COMMENT
Pirate Radical Philosophy
Gary Hall
Pirate … from the Latin pirata (-ae; pirate)…
transliteration of the Greek piratis (pirate; πειρατής)
from the verb pirao (make an attempt, try, test,
get experience, endeavour, attack; πειράω). … In
modern Greek… piragma: teasing [πείραγμα] …
pirazo: tease, give trouble [πειράζω].1
Much has been written about the ‘crisis of capitalism’
and the associated events known, for short, as the ‘Arab
Spring’, ‘student protests’, ‘Occupy’ and ‘August riots’.
Yet to what extent does our contemporary situation
also pose a challenge to those of us who work ‘in’ the
university – a challenge that would encourage us to go
further than merely endeavouring to ‘just say “no”’ to
the idea of universities operating as for-proit business
in order to serve the economy, and demanding a return
to the kind of publicly inanced mass education policy
that prevailed in the Keynesian era? What if we, too,
in our capacity as academics, authors, writers, thinkers
and scholars want to resist the continued imposition
of a neoliberal political rationality that may appear
dead on its feet but is still managing to blunder on?
How can we act not so much for or with the student
protesters, ‘graduates without a future’, ‘digital natives’
and ‘remainder of capital’ (protesting alongside them,
accepting invitations to speak to and write about
them and so on), but in terms of them?2 What if we
desire a very different university to the one we have,
but have no wish to retain or restore the paternalistic,
class-bound model associated with the writings of
Arnold, Leavis and Newman? While appreciating the
idea that there is an outside to the university is itself a
university idea, and that attempts to move beyond the
institution too often leave it in place and uncontested,
is it possible to take some impetus nonetheless from
the emergence of autonomous, self-organized learning
communities such as the Public School, and free textsharing networks such as AAAAARG.ORG (to name
but two)? Does the struggle against the ‘becoming
business’ of the university not require us, too, to have
the courage to try out and put to the test new economic,
legal and political systems and models for the production, publication, sharing and discussion of knowledge
and ideas; and thus to open ourselves to transforming
radically the material practices and social relations of
our academic labour?
To date, such questions have proven surprisingly
dificult to bring into focus, no doubt in part because
they do indeed contain the potential to change and
renew, radically, our professional practices and identities. In the March following the student protests of
November 2010, the Institute of Contemporary Arts
in London hosted an afternoon of talks under the title
‘Radical Publishing: What Are We Struggling For?’
At irst sight, this event looked as if it might explore
some of these issues.3 As it turned out, the afternoon
featured extensive discussion from speakers such as
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Peter Hallward and Mark Fisher
of K-Punk blog fame about politics, understood according to the most easy-to-identify signs and labels, the
majority of which concerned political transformation
elsewhere: in the past, the future, Egypt. Somewhat
surprisingly, given its title, there was very little discussion of anything that would actually affect the work,
business, role and practices of the speakers themselves:
radical ideas of publishing with transformed modes of
production, say.
The human
Blindspots of this nature are widespread throughout
the humanities. Take the very idea on which the
humanities, and with it the concept of the university,
is based: that of the human itself.4 The humanities
have critically interrogated the concept of the human
for the last hundred years and more, not least in the
guise of critical theory and continental philosophy.
Nevertheless, the mode of production of knowledge
R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 17 3 ( M ay / Ju n e 2 012 )
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and research in the humanities continues for the most
part to be tied to the idea of the indivisible, individual,
liberal human(ist) author. It is a description of how
ideas, theories and concepts are created, developed,
published and disseminated that is as applicable to
the latest generation of theorists to emerge as it is to
the ‘golden generation’ of Barthes, Foucault, Lyotard
and Lacan – not just radical philosophers such as
Agamben, Badiou, Latour or Stiegler, but many of the
so-called ‘children of the ‘68ers’, like Meillassoux, too.
For all that theorists nowadays may be more inclined
to write using a computer keyboard and screen than
a fountain pen or typewriter, their way of creating,
developing and disseminating theory and theoretical
concepts remains much the same. This is the case with
respect to the initial production of their texts and their
materiality – the focus on print-on-paper codex books
and articles, or at the very least paper-centric texts,
written by lone scholars usually in a study or ofice,
and designed to make a forceful, authoritative, masterly
contribution to knowledge. But it is also the case with
regard to the attribution of their texts to individualized
human beings whose identities – regardless of any
associations they may have with anti- or post-humanist
philosophy – are uniied and self-present enough for
them to be able to claim them as their original work
or property.
