Category: Essay

In front of the University of Amsterdam Maagdenhuis building there is a red cube. The cube appears to be a foundation, a support structure, for an abstract metal geometric construction that emerges from it. Its constructivist nature may indicate a desire for change and replication – as if the structure is not quite finished, temporarily frozen in its growth process. If this is truly a ‘monument’ for the New University, as Alexander Nieuwenhuis and Rudolf Valkhoff’s piece is called, then it is one that seems to doubt its own nature because, rather than commemorating structures from the past, it yearns to imagine the future. It is as if the thousands of students and supporters of the New University who were standing around the red cube they had adopted as their symbol of protest were demanding not only a new university but were also planting the seed  for a new art.

 

1. The Practice of Occupation

On Friday, 13 February 2015, a group of students from the University of Amsterdam occupied a university building, the so-called Bungehuis, and subsequently the famous Maagdenhuis, which has been occupied more than ten times since 1969, when it was famously declared ‘Karl Marx University’. The student occupation of 2015 declared itself the New University and demanded the democratisation of the university, direct elections of the internal university board, political and financial transparency, an end to the budget cuts in philosophy and language departments, ending the university’s real estate speculation practices, and improving adjunct teaching contracts. In essence, it was a protest against university privatisation and commercialisation.

What is crucial about this student occupation is that it is not just a protest, but that the New University is actually proposing an alternative to current practices. The students are currently organising their own studies in collaboration with sympathetic teachers and the student union, which have joined the protest. There are full days of lectures, debates, workshops, film screenings, and reading groups  – free of charge to anyone. The New University’s programs and policies are decided upon in daily student assemblies, thus making the old University of Amsterdam into a site of student self-governance. In other words: the students and teachers are performing the university they always desired. They shape a structure of direct democracy and self-governance that creates a space, an imaginary, that allows them to articulate and enact these desires. They are not giving in to the world as it is, but dare to imagine and desire for it to be different, and thus act it differently.

The students never asked for ‘permission’ from the university board to occupy the Bungehuis. They never discussed it with any political parties, they simply occupied a building. In other words, they engaged in what the board considers an act of violence; an occupation that brought the former board chairman, Louise Gunnink to oppose the occupation of what she referred to as ‘her’ university. This perception of a university space as something that is privately owned is the crux of the issue. In fact, occupation was an attempt to reclaim education as a common good from the clutches of the bureaucrats and managers. One could even claim that their occupation was an act of self-defence, a reaction to the government’s decision to slash the basic educational stipend (basisbeurs), which would return education to one based on class and those who can afford it.

The establishment of the New University through occupation was an act of self-defence that sought to maintain the principle of education as a common good. The New University framed itself as a non-violent movement, which offered obvious strategic advantages, but at its core was the act of occupying as self-defence. Austerity was seen as an act of violence against general society, and as members of that society we claim the right to oppose the authorities through occupation. The unnecessarily violent expulsion of the students on April 11 proves that our opponents have no hesitancy in affirming their will through power, and we, as those who have decided to resist, will have to find creative means to articulate and practice new, opposing forms of power.

In any case, a single expulsion cannot squash the movement. Over the past few months, the New University student occupation has unleashed a chain of events, with New Universities being established all over the Netherlands – in Leiden, Utrecht, Rotterdam, Maastricht, Nijmegen, and Groningen. But the student occupation movement has also engaged in discussion with other student protests worldwide, from South Africa to Istanbul to London.

The protest symbol, the red cube, refers to the student protests that have taken place outside of the Netherlands, namely the 2012 Red Square student protests in Quebec, which took the lead with their now-famous saying ‘Être quarement dans le rouge’ (‘Being squarely in the red’), which refers both to student debt and to the red banner of internationalism. The New University thus recognises that our political and educational interests are not limited to a specific school, city or country, but also addresses the well-being of others who are facing a common enemy. A declaration of cross-border solidarity by protesting against the privatisation of our common, public resources – politics, economics, ecology, education, healthcare, and culture – by corporate capitalist forces is the essence of internationalism. In recognising this common enemy, we are able to make the common internationalist struggle tangible and visible.

 

2. The Total Work of Art – Revisited

This issue of visibility brings me to the question of art. During the pro-New University demonstrations in Amsterdam on 13 March, we saw art history students gathered around a banner that read: ‘Art History is Present’. The question that we as artists now need to address, as curator Vivian Ziherl observed during the protest, is whether contemporary art is present here as well.

During this period, I worked with fellow New University artists, like designer-filmmaker Rob Schröder, who had a prominent role in designing posters and conferences in the 1980s student movement and artist Matthijs de Bruijne, who over the past few years developed work in collaboration with the Dutch cleaners’ union campaign called ‘Schoon Genoeg’! (‘We’ve Had Enough!,’ where schoon is a pun that also means ‘clean’). Together with students from the Sandberg Institute, we explored how artists and designers can reshape their work when they position themselves in the heart of a political struggle. This was an attempt to address the question regarding the New University – what kind of university do we actually want? – by rephrasing it for the art world: in what kind of world do we want to be artists? Do we dedicate our work to make ‘capitalism more beautiful,’ as artist Hito Steyerl has noted, or do we attempt to define our practice in a different political context? What does it mean to be an artist inside the New University compared to being an artist trying to get a painting or sculpture sold at some generic art fair? What is the social project being articulated by the New University, and what should the place of art be in this project?

What is crucial when thinking of our work as artists in the context of social movements such as the New University is that we should not seek to make singular, so-called ‘autonomous’ artworks. A social movement is not a ‘gallery’ in which to exhibit one’s work. Rather, the assembly of participants in this social movement is itself the artwork. What the New University is essentially creating by offering free education and encouraging open assembly is a set of new social relations, a compositional model that assembles precarious forces such as students, teachers, workers, refugees, and artists into a new, political entity. This touches upon the concept of the ‘Gesammtkunstwerk’ (the total work of art) as Joseph Beuys, artist and co-founder of the Green Party (Die Grünen), described it. Despite the fact that his methodology has become known as ‘Beuysian,’ his approach was an attempt to depart from the Wagnerian conception of the total work of art as a model orchestrated by a singular author. His famous dictum – ‘Jeder Mensch Ein Künstler’ (Every Human Being an Artist) was not, however, a call for everyone to become individual visual artists. Rather, Beuys was articulating a new social ecology that applied to the whole of humanity, in which the main value of human life lies not in the domain of labour, but in the collective capital of creativity. The capacity to create, to make worlds, is not limited to the position of the artist alone; it applies to the whole of society.

Beuys saw himself as an instrument for the extension of the domain of creative capital, to connect his authorship to a multiplicity of authors that together create a new ecology of life: the total work of art was no longer restricted to the theatre stage, but could actually be extended to the whole ecology of society. In that context, the quality of the artwork lies in its transformative capacity: its capacity to engage the collective capital of creativity in each and all of us. In Beuys’s case, it was located in a revolutionary, ecological socialist project. To reconstruct social relationships around common capital rather than the individual privilege obtained from engaging in the rat race that corporate capitalism has laid out for us, was the ideological aim that structured Beuys’s artistic convictions.

