---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> Date: Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 8:36 PM Subject: Fwd: <edu-factory> A Hierarchy of Networks?, or, Geo-Culturally Differentiated Networks and the Limits ofCollaboration To: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> Found the following thread ( Jan 2008 ) when searching in my archives... Are you in touch with Ned Rossiter ? http://nedrossiter.org/ <http://nedrossiter.org/> Forwarded conversation Subject: <edu-factory> A Hierarchy of Networks?, or, Geo-Culturally Differentiated Networks and the Limits of Collaboration ------------------------ From: *Ned Rossiter* <[email protected]> Date: Sun, Jan 20, 2008 at 4:20 PM To: [email protected] A Hierarchy of Networks?, or, Geo-Culturally Differentiated Networks and the Limits of Collaboration Ned Rossiter The edu-factory organizers invited me to comment on the passage from hierarchisation to autonomous institutions. Indeed, I think it appropriate to maintain the connection between hierarchy and autonomy. This constitutive tension is apparent in the political economy and social-technical dimensions of both open source and proprietary software that provides the architecture for communicative relations. And it manifests on multiple fronts in the modalities of organization that attend the creation of autonomous spaces and times of radical or alternative research and education projects, experiments and agendas. There is no absolute autonomy, but rather a complex field of forces and relations that hold the potential for partial autonomy, or 'the difference which makes a difference' (Bateson). How to move and direct such complexities in such a way that make possible autonomous education is what I understand to be the program of edu-factory. And in such guidance - a combination of collective investigation and top-down decision-making - one finds the movement between hierarchy and autonomy. This is a matter of governance for networks. Protocols come in to play, and dispute, disagreement and alliance shape the culture of networks in singular ways. At the technical level there are some near universal features of networks: TCP/IP, location of root-servers according to the geo-politics of information, adoption of open source and/or proprietary software, allocation of domain names, etc. But as the debates around the UN's World Summit on the Information Society (2003-2005) amply demonstrated, it quickly becomes analytically and politically implausible to separate the technical aspects of information from social and culture conditions. Autonomous education that makes use of ICTs will always be situated within a geography of uneven information. Hierarchies will always prevail. The possibility of transnational collaboration that aspires to autonomous education thus becomes a problem of translation, as Jon Solomon and others have discussed in rich ways on this list. There will be no 'construction on an autonomous global university'. How, then, might autonomous education initiatives engage in scalar transformation in such a way that makes transnational relations possible? This seems to be the ambition of the edu-factory. But what is the desire for transnational connection? Why not keep things local, rooted in the geographies of the city, neighborhood or village? Who is the subject of, let us say, not a global but transnational education project that resides sufficiently outside the corporate university? Part of the brilliance of the edu-Summit held in Berlin last May was to finally break with the anti- or alter-globalization cycle of staging protests according to the diary of the WTO, G8, etc.[1] Autonomy begins with invention that is co-emergent with conflict, crisis, frustration, curiosity, depression, wild utopian desires, boredom, etc. The sites of conflict are multiple: individual, institutional, social/collective, corporeal, affective, ecological, cultural, geopolitical, governmental, etc. Underscored by heterolingual tensions and incommensurabilities, the edu-factory organizers' call for and presupposition of 'the realization of our collective project' is nothing short of complex (a problematic acknowledged by edu-factory organizers and participants). What is the situation of autonomous institutions? Paolo Do: 'Talking about an autonomous university is to find a starting-point to attack and to occupy the spaces belonging to the enemy'.[2] Such an approach is a reactionary one if it is to be reduced to a takeover, say, of the institutional spaces of the university. The conservatism in such a move lies in a responsive mechanism determined by the space and time of 'the enemy', or hegemonic institution (the university as we know it). To simply occupy the spaces of the enemy is to repeat the failure Foucault saw of revolution: the end-result is a reproduction of the same. This amounts to a reformist agenda and, in the case of the transformation of universities over the past 20 or so years, succeeds in the production and proliferation of managerial subjectivities. There are, however, different registers of occupation, and I will assume this to be the interest of Paolo. A good example can be found in the case of domestic workers in Hong Kong and their invention of new institutional forms that arise through the practice of occupation. The potential for commonalities across labouring bodies is undoubtedly a complex and often fraught subjective and institutional process or formation. The fractured nature of working times, places and practices makes political organization highly difficult. Where this does happen, there are often ethnic affinities coalesced around specific sectors - here, we are thinking of examples such as the 'Justice for Janitors' movement in the U.S., a largely Latino immigrant experience of self-organization.