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<TITLE>Re: [iDC] work, play, praxis</TITLE>
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<FONT FACE="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'>Davin’s comment son desire open up some new vistas. The challenges are how to square desire and the gift - ie to see how the vicissitudes of desire, its notorious ability to turn lust into violence, hunger into disgust, are expressible in the gift relation - and how to understand desire as something other than the moblising force of consumer capital<BR>
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While this discussion has been rolling, I’ve been travelling and therefore reading, among other things a book (Matthew B Roller) on the transitional relations between autocrats and aristocrats in the early empire in Rome, where he makes a simple useful distinction between gifts and commodities: Gifts create or reinforce personal relationships, and are usually incommensurate (either one gift is ‘better’ than the other or the reciprocal gift is delayed in time). Commodity exchange is between commensurate things (of equal value) exchanged in real time and implies no personal relation. Roller points out that gifts can be amicable or hostile, ie designed to create unrepayable debt, so reinforcing hierarchy. At that time of huge social change, gift relations rather than commodity exchange were typically used to create obligations within the ruling elite <BR>
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Today we see an additional term: the impersonal relationship of the commodity exchange can itself be commodified (the on-selling of bad debts).<BR>
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Thesis 1: the commodificaton and sale of labour was complemented by the commodification and sale of attention between the 1880s and the 1950s. Subsequently it has been extended into the commodificaton and sale of free creative play<BR>
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Thesis 2: both commodified relationships (on-sold debt) and unpad content creation rely on the existence of individuals. But in commodity exchange the actual (phenomenal) person matters less than certain data characteristics (creditworthiness, insurability). Likewise we know from Adorno that despite social origins, social vehicles (eg language) and social audiences, markets and socio-cultural functions, creativity requires the lens of the person as a medium through which the social is brought to an experiential precision, a degree of subjectivity which both ties it to the truth of contemporary (individualistic) societies and provides the randomness which pure rationality (of the market or for that matter of critical theory) can’t produce. Meanwhile the market, while massified, requires the individual as the agent of purchasing and consumption. The market needs individualised tastes and choices in order to disperse risk, encourage fashions, and thus increase rates of innovation and waste. <BR>
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Thesis 4. The necessity of individuation when connected up with the commodification of labour, attention, play <B>and</B> of relationships — initially fiscal and actuarial but now also social (the exchange value of personal networks) -- makes the person a commodity, or more specifically commodifies the data abstractable from but identifable with a person. <BR>
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(this is the issue of privacy. There is no ‘right’ to privacy unless you posit the self as a internal relation of ownership, ie that there is a legal person who owns her own data, ie that we are our own commodities, not only when we sell our labour but in all aspects of non-working life)<BR>
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So a possible answer rto Michael’s query about the quantification of free colllaboration might come in one of two forms, the first drawing obliquely on the lacanian thread in tis discussion. The other from the Multitude thread. Either a) in the schiz produced by the commodification of the self as owner of its own data, something is left out, which we may as well call desire. This is , as Nicholas says (‘</SPAN></FONT><FONT FACE="Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12pt'>the desiring pulse is a capitalist pulse to begin with’)</SPAN></FONT><FONT FACE="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'>, shaped by Capital, but only in the way that the unconscious in lacan is shaped by language, ie it is the obverse, what is excluded, which takes its shape from the act of exclusion, an Other that begins beyond the boundary we set. <BR>
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The second answer is that the statistical management of data and bio flows is so exclusively focused on the atomistic behaviour of individuals it no longer has room for the behaviour of crowds as anything other than the aggregate of individuals. An emergent politics might do worse than go back to the fascination with the sociology of the crowd back in the 1930s, to return the idea of the crowd to the centre of political discourse<BR>
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The new crowd may well be deeply marked by the collapse of old class solidarities and to a significant extent of extended families and even (in the most overdeveloped economies) the nuclear family. No nostalgia for Sparticism. But if the individual is an institution – in much the same way as the family before it – then it has a history; and so does the crowd which has been edged out of our conception of politics..<BR>
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In our instance, the creation of mutual obligations trough gift-giving will also be marked by the self-orientation of the contemporary form of individuality. But because contemporary individuality is deeply unsatisfying, because it leaves out the profoundly socialising Other-orientation of desire, and does so if anything more radically than predecessor regimes, the crowd emerging from the database economy may well be more amorphous and - god willing – a great deal less autocratic, demagogic and foundationally racist than the plebeian crowd of ancient Rome <BR>
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sean<BR>
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On 5/07/09 2:53 PM, "Nicholas Ruiz III" <<a href="editor@intertheory.org">editor@intertheory.org</a>> wrote:<BR>
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</SPAN></FONT><BLOCKQUOTE><FONT FACE="Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12pt'>Greetings davin/all...many thanks for your great thoughts on this...i'm not really sure we can substantiate such an ethereal desire, to 'carve out a relationship between subjects that IS outside of this materiality'...as the desiring pulse is a capitalist pulse to begin with - desire 'wants' something and generally seeks it, from the environment or from itself -resulting in the phenomena of capitalization....and p2p is the ultimate in capitalistic circumvention and exchange all while it is 'free,' (which it isn't for myriad reasons) in the sense that the sharing pod exists, to share the livelihood of the 'other'...who may or may not benefit from the sharing and is likely, in many cases, forced to adapt to the increased 'sharing' of one's 'labor' -ala the music artists which now know they must tour (more than ever before) to make a living.<BR>
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The question of motivation - 'that many desperately want to live in a world where it is possible to imagine that people might be motivated by something other than the zero sum game' - i think this is an interesting question...but as a hypothesis, perhaps it might be better to say that the rules of the game we must maintain in a more 'fair' manner? We might even speak of Justice? Yes, a striving toward something unrealizable, yet 'approachable' as a limit in calculus. We must be careful with love however, as it excludes that which it does not love and hence renders the 'unloved' with many possible, or even probable, consequences - solidarity seems more compelling, for its own sake - and for the sake of a very specific, 'desiring-capital' you describe.<BR>
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amicalement!<BR>
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NRIII<BR>
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Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D<BR>
NRIII for Congress 2010<BR>
<a href="http://intertheory.org/nriiiforcongress2010.html">http://intertheory.org/nriiiforcongress2010.html</a><BR>
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