The very idea of the New University – the ‘university within the university,’ the ‘parallel university’ – in that light is an intervention in and of itself. It’s a conceptual framework that allows us to rethink the social relationships of common knowledge and the collective right to education. As such, from a Beuysian perspective, it can be considered a collective work of art that performs and thus creates the imaginary of a new university and, through this collective performance, restructures social relations. While we can relate this movement to the Beuysian idea of the total work of art, it also departs from the last remaining notions of authorship in his work, because the New University movement has done everything within its capacity to avoid appointing leaders – singular authors – who could undermine its radical pluriformity. While this position also threatens the possibility of holding the movement accountable for its aims – as everyone is always responsible for everything, which in times of crisis easily turns into no one being responsible at all – the foundation of a broadly carried movement needs an equally broad and differentiated sense of identification.

3. The Art of the New University

So let’s say that an artist makes a banner, which in art schools is considered as the ultimate horror of ‘protest art,’ a derogatory term that disqualifies art that attempts to engage in political transformation as ‘activism’ and ‘propaganda.’ In this case, I propose to analyse the banner ‘NIEUWE UNIVERSITEIT – WELCOMES YOU –’ (2015), a 17-meter canvas that hung from the roof of the Maagdenhuis. The idea was initiated by artist-student Marleen van der Zanden, but, of course, the banner is not the ‘artwork’. It cannot be evaluated as merely a singular object or canvas. Its quality lies in its capacity to contribute to the articulation of the common political imaginary that the movement as a whole is trying to bring into being. Nevertheless, Van der Zanden’s endeavour can be analysed in very specific aesthetic terms.

Van der Zanden analysed the front of the building before her intervention and decided that the New University’s aesthetics were first and foremost that of a student protest, not an actual new university. The University of Amsterdam’s logos were still intact and the student banners were simply too small to make an impression on passersby and visitors that a totally new institution had been created. In simple visual terms, the massive building overwhelmed the other student occupation signs and banners.

The very visual nature of the occupation itself already forebodes that the occupiers will ultimately be evicted while the building itself will remain. Thus, this monumental University of Amsterdam site effectively works as an architecture of conservatism. Van der Zanden thus had to first of all engage with the sheer size of the building, her intervention had to be a spatial one that could destabilise its conservative, monumental nature. This resulted in the choice of a very large canvas that could span the entire façade and thus effectively lay a claim on the total institution and transform it into the New University. The building is, in a sense, wrapped around the banner, rather than the other way around. Prior to the banner, the prospects of the New University in visual terms were speculative at best, but suddenly the banner had made it a reality: the New University came into existence because it is borne and performed by students and teachers alike. The banner inscribes this claim into the architecture itself.

The banner thus enforces the imaginary of the New University; it makes a future scenario – the indefinite end of the University of Amsterdam, the beginning of the New University – real in the present. By making this imaginary visual and materially tangible, it becomes something we can relate to: a point of concrete orientation in the tedious struggle of building an institution anew. Moreover, Van der Zanden also decided not to create an overtly corporate identity. Whereas the font of the banner is very readable and meticulously painted, she consciously did not print it, but kept the human hand – the hand of the painter – that created the canvas visible.  Thus, she perfectly balanced the need for a legitimate, visual claim on the old university, indefinitely declaring it as the legitimate New University in the present, but remained reminiscent of the fact that the New University is not a corporation that imprints its demands and structures upon its subjects as the current board of the University of Amsterdam does. Rather, it considers itself as a collective creation – one in which human scale, human needs, human sociabilities, are the foundation and not its collateral damage. Van der Zanden seems to be re-evaluating the practice of futurist art because, after all, the New University has yet to be fully born. Meanwhile the imagery she proposes has already declared that it is there in the present. The New Art of the New University is a futurism visualised and acted upon in the present. The New University and its art propose a ‘utopian performance’, as theoretician Timotheus Vermeulen termed it, which refers back to the famous ’68 dictum: ‘Be realistic, demand the impossible’. In the case of the New University, this could be rewritten to say: ‘Be realistic, practice the impossible.’

The artist contributes his or her visual literacy to the social movement, by which we mean the capacity of artists to ‘read’ form. You could say that the space that defines art as distinct from politics is that of morphology, a genealogy of forms. Artists articulate specific sensibilities through form, and they understand that there is a relation between the form in which we organise, the form in which we assemble, the form in which we communicate, and the possibility of political transformation that results from it. We can only act upon this future in the present if we learn to imagine a different future. Art is what connects the space of the impossible to the present; it occupies the space of our political desires and imaginaries, and creates the means for them to manifest themselves in a collective and shared presence. Morphology thus also connects the concepts of past, present and future, allowing different ‘spheres’ of time to become interconnected. In this process, solidarities are created through the overlapping of time – how the students from 2015 engage in a dialogue with the students from 1969. The years of ideological erosion are ultimately discarded, and 1969 re-emerges in the present day. The nightmare of global capitalism that separates the two is discarded allowing a new history to be articulated. In other words, after 1969 comes 2015.

Let’s examine the artwork ‘Driving a Wedge Through the Corporatized Art School’ by Robin Clark, which was produced for the student protests at the Chelsea School of Art in London. The red triangle is seen violating the bureaucratised and privatised art school and refers directly to Soviet constructivist El Lissitzky’s poster ‘Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge’ (1920), in which the red wedge symbolises the revolutionary Bolsheviks, who are penetrating and defeating their White movement opponents during the Russian Civil War. Clark has attempted to visually link two different historical struggles. The White Movement, loyal to the Tsar, has become the armies of managers loyal to corporate capital.

The red wedge links the two time frames to one another: an abstract shape that represents the revolutionary consciousness of an alliance of peoples, students, teachers, workers, artists, to resist and overcome oppressive structures of power.

The red wedge of the 1920s is the red square of 2015. And in both 1920 and 2015 it was an artist who created it. Let’s keep that powerful truth in mind when we create our New Art for the New University.

 

 

The role of the university as a place of education and research, as an employer, and as an important institution in the social landscape has changed dramatically in the past decade. As PhD students from various European and North American academic backgrounds, we are keenly aware of these developments and have been involved with or engaged against them – often both at the same time. One of the most pressing issues from our perspective concerns changing labour relations and the situation of the workforce in universities, especially the collapse of working conditions for many academic and non-academic staff and the lack of effective ways of addressing this development.

Professors, who once enjoyed excellent working conditions in Europe and North America, are increasingly subjected to stricter, stranger, and more noxious standards and regulations. They are pressured into constant external grant applications, and are threatened with severe sanctions if the administration considers the results of their activities inadequate. The case of Stefan Grimm, a professor at Imperial College London who was found dead in September 2014 shortly after a distressing email exchange about funding, is one tragic example (Parr 2014).

