[p2p-research] Fwd: the Psychological Commons:

[Michel Bauwens]

treatments of p2p ideas as how it applies to psychology/therapy contexts,

Michel



Honouring the Psychological Commons:

Peer to Peer Networks and

Post-Professional Psychopractice



AN eIPNOSIS <http://ipnosis.postle.net/> REVIEW Denis
Postle<denis at postle.net>March 8, 2010

* *

As the Regulation of the psychological therapies in the UK moves towards an
endgame, *e*Ipnosis attention has turned from resisting the Health
Professions Council’s [HPC] codification of the ineffable strands of working
with the human condition, to re-stating, exploring and developing what we
value and trust.



Foremost among this for *e*Ipnosis has long been the notion of a
‘psychological commons’, an abundance of psychological knowledge and
practice that has been more or less freely available for decades.



‘Psychological commons’ refers to a psychological space where people can
find support for enquiries into their particular experience of the human
condition. It is a space informed but not dominated by the hundreds of
thousands of articles, journals, books, tapes, cd’s and DVDs about
psychology, the hundreds of varieties of psycho-practice, plus survivor
groups, user groups, help lines, self-help manuals, twelve step programs,
Balint groups, infant massage, 5 rhythms dancing, agony aunts, radio chat
programmes, meditation, co-counselling, re-evaluation counselling and so on.



Aided and abetted by the confident codification of the HPC, the fiefdoms and
clans of the mainstream accrediting bodies seek to consolidate their capture
of sections of this commons, and in a re-iteration of similar historical
appropriations, enclose them in state endorsed gated communities. Psychology
is already captured and the HPC have counselling and psychology in their
sights.



*e*Ipnosis has been very active in defending the psychological commons from
these developments, a task in which hundreds, even thousands of
practitioners are engaged.  Attention here now turns to how the
psychological commons might be supported and enhanced – helped to flourish
as an entity in its own right.



If we ask what a post-professional practice that honours the psychological
commons would entail, the answer seems to require a paradigm shift. A move
which, while not denying the value of the schools of psychological knowhow,
seeks to embrace mutuality and community; the generation of peer to peer
cultures structured in ways that support the generation/development/keeping
open access to those aspects of the psychological commons currently under
threat, and out of which a post-professional practice could be born.



Happily such a tradition exists in what has become known as the peer to peer
[P2P] movement, a well-established world-wide cultural tradition of thousands
of such entities <http://integralvisioning.org/iv/p2p_index>. P2P stands for
an international network of networks built around the idea of holding open
the creation and maintenance of commons of many kinds, not least the
planetary one.



Peer to peer forms of occupational relating are familiar to Independent
Practitioner Network [IPN] participants but this article, while entirely
supportive of IPN as a worked example of P2P, is not a selling document for
it. I intend a review of some of the key elements of the P2P tradition,
especially the commons notion, which might be attractive to practitioners
and others who may adopt principled non-compliance with HPC. In what follows
I draw extensively on an introduction to the P2P
movement<http://www.networkcultures.org/weblog/archives/P2P_essay.pdf>by
one of the people who have been leaders in identifying and promoting
it,
Michel Bauwens.



P2P is a label that describes the emergence of a form of human network based
organization that rests on the free participation of participants who are
developing or producing common resources or services where money is not a
key motivating factor and which is not organized through hierarchical
command and control. It is a mode of knowledge exchange and collective
learning that is hugely supported by the internet. Michel Bauwens’
definition runs like this:



… It is a specific form of relational dynamic, is based on the assumed
equipotency of its participants, organized through the free cooperation of
equals in view of the performance of a common task, for the creation of a
common good. Equipotency means that there is no prior formal filtering for
participation, but rather that it is the immediate practice of cooperation
which determines the expertise and level of participation. It does not deny
‘authority’, but only fixed forced hierarchy, and therefore accepts
authority based on expertise, initiation of the project, etc… 2.1



P2P has many historical antecedents but has been hugely amplified by the
information abundance of the internet and digital culture generally.



Hierarchy only works with scarcity, and in a situation where the control of
scarce resources determines the end result of the zero-sum power games being
conducted. In a situation of abundance, centralized nodes cannot possible
cope. Information, I probably do not need to remind the reader of this, is
different from material goods, in that its sharing does not diminish its
value, but on the contrary augments it. 2.2



Bauwens suggests that P2P be seen as a part of a third phase of capitalism,
‘cognitive capitalism’, where immaterial processes are more important
economically than the production of goods. Where ‘information as property’
become a central asset.



This is not to posit some emerging techutopia, more to hold on to the
downside of technical ‘advances’ of recent decades that P2P networks have
the capacity to contradict.



Efficiency and productivity thinking has taken over the sphere of intimacy.
There has been a dramatic destruction of social knowledge and skill, of
autonomous cultures, and this type of knowledge has been ‘appropriated’ by
the system of capital, and re-sold to us a commodities. Think of paid-for
online dating, as a symptom of the loss of skill in dating, as one example.
 2.3.A



Bauwens argues that peer to peer be understood as a densely interconnected
network of affinity-based P2P networks participating in and generating a
variety of ‘commons’. These have previously existed, in the tribal eras,
before the division of labour, the advent of property and class divisions.



However it is important not see P2P as a technology artifact, it appears to
be an example of a profound shift in our understanding of human nature from
dominance as natural and inevitable, to cooperation, community and
mutuality. A new politics deriving from less authoritarian child-care
threaded through the old.  The technology abundance of the internet enables
a huge amplification of what had previously been local and minority
perceptions.



