The Missing Community

(What follows is the sixth part of an interview, 'Just Because You Write about Posthumanism Doesn’t Mean You Aren’t a Liberal Humanist: An Interview with Gary Hall' by Francien Broekhuizen, Simon Dawes, Danai Mikelli and Poppy Wilde. It is published in the MeCCSA-PGN Conference 2015 issue of Networking Knowledge, Vol 9, No 1 (2016). The first part of the interview, 'Neoliberal Subjectivation', is available here; the second part, 'Liberalism as a "Way of Doing Things"', here; the third part, 'From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg', here; the fourth part, 'Thinking With Media Technologies', here; the fifth part, 'On Open Humanities Press And Other Projects', here.) 

THE EDITORS: Where do you feel your responsibility lies in terms of nudging people towards open access? 

GARY HALL: I realise this is probably going to sound odd, but I don’t feel I have that kind of responsibility. I know you’d like me to speak about open access, and I understand why that is, given how much work I’ve done in the area, and that I’ve published a book about it and so forth. The fact is, though, while I really want to be helpful, I’m not sure how interested I am in open access – except to the extent it enables us to address, critically and creatively, the sort of issues we’ve been talking about. It’s certainly not my intention to position myself as some kind of representative or spokesperson for open access by assuming responsibility for nudging people towards it, be it at a governmental policy maker, funding council, scholarly society, institutional, departmental or professional level. 

If what I’m interested in is placing a question mark against both our neoliberal and our liberal humanist models of subjectivity, then it’d be naïve of me to expect that there’s going to be a large, pre-existing audience out there I can appeal to; an audience that’s ready and waiting for me to simply prod them into taking on board these ideas and their implications for our current ways of doing things, which as we have seen are largely (neo)liberal humanist in practice. You could even go so far as to say that, in denaturalising and destablising notions of individual rights, property, copyright and so on that we otherwise take for granted, my work is designed precisely to challenge a lot of the norms, values and practices around which any such wider audience might gather. (There are no legal anti-humanist or non-humanist alternatives to publishing on a copyright all rights reserved basis that are professionally recognised, for instance.) Consequently, we might think of such an audience, not so much in terms of Giorgio Agamben’s ‘coming community’ or what, following Jacques Derrida, we could call a community to come, but as a missing community. This is another reason I’m interested in experimenting with ways of working and thinking as a media theorist that are not only engaged in representing or providing an account of the world, but performatively acting in or intra-acting with it too. Rather than endeavouring to speak to or on behalf of such a missing community, it seems to me we have to performatively invent the context in which such a community could emerge.  

Creating such a missing community is what I’d suggest we’re attempting to do with many of the projects I’m connected to, which include not just Culture Machine and Open Humanities Press, but also the Centre for Disruptive Media here at Coventry and its affirmative disruption of both neoliberal and liberal ideas of the humanities, the library, the archive and even the university.  Will we succeed? I’m not sure. It’s reinflecting a phrase of Stuart Hall’s, I know, but for me we have to work ‘without guarantees’, without any assurances that such a community will appear at some point in the future. Still, that’s the kind of difficulty, contradiction, paradox even, I’m interested in living with and exploring. And this includes the paradox that’s associated with my own inability to simply transcend the individualistic authorial ‘I’: both in this interview, and in my forthcoming publication of a traditional print book with only my name on it about the problems involved in authors producing books with only their individual names on them, even though I know this book, like this interview, is written by what for shorthand can be called the Others in me.  It’s something I’m not entirely at ease with – and not just for the reasons we’ve discussed. (It’s also partly why I began by referring to Foucault’s ‘Masked Philosopher’ interview, which he published anonymously.) Nevertheless, I still take the decision to write such books and to participate in such interviews on occaision. For me, doing so can be another means of experimenting in a quasi-transcendental fashion with some of the multiple differential modalities of ‘I’ that are possible in our current context; and thus of again giving new, non-dialectical inflections to certain tendencies associated with both our neoliberal and liberal ways of doing things. 