Admittedly, these traditional methods for the creation, composition, publication and circulation of knowledge and research in the humanities are being put into
question by the emergent ield of the digital humanities.
Witness literary theorist Stanley Fish’s recent characterization of those forms of communication associated with the digital humanities, blogs especially, as
‘provisional, ephemeral, interactive, communal, available to challenge, interruption and interpolation’. Fish
consequently positions such uses of networked digital
media technologies as standing directly against the
traditional ambition of the scholarly critic, an ambition
he admits to sharing. This entails being able ‘to write
about a topic with such force and completeness that
no other critic will be able to say a word about it’. It
is an aim he ascribes to a ‘desire for pre-eminence,
authority and disciplinary power’. Accordingly, Fish
contrasts both blogs and the digital humanities to the
kind of ‘long-form scholarship – books and articles
submitted to learned journals and university presses’
– he has devoted his professional life to, and which he
describes in terms of the building of ‘arguments that
are intended to be decisive, comprehensive, monumental, deinitive and, most important, all mine’. 5 Yet the
digital humanist Fish concentrates on in most detail,
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Kathleen Fitzpatrick, does not really offer a profound
challenge to ideas of the human, subjectivity, or the
associated concept of the author at all. Nor, to be fair,
is she particularly interested in doing so. In fact, far
from radically questioning the notion of the human that
underpins ‘the “myth” of the stand-alone, masterful
author’,6 Fitzpatrick’s view of the digital humanities
sees it as being more concerned to bring the humanities as they are traditionally known and understood
to bear on computing technologies.7 Take her recent
book Planned Obsolescence, which, as an experiment
with open peer review, was itself irst published on a
blog to which others could contribute. Fish portrays
Fitzpatrick as contending in this volume,
irst, that authorship has never been thus isolated –
one always writes against the background of, and
in conversation with, innumerable predecessors and
contemporaries who are in effect one’s collaborators
– and, second, that the ‘myth’ of the stand-alone,
masterful author is exposed for the iction it is by
the new forms of communication – blogs, links,
hypertext, re-mixes, mash-ups, multi-modalities and
much more – that have emerged with the development of digital technology.8
Yet, as Fitzpatrick makes clear in a section expressly
concerned with the change in authorship ‘From Individual to Collaborative’,
the kinds of collaboration I’m interested in need
not necessarily result in literal co-authorship. …
The shift that I’m calling for may therefore be less
… a call necessarily for writing in groups than for
a shift in our focus from the individualistic parts
of our work to those that are more collective, more
socially situated … focusing on this social mode of
conversation, rather than becoming obsessed with
what we, unique individuals that we are, have to say,
may produce better exchanges. One need not literally
share authorship of one’s texts in order to share the
process of writing those texts themselves; the collaboration that digital publishing networks may inspire
might parallel, for instance, the writing groups
in which many scholars already share their work,
seeking feedback while the work is in process.9
Fish reads this as suggesting that,
if the individual is deined and constituted by
relationships, the individual is not really an entity
that can be said to have ownership of either its intentions or their effects; the individual is (as poststructuralist theory used to tell us) just a relay through
which messages circulating in the network pass and
are sent along.10
As Fitzpatrick emphasizes, however, the shift she is
calling for is ‘less radical than it initially sounds’.
Far from being based on a rigorous decentring of the
subject, her approach often seems closer to the liberaldemocratic humanist stance she is endeavouring to
question; albeit one in which ‘unique’, stable, centred
authors are now involved in a ‘social’ conversation
‘composed of individuals’ that is somewhat akin to
Habermas’s ideal speech situation – at least to the
extent this ‘conversation’ appears to contain relatively little conlict, antagonism or incommensurability
between the participants.11 There is no differend, as
Lyotard would have put it. Responding to Fish on his
own blog, Fitzpatrick is thus at pains to point out that
she is not maintaining that notions of the author, text
and originality ‘are going away in the digital age, only
that they are changing, as the interpretive community
of scholars changes’.12
In this respect, it is signiicant that Fitzpatrick chose
to employ a blogging tool for her experiment with
open peer review: namely, WordPress, albeit it with
the CommentPress plugin developed by the Institute
for the Future of the Book, which enables comments
to appear alongside the main body of the text on a
paragraph-by-paragraph, whole-page or entire-document basis. For of course most blogs (in contrast to
wikis, say) do not actually allow for collaborative
writing, let alone for the ‘elimination of the individual’.
