opposition means creating and sustaining something un-opposable? by neil
Risa, first, I am sure there’s no yammering ongoing in your thesis; instead, I suspect you undertake a thorough consideration of opposing monopolies of knowledge and that, as such, it seems like the process of eternal return that is the stuff of such a project. That’s to say that linear progression is more an idealization and that you’re crunching through problems of controlling how we do things – communicating, communicating our communicability – that are basic to us becoming the beings we are in this world. Which is why I am taken by your historical and theoretical investment with open source: it grounds and anchors the thinking of Innis and it helps to distil and condense your ideas, which you can pragmatically assert and exercise at the level or practicing with and through open source. I guess that means that you do have to keep moving in order to shake off those strategic distortions or moments of arrest that allow for moments of uptake. And again, that’s the sheer and mundane beauty of open source: it allows for that; it allows you to facilitate through use and deployment, without recourse to instructive discipline by experts bent on exacerbating the gap by offering you additional prosthetics to “work for you” when you may be able to work for you and your auto-heuristic self.
Politics is about finding ways to do things: bridging, negotiating, interfacing with divergent interests and concern. the demands of so many different perspectives (“openings into the world”) necessarily require that acknowledgement, which is to say that politics are about perceptions, environments, and socially determined orientations. While the formula of multitude= (singularity + multiplicity) /duration has been taken around the block a few times and has been realized by communities committed to radically challenging the status quo (consider: global groups who are oppose the state monopoly of political violence, and the state’s ability to abstract away violence by delegating it and coding it as “ organized force”), there’s still an ethos here worth validating. I feel like I’m regurgitating your points. “Getting thing done” is thus the most practical challenge, which is why pragmatism – and the umbrella for tools like open source – is foundational. Further, in terms of governance, no state has a monopoly on how its citizens engage themselves, which is to say that open source tools do practically side-step impositions of dominant forms. I guess it’s a matter of being able to be left to our wits to figure out what’s best for us as opposed to being given a manual. which, again, is why the “ways” matter: the cascade of successes and failure inevitably provides some new or refreshed way of approaching the same demanding set of questions recast again.
[I think here about the temporality of Raymond Williams’ residues, emergent things, and dominant forms and apologize for my ability to give a better explanation…I do not mean to imply that the moment tools to techniques are expunged of use-value when taken up or circumscribed by hegemonic formations – as the incorporation of difference and its subsequent harvested offerings. they are still useful little tricks with which to do things and continue as such, a habitual schemes that make life intelligible, ownership or otherwise. My point is that the delay in and around such a transition is hard to peg and that the shifting valuation and who confers that value, as it becomes “more owned” has a tendency to extract a kind of inexhaustible quality , which would mean also determining the completed or prolonged “social life of things” by who and for who and how. It is around this question that one locate the kind of outstripping tipping point that is arguably worth considering. I suggest this because if capital is premised on the cultural logic of neoliberalization of territory and ideas by way of penetration and new rounds of primitive accumulation, then this temporal structure is a significant indicator. That sounds ridiculously ham-handed and conspiratorial but lately I’ve been thinking and reading a lot in and around that trajectory, especially in relation to how this kind of capital piggybacks militarization and permanent war, where the “war machine” is a capital engine itself but also is equally a means to establish points of penetration to enable a process of build and destroy and build + x + y + x+ y ….Perhaps this may unfold using said open source systems for network-centric containment, tabulation, and enclosure...]
It is a matter of shared purposes regardless of what said federales attempt to moderate or recycle. Education, health care, and the military all rely on federal policies. This is to say that all these policy areas intersect with the sugar-coated bifurcated division we make of our political selves: the sovereign citizens who instruct as agency-bound, expressing themselves democratically, thus taking some ownership of the representative process, with rights and liberties and guarantees; and objects subjected to administration and management, the subjects of the state, the disciplined and biopower-bound national subjects on whose behalf the states acts, thereby rhetorically constituting state power as the completion of the very guarantee laid out. Consider these two sides to be: a continual suspicion of the will and legitimacy of the state; and infantile faith in the state for its promise of protection.
Last, funny: the policy developments we really seem to need most – the health care and the education – would actually provide the “most” protection and would indeed stand to gain from the organizational benefit the open source practices. The traditional area of state-delegated violence explained away as force – framed as the extended, ultimate protection of the citizenry’s right to self-preservation – has become the object of inquiry for funded research projects pursuing the benefits of open source practices while arguably being the thing that makes us most cynical, that we perceive needing least. Are we wrong? Probably not, though the realpolitik we are facing – where politics is actually war, at the behest of and for the gain of capital, by other means – repeatedly utters answers otherwise.
I finish with this: open source is a practice premised on pursuing an alternative mode using alternate code in what amounts to, like semiotics, a working on the quantum-like level of a communicative form. Because of the historical circumstances, open source matters, and while it is a tool-like thing, it is worth sustaining and pushing as an alternative rather than using it simply as a proxy for critique of whatever existing order of incorporation and absorption. It is a means with ends for the creation of form, or maybe even a harmonizing end in itself if we wish to approach it differ tent. Both ways, it’s a process that connects, conjugates, and continues. The emancipatory narrative of the web has come and gone while the practical function of allowing for connections and transactions is still firmly with us, for better and worse. Open source provides for better, grassroots kinds of communicative encounters. that’s worth protecting from enclosure; its another kind of commons to refuse becoming contained mad overwritten as property. I keep returning to capital and that’s still one of the most basic problem: not the resource of flexible capitals as much as the act of capitalizing at the exception of others…
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