature of life and work under 21st century capitalism.  Meanwhile others, such as Felix Stalder, David Harvey and Manuel Castells, have been keen to portray the Arab spring, anti-austerity and student protests as expressive of new ways of being human that are markedly different to those generated by neoliberalism.

Yet in the era of Anonymous and Occupy, with their explicit rejection of the drive toward individual fame that constitutes an inherent part of modern capitalist society, and emphasis on non-hierarchical forms of organization instead, do we need to critically explore new ways of being radical philosophers and theorists too? Ways that are unlike us, at least as we currently live, work and think, in that they are not quite so tightly bound up with the logic of neoliberalism?

Significantly, few of the key theorists whose thought provides a framework for the study of contemporary media have paid much attention to the implications changes in the media landscape have for their own ways of creating, performing and circulating knowledge and research (and this despite the opportunities that are provided by networked media technologies especially to perform ideas of the human, authorship, the text, the book, the university, originality, intellectual property and copyright differently).  The majority have been content to operate with norms, conventions, material practices and modes of production that originated in very different eras. Indeed, a number of them would be familiar even to scholars in the second half of the 17th century, when the world’s first peer-reviewed journal was established, let alone the 19th or 20th.  With surprisingly few exceptions they are those of the liberal humanist author, working alone in a study, office or library. Motivated by a ‘desire for pre-eminence, authority and disciplinary power’ (to quote Stanley Fish’s recent characterisation of his own ambition as a literary critic), this author produces a written text designed to make an argument so forceful and masterly it is difficult for others not to concur.  Claiming it as the original creative expression of his own unique mind, the lone author proceeds to present this contribution to knowledge to his peers in the form of a talk delivered at an academic conference or some other scholarly gathering. Having incorporated the resulting feedback, he then submits the written work for publication as part of a paper (or papercentric) journal or book. Once the work has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication, it is eventually made available for sale under the terms of a publisher’s policy, licence or copyright agreement which:

•    asserts his right to be identified and acknowledged as its author and to have it attributed to him as his intellectual property;
•    transfers the rights to the commercial exploitation of the text or work as a commodity that can be bought and sold for profit to the publisher;
•    reserves the right to control and determine who publishes, circulates and reproduces the text, how, where and in which contexts;
•    prevents the integrity of the original, fixed and final form of the text from being modified or distorted by others.

Yet if the majority of key theorists have remained somewhat blind to the implications of changes in the media landscape for their own ways of performing knowledge (a landscape that shapes even if it does not determine human consciousness), one thinker has paid a lot of attention to the relation between subjectivity, technology and time at least: the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. It is to his work that I am therefore going to turn in what follows in order to think through the relation between networked media technologies, social media, temporality and our ways of living, acting, working and thinking as philosophers and theorists.

('#MySubjectivation' II is above here, and III here)