[-empyre-] from the personal to the political, a p2p confession

[Simon Biggs]

Perhaps the term  'collective intellectual' can be considered a synonym for
"culture"?

Also, the observation about times of social stress throwing up temporary but
potentially disruptive power relations is important. Both the great wars of
the 20th century engendered social change, in terms of class relations but
also in regard of gender, age groups and international relations. Periods of
war, revolution, plague and radical technological change are often seen to
be associated with such social change. Generally, but not always, such
change has been beneficial. However, in every instance many are hurt or
disadvantaged. The question is surely how such situations are ethically
handled? Or is it a mistake to even ask that question? Is it ethically
unsound to ask how we ethically manage disruptive change as it implies
somebody is in the luxurious position to ask that question? The risk is
patronage and with that comes power and more of the same...

Best

Simon


On 28/07/2011 04:30, "Michel Bauwens" <michel at p2pfoundation.net> wrote:

> hi magnus,
> 
> this reminds me of a text by brian holmes I once read, where he wrote that
> today art/creation, public intellectuality,  and social engagement, are
> 'merging', not only in a new type of individual, but as a new type of
> 'collective intellectual'. I think this is what the p2p foundation purports
> to be, not just a vehicle for one person or 'group' with the answer, but as
> a platform for the collective intelligence of a moving social field ... I'm
> guessing that Anonymous, on a much bigger scale than us, is also a similar
> type of attempt, through their stress on anoninymity, makes it different,
> 
> I also noticed in the recent 15m mobilisations, there is a tendency of at
> least part of the movement to choose the new collectivity against any
> individual manifestations of leadership ..
> 
> obviously in the p2p foundation, my own personality looms large
> 
> I'm not sure what the good solution is, but I think that a 'transcend and
> include' approach, which allows individuality to persist and be part of  a
> new collective, is preferable ...
> 
> I must admit i'm still struggling with radical non-representationality, also
> in terms of political effectiveness; it reminds me a bit of the issue of
> tribal structures .. as far as I know the 'flat structures' and governance
> by the elders, was put on hold in times of conflict, with temporary
> warchiefs directing the wars,but when they returned and the conflict was
> over, their power withered ...
> 
> It is probably when this withering away stopped occuring, that chiefdoms and
> eventually class society emerged; but while it worked, and really this was
> the longest period of human history, against which class society is a mere
> blip, there was room for individual leadership
> 
> my feeling is that 'consensus' governance, has actually very high
> transaction/coordination costs,
> 
> compare anonymous to the personalized wikileaks, which outfit is the most
> politically productive?
> 
> Michel
> 
> Michel
> 
> 
> On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 4:13 AM, <magnus at ditch.org.uk> wrote:
> 
>> Hi Michel,
>> 
>> Thanks for sharing this personal background with us... the positive,
>> sweeping view, your sense of being a 'political artist' engaged in
>> creative and performative acts and the constructive, bringing together of
>> varied individuals and paradigms.
>> 
>> Best wishes,
>> 
>> Magnus
>> 
>>> I'm not much of an art expert but rather the kind of person that gets
>>> excited about ideas and visions, but those ideas and visions are very
>> much
>>> alive and present in my mind .. So I thought that I'd focus my first
>>> contribution on political aspects of our work at the p2p foundation. I
>>> will
>>> comment later more specifically about piracy and its political-cultural
>>> aspects. (well actually, after finishing this piece, it turns out I went
>>> in
>>> personal confession mode, something I have actually never done outside
>>> this
>>> forum)
>>> 
>>> 
>>>  I hope people won't feel to uncomfortable with the personal background,
>>> which is part of the story.
>>> 
>>> 
>>>  It all begin a first time about 14 years ago, when I had a 'annus
>>> horribilis' that really shook me to the core, I think we're talking about
>>> the period 1996-97. It was a year where my father died, my mother got
>>> diagnosed with Alzheimer, the love of my life broke up, I discovered some
>>> of
>>> my business associates had a criminal background and had gone off with
>> the
>>> business funds; a movie I had been working on for three years,
>>> TechnoCalyps,
>>> got stalled because of a fight between the producer and the director,
>>> cutting off my escape from the corporate world; and I had a major row
>> with
>>> my intellectual guru of the time, Ken Wilber (integral theory). Of
>> course,