The work of a blog’s author tends to be kept quite
separate from that of others who use the same blog to
review or respond to that work. Although ‘responses
to the text’ may indeed ‘appear in the same form, and
the same frame, as the text itself’,13 then, these two
distinct identities and roles – of original author and
secondary reviewer, respondent or commentator, as it
were – are maintained and reinforced by the blogging
medium. So not only does Fitzpatrick not actually
put ideas of the human, subjectivity or the associated
concept of the author to the test, neither do blogs,
for all Fish endeavours to portray both otherwise.
Instead, the maintenance of authorship and originality
on Fitzpatrick’s part is achieved with the assistance of
the very medium (blogging) Fish positions as creating
problems for it.
While these media are different to traditional forms
of long-form scholarship, the way the majority of
academics interact with blogs and social media such as
Facebook and Google+ actually functions to promote
and sustain notions of the author and originality more
than they undermine them. This is in no small part
due to the fact that, as Felix Stalder points out, ‘[y]ou
have to present yourself in public as an individual in
order to be able to join digital social networks, which,
increasingly, becomes a precondition [to] join other
forms of social networking.’14 Such personal social
media may thus be seen to offer a variation on the
theme of what Beverley Skeggs calls ‘compulsory
individuality’ – with a lot of academics using them
as a means of promoting and marketing themselves,
their work and ideas, not least by gathering ‘friends’
and ‘circles’ to network with and presenting themselves
as accessible, engaged, charismatic personalities who
are ‘always on’.15
Where does that leave us, if even the digital humanities (or at least Fish’s and Fitzpatrick’s versions of
them) do not represent too much of a test of the
orthodox modes of creation, composition, legitimization, accreditation, publication and dissemination in
the humanities? Interestingly, in a book from 2009,
one of the participants in the ICA’s Radical Publishing event, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, raised the question
as to whether we should not ‘free ourselves from the
thirst’ for the kind of ‘activism’ he sees as having
become inluential as a result of the anti-globalization
movement: ‘Isn’t the path towards autonomy of the
social from economic and military mobilization only
possible through a withdrawal into inactivity, silence,
and passive sabotage?’, he asks. Should we consider
embracing our own variation on the theme of refusal
that has been so important to autonomous politics in
Italy: namely, a strategic withdrawal of our academic
labour – and not just from blogs and corporate social
media such as Facebook and Google+?16
Open access
Peter Suber, a leading voice in the open access movement, has recently provided an instance of just such
a withdrawal. In January, Suber announced (using
Google+ to do so) that he would ‘not referee for a
publisher belonging to the Association of American
Publishers unless it has publicly disavowed the AAP’s
position on the Research Works Act’. The latter, which
was introduced in the US Congress on 16 December
2011, was designed to prohibit open access mandates for federally funded research in the USA. The
Research Works Act would thus in effect countermand
the National Institutes of Health’s Public Access Policy
along with other similar open access policies in the
USA. To show my support for open access and Suber’s
initiative, I publicly stated in January that I would act
similarly.17 Having met with staunch opposition from
within both the academic and the publishing communities, all public backing of the Research Works
Act has now been dropped as of 27 February. But I
can’t help wondering, rather than taking this as a cue
to abandon the strategy of refusal, should we not adopt
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it all the more? Should we not withdraw our academic
labour from all those presses and journals that do not
allow authors, as a bare minimum, to self-archive the
refereed and accepted inal drafts of their publications
in institutional open access repositories?18
As a supporter of long standing, I feel it is important to acknowledge that the open access movement
– which is concerned with making peer-reviewed
research literature freely available online to all those
able to access the Internet – is neither uniied nor
self-identical. Some regard it as a movement,19 yet
for others it represents a variety of economic models
or even just another means of distribution, marketing and promotion. It should also be borne in mind
that there is nothing inherently radical, emancipatory,
oppositional, or even politically or culturally progressive about open access. The politics of open access
depend on the decisions that are made in relation to it,
the speciic tactics and strategies that are adopted, the
particular conjunctions of time, situation and context in
which such practices, actions and activities take place,
and the networks, relationships and lows of culture,
community, society and economics they encourage,
mobilize and make possible. Open access publishing is thus not necessarily a mode of left resistance.