[3] In Hong Kong, domestic workers gather on Sundays within non-spaces such as road fly-overs, under pedestrian bridges and in public parks. The domestics are female workers for the most part, initially from the Philippines with a new wave of workers in recent years from Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.[4] And as cultural critic Helen Grace notes, 'there are also mainland migrant workers with limited rights, working in all sorts of low-paid jobs, moving backwards and forwards and living with great precarity'.[5] The domestic workers transform the status of social-ethnic borders by occupying spaces from which they are usually excluded due to the spatial and temporal constraints of labour. Sunday is the day off for domestic workers, and they don't want to stay at home, nor do their employers wish to have them about the house. The Norman Foster designed headquarters for HSBC bank located in Central district nicely encapsulates the relation between domestic workers and capital and the disconnection between state and citizen. This bank is just one of many instances found globally where the corporate sector makes available public spaces in the constitution of an 'entrepreneurial city'.[6] Yet the actions of undocumented workers mark a distinction from the entrepreneurial city and its inter-scalar strategies of capital accumulation in the form of property development and business, financial, IT and tourist services. With a first floor of public space, workers engage in praying and study groups reading the Koran, singing songs, labour organization, cutting hair and dancing while finance capital is transferred in floors above the floating ceiling of the HSBC bank. Used in innovative ways that conflict with or at least depart from how these spaces usually function, there is a correspondence here with what Grace calls a 'horizontal monumentality', 'making highly visible - and public - a particular aspect of otherwise privatized labour and domestic space'.[7] Not described in tourist guides and absent from policy and corporate narratives of entrepreneurial innovation and development, the domestic worker is a public without a discourse. For many Hong Kong residents their visibility is undesirable, yet these workers make a significant contribution to the city's imaginary: their visibility of Sundays signals that the lustre of entrepreneurialism is underpinned by highly insecure and low-paid forms of work performed by non- citizens. The domestic worker also instantiates less glamorous but nonetheless innovative forms of entrepreneurialism. An obvious example here consists of the small business initiatives such as restaurants, deli's and small-scale repairs and manufacturing that some migrant workers go on to develop, making way for new intakes of domestic workers in the process and redefining the ethnic composition of the city. Such industriousness provides an important service to local residents and contributes in key ways to the social-cultural fabric of the city. The competition of urban space - particularly the *use* of urban space - by the domestic worker also comprises an especially innovative act: the invention of a new institutional form, one that we call the 'organized network'. The transnational dimension of the domestic workers is both external and internal. External, in their return home every year or two for a week or so - a passage determined by the time of labour and festivity (there is little need for domestics during the Chinese New Year). There also consists of what Brett Neilson and Sandro Mezzadra in their posting called 'a multiplicity of overlapping sites that are themselves internally heterogeneous'.[8] Here, I am thinking of the borders of sociality that compose the gathering of domestics in one urban setting or another - as mentioned above, some choose to sing, engage in labour organization, hold study groups, etc. Ethnic and linguistic differences also underscore the internal borders of the group. Can the example of domestic workers in Hong Kong be understood in terms of a transnational organized network? I suspect not. The domestics only meet in particular times and spaces (Sunday in urban non-spaces). Such a form of localization obviously does not lend itself to transnational connection. Perhaps NGOs and social movements that rally around the conditions of domestic workers communicate within a transnational network of organizations engaged in similar advocacy work. But if this is the case, then we are speaking of a different register of subjectivity and labour - one defined by the option of expanded choice and self-determination. In this sense, we can identify a hierarchy of networks whose incommensurabilities are of a scalar nature: local as distinct from transnational. For domestic workers, much of this has to do with external conditions over which they have little control: Sunday is the day off work, exile from their country of origin is shaped by lack of economic options and the forces of global capital, their status as undocumented or temporary workers prevents equivalent freedom of movement and political rights afforded by Hong Kong citizens, etc. But within these constraints, invention is possible. Part one of this second round of discussions on the edu-factory mailing list identified many of the conditions at work that shape the differential experience of labour and practices of education. How to make the transition to institution strikes me as the task now at hand. Notes: Parts of this text are drawn from an article currently in progress with Brett Neilson. 