Academics and their institutions are increasingly being judged according to various forms of ranking, both state-sponsored (such as the Research Excellence Framework in the UK) and international ones such as the Shanghai ranking and the Times Higher Education ranking of global reputation.[1] These rankings, as Cambridge historian Stefan Collini argues, do not actually reflect the excellence of research, or the quality of the university (Collini 2013). And yet they matter tremendously to university administrators, students, and state officials (Floch 2015). Recent months have seen an outpouring of articles from UK-based tenure-track academics in the humanities criticizing the ‘new dirigisme’ of the modern university, many of them inspired by Stefan Collini’s 2012 book ‘What Are Universities For?’

Academic Working Conditions Under Strain

Of course, we must not forget that professors are far from being the only academic workers at a university. There are throngs of other individuals involved in the production of knowledge. These include temporary teaching staff, ‘research assistants’, or graduate students who often combine their own thesis-related work with teaching and with non-thesis related research. It has lately become popular to claim that some of these schemes provide valuable or even necessary experience for graduate students, allowing them to be more competitive in the clogged-up academic labour market (Grove 2014).

However, such valuable experience can come with unpleasant strings attached, such as less than adequate working conditions: these contracts are typically temporary, with irregular hours, and the workers are frequently underpaid. In the last months this has led to teaching assistant strikes and walk-outs at three major Canadian universities: the University of Toronto, York University, and McGill University (Bryson 2004; Chiose 2015; Sadikov 2015). Most recently, our own institution, the European University Institute (EUI) has even created teaching positions that are simply not paid. Instead, they have been branded and sold as opportunities for ‘clinical training’ that do not therefore require remuneration.[2] These moves, by which academic employers attempt to represent exploitative labour relations as ‘win-win’ situations, as ‘valuable experiences’ or even ‘fantastic opportunities’, should be exposed for what they really are and  ought to be resisted.

Similarly, temporary teaching staff are frequently employed in dire conditions, a trend one can observe in such diverse contexts as the United States (Krause, Nolan, Palm & Ross, 2008), Poland (Chodzież 2015, Modzelewski 2015) and even the ‘social-democratic paradises’ of Scandinavia (Sved 2014). High competition, low pay, few to no benefits, and very unstable contracts have become the rule leading to wide-spread precarity. In Norway, for example, as much as 20% of all university and college employees are hired on temporary contracts. Such harsh conditions make it particularly difficult for members of historically disadvantaged groups, such as women, people from lower social classes, and those with a migrant background to succeed, as they are the ones most affected by the low pay and lack of benefits. This exclusionary effect is further compounded by the more specific discriminations many academic workers from these groups experience at their workplace (Bryson 2004: 50-51). The risk and often the result is a university that is not more but less socially and intellectually diverse.

The Neglected Workers: Attacks on Non-Academic Staff

And yet, to only focus on academic workers and their labour conditions would be a mistake. Indeed, we must not forget that an often neglected but huge part of the university-employed labour force consists of non-academic staff. As an institution, the university does not simply produce knowledge – it also consumes a huge amount of services. These run from vast quantities of administrative work to security, cleaning and catering.

The workers who perform these tasks are, to a significant extent, the life-blood of the university. However, their important contribution often remains unnoticed even when their working conditions, and therefore their livelihoods, are being attacked, as has regularly happened in recent years. What is true for young academics hold here as well: those who are overwhelmingly affected by these degrading labour conditions come from historically underprivileged backgrounds. They are often women, migrants or both and do not usually have ready access to institutionalized power or the media to fight back (McDowell 2013).

In some ways these changes did not remain unchallenged. In late 2011, in Montréal, members of the McGill University Non-Academic Certified Association went on strike for almost four months. At stake were the usual suspects of labour negotiations: wages and benefits. The contract proposed by the administration included wage cuts in real terms, a negative (and, from the workers’ point of view, fairly dangerous) change in the pension scheme, as well as reductions in other benefits that are usually part of similar contracts in other Canadian higher education institutions. The administration claimed that it needed to make these changes because of the University’s increasing debt and consequent need to cut costs. The workers, in contrast, highlighted the mismanagement of funds and a huge disparity in wages between an ever-increasing number of high-level managers and the rest of the administrative staff (Arsem-O’Malley 2011a).

Across the Atlantic in 2013, students and staff at the University of Sussex occupied a medical school lecture theatre, protesting against the university’s continued privatisation of services that threatened working conditions of staff including porters, caterers and security workers (Elsisi 2013). In 2014, at the EUI in Florence, it came to the attention of several researchers that there was a new call for tenders, putting the porters’ existing contracts at risk. Given what it considered as budget constraints, the administration of the EUI saw a reduction of the costs of the porters’ services as a best-case scenario, but formally only asked for costs not to be increased. The initial result of this call for tenders led to a proposed contract which would require the workers to accept severe salary cuts (of the order of about 10-15% of their salaries), as well as equally severe benefit reductions.

The McGill strike ended in December 2011, with a hard-won victory for the union. In this process, the workers faced not only the usual consequences of a long-lasting strike, but also repeated court injunctions curtailing their right to free speech, as well as their ability to organise picket lines and to make their struggle visible (Arsem-O’Malley 2011b; Gass 2011). Regrettably, and despite the involvement of students and academic staff in solidarity with the workers, the struggles at the University of Sussex and at the EUI ended without allowing the workers to secure any long-lasting gains. Nevertheless, there is a bright side to this: in all three cases, genuine solidarity between students and staff emerged and was put into action, creating new possibilities for resistance.

Unfortunately, the attacks on non-academic labour as well as their social and intellectual consequences have rarely been addressed by the tenured professors who usually focus on recent developments in the academic organization of universities. All the groups that give substance to a university, that is to say students as well as academic and non-academic workers share the same workplace, collectively face more precarious working conditions, and are more generally part of the same society, experiencing and resisting these very developments. It is therefore our view that a broad alliance between all these groups would make us stronger. Indeed, while the combined pressure of these groups has already achieved some smaller effects, in the future we need a stronger, more conscious alliance between tenured professors, junior academic staff and non-academic staff, and students who in turn need to be allied with other groups outside of the university facing similar problems in their workplaces and social existence.

Ways of Protest

The recent university protests in Amsterdam, London, Toronto, and Montréal, to name but a few, are far from unique. To better situate this wave of protest in a broader context, it is helpful to look both backwards and forwards and beyond the ‘West.’ Here we can only do this in a very limited way, focusing on a surprising parallel with student activism in mid-20^th century communist People’s Republic of Poland. In 1956 on the wave of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech and the promise of de-Stalinization the activist Polish communist youth, and especially students, unleashed a critique of the Polish United Workers’ Party and what they perceived as the deteriorating situation of higher education.

