Commons & Pirates

Peter Linebaugh (who co-authored Many-headed Hydra with Marcus Rediker) has a new book out, which reads the Magna Carta and the Forest Charter together as manifestos/ procedural mechanisms of the commons. I read one chapter (published as an essay in CNS Dec 07) which draws primarily on the work of south asian historians of forestry. First off, how weird that one of my favorite pirate-historians (and a student of E P Thompson, trained as a Europeanist) should write a chapter of a book on commons ( my current obsession) drawing from the obscure forest-historiography circuit I spent a decade in, and which I thought I had to (reluctantly) leave behind as I engaged with the twenty first century. Well actually it’s not really weird, as much as fabulous. I am excited largely because the connections I’ve been trying to make in my head (forests, nineteenth century british colonial admin, early modern science and economics, marx, material conditions, and social reproduction, commons experimental communities, the narrowing of commons under neoliberalism, the pre-figuring of this under 17th century liberalism, subjectivation under conditions of  coercion/ colonialism as well as resistance/ freedom, the lessig-type creative commons, etc etc) seem to come together in this book. I’ve only seen one chapter so far, so perhaps it is not so much the structure of the book as the fact that these themes are out in the public and it seems feasible to put them together. Some people are dismayed when their “thesis” seems “scooped” by others but I see it as a sign that there is something in the world, historically and in a lived sense, that people are picking up on (and today I am thrilled that it is a favorite historian, as opposed to a slick stanford law prof, but hey, i am happy about lessig’s work too; just amused by his a-historicity). Anyway – this post is so bloggish that i really havent advanced an argument, have I? I shall have to post again when I have actually read the book.

Notes: Heredity as Epistemic Space

I’ve been reading the edited collection by Staffan Muller-Wille and Hans-Jorg Rheinberger called Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics and Culture, 1500-1870. It has been tremendously suggestive, particularly in terms of adding the axis of heredity to the project of historicizing the reproduction/production juncture. In my own research on the process , which I am call the “economization of life,” I’ve been looking at how economic value begins to substitute for “race” as the primary axis for calibrating differential human worth in the era of eugenics, coming to culmination in the era of population control. The multiple genealogies of heredity in Heredity Produced (particularly the introduction) suggest a re-opening of questions about heredity and capital formations, questions which are importantly varied from that of commodified life and biomedical sex reassemblies.

calculative formations of reproduction

I’m not sure if this is the precise phrasing, but taking seriously the claim that reproduction has an ontological purchase in its economized form — as a demographic and economic aggregation, measured and brought into recognition through quantitative practices– it seems to follow that one might speak of a calculative ontology within reproduction’s multiple and distributed formation.

This point perhaps provides some opportunity to find other traffic between organic and non organic (production) domains of repro: questions about kinds of “many,” governing of unruly mulitplication, etc.

Another thought too is to think more about the work of substitution that forms of capital, and the performance of substitution in quantitative measures of aggregation. Opening up questions about kinds and forms and sites of substitutions and “exchange” and translation.

distributed reproduction

Starting with the premise of a distributed ontology of reproduction, mapping such a distributed ontology evokes multiple domains that crisscross between organic and technical registers. Thinking about “reproduction” simultaneously from the vantage points of 1) population and aggregate life, often in relation to managing “economy” as an epistemic figure and target of governmentality, 2) digital copying, reassembly, and piracy, and 3) chemical copying, generics, similars in pharmaceutical production.

Reproduction is about multiplications and new designations of legitimate, illegal, or dangerous creations.

Thinking then about reproduction as exceeding its organismic formation and extended into capital formations, I am beginning to question my presumption that “reproduction” necessary best names the object of inquiry. here, a tag cloud comes to mind– a cluster of tightly bound, closely related terms.

Notes on Working Group meeting

Tartine Bakery (Feb 2008) was very good for the exchange of productive ideas on technopolitics.

Notes below, posted belatedly some months later (June 2008),  rather fragmented.

THE COPY: [see French OED; "copious"] ; M-C-M

Copy as generative of value? Profit not from innovation but about imitating, copying

Innovation or copying should not be mapped onto stages of growth.

Post-industrial play of signs; Materiality of replication

The vital copy (generic living vaccines)

Generativity in a distributed ontology – allows traffic across domains to crystallize under the sign of reproduction

- what are the domains crystallizing under this sign?

What are the generative formations that are not completely subsumable under teh sign of capital? Gift/hacker? Public domain?

The opposition between Public Domain and private/capitalized domain : these markings always produce their consstitutive outside

Tim Mitchell: essay on de Soto – see Lancaster sociology site “Mystery of Capitalism”

Miranda Joseph – Against the Romance of community; new work on debt

Geeta Patel – work on credit, rish

Baudrillard; Hillel Schwartz; Walter Benjamin; Stengers; Derrida (Given Time); Natalie Zemon Davis (book on gift giving);  Mbembe (Necropolitics; superfluity)

Time and Accumulation: standard model of scientific truth (philosophy of science; recall Sandra Harding’s critique of objectivity as masculinist, what is the next round of feminist critiques of objectivity that dont take us down the standpoint road?)

Surplus, Excess: valuations of multiplicity

Death: Last chapter of Dolly book (on culling); Kathy High on lab rats

Cori: Clinical trials mobilize populations as resources; testing is crucial to figuring epidemiology