1. Summit: Non-Aligned Initiatives in Education Culture, Berlin, 24-28 May, 2007, http://summit.kein.org 2. Paolo Do, 'Open University', posting to edu-factory mailing list, 14 January, 2008, http://www.edu-factory.org/index.php? option=com_content&task=view&id=89&Itemid=41 3. See Florian Schneider, 'Organizing the Unorganizables', 2002, http://wastun.org/v2v/Organizing_the_Unorganizable 4. See Nicole Constable, 'At Home but Not at Home: Filipina Narratives of Ambivalent Returns', Cultural Anthropology 14.2 (1999): 203-228 and Lisa Law, 'Defying Disappearance: Cosmopolitan Public Spaces in Hong Kong', Urban Studies 39.9 (2002): 1625-1646. [both articles available online - do a search] 5. Helen Grace, personal email, 15 January, 2008. 6. See Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum, 'An Entrepreneurial City in Action: Hong Kong's Emerging Strategies in and for (Inter-)Urban Competition', (no date), http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/digitalfordism/ fordism_materials/jessop.htm 7. Helen Grace, 'Monuments and the Face of Time: Distortions of Scale and Asynchrony in Postcolonial Hong Kong', Postcolonial Studies 10.4 (2007): 469. 8. Brett Neilson and Sandro Mezzadra, 'Border as Method or the Multiplication of Labor', posting to edu-factory mailing list, 27 December, 2007, http://www.edu-factory.org/index.php? option=com_content&task=view&id=83&Itemid=41 _______________________________________________ edufactory mailing list [email protected] http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/edufactory_listcultures.org ---------- From: *Jon Solomon Su Zhe-an* <[email protected]> Date: Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 12:16 PM To: [email protected] I do not think that the relation between hierarchy, knowledge and translation at the forefront of recent discussions is simply fortuitous or accidental. I have several remarks to share: 1) The hierarchies at issue occur on two very different levels, the social and the cognitive, to speak in crude terms. In other words, there are social hierarchies (class and culture repeatedly come up here, but there have been significant references to gender, language, ethnicity, and sexuality), and there are hierarchies in the order of knowledge. Each has it own specifities, yet we are still very far from understanding how the relationship between the two may in fact determine the way we understand each individually. Composite or quasi-objects that straddle both the social and the cognitive are key sites of intervention into the composition and reproduction of hierarchies. 2) One of the reasons why the university is a crucial site of intervention is because its very nature is to institutionalize and regulate the ratio between the paradigmatic quasi-object of modernity: i.e., the complex models of thought + world that we call "regions". The ratio between thought and world-the magic bullet of modern social theory in general-is what is generally called "rationality". It is no accident-only a catastrophe!-that the dominant image of rationality in modernity is a quasi-object that combines both hierarchies of knowledge and social organization in a single geo-cultural unit called, quite notoriously, "the West". In fact, as we have discovered, it is impossible to consider the ratio beteween thought and world accumulating, in primitive fashion, to the "West" without encountering the problem of ressentiment. The various postcolonial, postmodern and feminist critiques of "western rationality" have the signal merit showing us that ressentiment is the repressed other of this particular form of rationality. 3) Ned's work has gone farther than anybody else I can think of to show how the new forms of dis/organized networks are not just displacing the quasi-objects of high modernity known as geo-cultural regions but are in fact posing entirely novel ratios between the social and the cognitive. Evidently, the displacement of modernity's geo-cultural regions by the postmodern network does not mean that we have found our way out of the quandary of quasi-objects! On the contrary, the entire problem of regions as composite or amphibological models of transcendental and empirical, cognitive and social, levels is only further exacerbated by the essentially epidemic nature of postmodern sociality and knowledge. 4) One of the challenges posed by this displacement is that it is occurring before we have had sufficient time to fully critique in a bilateral way the colonial and anthropological legacy of geo-cultural regions and to produce thereby entirely new understandings of "regions" based on alternative terms of comparison. In fact, given the new, "proactive" interventionism of U.S. imperial-nationalism and the rise of resentment-based geo-cultural politics of "return to the West, return to the East" today, such critique is becoming ever more difficult to imagine. As a result, the new rationality being promoted by the displacement of regions-as-networks bears within it an important contradiction that blocks the passage to alternative pasts as well as futures. 5) The opportunity offered by "translation"-as a mode of social praxis rather than a mode of epistemological mapping-is the chance to think in terms of relationships, rather than discrete identities. This means that the relationship takes priority in a temporal sense: the identities (at least as far as we normally talk about them) are formed only after the relational encounter. To take but one example, it would make little sense to talk of/critique the West as a specific identity or amalgam of defining traits, since its very formation (as a mode of translation-and certainly not the only mode possible!) determines both what we know and who knows it. The types of critique that assume the identity of the West at the expense of seeing the "Western relation" will be easily recuperated into the intrinsically-hierarchical structure (no matter what the reversals and permutations may be) of "the West and its others". 