Engaged Marxist newspapers for young academics and students such as the Warsaw-based Po Prostu (‘Frankly’) and political discussion clubs at the University of Warsaw became important sites for creating and spreading the revisionist Marxist discourse that questioned the official Party line (Modzelewski 2013, 100-103). This revisionist and critical discourse of the students exposed the malfunctioning system of higher education by, for instance, addressing corruption. Far from limiting their critique to their closest social environment and interest, the students and young intellectuals were also critical of the Party’s proclivity to focus on quantity over quality both on the shop floor of the factories and in the universities. As a result of Po Prostu’s uncompromising tone and the increasingly anti-revisionist orientation of the Party, the weekly was shut down in 1957 which was followed by a students’ protest.

It was precisely within the university as an enclave of somewhat autonomous and yet socially engaged critical thought that the student rebellion emerged and eventually made its major public appearance during the famous March Protest in 1968 in Warsaw. The founders of various discussion clubs and leaders of the March protest in 1968 – Jacek Kuroń, Karol Modzelewski and Adam Michnik – later became key activists of Solidarność, a first autonomous workers’ union founded in 1980, which spearheaded change in the ‘Eastern Bloc’ and became the biggest European workers’ movement in the twentieth century. Other members such as Irena Grudzińska-Gross and Barbara Toruńczyk became famous intellectuals in Poland and beyond.

The remarkable example of the Polish post-1956 Marxist students turning against the repressive Communist Party and defending an alternative vision of critical and engaged academic work allows us to trace a history of ideas and student activism over time and beyond the limits of ‘the West.’ As Jo Guldi and David Armitage suggest, such a comparative view also demonstrates that the practices and views informing contemporary protest can and should be linked with other traditions of contestation (Guldi and Armitage 2014: 34). Moreover, the provided example proves that the university’s classroom became one of the sites within which a radically critical thought and conversation could emerge. It was a conversation, with the social bonds of solidarity that it created, that did not limit itself to the walls of the university and eventually turned into a contributing force to a social movement that brought about a substantial social change.

A broader contextualization is not only of intellectual value but can contribute to strengthening the political force of these movements, underlining their resonance and significance beyond the local contexts from which they emerge. Without romanticising past struggles and essentializing cultural differences, thinking along the lines of the examples from the past and beyond the ‘West’ continues to be a helpful framework that might prevent the automatic reproduction of a self-absorbed perspective of actors from the ‘West.’ As recent discussion continues to show the ‘Western-European left’ is far from being free from this self-absorption, often marginalizing perspectives, for instance such as those from the East, that are already marginalized.

Neoliberalism and State-led Privatisation

The responsibility of national governments for ‘marketisation’ and the drive for privatisation in higher education is sometimes underestimated, both within and outside academia. Reforms aimed at privatisation are very often the result of government intervention in the management of universities, and have therefore been imposed from the top down (Gray 2010). Since this has been done by governments of both the centre-right and the centre-left, it has led some to conclude that the word ‘neoliberalism’ is not an appropriate term to describe these developments.

However, this rests on the common misunderstanding that neoliberalism is no different from classical liberalism in that it favours a small state. Had this actually been the case there would have been no use for the prefix ‘neo’ neither for contemporary critics nor for the founding fathers of this doctrine in the 1930s. However, a variety of recent studies undertaken in the wake of the recent translation and publication of Michel Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics from 1979 (Foucault 2010 [1978-79]) have affirmed that both in doctrine and in practice neoliberalism favours a strong state capable of carrying out a program imposing the logic of the market in all spheres of society. It is precisely this political logis that we are witnessing at the university today. Therefore understanding and calling it by its rightful name is one step on the way to resisting it and working through it in a quest for something better.

Resistance to the neoliberalisation of the university comes from both a diverse alliance of the radical-left, who draw on theories of financialisation and indeed neoliberalism itself to explain our current economic situation, and from more conservative scholars who see themselves as the protectors of ancient academic tradition.[3] In critiques inspired by Collini, such as Marina Warner’s recent essay ‘Learning my lesson’ (Warner 2015), there is more than a hint of nostalgia for a past in which professors in the humanities had better working conditions and enjoyed a higher social standing. Such nostalgia, however, should not cloud our theoretical and historical perspective.

Roughly speaking, one can distinguish three different approaches to the contemporary study of neoliberalism. The first is what we may call the nostalgic or even Keynesian approach. Its proponents put the blame for the evils of neoliberalism on right-wing politicians, and an alleged ‘deregulatory project’ that they are supposed to be advocating and successfully enacting. The second approach is Marxist in nature, and famously expounded by David Harvey. According to this view, neoliberalisation is seen as little more than an episode in an ongoing class struggle, and it is always systemic problems of capitalism that are to blame for any perceived evil (Harvey 2007). The third perspective we may call Foucauldian or biopolitical. Instead of focusing on party politics or the systemic features of capitalism, it builds on the concept of ‘governmentality’. Like the Marxist approach, the biopolitical perspective sees little use in a nostalgic or Keynesian view as it recognises that the problem cannot simply be reduced to the latest developments in the field of academic economics and its influence on the policies of whatever party happens to be in power. Unlike Marxists, however, proponents of the biopolitical approach have also acknowledged that the state plays a particular and specific role in the process of neoliberalisation, which does not amount to a bourgeois return to the policies of laissez-faire (Bröckling, Krassmann & Lemke 2010).

The somewhat sentimental critiques by Collini and Warner can also be taken to point to a more Foucauldian approach in their attempts to problematize the changing view of knowledge and those who produce it in current ‘Western societies’. Wendy Brown has remarked that Foucault’s notion of governmentality highlights ‘the critical role of mentality in governing as opposed to the notion that power and ideas are separate phenomena’. It thereby allows us to theorize ‘the state formation of subjects rather than state control of subjects’ (Brown, 2005: 142), and points to a neoliberal political rationality, itself based on a ‘regime of truth’. While being in the middle of the business of producing knowledge, or truth, academics and their positions are under serious threat from the neoliberal conception of markets as information processors and producers of truth. From this logic it follows that academics have a new role in neoliberal society: they do not produce truth themselves, they participate and compete in a ‘marketplace of ideas’, where the truth eventually emerges.

Paradoxically, this is radical change and even those who want to seriously challenge the structures of ‘the postwar settlement’ as it is manifested in the university system see academic traditions of independent enquiry as vital for a new and better society. Despite possible continuities the left has changed since 1968. While still a transcendent political project, neoliberalisation demands a new generation of activists, acutely aware that there are aspects of the past worth fighting for and building upon for a better future. 

Towards a New Future

As young scholars, we are part of the university’s future. It seems evident to us that we should, following Collini, try to find the answer to the question: ‘what are universities for?’ But in so doing, we must not forget to ask an even bolder question: ‘what should universities be?’

Further alliances between students and workers must also be fostered and maintained. One of the strengths of the sequence of struggles, in the academic year 2011-2012 at McGill University, was precisely that it brought together under the flags of various kinds of radical demands students, non-academic workers, precarious academic workers, and to a lesser (though significant) extent, professors. There was an understanding of the commonality of the struggle against a new managerial system and a market-based approach to the university, and its expression took the form of mutual solidarity.

