>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).
'information wants to be free' is only a current manifestation of something that has been around for awhile, as i'm sure you know.
>Its just that in South Africa,
>right now, the opposite of MIT's ploy seems to be happening.
the opposite is happening here, as well. all the more reason why MIT's gesture might be viewed, in part, as a cynical one.
>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?
oh! don't get me started on that movie. while I loved it, it was nonetheless an ideology machine! Chuckie's speech? where the 'failure' of the working class is blamed precisely on Will's class consciousness and solidarity? Good Will Hunting ultimately blames the working class for its fate and reproduces the myth that hard work and natural ability will get you somewhere in life--IF you can only give up that no good working class culture and be free in kaliforneyaaah. eeeeeeeuuuuuuuu!!!
>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'
i will take the position here that there is no 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.
I'm not following you here.
>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.
I fail to see how MIT's initiative does much for building solidaristic learning communities of the kind forged by freedom schools and work modeled after something like Salt Alinksy has done or what we did in the Centertown Project
>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.
yeah, but MIT's initiative doesn't do much in that regard, which was the original point: Brad insisted that somehow Chuck, an autodidact par excellence, is giving up something as an individual if he even breathes critically on that press release!
> >
> > >Peter
> > >P.S. maybe I should go and register bitterautodidact.com right around
> > >now. :)
> >
> >
> > you're referring to me or you?
> >
>Well, me, originally.
well, i don't understand why you are bitter?
kelley