>>> serious health consequences also ensued. It basically totally floored me
>>> and
>>> constituted my mid-life crisis. For me this is the time when you realize
>>> your life is half over, and you realize that if you don't realize the
>>> dreams
>>> and ideals of your youth, you will die cynical and disappointed. It was
>>> now
>>> or never.
>>> 
>>> 
>>>  The way I saw it then, was that the major issue for me had been that I
>>> had
>>> given up on my ideals for the creation of a better world, as corny as
>> this
>>> may sound. It seemed to me that the passionate energy involved in that
>>> desire, had been buried and was working against me, and that if I wanted
>>> to
>>> discover from the combined crisis, I had to reconnect with this source of
>>> energy. It was also the time when I became increasingly convinced that
>> all
>>> the objective indicators of human and social life, were turning negative,
>>> and that our civilisational model was hitting a wall.
>>> 
>>> 
>>>  The first thing question then was really, but how do we change this
>>> overall
>>> situation as a single individual, how do we engage without actually
>> making
>>> the situation worse.
>>> 
>>> 
>>>  As a youth, I had been a radical leftist, active within the rather
>>> sectarian Militant tendency, then rather well-known in the UK. But this
>>> engagement had led nowhere, was followed by the neoliberal
>>> counterrevolution
>>> of the 80s, and had personally exhausted me. Since I could not change the
>>> world, I had concluded, by the time I was 23 and after seven years of
>>> intense engagement, the only option was to change my 'self'. The problem
>>> though was that I had emotionally broken with that type of life, and with
>>> Marxism, but had not really gone through a rational process of thinking
>>> through what was wrong with it, I had rather rejected it as a whole, even
>>> ritually burning a suitcase full of my books (yes, I know, a crying
>>> shame!).
>>> Instead, I began a personal exploration that brought me in touch with,
>>> more
>>> or less in sequence, the human potential techniques, eastern spiritual
>>> practices and theories, the western esoteric traditions (been a
>>> rosicrucian,
>>> a mason, a templar, had a alchemy teacher and drew Tarot cards), ending
>>> with
>>> a 3 year period of self-study of western philosophy by the time I was 30.
>>> This may seem pretty fast, but I think I have a capacity of absorption of
>>> ideas and concepts that is probably beyond the average. My method was
>>> really
>>> participant observation, going into a movement fully and without
>>> reservation, practice the injunctions, see what it did with the bodymind
>>> and
>>> my personality structure, and when I thought I had absorbed its most
>>> important core elements, move on. By my thirties then, feeling
>>> substantially
>>> transformed, I embarked on my business career, not because of a love of
>>> the
>>> corporate world, but because I felt it was an area of cultural dynamism,
>>> in
>>> which I could 'create' something and make something of my life. That was
>>> the
>>> period then that ended with that big personal crisis.
>>> 
>>> 
>>>  In any case, as I decide to go back to my roots and my youthful
>>> engagement,
>>> I felt the need to study Marx again, but at the same time, I dreaded the
>>> effort of going through not only the primary texts, but also the major
>>> interpretations of where it had gone wrong. Luckily then, I stumbled upon
>>> Negri's Empire Š It's not that I cannot find fault with the approach, but
>>> here it seemed to me was at least a work with a sweeping vision, a
>>> positive
>>> view of the potential for change, and that had gone through a critique of
>>> Marx Š
>>> 
>>> 
>>>  It is after this reading experience, which took me about three months of
>>> internal struggles, that I decided to follow a basic intuition: that the
>>> isomorphism of peer to peer, which I literarally saw emerging everywhere,
>>> this great horizontalisation of human relationships through massive
>>> self-aggregation around common value and affinities, was te lever of
>>> change
>>> I had been looking for. That civil society had now become productive, and
>>> was no longer a derivative of the value creation of the corporate world,
>>> but
>>> rather the other way around, that social cooperation was becoming
>>> increasingly primary, and that the older vertical institution were living
>>> increasingly 'off' this new productivity.
>>> 
>>> 
>>>  I decided by the end of 2002, that I had to finally quit the corporate
>>> world, take a 90% pay cut (actually 100% at first), and try to develop
>>> this
>>> basic intuition in all its consequences. With hindsight, the great crisis
>>> of
>>> 1996-97, when all had gone wrong that could go wrong, had been a true
>>> 'born
>>> again' moment in my life, which after a period of restoration and
>>> maturation, led to the decision to create an autonomous life around a
>> core