Practically, it meant for example that many students came to picket and demonstrate with the striking workers, and made sure their voices could be heard even in the face of repeated court injunctions that curtailed the workers’ right to protest. Strategies such as this one were devised through discussions occurring at different levels at different points in time. This meant not only that workers discussed among themselves in the context of their general assemblies and union meetings or that students had relevant conversations in the context of their own assemblies, but most importantly, it meant that there were significant and sustained discussions that cut across professional lines and allowed students and workers to build together a stronger movement and a more coherent strategy. In turn, the workers supported the student struggle against tuition increases in the province of Québec, which eventually brought about 250.000 people to the streets of Montréal in May 2012, numbers achieved before only during the demonstrations against the war in Iraq (Arsem-O’Malley 2011c; Bourgault-Côté 2012).

There is no ‘going back’ to a perceived golden age or ivory tower, but it is beyond doubt that there are aspects both of the academic tradition and of the post-war ideal of affordable or free higher education that are worth defending. As institutions charged with the important task of producing new knowledge, universities should not be mimicking already outdated forms of corporate organisation, but rather should be leading the way towards something better. In so doing, the university should resist neoliberal attempts to appropriate the idea of the social relevance of science and knowledge production of which it often gives a reductive, economistic account.  A possible alliance between nostalgic professors with radical potential and a reformed activist left bodes well for the future.

These spaces and practices of solidarity, which have precursors in a variety of historical moments such as the alliance between student activists and workers in the context of the Polish opposition and 1968 Paris, have most recently been explored further through the occupation of the Maagdenhuis in Amsterdam, and the several occupations at universities in London. Through these various loci of struggle, we see the fledgling possibility of constructing a new university that embraces occupational, social and economic diversity, and where workers and students are able to co-determine the directions to be taken by the institution as a whole. It is perhaps with the help of these experiments and the experiences they procured that we may therefore see the future of the universities and get a glimpse of not only what they should be, but also find the way to how we can get to that point.

Acknowledgement

This article is a significant extension on a contribution the authors wrote for https://theconversation.com/uk/education We thank the editors for allowing us to make use of it.

In an (in)famous postscript, Gilles Deleuze traces the emergence of a society of control, whose passive danger is jamming, and whose active danger lies in piracy and viruses. Media jamming and piracy, hacktivism and viruses are all rampant today: the internet is their natural breeding ground, to the point of becoming trivial occurrences in everyday life. Technology moves fast, but the means of understanding its movements do not, given the new media theory’s obligate and persistent homage to Deleuze’s early nineties programme. The gratuitousness of this reference today, combined with the lack of specificity concerning contemporary implementations of cybernetic modes of machinic governance, might just as well introduce a kind of theoretical laziness concerning the concrete stages of their development.

In their collaborative research efforts, Ned Rossiter and Soenke Zehle explore the consequences of new economies of capture and the enclosure of experience. For this edition of Krisis, they were willing to respond extensively via email to questions about their research, the directions it is taking, and the methodological and conceptual innovations they feel are needed in order to address the complexity of the present, so as to better grasp the most recent incarnation of that eternal and ambiguous figure at the center of this special issue, the pirate. The latter offers an entry node into some of the more intangible and abstract issues that permeate so-called network societies. As the focal point of a cognitive mapping, the interview addresses debates on the common(s) and its multitudes in their flight from wage labor, as well as the antinomies of informational capitalism, which frees up and mobilizes with one hand what it blocks entry to with the other. Fire and pay walls prevent access from what could be freely available to all, an idea that drove Aaron Swartz to disclosing JSTOR’s database of academic articles. As big data and dragnet surveillance increase the costs of identity, opting out becomes a viable alternative. What lies beyond is still uncertain, as the boundaries of the political implode to fuel a civil society whose weight existing democratic institutions cannot carry, without at least a sense of its ‘parametric’ dimensions.

Daniël de Zeeuw

 

Pirate practices often involve theft and property violations without clear-cut ideological motives, as is the case with most torrent trackers. For this reason they are often dubbed apolitical, in a pejorative, delegitimizing sense, namely as ‘merely’ criminal, directed towards private gain and against the public interest. More often than not, repression of what is deemed private is much stronger than what is said to be of public significance, making this repression less contested as well. Similarly, hackers’ targeting of information and communication infrastructure is depoliticized, or delegitimized under criminal conspiracy acts. Instead you claim that contemporary forms of piracy involve both contestations of ownership, new forms of use and an alternative politics of the common. Does this mean you reject the above framing of piracy as apolitical? Under what conditions may pirate practices involve genuine political acts? Or should they be evaluated according to other norms and categories altogether?

To talk about how such framings operate as devices of depoliticization, we should perhaps revisit the distinction between politics and the political that also informs reflections on piracy. As Derrida has noted in his reading of Schmitt’s account of the friend/enemy distinction as an existential antagonism – implying the ever-present possibility of physical killing – that is constitutive of the political, Schmitt’s attempt to deduce the political from a place where it did not yet exist requires a definition of the enemy as such, one that is linked to the possibility of a proper war – that is, an existentially political war. It is a distinction whose disappearance in the wake of modern warfare Schmitt both acknowledges and resists. It should be noted that in his post-war writings, Schmitt has discouraged readings of this distinction that stress annihilation as the inevitable telos of such an antagonism, but affirmed the need to think the ‘enemy’ as that which binds any one sphere of the political as an ethico-political space. Schmitt’s desire for distinction is alive in contemporary legal orthodoxy. The prosecution of piracy as a crime (rather than an act of war) has been lamented by current adherents of Schmitt such as John Yoo, for instance, Deputy Assistant US Attorney General in the George W. Bush Administration, who would like to see the public enemy status extended to terrorists (i.e. combatants that are ‘illegal’ in that they do not act on behalf of a sovereign state) more generally. But the definition of piracy that opens Daniel Heller-Roazen’s (2009) genealogy of the ‘enemy of humanity’ also echoes Schmitt’s attempt to deduce the political from non-subjective, non-anthropological categories.

This question is not limited to piracy, of course; it is one of the characteristics of the current conjuncture that statelessness, a key concern in the political philosophies of Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben, is once again considered an instrument of governance (take the call to revoke the citizenship of jihadists, coming, needless to say, mainly from states who are signatories to the two UN conventions on the reduction of statelessness). So, the political character of piratical practices refers to the ways in which they modify the conditions of possibility for politics and political action. In this sense there is some correlation here with hacker practices, frequently subsumed under the governance meme of ‘cyberterrorism’. While following this line of thought leads us beyond the terrain of this interview, it should be noted that the association of piracy with terror is itself in need of a conjunctural explanation.