Hopefully, all this explains why I continue to work in a university, despite all the stress, anxiety and exhaustion associated with it at the moment. I do so because the university is one space – it’s not the only space, art is perhaps another, but the university is one space – where we have a chance to do things differently. Where we can raise these kinds of questions. Where we can explore and experiment with new ways of doing.

Really, We're Helping To Build This Fucking Business: The Academia.edu Files

We are pleased to announce Volume 9 in the Culture Machine Liquid Book Series, published by Open Humanities Press: 

Really, We're Helping To Build This . . . Business: The Academia.edu Files. 

This book can be accessed here:

http://liquidbooks.pbworks.com/w/page/106236504/The%20Academia_edu%20Files

 

Image Credit: CC-BY: Linda N. from Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/22748341@N00/361025310/ 

Really, We're Helping To Build This . . . Business: The Academia.edu Files, charts the recent debate about for-profit academic social networking sites (aka research sharing platforms) such as Academia.edu, ResearchGate and Mendeley. It features contributions from Gary Hall, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Eileen Joy and Guy Geltner, among others.  

Help Wanted

Initially put together by Gary Hall and Janneke Adema, The Academia.edu Files, like all the titles in the Liquid Books series, is open for editing by anyone.

  

The editors are particularly keen for users to contribute to the section on alternative platforms, to raise awareness about the not-for-profit, institutionally supported and/or scholarly-led alternative initiatives for sharing and discussing research. 

On Open Humanities Press And Other Projects

(What follows is the fifth part of an interview, 'Just Because You Write about Posthumanism Doesn’t Mean You Aren’t a Liberal Humanist: An Interview with Gary Hall' by Francien Broekhuizen, Simon Dawes, Danai Mikelli and Poppy Wilde. It is published in the MeCCSA-PGN Conference 2015 issue of Networking Knowledge, Vol 9, No 1 (2016). The first part of the interview, 'Neoliberal Subjectivation', is available here; the second part, 'Liberalism as a "Way of Doing Things"', here; the third part, 'From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg', here; the fourth part, 'Thinking With Media Technologies', here) 

THE EDITORS: You have helped found and run a wide variety of open access initiatives, such as the journal Culture Machine, Open Humanites Press (OHP), and the two Liquid Books and Living Books About Life series. Could you say a little more about them? And do you have any plans for future developments?

GARY HALL: The above idea of taking some of the elements, dynamics and potentials associated with the transition from the Gutenberg galaxy of the print book to a post- Gutenberg space of networked digital information flows and giving them new and different inflections would be one way of understanding what it is we’re doing with some of the projects I’m connected to: not just those you mention specifically, but also more recent projects such as Photomediations Machine, Photomediations: An Open Book, and after.video. 

Photomediations: An Open Book from Photomediations Machine on Vimeo.

So Open Humanites Press is a scholar-led, non-profit, open access collective dedicated to making works of contemporary critical thought openly available worldwide on a free, gratis basis.  Launched by Sigi Jöttkandt, David Ottina and myself in 2008, this networked, multi-user collective currently consists of nineteen open access journals (including Culture Machine), and to date has published approaching thirty ‘traditional’ open access books. But OHP also has two more experimental series – Liquid Books, edited by Clare Birchall and myself; and Living Books About Life, edited by Clare Birchall, Joanna Zylinska and myself  – which feature books that are published on a free, gratis and libre basis so that their ‘readers’ are able to edit their content, rewrite, remix and reversion them. 