6) We are in need of a new kind of social movement that addresses this ratio or relationship in an integral way, producing an alternative rationality that allows new social and cognitive relations to take place in ways that completely redefine what "regions" mean. The fact that such massive reorganization is currently underway is everywhere in evidence today. The question is whether it will be guided by destructive forces of self-immunization/overexposure that lead to catastrophe, or whether we can together reappropriate these transformations for the better? 7) The process of this alternative rationality produces a temporal schism that necessitates two movements, one towards the past, the other towards the future. On the one hand, it demands a radical rewriting of past history and the terms of comparison that ground humanistic knowledge. The flawed Marxist project of rewriting world history on the basis of class rather than nation or civilization is but a caricature of the kind of project required, yet it can serve, in spite of its fatal flaws, as an emblem of the possibility ahead. On the other hand, the question "Who are we?" formerly central to modernity will be replaced by the question "What are we becoming? and, What can we become instead?". 8) Thinking/acting in terms of relationships produces its own special kind of resistance, some of which we have already discussed on this list. This forum is obviously not the place to resolve these questions, but to the extent we bear in mind that resistance corresponds to invention, we are on the right track, I think. ---------- From: *Nagarjuna N* <[email protected]> Date: Thu, Jan 24, 2008 at 1:34 PM To: Jon Solomon Su Zhe-an <[email protected]>, "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, EF ListCultures <[email protected]>, List EduFactory <[email protected]> Dear All, I have found the comments of both Ned and Jon regarding "A Hierarchy of Networks?, or, Geo-Culturally Differentiated Networks and the Limits of Collaboration" very illuminating. I do feel that Jon's comments are very appropriate, regarding Ned's comments on dis/organized networks replacing the desire of Edu-Factory agenda - "not just displacing the quasi-objects of high modernity known as geo-cultural regions but are in fact posing entirely novel ratios between the social and the cognitive. Evidently, the displacement of modernity's geo-cultural regions by the postmodern network does not mean that we have found our way out of the quandary of quasi-objects !" I had initially expressed my skepticism about the bio politics concept mentioned by Jon and translation as a way forward for Edu-Factory, as he further elaborates .. "The opportunity offered by "translation"-as a mode of social praxis rather than a mode of epistemological mapping-is the chance to think in terms of relationships, rather than discrete identities. This means that the relationship takes priority in a temporal sense: the identities (at least as far as we normally talk about them) are formed only after the relational encounter. " Ben had of course mentioned the issue of open source software as a possible post Marxian model to consider, but we had not gone further in discussing these as diffuse networks, but instead the discussions had taken the form of a debate on rationality (western vs Eastern, science vs humanties, original spirit of software hackers vs original spirit of Edu-Factory initiators, or however else one may put it) of open source software and whether or not it could be blocked by network / legal controls and legislative fiats, goodness or badness of FOSS, whether IBM / Ubuntu gangs are making money from open source software and services in the guise of a new business model, etc. In this sense, yet another possibility to consider, in my opinion, in terms other than what Jon is suggesting (bio politics and translation as praxis), in more concrete terms may be the concept of software patterns and the work of the Gang of Four in mapping the "quasi objects of modernity vis a vis their interactive relationships. " This may entail a lot of reading up and preparations, and sometimes the risk will be seen that the discussions tend to veer off into supra theoretical, but I feel, the software world has its ideological pinnacles not in the open software enterprise, dissolution of hierarchies, commons spaces as an arena for conflict, community participation or the "hack of the GPL", but rather in the Design Patterns of software - where also, some of the most intense thought of the last four decades, of the originality of Western scientific thought, has gone into, also a key element of why sciences are outstripping humanities in competition for surplus funds and stable economic environment. The scientific academia, able to keep its eyes on the ball, is always able to turn, any and every, social, human and global crisis, into a corporate economic opportunity, which the humanities have not been able to. Tracking these software patterns, their theory and assumptions, and how they have played out in corporate Western and globalized post Davos world (G8 countries and the auxiliary G8 BRIC economies, being invited to be part of "stable" global economic order), may be more revealing for the Edu-Factory project as a transnational loose dis/organized network, rather than simple goodness or badness of FOSS et all, I feel. I agree with Jon that .. " I do not think that the relation between hierarchy, knowledge and translation at the forefront of recent discussions is simply fortuitous or accidental. " Regards, Nagarjuna ------------------------------ Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your homepage.<http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=51438/*http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs> _______________________________________________ edufactory mailing list [email protected] http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/edufactory_listcultures.org -- 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