What interests us here is the scope available for tinkering with social and technological systems, the linkages that are foregrounded by reapproaching the question of piracy in terms of the infrastructural implications of its practices. The centrality of infrastructural and logistical registers to piratical practices cuts across public/private distinctions and calls for a parametric sense of the political, rather than the fall-back on a public sphere model that always-already depoliticizes piratical practices as private acts of appropriation without authorization. There is no necessarily progressive vision in the political dimensions of piracy. This is of course also true for any politics organized around the principles of identity and representation, but it nevertheless bears repetition. The point of departure for our reflections on piracy is not the romance of disruption, but a sense that piracy offers a particularly useful point of departure for analyses of the varying perspectives in the way we delineate the boundaries of the political.

For instance, we do not think of piracy primarily in terms of property violations. Such a framing is of extremely limited analytical reach. Instead, we want to know what is left of piracy when it is not exclusively understood in relation to property. There is a sense of piracy that simply involves illicit changes in ownership. But we are more interested in how piracy opens an exploration of the boundaries of sovereignty. Historically, the idea of a contiguous space of sovereignty (where one boundary touches the next, without non-sovereign territories in between) is rather recent, and in many parts of the world does not exist in practice – permanent policing of these boundaries is needed to produce them as boundaries, and pirates play a key role in how the predictive policing strategies of these semi-open spaces are determined and designed by public (states) and private actors (Private Military Corporations, NGOs). Within such a geopolitical imaginary, we move instead to practices of anonymity as exemplary acts of piracy situated within logistical worlds, whose techniques and technologies of governance seek to extract value through the capture of experience. With such a movement, we register the extent to which the infrastructural dimension of digital economies demands analytical attention, from the shift to low-latency networks and centralized storage systems (e.g. data centres) to the logistical technologies ensuring the synchronization of networked activities across the topologies of these new economies of capture.

 

Data pirates often narrate their own identities in terms of invisibility and anonymity: Anonymous is a recent example, but it goes back to the early cypherpunk scene. What is it about digital culture that invokes this persistent association with anonymity as a form of power, and political strategy?

In this world, anonymity is a central principle of operation. While anonymity is most often understood in terms of a refusal of the principle of identity, it acquires additional meaning in the shift from causation to correlation that lies at the core of a data analytics in which pattern recognition is more important than the logic of accountability and attribution. At the same time, the epistemological binding of data to empirical conditions is difficult to refute, even for practices of anonymity, not only because of the weight of legitimacy bestowed upon big data analytics to ‘explain’ the patterning of the world. But quite simply because once we acknowledge the extent to which identity is distributed across the topologies of our communicative enmeshments, stretching far beyond the sphere of signification to a much more encompassing semiotics of intensities, we realize that the dispersal of subjective traces far exceeds the economy of anonymity. It is too soon to tell, of course, how well anonymity scales, beyond encryption and the facile move of an exodus from commercial social media systems. But the space of a politics of anonymity is so much wider than the deliberative dimensions of the politics of representation. It is for this reason that we hold on to the concept of the political to at least lay claim to political possibility, even if we are not sure how and across which social and technological registers such a politics of anonymity can be articulated. Here, the question of anonymity becomes intimately intertwined with the question of how we approach the transformation of agency within machinic assemblages, of technical systems whose dispositions confront us with forms of agency we are not sure how best to comprehend. But rather than assuming at the outset that forms of agency that cannot be folded into a politics of representation lie beyond the scope of the political, part of the question of a politics of anonymity is to ask how we engage the disposition of these new technical systems in ways that acknowledge the actuality of machinic agency (without being reduced to a Latourian or STS world view, whose flat ontologies of thick description tend to occlude the instantiation of the political).

The question of traceability across computational systems, a significant concern in the analysis of such forms of agency, lies at the heart of the practice of piracy as well. There is nothing at the ontological level that ties data to the externalities from which it arises. Part of an economic logic of recursion, data speaks to itself before it addresses the world around it. To distinguish between the epistemological and ontological layers is itself a political thought, for as long as the data trails of anonymity are linked to empirics, then subjects become culpable of acts of piracy (among others). The ways in which the empirical dimensions of data are articulated epistemologically and ontologically also concerns parametric politics, as politics is increasingly drawn to explore and incorporate these registers of algorithmic cultures into new forms of governance.

 

Can you expand on what you mean by parametric politics and its relation to piracy?

By parametric politics we mean an engagement with the technical parameters of the infrastructural and logistical registers of politics. Understood as such, piracy is political in this broader sense regardless of its legitimacy, and there are faint echoes of this acknowledgement even in the generative visions of celebrity architects that have also popularized the term ‘parametric’ in the context of neoliberal urban development schemes. The political dimension of these practices is separate from their legitimacy: we have often seen the same practices de- and relegitimized rather quickly in relation to shifting geopolitical agendas, for instance. What was once considered legitimate reverse engineering has been recast as illegitimate in the name of intellectual property protection, mirroring shifts in the way we have come to speak about creativity and innovation.

Parametric politics is the politics of design. We need to develop a collective language – an idiom of expression, which entails the singularity of practice – that helps organize the production of subjectivity and social relations in ways that are not constrained by the (pre)formatting of action in algorithmic architectures. While we approach the Rancierian attentiveness to the autonomization of the aesthetic as an aspect of the real subsumption of aesthetic experience, we also draw on the notion of ‘procedural literacy’ popularized by the game theorist Ian Bogost: ‘When we play games, we operate those models, our actions constrained by those rules’ (Bogost 2011: 4). A parametric politics for us means identifying, testing and, where possible, transforming the rules that delimit how we operate within the machinic arrangements of logistical media apparatuses. Maker movements have embraced the collective ability to appropriate the infrastructures of informatized production, social philosophy has rediscovered craft. Our variety of design thinking also draws on the philosophies of machinism we think we need to engage in to escape the presentist politics of isolating algorithms as autonomous digital agents, as useful as algorithmic accountability analyses can be. Software studies has drawn attention to the semiotics of software, while Maurizio Lazzarato calls attention to the asignifying semiotics of machinic assemblages.

Finally, parametric politics is an attempt to bring the machine back into view, into the comprehension of a specific politics (where we understand the machine in the sense of Marx’s Grundrisse, i.e. a distributed assemblage whose operational logic both enables and limits the autonomy of its constituent elements as well as the extent of its involvement in the production of subjectivity). Piratical practices operate at the boundaries of such a parametric politics. Their machinic scope is neither comprehended nor governed by the traditional juridical problematization of piracy and the conception of politics it presupposes.

In your research, as well as in your answer just now, you try to relate pirate practices to what you call a politics of anonymity (Rossiter and Zehle 2014b). Can you further elaborate as to what anonymity in this context refers to?

As argued above, piracy is neither adequately nor exhaustively comprehended in terms of the legality or illegality of its practices. What must come into view is what used to be referred to as so-called primitive accumulation (or, as David Harvey called it, accumulation by dispossession, which links these processes more directly to the dynamics of commoning) – how something becomes property, a ‘resource’ to begin with, and not start with its status as property as a given. The shift from a comparatively open destination web to the walled gardens of commercial media is a prime example of this process of exploiting and extracting value from the common (a social relation) in order to enclose the commons (the expressive form of social relations).

