[-empyre-] Week Three - Open Access

[christopher sullivan]

what is this economic intellectual economy based on?
once again it appears to be tenured professors who do not have to pay any bills
with there work. Why is an author visualized here as some stingy hoarder of
thought? what is wrong with identifying, and giving credit to an author. 
perhaps if we are talking about a text of pure appropriation, this all hold
water. I and many other writers do in fact write original material, yes it is
part of a history, but it is a singularly new collection of words.

also I always want to know which, non Utopian Marxist culture, country are you
basing this on, I would like to get actual not just Utopian. 
please actually describe the system you think will work, instead of finding
pitfalls and problems in a very easy to hit target.
How for instance do you, Emmett, publish, and control your own work, honestly,
what is your economic system? how would you like it to change. (academic or
other salary could be part of this equation, thus identifying both products.) 
Chris



Quoting Emmett Stinson <stinsone at unimelb.edu.au>:

> Just to clarify, in my original post on this, I noted that 'the idea of free
> culture may simply result in more alienated labour.' I noted that this was
> 'more' alienated labour for the reason all labour under captalism is
> alienated. Alienation is synonymous with modernity for Marx, and most
> classical readings of Marxism would argue there is no opting out of
> alienation short of a revolution that enables workers to control the means
> of production (I'll leave it to the autonomous Marxists on this list to
> discuss more recent Marxist concepts of resistance). I apologise if this
> wasn't clear, and I appreciate Paul's clarification of the matter.
> Nonetheless, there is still a distinction between paid and unpaid labour
> under capitalism, even if both are alienated.
> 
> The open access movement's mode of resistance (or so it seems to me) is to
> remove the exchange value of texts (since there is no monetary cost),
> thereby returning labour to its use-value (although the notion of
> 'use-value' in relation to both theoretical and literary texts is fairly
> problematic, since such texts seem to have other notions of value at stake,
> as well) or else operating along lines of a Mauss-ian gift exchange. This is
> a healthy, utopian impulse, I think, but the concern is that, within a
> larger system of commodity exchange, utopian impulses can be co-opted. I
> think Michael Dieter articulated this very well, when he noted that:
> 'Neoliberal economic rationalism cannot itself be sustained without rallying
> a material infrastructure in support of the logic of increasing work hours,
> competition and value-added knowledge work. The blurring of work and leisure
> that underpins attempts to increase productivity is actually facilitated by
> mobile networked devices, such as the iPad.' In this sense the notion of
> things being 'free' can be utopian, but it can also be rationalised by a
> neo-liberal framework and incorporated back into the system.
> 
> I completely support open-access publishing for academia (and re.press and
> OHP are both phenomenal organisations, publishing work of the highest
> quality), but it's incorrect to assume that open access publishing is
> necessarily a mode of resistance. Open access academic publishing can be
> seen as a radicalised response to corporatised academic publishing that
> profits off of commodity exchange, but it's also appearing at a time when
> many University presses are dying, cutting back their lists, or else moving
> more and more into trade publishing (eg. Peter Dougherty's 'Manifesto for
> Scholarly Publishing' at
> http://chronicle.com/article/A-Manifesto-for-Scholarly-P/44462 which is a
> strangely corporatised response to these trends). In this sense, Open Access
> publishing also offers a lifeline to a University system that requires
> material outcomes that can be measured (publishing outcomes as a form of
> metrics), as a time when publication (particularly in specialised areas) is
> far more difficult for academics. It also benefits university libraries,
> whose budgets are increasingly constrained by expensive journal digital
> subscriptions (e.g. the current battle between UCal and the journal Nature
> http://www.physorg.com/news195486711.html). In this sense, a refusal of
> exchange value for your own work doesn't necessarily extricate it from the
> larger system of capital and exchange.
> 
> -- 
> Emmett Stinson
> Lecturer, Publishing and Communications
> School of Culture and Communication
> The University of Melbourne
> Parkville, Victoria, Australia 3010
> Ph: 613-8344-3017 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> 


Christopher Sullivan
Dept. of Film/Video/New Media
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
112 so michigan
Chicago Ill 60603
csulli at saic.edu
312-345-3802