That said, I should stress we’re not attempting to completely rethink everything at the same time and to the same extent with these projects –  as if with Culture Machine or OHP we’ve hit on a new way of doing things that’s somehow capable of engaging with all of the issues we’ve touched on. Instead, we’re operating more according to Jacques Derrida’s notion of the quasi-transcendental, whereby the process of examining some concepts by necessity requires that other concepts are left unexamined. So, to provide examples of projects that are experimenting quite explicitly with books and learned journals as information media, Joanna Zylinska and Ting Ting Cheng’s image-driven online journal-cum-gallery site, Photomediations Machine (a sister project to the Culture Machine journal), is exploring the process of moving from an era of literacy and grammatology to a post-literate era – what is already being called the visual web – and what this change means for theory.  Meanwhile Adnan Hadzi, Oliver Lerone Schultz, Pablo De Soto and Laila Shereen Sakr’s collectively edited after.video, which OHP is publishing as part of the Liquid Books series, is doing something similar in the form of paperback book and video stored on a Raspberry Pi computer and packaged in a VHS case. However, rather than the still or photographic image – which is the primary concern of Photomediations Machine – it is focusing on moving images in order to rethink the book and theory ‘after video’.  I won’t detail them here, but other OHP projects are concentrating more on testing our concepts of individual (and individualistic) authorship, fixity, the finished object, property rights, copyright and/or piracy. 

To this extent, one way of thinking of OHP is as a heterogeneous collective of theorists, scholars, librarians, publishers, editors and technologists, working in a non-rivalrous, non-competitive, non-dialectical fashion to explore and invent new models of creation, publication, circulation and ownership. However, rather than telling these different people exactly how they are to publish their work, say, by imposing one particular publishing model or one specific platform on them all, OHP is endeavouring to work with them to develop the means of doing so that they themselves consider to be most appropriate for their particular project, context, specialism, field or community. I know this is how some people have understood OHP, certainly: as trying to relate to what theorists and scholars want, rather than to what their institutions, libraries and funders want, as is the case with many government and research council-funded open access initiatives. From this perspective, OHP is opening up a space for the continuation of academic freedom, albeit in a radically different form from most of those with which we’re familiar. 

Thinking With Media Technologies

(What follows is the fourth part of an interview, 'Just Because You Write about Posthumanism Doesn’t Mean You Aren’t a Liberal Humanist: An Interview with Gary Hall' by Francien Broekhuizen, Simon Dawes, Danai Mikelli and Poppy Wilde. It is published in the MeCCSA-PGN Conference 2015 issue of Networking Knowledge, Vol 9, No 1 (2016). The first part of the interview, 'Neoliberal Subjectivation', is available here; the second part, 'Liberalism as a "Way of Doing Things"', here; the third, 'From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg', here.)

THE EDITORS: You’re very active in the field of open access publishing. Could you tell us about your motivation for being so?

GARY HALL: As I say, variations on the narrative that sees us moving from an era of written and printed communication into a ‘universe of technical images’, as Flusser calls it, have been provided by a number of theorists and philosophers.   But if this is the case, rather than concentrating on writing even more commercially copyrighted, linearly organised, bound and printed codex books about it, might it not be more appropriate for us to try to understand this post-Gutenberg universe by acting as though we are indeed living through a long process of transition from one era to another, whatever form the latter may eventually turn out to take?

It’s from the performance artist Stelarc, perhaps more than anyone else, that I’ve learned the importance of engaging with media technologies as things we think with and not just through or about. In his talks and lectures Stelarc takes great care to emphasise that he doesn’t feel he can explore how different developments in technology are altering our understanding of the body and the human unless he is able to achieve his often extremely difficult to realise performances with robotics, medical procedures, cybernetic systems and the internet; unless he actually has, for example, an extra ear surgically constructed, positioned as an additional bodily feature, and able to ‘broadcast RealAudio sounds to augment the local sounds that the actual ears hear', and perhaps to ‘whisper sweet nothings’ to them.  

At the same time, Stelarc is aware that in doing so, he is merely offering his own  – albeit rather unique, some would say physically quite extreme – contribution to that long tradition of artists, writers and philosophers who have stressed the importance of understanding our relationship to media and other technologies performatively. It is a tradition that includes Friedrich Nietzsche, who claimed that ‘our writing tools are also working on our thoughts’; Ludwig Wittgenstein, who commented that ‘I really do think with my pen, because my head often knows nothing about what my hand is writing’; and also William Blake, who in his poem Jerusalem observed that ‘If Perceptive organs vary, Objects of Perception seem to vary’.

