From the Realm of Necessity to the Realm of Freedom, One Webserver at a Time...

Peter van Heusden pvh at egenetics.com
Mon May 14 03:16:16 PDT 2001


On Mon, May 14, 2001 at 04:48:44AM -0400, Kelley Walker wrote:
> At 10:13 AM 5/14/01 +0200, Peter van Heusden wrote:
>
> >This, and the pressure on science journals to put issues online
> >after a given period (e.g. 6 months) is a *good thing* in my opinion.
> >If only something similar could happen to humanities texts - then
> >maybe I could join in the quoting spree that you and Yoshie indulge
> >in.
>
> it's not a bad thing. it's a good thing. but it is new. it's an old aspect
> of the professions! it's an old aspect of the university system--to
> "donate" their knowledge. come one. universities have always done stuff
> like this. So, when Brad fawned all over the initiative as if it was some
> kind of noble gesture... please!
>

I don't disagree that the idea of professions which basically build walls of certificates around 'public knowledge' is a sad old story - and the 'information wants to be free' posturing of hacker culture says a lot about alienation and commodity fetishism (the commodity, information, appears to have particular attributes, powers, which are in fact a quality of human actions). Its just that in South Africa, right now, the opposite of MIT's ploy seems to be happening. UWC is now surrounded by an electrified fence, with security cameras and access control at all exits. Apparently the trend started with RAU in Jo'burg in the mid 1990s, as 'massification' of higher education gave way to increased exclusion and policing of campuses. (I guess that says something about how capitalism is different in SA vs. e.g. UK - in UK they force everyone through a carefully tuned grading system to internalise social hierarchies. In SA hierarchies are enforced more crudely, through a very crude geography of power.)

My imagination is fired by examples like the Communist Party literacy schools of the 1940s and 1950s - that's where Walter Sisulu (one of the Rivonia trialists, for a while Dep. Pres of the ANC) learnt to read. And what is Will in 'Good Will Hunting' took the knowledge that he so eloquently claimed to have extracted from a public library for $ X in library fines and instead of breaking into and merging with the professional strata, turned around and fed it back to his friends?

On the one hand what's happening with information, in the case of this MIT stuff, the Public Library of Science initiative, Open Source, etc. is the organisation of a professionalization hierarchy on top of the bedrock of 'free information' (After all, it is much more efficient in terms of human resource growth to have a massive highly literate population, with supply and hierarchy regulated by 'professional' bodies, than to restrict the required literacy.) On the other hand, there is an element of the 'subversion of money as command' (where we are actually talking about 'cultural capital' rather than money per se) which is possible, and to some extent, actual when the academy is defined less by physical exclusion and more by accredition.

To put it simply: the library holds revolution to the extent that through books we hold a dialogue much broader than possibile within the confines of our everyday lives. Power maintains its centrality by painting us as fragmented Others, each ghettoized in our minds. If capital is transforming, re-organising the ghettoes, then that transformation can sometimes (like the old factories which become social centres) be used in unanticipated ways.


>
> >Peter
> >P.S. maybe I should go and register bitterautodidact.com right around
> >now. :)
>
>
> you're referring to me or you?
>
Well, me, originally.

Peter -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844 k*256^2+2083 OpenPGP: 1024D/0517502B : DE5B 6EAA 28AC 57F7 58EF 9295 6A26 6A92 0517 502B



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list