Anonymity is likewise a non-proprietary resource, and a key element in commoning strategies. The refusal to be identified and captured by processes of subjectivation links practices of anonymity to the social production of the common, but also to what we might call the a priori of any politics of rights – what Étienne Balibar has, following Hannah Arendt, referred to as the right to have rights. If there is a right to have rights, there has to be political subjectivity prior to citizenship. Hobbes knew this, of course, but what struck him as a dangerous thought experiment was limited as a potential attribute of the indigenous peoples of the new world. Today, the renaissance of animist thought serves as yet another reminder that humanity and subjectivity are coupled only within specific cosmopolitical horizons. So anonymity refers to a type of political subjectivity that is not articulated in terms of citizenship, identity, representation.

All that remains is expression and action without enclosure. At the same time, anonymity communicates with itself and to the world through, more often than not, commercial infrastructures. This is not insignificant, and it is one reason why anonymity operates differently online. At this point we note the intersection between the political economy and territorial mediations of digital infrastructures such as data centres or server farms and the internal operations of anonymity. To be anonymous, in other words, is not to be severed from relations of control. We are not romantics in that sense, but questions relating to anonymity and autonomy at the level of infrastructures that have been a core register of net-cultural engagement since the very beginning are also and necessarily a concern of parametric politics, of the creation of interfaces with relations of control that allow us to address whatever effects of subjective constitution these relations establish.

The territorial consists of juridical, geological, economic and social-political struggles over spatial imaginaries, formations and their temporal variations. As an object of computational measure and calculation, territory works to contain and govern through techniques of deduction and exclusion. It does this through the design of parametric politics. That which does not conform to the rule-set of parameters is beyond measure and therefore free. Yet, paradoxically, this freedom is accompanied by a form of illegitimacy vis-à-vis the struggle for power, since it is existence beyond accountability. This is also the paradox of anonymity: it only exists as a collective ensemble of sociality (beyond itself) once it registers within the parameters of control, even if it does so as disruption. Which is why we not only want to think piracy beyond its determination by property, but anonymity beyond its determination by identity.

Expression has to pass through infrastructure, whether that is the body or the machine (the body as machine). So even when communication is secured with sophisticated encryption technologies, it is also being indexed as data within server stacks. And while data may enjoy a life without identity, someone or some entity is footing the power bill for energy consumed and costs related to the construction and maintenance of data infrastructures. This inevitably means they want a return on investment, since the idea of public infrastructures for communication no longer attracts much support from the neoliberal state. Such forces and material conditions constitute an ethico-political dimension that all too often goes overlooked within the cult of anonymity. Expression is not just a practice of multiplication (of discourse, practice, relations, subjectivities). It is also a practice of subtraction. And this is also an important attribute that we invoke through the practices of piracy. Subtraction not of value from property, but more the subtraction of resources from the common. Piracy, then, is also a practice of depletion. Our interest is in asking how we think of practices of design, of invention and orchestration as the work of politics within networked ecologies situated within zones of depletion and economies of exhaustion. Depletion is where the common begins, in sites to which no one lays claims anymore because they have been exhausted. Exhaustion leaves fragments, ruins, waste – it is what comes after production,  after use, after work (Zehle 2015). Piracy not only operates in this space, its movements across machinic assemblages facilitate our comprehension of the role of informatization in the structural transformation of work more generally (Rossiter and Zehle 2015).

 

You mention the rise of a culture driven by a desire for invisibility and escape from neoliberal networks of capture. Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker have employed a similar vocabulary, just as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri speak of an exodus of the multitude. You also seem to conceive of invisibility as a form of withdrawal of free labour from the digital economy and as an immunitary device against overly ‘imperial ambitions’. Yet you acknowledge its utopian-romantic bend, and stress the continuing need for institutional engagement (the figure of the whistleblower, for example). How do you situate yourself in relation to these other approaches? And, furthermore, as it appears that, instead, the emancipatory struggles of the previous decades were mostly aimed precisely at ‘becoming visible’ (in an institutional sense, through the acquisition of rights, the recognition of identities, etc.) has there been a genuine shift in the logic of emancipatory practices?

As to the last question: in online communication, the trace is trackable, regardless of whether you block cookies or hide your IP address. But it’s not a shift, at least not simply from one to the other – politics organized around representation is alive and well, including a politics of rights (just consider the occupy / pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, or the electoral victories of anti-austerity parties across Europe). The freedom to organize includes the freedom from surveillance, involving both invisibility/visibility. A default setting for a politics of anonymity would be to proceed by way of encryption. Yet it has become increasingly apparent since Snowden, NSA, et al., that everyone follows everyone else. This is the mutual surveillance game. Interestingly, anti-surveillance tools have much in common with the double agency of a different era – and with a poetics of disappearance and desubjectivation. So again, this is part of what engaging piracy on its own terrain can do: it opens up our analysis of the computational conjuncture beyond the historical horizon of the digital society and the presumption that we need to comprehend it above all in the technological terms of informatization.

As to the apparent opposition between withdrawal and engagement: the latter might also manifest as collective practices of inventing new institutional forms. When movements organize, they are building political and social infrastructures whose dynamics will often take on properties specific to the media of communication, the architectures of code and, let’s not forget, the materiality of the built environment. But as we mentioned earlier, there is also a larger scale of political economic forces associated with the commercial infrastructures through which the communication practices of movements must necessarily pass. This raises the paradox of anonymity, or a politics of the invisible, which also registers as a technical trace. So whatever gestures of withdrawal one may attribute to labour-power, there remains the lingering problem of the trace and the economy it fosters. The general problem of post-autonomia as presented in the writings of Virno, Hardt and Negri is an insufficient knowledge of the politics and economy of the technical apparatuses of communication. This is less of a problem in the work of Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, and not one at all for writers of a new generation like Matteo Pasquinelli or Tiziana Terranova.

David Graeber has referred to figures associated with post-autonomia as ‘impresarios of the historical moment’ (Graeber 2008). The political character of multitudinal agency is notoriously difficult to grasp and gauge; and how useful a single-concept political ontology ultimately is remains unclear. But we can, at least, study the effects of its mobilization, as well as contextualize this usage – just as the activities of the multitude in the heydays of Atlantic piracy help us understand how the open spaces of the sea became mapped to operate like factories, the piratical multitudes of today help us understand the role of logistical infrastructures. In this context it bears repetition that withdrawal is a form of engagement. The moment of retreat is constitutive of new relations. People want to see this put to the test and are disappointed with outcomes when bloggers enter politics. Similar analyses have been made of the wide range of pirate parties; while we follow their activities, we are more interested in registers of the piratical that lie beyond the politics of representation.