So what are the implications for us, as media, cultural and communication studies students and scholars, of the theory that is being rehearsed here: that our performances with media technologies exist in an enmeshed, processual, intra-active relationship with our thoughts and bodies? Well, for one thing, it means our thoughts do not pre-exist this relationship. Once again we can see that they are created at least in part by the ‘tools’ we use to express them, as well as by the performance of doing so, including that part of the performance that involves the physical human body. But what it also means is that if these tools and performances change – if as a culture we switch from writing predominantly with a pen to communicating increasingly with a typewriter, networked computer keyboard, Bluetooth-enabled tablet touchscreen, or Oculus Rift Virtual Reality Headset – then so do our thoughts.

What it certainly does not mean is that we all now have to sign up to Facebook, Twitter and Google Scholar so we can try to understand our post-Gutenberg world by learning to think with these corporate media environments (and not just about them). It doesn’t mean we have to go along passively with the transition from the printed codex book to networked digital information and data flows. But neither does it mean we should be acting today as if we can somehow replicate the conditions of the Gutenberg galaxy – especially its quiet, private spaces where an individual could concentrate on reading and writing books without having their thoughts disturbed by a constant stream of communications from the outside world. (I’m thinking of Jonathan Franzen permanentley sealing up the Ethernet port on his laptop that enables him to connect to the internet so he can write his great American novels, or Nicholas Carr moving to the mountains in Colorado where there is no cell phone service to produce his books about how the internet is damaging our brains.) Indeed, one of the main points I want to make is that, when it comes to our ways of being and doing in the world, these two culture industry-dominated systems for the creation, publication and dissemination of knowledge and information – what we might crudely characterise as the classic ‘closed’ system of print culture and the newer ‘semi-closed’ system of corporate social and mobile media – are not so very different in this respect.  Instead, I’m motivated more by the idea of taking some of the tendencies associated with this transition and giving them new inflections that are different to both the neoliberal and the liberal ‘“way of doing things”’.

From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg

(What follows is the third part of an interview, 'Just Because You Write about Posthumanism Doesn’t Mean You Aren’t a Liberal Humanist: An Interview with Gary Hall' by Francien Broekhuizen, Simon Dawes, Danai Mikelli and Poppy Wilde. It is published in the MeCCSA-PGN Conference 2015 issue of Networking Knowledge, Vol 9, No 1 (2016). The first part of the interview, 'Neoliberal Subjectivation', is available here; the second part, 'Liberalism as a "Way of Doing Things"', here.)

THE EDITORS: In the conference you also talked about the shift from a Gutenberg to a Zuckerberg galaxy. Could you elaborate on that? 

GARY HALL: What I was referring to is the idea that the development of the print codex book and the related requirement for closed spaces in which to read and write has had a fundamental role in the emergence of modern subjectivity – along with the associated notions of the rational liberal individual, linear thought (and the related long-form argument), critical reflection (the grammatical rules used in the production of linear written texts constituting a test for reason), and also the public/private distinction. The work of Vilém Flusser, Walter Ong and Bernard Stiegler should all be mentioned in this context. Without doubt, however, the most famous expression of this idea remains that of Marshall McLuhan. 

It is this Gutenberg galaxy, as McLuhan calls it, which is seen as having played a large part in giving us our sense of the private individual. Moving quickly again, this occured because once books became widely available thanks to the invention of the printing press, private spaces were needed in which they could be read, concentrated on and thought about: a study or ‘room of one’s own’, to borrow the words of Virginia Woolf. The provision of just such a study area is one of the functions libraries have fulfilled: historically, they have provided the kind of quiet, solitary spaces for the reading and contemplation of books that have helped to form our subjectivities, our sense of the individual, our sense of the difference between the public and the private. 

