[-empyre-] laws, outlaws & golden pirates

[Gabriela Vargas-Cetina]

Dear all,

I am an anthropologist and would like to differ from what Marc says here,
but unfortunately I concur with his description of the general situation.
'Anthropology' has now become 'the anthropology job market', so that it is
very difficult to go against whatever neoliberals come up with to expand the
power of corporations.  Those of us who are older are seen with suspicion by
the younger generations who think WE keep them out of jobs.

For unemployed anthropologists and other social scientist, piracy has lost
many of its negative connotations, since they really cannot afford
'regularized' information goods (which are the goods of our trade).  So,
they download books and articles without paying for them, find ways to
download music and in general poach stuff from the web.  Besides, many work
every now and again for corporations, including Coke, beer companies, phone
companies and pretty much anything they can get.  Those of us with actual
jobs are in a bind: should we censure these practices? If we do, how do we
expect them to make a living applying what they learned?  So, post-modern
anthropologists are very often underemployed or even unemployed
anthropologists, and neoliberalism shows no signs of haltering or faltering
in its evil ways.

Best to all, and thanks for this great discussion,

Gabriela

----
Gabriela Vargas-Cetina

http://sites.google.com/site/representacionesculturales/vargas-cetina
http://antropuntodevista.blogspot.com
-- 



On 7/11/11 9:11 AM, "marc garrett" <marc.garrett at furtherfield.org> wrote:

> Hi Davin,
> 
> An interesting read, consisting of thoughts reflecting social anxieties
> of our troubling age. Everything you mention includes the spectre of
> social engineering, and the most troubling aspect of all this, is how
> deeply 'comfort' is linked to it all. How a desire (or very human need)
> to be warm, safe and relating to others is a psychological factor, that
> tends to incorporate a kind of default of submission or even sacrifice
> in order to live without fear.
> 
> You mention the word 'Vandalism', which is typically associated with
> senseless destruction. Where the contemporary notion of it, consists of
> it meaning private citizens damaging the property of others, generally.
> Yet, I view vandalism as a two-way process, where people's lives have
> been vandalized by the state, corporations and privileged elites. And
> these groups of confidence tricksters have fooled generations of
> individuals and common people, exploiting human sensibilities and
> everyday, functional needs, from basic experience right through to
> consumer orientated desires and use of (now) functional, networked
> protocols, where behaviours become more a collective noise of data ready
> for harvesting.
> 
>> Property rights, like money, like food, like fashion,
>> like all the other superficialities really are rising to meet the
>> postmodern critique.  All the things we once imagined were deep are
>> floating to the surface, are beginning to look shallow.
> 
> As you allude to, the postmodern critique; has now, only so much
> effectiveness in a world where business has successfully appropriated
> its theories. Postmodernism for business, is like quantum physics for
> science, neo-liberalism is a globally networked medium effectively
> transcending the old 'modernist' order of corporate practice into new
> fields of complexities and endless evaluations, which in-hand, relate to
> making growth for traditional, mannerist economies and their supported
> hierarchies. The post-human condition is now with us, and the
> post-humanists and postmodernist theorists together, have sought to
> de-construct old values of the human condition, actively questioning
> apparent realities as only social constructs. But unfortunately, in turn
> the door has also been left open to allow an influx of neo-liberal
> greed, like a virus infecting all of humanity. So now, we no longer
> whistle to the tune of Adam Smith's Wealth Nations, but to the tune of
> Wealth of Corporations.
> 
> Property is no longer defined as object alone, but also as process, a
> moving set of relations. Whatever we throw at them, the neo-liberals,
> like the Borg appropriate's the essence, the juice and sells it back in
> variant forms, where rights exist only in terms of consumer relations
> but not in terms of human rights or equal values. The source is tweaked
> and changed rerouted, according to the conditions defined by the owners
> of our needs and desires, no matter how large or small. The illusion of
> power is specific only to how much power one can afford to buy. For
> instance, state rule or political governance is defined by how much it
> can afford to be, in the eyes of neo-liberal determinations. "[...]
> politicians today recognise the reality that 75% of their GPD is reliant
> on the private sector, all of their fiscal deficit is paid for by
> corporation tax, and two-thirds of employment is created by it. His
> conclusion: "politicians are beholden to the corporation." The paradox
> of corporate power. Jo Confino.
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/blog/corporate-power-paradox-su
> stainability-change
> 
> I can see social anthropology, with postmodern thought along with
> contemporary tools opening up new contexts, for what neo-liberalists
> wish to see as a pre & post socialist age. As in, just like indigenous
> societies and groups are actively reclaiming much of their own cultural
> agency and histories before and post the industrial revolution,
> neo-liberalism will aid this, and then own whatever comes of these
> processes as 'sourced' recovery and material, for their own marketing
> revenues. This is not to say, that anthropologists are seeking to please
> such powers, but we are in a world where information and the study of it
> is feeding not only those who wish for positive social change, but also
> helps those who wish to exploit and control others. Thus, mediation
> becomes more a narrow define via specific protocols under the scheme and
> management of top-down initiations, allowed not because of the
> importance, values, political knowledge, or critique of the subject
> itself, but because it feeds a greater body of power networks that need
> to consume all, to continue existing.
> 
> wishing you well.
> 
> marc
> 
> www.furtherfield.org
>>> The question is how to short circuit that process? Vandalism might be part
>>> of that - to take away more than you put in, to ensure whatever it is you do
>>> its destructive tendency is greater than its creative. However, until now, I
>>> cannot think of a single strategy that has worked. That doesn't mean there
>>> isn't one...
>> I wonder if the solution might have less to do with the actions and
>> the relative rates of production and consumption, than with the
>> underlying ethical and social motivations.  At some level, what we are
>> all expressing (both the petite pirates and the official pirates) is
>> the fundamental silliness of an extremely focused application of a
>> particular enlightenment sensibility: the realization of individual
>> subjectivity and a notion of human rights that includes individual
>> autonomy, free-thinking, and the right exercise these rights over
>> one's body and related material possessions (a good thing) taken to an
>> extreme form of hyperindividuality and a radical notion of property
>> rights.
>> 
>> But these notions of rights an individuality are supported by laws,
>> but held into place only as far as we are willing to recognize the
>> "personal" nature of the rights of others.  The Law doesn't keep me
>> from stealing my neighbor's stuff or wrecking his car or rifling
>> through his mailbox.  I don't do those things, primarily because I
>> don't want to mess up his life.  And, I don't do those things to
>> people who live across town because I imagine that it would just not
>> be worth it.  Even if I don't like someone or disagree with someone, I
>> am not going to attack them.  They don't want people creeping around
>> inside their homes.  They don't want someone taking their mail.  They
>> don't want to pick up messes made by other people.  Etc.
>> 
>> But, really, it is simply hard to imagine an equivalent relationship
>> between a corporation and an individual.  I have never had a
>> corporation treat me as a person.  Sure, maybe the person working for
>> the corporation has bent the rules (or even interpreted existing rules
>> in my favor) out of some feeling of solidarity and identification.
>> But some entity that exists as the expression of a charter, that is
>> ruled by mechanisms which relentlessly abstract my "worth" to them in
>> terms of stock prices, is neither able to interact with me as a
>> person....  and I cannot imagine that entity as a person.  Thus,
>> companies have to try to humanize themselves to us....  create
>> characters and identities....  run ads that emphasize the humanity of
>> their employees...  or resort to propaganda that casts the offending
>> individual as some sort of anti-social person ("You wouldn't steal a
>> car, would you?").  But it's hard to feel like you are "killing"
>> someone by ripping an mp3 when people routinely starve for the global
>> market.
>> 
>> They are clinging to the very trappings of a culture they have tried
>> to destroy.  I think the pervasiveness of mutual piracy doesn't really
>> do much....  and I think this is its most important point...  it's a
>> mutual recognition that culture linked to materiality is absent, and
>> in its place we are seeing the official reassertion of culture as a
>> virtual quality, as a sort of puppet show (as private property has
>> always been).  The puppets are fighting over "ownership," but really
>> what's at stake is social relationships.  I think those will continue
>> to exist.  And, maybe they will even get better as the puppet show
>> gets sillier.  Property rights, like money, like food, like fashion,
>> like all the other superficialities really are rising to meet the
>> postmodern critique.  All the things we once imagined were deep are
>> floating to the surface, are beginning to look shallow.  But maybe
>> this crisis of being (of which ubiquitous piracy is a symptom) is
>> clearing away the dross of consumer culture, pruning back a particular
>> enlightenment tendency (radical individualism) that we might fully
>> explore the critical role that community plays in the formation of
>> being.   And property rights and the prices for goods and services can
>> be re-aligned with basic questions of justice and equity, where they
>> belong.
>> 
>> Davin
>> _______________________________________________
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>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
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>> 
> 
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