Nevertheless, what is interesting about the transition to
the open access publication and archiving of research
is the way it is creating at least some ‘openings’ that
allow academics to destabilize and rethink scholarly
publishing, and with it the university, beyond the model
espoused by free-market capitalism.
In fact, it could be argued that the open access
movement possesses greater potential for doing so
currently than a lot of supposedly more politically
subversive movements. This is certainly the case with
regard to the ability of open access to establish some
‘chains of equivalence’ between a range of different
struggles, and thus garner a large constituency of
supporters made up not just of academics and those
associated with the free software and free culture
movements, but of students, ex-students, and even
representatives of capital itself. That said, open access
continues to operate within particular limits. While
John Willinsky has represented it as ‘both a critical
and practical step toward the unconditional university’
imagined by Jacques Derrida in ‘The Future of the
Profession or the University Without Condition’, the
open access movement is actually (currently at least)
quite conditional. It may promote the ‘right to speak
and to resist unconditionally everything’ that concerns
the restriction of access to knowledge, research and
thought, as Willinsky says. However, the open access
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movement does so, for the most part, only on condition
that the ‘right to say everything’ about a whole host
of other questions is not exercised. 20 Included in this
are questions not just about the use of blogs, Facebook,
Google+ and so on by open access advocates such as
Suber and myself, but also about the author, text and
originality.
But what if, taking our lead from Derrida, we
were to view the open access movement as merely a
strategic starting point for thinking about such issues?
What if we were to regard the above conditionality
of open access not as a prompt to move beyond
open access, or to leave it behind and replace it with
something else, but rather as directing us to follow
the logic of the open access movement through ‘to the
end, without reserve’, to the point of agreeing with it
against itself? 21 What if we were to begin to speak
about, and to resist unconditionally, some of the other
orthodoxies that concern the restriction of access to
knowledge, research and thought: precisely ideas of
authorship and originality, and the copyright system
that sustains them? I single out copyright because, if
we wish to struggle against the ‘becoming business’
of the university, then we have to accept this may
involve us in a struggle against the system of copyright
too, since the latter is one of the main ways in which
knowledge, research and thought are being commodiied, privatized and corporatized.
Copyright
Drastically simplifying the situation for the sake of
brevity, there are two key justiications for copyright
in this context: that associated with economic rights
and that connected with what is known as authors’
or moral rights respectively.22 In the former, which
dominates the Anglo-American copyright tradition, the
emphasis is placed on the protection of the commercial
interests of the author, producer or distributor of a
work and their right to beneit from it inancially by
making and selling copies. This is how the majority
of conventional academic publishing irms regard the
books they bring out: as commodities the rights to the
commercial exploitation of which have been transferred
to them. To be sure, few academic authors of research
monographs derive substantial income directly from
their writing. Most are willing to assign the rights
to the commercial interests to publishers in return
for having the resulting volumes edited, published,
distributed, marketed, promoted, and so hopefully read
and engaged with by others. In this respect, academics are operating on the basis that doing so has the
potential to lead to further income indirectly: through
a growth in their reputation and level of inluence, and
thus to greater opportunities for career advancement,
promotion, salary increases and so on. Consequently,
it is publishers who are perceived as being most at risk
inancially from the infringement of copyright in this
economic sense. Witness, with regard to AAAAARG’s
‘pirating’ of texts drawn from philosophy, politics,
theory, avant-garde iction and related areas (including
some of my ‘own’ and many of those of the Radical
Philosophy collective as well), the fact that it was the
self-professed ‘radical publishing house’ Verso (and not
the authors) who posted the December 2009 ‘cease and
desist’ letter asking the knowledge-sharing platform to
take down copies of those titles by Žižek, Rancière,
Badiou, et al. for which Verso holds the rights.