The metaphor of the multitude has sharpened our analytical vision in the sense that we pay much closer attention to non-identitarian forms of collectivity and agency. The Italian post-autonomia thought has also paved the way for analyses and appreciations of post-union, or post-party practices of building capacities to intervene. So there is, in a sense, more politics than ever. But at the same time it cannot by definition tell us something about the directedness of these forces.

A politics of the multitude that has nothing to say about the agency of machines seems of limited use to us. And we are not especially interested in teasing out the theoretical nuances of a concept better left to devotees of philosophy who in many ways are weary of the work of thinking the constitution of technical objects. Instead, we speak about piratical networks as machinic assemblages, which include clear and direct links to financial networks, the anonymous politics of offshore finance, of anonymous corporations, etc. We might also learn a thing or two about piratical practices from the errancy of algorithmic agency. Here, we think of the failure that comes with parameters in the design of algorithms for high frequency trading (HFT). Low-latency networks engineered to maximise the exploitation liquidity within markets are often promoted as reducing risk and exposure to market volatility for investors. Well, the ‘flash crash’ of 2010 brought that ruse to an end. Or at least it should have. No matter how carefully conceived, the algorithms of HFT are never able to completely account for unforeseen ‘behaviour’ in markets. Contingency, in other words, exceeds even the time of transaction within the speed of nano-seconds. This prompts us to think of the politics of the interval. How to identify, and exploit for political purposes, the uncertainty of time unaccounted for by even the most sophisticated algorithmic tools of inspection?

This brings us back to the question of visibility versus invisibility. In essence, this is a question of the power of discourse, of epistemology, to register presence and action in a world made operational. Anonymity offers one route toward a politics of the inactionable, a politics of relations without registration. This is what Foucault may have meant in privileging the status of the ‘non-discursive’ as a correlate of the ‘limit-experience’ of errant subjects, of desubjectification and a refusal to be governed, finding freedom in and as objects of experience. Such is the agency of machines, of a politics of the interval, of intervention in the logic of machinic self-organization, of modifications of parameters above or below the thresholds of perception of the laboring body. If cinematic practices indeed prefigure the computational, an ancestry worth keeping is the gesture of reappropriating the machinic eye. No accident, perhaps, that the scanner (including surveillance cameras and in fact all implements of vision-based organization and logistical governance, along with non-human vision such as infrared and a new generation of low-cost satellite-based imaging systems) has become an object of increasing political attention.

 

The title of one of your essays states that ‘privacy is theft’ (Rossiter and Zehle 2014a). This can be read (sarcastically?) as an affirmation of Dave Egger’s criticism of web 2.0 ideology, as advocating the elimination of privacy qua basic right/good. The elimination of anonymity is co-incidental with this, it suffers the same fate. But it seems that, as privacy designates a stance advocating a proprietary ‘keeping to oneself’ of data, anonymity can be dissociated from this, as it functions positively in online pirate practices by securing the collective sharing of data irrespective of ownership or authorization. Whereas in The Circle the elimination of privacy entails the total elimination of anonymity, here, privacy and anonymity seem to occupy different, perhaps even partly incompatible registers due to the notion of ownership implicit in privacy. Nevertheless, on an ideological level for most internet pirates anonymity is precisely a means to secure or regain privacy as a fundamental liberal value and condition, i.e. they make for a functional continuum. Is there a conflict, then, between what pirates do and the way they reflect politically on their own practice? And can you further elaborate how you conceive the relation between privacy and anonymity in general?

If communication is commerce, privacy involves reappropriation. Privacy nowadays is coincident with property, with technologies of enclosure. And indeed, as you point out, this has implications for anonymity, which is always-already entwined within juridical regimes of proprietarization. How to reclaim privacy in ways that shift acts of piracy beyond violating the rule of law in the pursuit of anonymity becomes a key political task of the present. As we note in our text (Rossiter and Zehle 2014a), it requires a collective work of invention to reroute – or as we put in that writing, to delink – our communicative relations from the capture of value by the infrastructural systems of lifestream logistics. Privacy, then, becomes one condition of possibility for anonymity. This came to the attention of many following the Snowden revelations about the NSA PRISM program. With the core of privacy under attack for individuals, governments and corporations, it dawned on many for the first time that piracy-as-anonymity is no longer exclusive to the bedroom follies of computer geeks, but rather an ontological layer of techno-sociality that now occupies a central space within the pantheon of online rights. Unsurprisingly, this led to a blossoming in the tech industry with any number of encryption software and VPN products hitting the market.

 

Lastly, you describe contemporary networks as sites where acts of communication are by definition acts of surveillance (Rossiter and Zehle 2014a). It is here that a desire for anonymity (as it intersects with an unaffected desire to communicate, but without being systematically monitored) becomes a stake in a political struggle. But by showing that surveillance has indeed become the main instrument for securing state and corporate governance and is intrinsic to the technico-legal standards and protocols enabling communication through which given power ratios are distributed and reproduced, does this preclude the emergence of a space in which such a desire for anonymity can be articulated?

Anonymity is worth pursuing if the price we pay for identity continues to rise. Part of the politics of anonymity is the on-going race between those who leave tracks and those who read them. Can we think of infrastructures that allow us to move anonymously? That’s where ghosts enter the stage, as they have in the theory of excommunication.

Another strategy is to lower the cost of identity. If identity constitutes an economy, and if we believe that something like the common helps articulate alternatives, this includes a commoning of identity. Anonymity is an element of that, but attribution and recognition play a major role in commons-based peer production and other forms of sharing.

We would also point to the ways in which low-latency networks (including high frequency trading systems and the associated ‘dark pools’ of anonymized financial automation) give rise to a different kind of anonymity, namely one that is subject to the architectures and economies of financialization. At this point, we begin to arrive at some of our core interests: the relation between labour and extraction machines, the centrality of black box design strategies for infrastructures whose operative logics are not easily folded back into the analytical and political horizons of representation, the general relation between anonymity and algorithmic architectures, the simultaneity of the structuring and capture of sociality and modes of relation. As ‘enemy of all’, piracy offers a powerful figure to a thinking that engages these practices and operations as logics of existentialization, as Félix Guattari put it, rather than from within the limited frame of public/private distinctions.

Perhaps most importantly, piracy continues to imply a non-sovereign imaginary that cuts across most of our conceptual concerns. We have long tried to somehow bring the local and the global into relation, and what we have gotten is a global civil society that mirrors the idea of an international community, both rooted firmly in the logic of sovereignty. Piracy is also a way to think about the political – parametric – registers of terrorist activity: Twitter welcomes free speech, but deletes links to the Foley killing by ISIS members, for instance. Social media editing is not necessarily censorship but the exercise of an editorial ethos, of course, so this is not really a debate about journalism ethics. It’s a debate about how much influence the figure of the ‘enemy of all’ has in shaping the logistical infrastructures that sustain the way we create and relate: no figure of (our) humanity without a satanic figure that hails from beyond its sovereign boundaries. And as long as we speak about the human, the enemy of all will be with us.