Now, if the development of the print book has had a significant role in the emergence of modern subjectivity and consciousness, it follows that the ideas readers and writers have are not separate and distinct from the material apparatuses with which those ideas are physically created, published and circulated. Rather, we can see that things and words, body and mind, language and reality, the so-called immaterial and material are enmeshed here – to the point where the material qualities and properties of books form the environmental pre-conditions for the constitution of the ideas they carry and convey. (Although it’s worth emphasising that they don’t determine those ideas; not least because there are other forces and energies at work that are non-technological and media related. So this is not a theory of technogenesis, for me: it’s not that human development has gone hand in hand only with technological development). 

However, we can now be said to be in the process of leaving the Gutenberg era and moving instead into what I was teasingly referring to as the Zuckerberg galaxy. Of course we don’t yet know what form the latter is eventually going to take. What we can say is that, at the moment at least, our world is dominated less and less by the print codex book, and more and more by the kinds of digital networks and mobile media that have been made possible by the development of the internet, computers, laptops, smart phones and the cloud. In my talk I illustrated this change by taking as an example the library at Coventry University. What’s noticeable about the Frederick Lanchester Library, as it’s called, is that it’s undergone something of a redesign (what its website refers to as a Refurbishment Project). It no longer has so many small, enclosed, quiet spaces of the kind that used to be quite common in university libraries. (Often they were provided in the form of carrel desks, a design originating in monasteries.) Instead – and in line with a lot of contemporary libraries – the Lanchester is now much more open. It’s frequently quite noisy too. Of course, students are still going there on occasion to read a print book by themselves in private, much as they might have done in decades past. But when students are in the library these days they’re often sitting around together on sofas and at large open tables, they’re chatting to friends, they’re working on group projects, they’re texting on their phones, they’re downloading digital combinations of print and other media onto their tablets. So the library no longer offers a clearly maintained (and librarian policed) boundary between the private and the public to quite the extent that it used to. Nowadays, as a space, it’s too networked, it’s too digitally connected, for that to be appropriate, or even possible. (See the New City of Perth Library in Australia for another example. My thanks to Nina Sellars for drawing my attention to the fact that books are not included on the list of this public library's key features, and only get a brief mention in its online description.) 

A lot of the teaching in the Media department here at Coventry (which is where this interview is taking place) is likewise based on responding to this emerging new world of dynamic digital information and data: of user-generated content, of crowd-sourcing, of grassroots political movements and so forth. It’s now much more concerned with opening the university up, just as the library is being opened up in the 21st century, so as to make the courses we teach, as well as the rooms and buildings we teach in, much less rooted in the print paradigm.  

Coming back once more to the idea that media help to shape (but do not determine) our subjectivities, a number of thinkers associated with theories of the non-human, the posthuman and the postanthropocentric are striving to develop this idea still further. Put very briefly, their contention is that if the media we use today are different from those of the Gutenberg galaxy, if the material forms with which we create ideas are changing, then so must be the ideas themselves, meaning that our human subjectivity and consciousness is changing too. It is this argument that I was trying to think through at the MeCCSA-PGN 2015 conference. On the one hand, we have the transition from the Gutenberg galaxy of the print book to a new space of networked digital information and data flows, and the way in which the latter is transforming our subjectivities and sense of self, not least by means of algorithmic forms of state and corporate surveillance. And on the other hand there is the fact that one of the main ways in which even antihumanist and posthumanist theorists and philosophers are attempting to understand this shift is by writing print books and journal articles about it. The question for me is this: if we are in the process of moving to a post-Gutenberg world – if the internet is a ‘game changer’ in this respect, as some are claiming it is – to what extent can we understand this change by continuing to act as if we are still living very much in the world of Gutenberg, replete with the latter’s emphasis on the book, privacy, and the rational, liberal, individual human subject? How can we understand visual media such as photography, film, television, video, 3-D technology and augmented reality in the age of Megaupload, BitTorrent, Wikileaks, 4chan, Anonymous, and even YouTube, Instagram and WhatsApp, together with their implications for our inherited ideas of the named author, the sovereign proprietorial subject, intellectual property and so on, if we insist on continually writing commercially copyrighted, linearly organised, bound and printed paper codex books and journal articles about them?