Of course, some academic authors may wish to
support independent publishers of radical political content. Many such presses are in a precarious
inancial situation, especially in comparison to their
multinational conglomerate-owned rivals. They are
highly reliant on the income generated from the sale
of books to which they own the rights to be able to
stay in business and so bring out more such titles in
the future. However, because the copyright system is
one of the main ways in which knowledge, research
and thought are being commodiied and privatized, it
is perhaps more dificult for those committed to the
struggle against the increasing commercialization of
culture and society to support wholeheartedly defences
against infringement on the basis of the protection
of economic rights. After all, if we are interested
in trying out different or new economic, legal and
political systems to that of capitalism (and not just
neoliberalism), it can hardly come as a surprise if
that should have implications for those publishing
irms whose business models continue to depend on
turning even such obviously political phenomena as
ideas of communism, the revitalized student movement
and Occupy into marketable commodities that can be
bought and sold.23
When it comes to moral rights, meanwhile, the justiication for copyright has its basis in the protection of
what is held to be an inalienable right of the author in
their work. This right – often positioned as originating
in the culture of Western Europe and as operating in
a supplementary, secondary, even marginal relation to
economic rights – applies to the work considered as
an expression of the unique mind or personality of
the author. Interestingly, it is this special connection,
forged between author and work in the very act of
creation, which is also perceived as bestowing the
latter with its originality (rather than any sense of
the work being novel or inventive). Consequently, in
contrast to economic rights, the moral rights of the
author cannot simply be waived, sold or transferred
to another individual or corporate entity such as a
publisher.
Now, some might argue that philosophy’s decentring
of ideas of the subject and the human, and associated
declaration of the ‘death of the author’, have contributed to the expansion of the neoliberal globalized
copyright industry and its shifting of the emphasis
even further away from safeguarding the rights of
the individual author as original creator, and onto
safeguarding the rights to a commodity which can be
bought and sold regardless of who created it. By the
same token, however, if we are inclined to be generous, the tendency on the part of many philosophers
and theorists to assert vigorously their authorship of
particular works, ideas and concepts (e.g. so-called
‘object-oriented philosophy’), thus both enclosing and
branding them by association with a proper name on
the basis they are ‘all mine’ (an original expression
of their own unique selves) can be positioned as one
attempt to make this shift in emphasis from culture and
human authorship to economics and property ownership a little less smooth. From this perspective, the
risk copyright infringement poses to authors is more
to their moral rights, and in particular: (1) the right of
attribution – which, to return to the example employed
above, AAAAARG does not tend to threaten, as the
authors of most of the texts on the knowledge-sharing
platform are clearly named and identiied as such (you
can browse its library by author surname); (2) the right
of integrity, which enables authors to refuse to allow
the original, ixed and inal form of a work to be modiied or distorted by others; (3) the right of disclosure,
which covers the right to determine who publishes the
work, how, where and in which contexts. AAAAARG
may represent for some academics a loss of reputation,
honour and esteem, to the degree that their work is
being republished outside the conventional institutional
frameworks and in places and ways other than those
of their choosing.
The question we need to ask, though, is to what
extent operating according to the moral rights of
attribution, integrity and disclosure leads philosophers
and critical theorists to act to all intents and purposes
as if they continue to subscribe to the idea of the
author as individual creative genius that emerged from
within the cultural tradition of European Romanticism
– a notion that the humanities’ critical interrogation of
the concepts of the subject, the human, and indeed the
author was in many respects an attempt to challenge.
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For it is precisely this romantic belief that underpins
the idea of the work as the original expression of the
unique personality or consciousness of the human
author, and on which such moral rights are in turn
based. This is not to imply we should necessarily
do away with the concept of the author. Yet what
the above argument does suggest is that we need to
explore further how radical thought can enact ideas
of authorship in ways that do not either slip back into
compulsively repeating a version of romantic individualism and its ideas of originality, or empty this out so
that texts merely become exchangeable commodities.
To provide one example of how we might begin to do
so, could we perhaps try acting something like pirate
philosophers?
Pirate philosophers
Of course, as Adrian Johns has shown, despite its
romantic, counter-cultural image, much of the philosophy associated with online piracy today is itself
a ‘moral philosophy through and through’. It is concerned ‘centrally with convictions about freedom,
rights, duties, obligations, and the like’. What is more,
it is a philosophy that has its historical roots in a
‘marked libertarian ideology’: one of the UK’s pirate
radio ships of the 1960s was even called the Laissez
Faire.24 Such pirate philosophers as we might envisage
here would have to try acting like pirates in the classical sense of the term, then. Interestingly, when the
word ‘pirate’ begin to appear in the texts of the ancient
Greeks, it was ‘closely related to the noun peira, “trial”
or “attempt”, and so to the verb peiraō: the “pirate”
would then be the one who “tests”, “puts to proof”,
“contends with”, and “makes an attempt”’.25 These are
the etymological origins of the modern term ‘pirate’.