>>> belief and intuition. Lucky for me, I had by then met my new thai wife, a
>>> continual source of domestic happiness, and when I asked her if she'd
>>> agree
>>> with moving back to her home country, answered: don't worry, we will
>>> always
>>> have food and shelter, what else do we need Š This was the final go
>> ahead,
>>> I
>>> decided to quit my job by October 2002, taking my wife, new son, my
>> mother
>>> with Alzheimer, to Thailand.
>>> 
>>> 
>>>  I took a two year sabbatical, consisting of six months of travel within
>>> Europe, six months of studying Thai history and culture at the local
>>> university and one year of full-time reading, focusing on the long haul
>> of
>>> history and in particular the phase transition at the end of the Roman
>>> Empire .. (and finally getting to read the postmodern authors I had
>> always
>>> missed out on). In 2005, I wrote my first manuscript on peer to peer; by
>>> 2006, I started the online ecology, gradually introducing the wiki, the
>>> blog, the social bookmarking Š Somehow, though it is not at all
>>> financially
>>> sustainable, it seems to have been the good decision, and as the world
>>> continued to evolve, p2p emerged as more than a marginal effect, people
>>> were
>>> slowly attracted to the basic ideas of the p2p foundation, and I could
>>> build
>>> a community of some type, and this year, a cooperative to achieve some
>>> type
>>> of sustainable livelyhood for the precarious researchers which hover
>>> around
>>> us Š At home, the experience of my thai extented family, the
>>> magical-mythical forms of consciousness overlayered with a whiff of
>>> postmodern capitalism, the 19 cats, 3 dogs, porcupine, birds and fish,
>> the
>>> occasional visting monkey ; together with the online network, the
>>> equipotential cooperation and the lecture tours, give me a quite
>>> extraordinary relational wealth, not bad for a single child of two orphan
>>> parents Š In some way, I feel like a 'political artist', not that I'm
>>> particularly creative culturally and artistically, but I have to live,
>>> from
>>> my 'creations', sell my performances, and go through the precarity that
>> is
>>> the lot of most artists and creators ..
>>> 
>>> 
>>>  Anyway, what then, is the p2p foundation, it is really nothing else than
>>> the ambitious attempt to create a new vehicle for the world revolution,
>>> not
>>> the only one, but hopefully one that can be a positive factor; a
>> pluralist
>>> organisation, that does not know the 'answers' but facilitates the
>> ongoing
>>> dialogue around those answers, bringing very varied sorts of people
>>> together
>>> Š Precisely because of my convoluted past, having touched many different
>>> ideological and lifeworlds, I can bring together on the same table, a
>>> 'zionic' social economy mormon, a conservative catholic distributist, a
>>> deep
>>> ecological permaculturist, a unrepentent marxist, a anti-capitalist
>> 'freed
>>> market' mutualist, and many other strange manifestations of the human
>>> desire
>>> for change. Rather than looking for universal answers, we are looking for
>>> commonality of desire. But this ongoing effort is helped by the
>>> 'objective'
>>> changes in society, and by the new class realities of knowledge workers.
>>> 
>>> 
>>>  I cannot help but be truly convinced that ³p2p² is the chaotic attractor
>>> that we need to reformulate the emancipatory vision that is appropriate
>>> for
>>> the 21st century. Technology is NOT the change, but it enables struggling
>>> creative minorities to find new ways to outsmart the forces that are
>>> against
>>> emancipation and that are presently literally and physically, destroying
>>> our
>>> biosphere. As the system will increasingly go in crisis mode, these
>>> struggling minorities will be joined by the desperate majorities, who
>> turn
>>> to p2p solutions not out of any idealism, but as the necessary tool for
>>> resilience and survival. The key question then becomes, how do create a
>>> synergy between the new p2p thinking, the construction of new ways of
>>> life,
>>> and the mass mobilisations that are the inevitable result of the breaking
>>> of
>>> the social contracts on which capitalist life was based until now?
>>> 
>>> 
>>> --
>>> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  -
>> http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
>>> 
>>> Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
>>> http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
>>> 
>>> Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
>>> http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> empyre forum
>>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>> 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>> 
> 
> 


Simon Biggs | simon at littlepig.org.uk | www.littlepig.org.uk

new work email address from August 1 is s.biggs at ed.ac.uk

s.biggs at eca.ac.uk | Edinburgh College of Art
www.eca.ac.uk/circle | www.elmcip.net | www.movingtargets.co.uk