Hall 2016

Hall, Gary. Pirate Philosophy: For a Digital Posthumanities. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016.

"Does the struggle against the neoliberal corporatization of higher education not require us to have the courage to transform radically the material practices and social relations of our lives and labor?" (1)

This book "explores how w can produce not just new ways of thinking about the world, which is what theoriests and philosophers have traditionally aspired to do, but new ways of actually being theorists and philosophers in this 'time of riots'." (Xiv)

"How, when it comes to our own scholarly ways of creating, performing, and sharing knowledge and research, we can operate in a manner that is different not just from the neoliberal model of the entrepreneurial academic associated with corporate social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn, but also from the traditional liberal humanist model that comes replete with cliched, ready-made (some would even say cowardly) ideas of proprietorial authorship, the book, originality, fixity, and the finished object." (Xiv)

This book "endeavors to move the analysis of the human and nonhuman on by raising a question that is also an exhortation: How, as theorists and philosophers, can we act differently -- to the point where we begin to take on and assume some of the implications of the challenge that is offered by theory and philosophy to fundamental humanities concepts such as the human, the subject, the author, copyright, community, and the common, for the ways in which we live, work, and think? How, in other words, can we act as something like pirate philosophers in the sense of the term's etymological origins with the ancient greeks, where the pirate is someone who tries, tests, teases, and troubles, as well as attacks? Might doing so be one way for us to try out and put to the text new economic, legal, and political models for the creation, publication, and circulation of knowledge and ideas, models that are more appropriate for our postcrash sociopolitical situation?" (Xiv)

The Commons and Community: How We Remain Modern

Copyright and open access -- Creative Commons used by OA advocates, others in media/software studies argue CC is not really a commons at all, where the collective manages IP, but an individualistic model applied to digital age -- a continuation of bad aspects of copyright -- focused on creators not users

Richard Stallman, copyleft -- "Rather than supporting the ownership of private property, copyleft defends the freedom of everyone to copy, distribute, develop, and improve software or any other work covered by such a license" (5) -- but problems with this in that it feeds into neoliberal need for corporations to profit off unpaid "creative" labor

Roberto Esposito, Communitas -- what is "common"? What is "community"?

Academic life structured around questions of publishing but our critical theories rarely extend to it -- we continue to think "within the faded frame," as David Theo Goldberg puts it

"Nowhere is theory's thinking within the faded frame more evident, however, than in the way it continues to be dominated by the print-on-paper codex book and journal article, together with many of the core humanities concepts that have been inherited with them (which are of course not natural, but the result of years of historical development). The latter include a number of those concepts I have already begun to raise questions for in the process of analyzing the politics of sharing and the Commons, such as the unified, sovereign, proprietorial subject; the individualized author; intellectual property; and copyright. But ... they also include the signature, the proper noun or name, originality, the finished object, immutability or 'fixity,' the book, the canon, the discipline, tradition, even the human, along with the institutions that sustain and support them: the university, the library, the publishing house, and so on." (11-12)

"Indeed, if Western philosophy has forgotten that its origins lie with technics, if it has 'repressed technics as an object of thought,' as Bernard Stiegler insists, then many theorists and philosophers can be said to have also forgotten and repressed the technologies by which their own work is not only produced, published, and distributed but also commodified and privatized (not to mention controlled, homogenized, and standardized) by for-profit companies operating as part of the cultural industries." (12)

Those who champion the post-human or object-oriented philosophy (e.g. Graham Harman) continue to conceive themselves as Enlightenment human subjects when it comes to identifying and copyrighting their own authorship: "Thanks to the way in which they too have responded to the question of the politics of copying, distributing, selling, and reusing theory and philosophy, such 'posttheory theories' continue to be intimately caught up with the human in the very enactment of their attempt to think through and beyond it." (16)

"How can we operate differently with regard to our own work, business, roles, and practices to the point where we actually begin to confront, think through, and take on (rather than take for granted, forget, repress, ignore, or otherwise marginalize) some of the implications of the challenge that is offered by theory to fundamental humanities concepts such as the human, the subject, the author, the book, copyright, and intellectual property, for the ways in which we create, perform, and circulate knowledge and research?" (16) -- pirate philosophers

Not an "attempt on my part to invent an overarching theory or seamless philosophcyal system" -- no "fixed or predetermined meanings" -- "Rather, it is continually being generated within an extended meshwork of dynamic flows and interweaving relations concerning the human, the subject, the author, the law, the market economy" (17)

"Multithemed and polycentered" (17)

Barad, following Haraway; diffractive methodology -- criticism not as negative dialectric but affirmative process of building upon -- Foucault; critique as "an art, a practice, a doing" (21)