In this respect, what is most interesting about certain
phenomena associated with networked digital culture
such as Napster, the Pirate Bay or AAAAARG is that
we cannot tell at the time of their initial appearance
whether they are legitimate or not. This is because the
new conditions created by networked digital culture
– such as the ability to digitize and make freely available whole libraries’ worth of books (as is the case with
Google Books and AAAAARG) – at times require
the creation of equally new intellectual property laws
and copyright policies. The UK’s Digital Economies
Act 2010 is one example; the Google Book settlement,
SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP
Act) in the USA are others. It follows that we can never
be sure whether these so-called pirates, in the ‘attempts’
they are making to ‘contend with’ the new conditions
and possibilities created by networked digital culture,
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to ‘trial’ them and put them to the ‘proof’, are not in
fact involved in the creation of the very new laws,
policies, clauses, settlements, licensing agreements and
acts of Congress and Parliament by which they could
be judged. Take the case of William Fox, a ilmmaker
who relocated from America’s East Coast to California
in the early twentieth century in part ‘to escape controls that patents granted the inventor of ilmmaking,
Thomas Edison’. As Lawrence Lessig recounts in his
chapter on ‘pirates’ in Free Culture, Fox founded the
ilm studio 20th Century Fox precisely by pirating
Edison’s creative property.26 (Ironically, the chairman
and CEO of 20th Century Fox is now that scourge of
internet piracy Rupert Murdoch, who recently attacked
the Obama administration on Twitter after the White
House indicated it wouldn’t be supporting some of
the harsher measures proposed in the SOPA bill.) As
the example of Fox shows, then, one can never tell
the founder of a new institution or culture in advance.
We can only inally judge whether the activities of
such supposed pirates are legal or not, legitimate or
not, just or not, from some point ‘projected into an
indeinite future’.27
Another way to think about the issue of piracy is
in relation to the legislator in Rousseau’s The Social
Contract. Here, too, we can never know whether the
legislator – the founder of a new law or institution,
such as a university – is legitimate or a charlatan. The
reason is the aporia that lies at the heart of authority,
whereby the legislator already has to possess the
authority the founding of the new institution is supposed to provide him or her with in order to be able
to found it. Certain so-called Internet pirates are in a
similar situation to Rousseau’s legislator. They, too,
may be involved in performatively inventing, trialling
and testing the very new laws and institutions by which
their activities may then be judged and justiied. As
such, they can claim legitimacy only from themselves.
This is a state of affairs that, as well as marking their
impossibility, also constitutes their founding power,
their instituting force. Certainly, it is here, between the
possible and the impossible, legality and illegality, that
we must begin any assessment or judgement of them.
And it is not just the potential pirates who may be
legislators or charlatans. The current laws and institutions by which we might condemn Internet piracy as
illegal are based on the same aporetic structure of
authority. Such lawmakers are always also undecidably
charlatans or pirates too (or hackers, in the case of
Murdoch’s News International).
Consequently, we cannot tell what is going to
happen with ‘pirate’ philosophy. It may lead to new
forms of culture, economy and education: where
people work and create for reasons other than to get
paid; where the protection of copyright is no longer
possible; where the institutions of the culture industry
– book publishers, newspapers, and so forth – are
radically reconigured; music is available to freely
download and share (which it already is); communities disseminate academic monographs via peer-topeer networks and text-sharing platforms (which they
already do); and where even ideas of the individualistic, humanist, proprietorial author are dramatically
transformed. In this respect, pirate philosophy may
play a part in the development of not just a new kind
of university, but a new economy and new way of
organizing industrial society too. And in the process
it may have as profound an effect ‘as the establishment of copyright … in the eighteenth century’, to
borrow Johns’s words.28 But it may not. And that’s
precisely the point. As with the famous remark about
the signiicance of the French Revolution (attributed to
the Chinese communist leader Zhou Enlai) – let alone
the ‘crisis of capitalism’ and the ‘Arab Spring’ – it is
still too early to tell. Nevertheless, what is interesting
is the potential pirate philosophy contains for the
development of a new kind of economy and society:
one based far less on individualism, possession, acquisition, accumulation, competition, celebrity, and ideas
of knowledge, research and thought as something to
be owned, commodiied, communicated, disseminated
and exchanged as the property of single, indivisible
authors (who, as Andrew Ross notes, are often likely
to be corporate entities).29
Without a doubt, many currently at work in the
university are going to experience any such ‘trialling’,
‘testing’ or ‘putting to the proof’ of the idea of acting
something like pirate philosophers as an attack, not
just on copyright and the corporatization and marketization of the university, but on their professional
identities too: as a challenge to the secure ground on
which they have been operating for so long, based as
it is on quite orthodox ideas of authorship, originality
and so forth. And their fears will be justiied. Yet in
order to respond to the forces of late capitalist society,
might we not have to take the risk of leaving the
safe harbour of our profession as it currently stands?
After all, it is not as if we are going to be secure if
we do nothing; our professional identities are already
under threat. Might embarking on such an endeavour
not offer us a means of contending with some of the
forces behind this threat, without simply succumbing
to them, reacting with nostalgia or romanticism, or
naively celebrating and assisting them?
Notes
1. ‘Etymology of Pirate’, English Words of (Unexpected)
Greek Origin, 2 March 2012, http://ewonago.wordpress.
com/2009/02/18/etymology-of-pirate.
2. Michel Foucault, ‘The Concern for Truth’, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–
1884, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, Routledge, New York,
1988, p. 263. For a discussion of the importance of the
distinction between ‘for’ and ‘in terms of’, see Wendy
Brown, Politics Out of History, Princeton University
Press, Princeton NJ, 2001, pp. 42–3.
3. http://ica.org.uk/28063/Talks/Radical-Publishing-WhatAre-We-Struggling-For.html.
4. As Samuel Weber has argued, ‘To speak of the Humanities, then, is to imply a model of unity based on a certain
idea of the human, whether as opposed to the divine
(medieval, scholastic humanism) or to the non-human
animal world.… The unity of the university remains
profoundly bound up with the notion of a universally
valid essence of the ‘human’, which is the anthropological correlative of the epistemological universalism that
resides at the core of the university as an institution.’
Samuel Weber, ‘The Future of the Humanities: Experimenting’, Culture Machine 2, 2000, www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/311/296.
5. Stanley Fish, ‘The Digital Humanities and the Transcending of Mortality’, New York Times, 9 January 2012,
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/thedigital-humanities-and-the-transcending-of-mortality;
emphasis added.
6. Ibid.
7. The ‘“big tent” that the digital humanities can be’,
she writes, is ‘a nexus of ields within which scholars
use computing technologies to investigate the kinds
of questions that are traditional to the humanities, or,
as is more true of my own work, who ask traditional
kinds of humanities-oriented questions about computing technologies’. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, ‘Reporting from
the Digital Humanities 2010 Conference’, Chronicle of
Higher Education, 13 July 2010, http://chronicle.com/
blogPost/Reporting-from-the-Digital/25473.
8. Fish, ‘The Digital Humanities and the Transcending of
Mortality’.
9. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, New
York University Press, New York, 2009 (published in
print in 2011), http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.
org/mcpress/plannedobsolescence.
10. Fish, ‘The Digital Humanities and the Transcending of
Mortality’.
11. Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence.
12. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, 10 January 2012; response to
Fish, ‘The Digital Humanities and the Transcending of
Mortality’.
13. Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence.
14. Felix Stalder, ‘Autonomy and Control in the Era of PostPrivacy’, posting to the nettime mailing list, 4 July 2010,
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.culture.internet.
nettime/4848.
15. Beverley Skeggs, ‘The Making of Class and Gender
through Visualizing Moral Subject Formations’, Sociology, vol. 39, no. 5, 2005, p. 968, http://cms.gold.ac.uk/
media/skeggs1.pdf.
16. Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha
Generation, Minor Compositions, London, 2009, p. 127;
39
Mario Tronti, ‘The Strategy of Refusal’, http://libcom.
org/library/strategy-refusal-mario-tronti.
17. Peter Suber, ‘Watch Where You Donate Your Time’,
Peter Suber, 7 January 2012, https://plus.google.
com/u/0/109377556796183035206/posts/QYAH1jSJG6L#109377556796183035206/posts; Gary Hall,
‘Withdrawal of Labour from Publishers in Favour of the
US Research Works Act, Media Gifts, 16 January 2012,
http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2012/1/16/withdrawal-of-labour-from-publishers-in-favour-of-the-usres.html. At the time, this meant not writing, publishing,
editing or peer reviewing for, among others, Sage (which
publishes numerous journals in the critical theory area
including Theory, Culture and Society and New Media
and Society), Palgrave Macmillan (publisher of Feminist
Review), Stanford University Press, Fordham University
Press, Harvard University Press and NYU Press.
18. As long ago as 2007, Nick Montfort, an associate professor of digital media at MIT, stated that he was no
longer prepared to review articles for non-open access,
for-proit, non-public journals (Nick Montfort, ‘Digital
Media, Games, and Open Access’, Grand Text Auto,
21 December 2007, http://grandtextauto.org/2007/12/21/
digital-media-games-and-open-access). In 2008 he was
joined by Danah Boyd, who was at the time a Visiting
Researcher at Harvard Law School, among other things.
Dana Boyd, ‘Open-access is the Future: Boycott Lockeddown Academic Journals’, Apophenia, 6 February
2008, www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2008/02/06/
openaccess_is_t.html#comment-322195. At this point,
Radical Philosophy might have concerns about its own
business model. If Radical Philosophy was available
on an open access basis in its entirety, would sales of
annual subscriptions, paper copies and individual pdfs
from its online archive not fall dramatically? Would
there no longer be suficient funds to pay for the running of the journal as a result? There are a number
of ways of responding creatively to this challenge, although they might involve major changes to the nature
and character of the journal, such as moving to an
online-only open access basis or adopting the delayed
open access model.
19. See Peter Suber’s Open Access Overview, www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm and ‘Timeline of the
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
Open Access Movement’, www.earlham.edu/~peters/
fos/timeline.htm.
John Willinsky, ‘Altering the Material Conditions of
Access to the Humanities’, in Peter Pericles Trifonas
and Michael A. Peters, eds, Deconstructing Derrida,
Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2005, p. 121; Jacques
Derrida, ‘The Future of the Profession or the University without Condition (thanks to the “Humanities”,
what could take place tomorrow)’, in Tom Cohen, ed.,
Jacques Derrida: A Critical Reader, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001, p. 26.
This is Derrida’s procedure for reading Hegel’s dialectic according to a non-oppositional difference. Jacques
Derrida, ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve’, Writing and Difference,
Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1978, p. 260.
The reading of copyright that follows is greatly indebted
to my discussions with Cornelia Sollfrank, and to the
more detailed and subtle account of the relation between
economic and moral rights she provides in an art world
context in her ‘Performing the Paradoxes of Intellectual
Property: An Artistic Investigation of the Increasingly
Conlicting Relationship between Copyright and Art’,
Ph.D. thesis, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and
Design, University of Dundee, 2012.
For another example of such marketing, see Pluto’s
www.getpoliticalnow.com.
Adrian Johns, ‘Piracy as a Business Force, Culture
Machine 10, 2009, www.culturemachine.net/index.
php/cm/article/view/345/348.
Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Enemy of All: Piracy and the
Law of Nations, Zone, New York, 2009, p. 35.
Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity, Penguin, New York, 2004, pp. 53, 55,
www.free-culture.cc.
See Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Postal Politics’, in Homi K.
Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration, Routledge, London
and New York, 1990, pp. 131–2, on which the reading
of the legislator in Rousseau that follows is based.
Adrian Johns, ‘Piracy’, Inside Higher Ed, 3 February
2010, www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/02/03/johns.
Andrew Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and
Labor in Precarious Times, New York University Press,
New York and London, 2009, p. 167.
Access to Radical Philosophy: principles and policy
As an independent journal of the Left, collectively self-published in A4 magazine form, and non-profit-making,
Radical Philosophy has always aimed to maximize access while generating suficient revenue to fund
production. Currently, we do this by keeping the cover and individual subscription prices as low as possible,
giving individual subscribers free access to our forty-year archive in electronic form on the web, and making
more than 50 per cent of the archive available open access. We charge university libraries for full web access,
in order to make up the deficit on sales to individuals. Downloads of individual articles that are unavailable to
those without university or individual subscriptions cost £3 each – about 20 per cent of commercial rates.
But why isn’t Radical Philosophy freely available in its entirety to all on the web? Because we would not
then be able to produce it as a hard copy magazine, since we would not generate sufficient income from
institutional subscriptions. Much of what is intellectually and culturally distinctive about Radical Philosophy,
we believe, is connected to its format and low-priced availability in bookshops and to individual subscribers.
However, we are also exploring the possibilities of new formats.
We are interested to hear readers’ views on these issues and to debate them in the journal.
Email short pieces to mark.neocleous@brunel.ac.uk or write to us at admin@radicalphilosophy.com. RP
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