Why is P2P important? It marks an emerging cultural shift in how work is
organized. Bauwens quotes Himanen:



time is not rigidly separated into work and non-work; intensive work periods
are followed by extensive leave taking, the latter necessary for
intellectual and creative renewal; there is a logic of self-unfolding at
work, workers look for projects at which they feel energized and that
expands their learning and experience in desired directions; participation
is voluntary; learning is informal and continuous; the value of pleasure and
play are crucial; the project has to have social value and be of use to a
wider community; there is total transparency, no secrets; there is an ethic
that values activity and caring; creativity, the continuous surpassing of
oneself in solving problems and creating new use value, is paramount. 3.1



Because P2P is founded on abundance, especially informational abundance,
there is every reason to suppose that it can be extended into any field
where there is perceived abundance. Psychological knowledge would be one
such field. However scarcity can be an obstacle.



So far as there appears to be scarcity, Bauwens reminds us that it is often
a social construction.



when [nature] was transformed into land that counted as property, land
became scarce and a resource to be fought for. The enclosures movement in
England was designed to be precisely that. Out of land, previously plentiful
resources were taken, and transformed into the form of property known as
capital. Capital became scarce and to be fought for. 3.2.A



P2P networks provide massive support for a commons of psychological knowhow
that isn’t coded, Institutionalized and commodified.



Knowledge has historically often been guarded as a component of power
wrapped in secrecy, in Guilds, a bible in Latin, and tight monopolies of
interpretation of sacred texts. As Bauwens argues, knowledge then was
obtained through imitation and initiation. The encyclopedia movement brought
knowledge into view as a public resource and as Foucault has indicated,
knowledge began to be regulated by coding and rules through which we can
tell what is or is not valid. As examples Bauwens gives: academic peer
review, the scientific method, and universities, to which could be added
psychiatry and the medical model of human functioning.



He continues:



…peer to peer appears as a radical shift. In the new emergent practices of
knowledge exchange, equipotency is assumed from the start. There are no
formal rules to engage in participation (unlike academic peer review, where
formal degrees are required). Validation is a communal intersubjective
process. If there are formal rules, they have to be accepted by the
community, and they are ad hoc for particular projects. There is a move away
from public categorization, such as the bibliographic formats (Dewey, UDC,
etc..) to informal communal ‘tagging’, what some people have termed
folksonomies. In blogging, news and commentary are democratized and open to
any participant, and it is the reputation of trustworthiness, acquired over
time, by the individual in question, which will lead to the viral diffusion
of particular ‘memes’. Power and influence are determined by the quality of
the contribution, and have to be accepted and constantly renewed by the
community of participants. All this can be termed the de-formalization of
knowledge.  3.4.C



Building on earlier history, cognitive capitalism extends the commodifying
of everything. P2P is a counter reaction to its tendency to privatize
education, love etc., to the extent to which any immaterial process can be
sold as a commodity.



With ‘commons-based peer production’ or P2P­based knowledge exchange more
generally, the production does not result in commodities sold to consumers,
but in use value made for users.   3.4.C



He might have added for and with users. This reverses the usual process of
how information is shared in hierarchical social systems



Participation is assumed, and non-participation has to be justified.
Information sharing, the public good status of your information, is assumed,
and it is secrecy which has to be justified. 3.4.D

P2P participation creates a ‘commons’ - from each according to his or her
abilities to each according to her or his needs - but who, if anyone, gets
to rule the commons? Another way of posing the question is to ask who is
creating or sustaining scarcity? i.e. who is claiming ownership of
information and its gate-keeping and diffusion, and to challenge this and
develop workarounds.



The network structures of P2P allow for fluidity and avoidance of locked
adversarial positions, ad hoc temporary coalitions respond to local or
urgent priorities.  This is supported by adoption/emergence of a paradigm of
non-representationality, no-one speaks for the group or for anyone else, or
the movement, only in their own name.



P2P may offer some specific alternatives to present institutions, what is
more important is that as a culture it features  the creation of open
processes of governance not determined by the power politics and vested
interests of dominant elites. Its institutions are determined by diverse
autonomous constituencies of people and echo their values and wishes for the
future.



Bauwens draws attention to a feature of P2P, the phenomena of
‘coordinations’. By this he refers to coalitions often of very diverse
groupings based on non-representationality, no one is elected to represent
the group, anyone can participate and decisions are based on consensus, with
participants retaining freedom of action. A very potent contradiction of
traditional political styles.



P2P political strategies include refusing to enemise opposition; routing
round obstacles, and moving to create real time alternative practices that
refuse consent and legitimation to oppressive agendas. Bauwens quotes Miguel
Benasayag who argues:



…that ‘to resist is to create’, and that political struggle is essentially
about the construction of alternatives, here and now. Current practice has
to reflect the desired future, and has to emerge, not from the ‘sad
passions’ of hate and anger, but from the joys of producing a commons. 4.1.C



That P2P is contentious, not least for cultures based on dominance and
scarcity goes without saying. The main challenge would seem to be that the
construction of information commons would be a task which provides a serious
challenge to for-profit firms who already have, or seek, the appropriation
of knowledge through which they can convert information into a commodity.
And of course regulators.



Bauwens puts this very well:



In modernity, the concept is that autonomous individuals cannot create a
peaceful order, and therefore they defer their power to a sovereign, whether
it be the king of the nation. In becoming a people, they become a
‘collective individual’. They lose out as individuals, while the unified
people or nation behaves ‘as if’ it was an individual, i.e. with ambition
for power. It is ‘transcendent’ vis a vis its parts. In
non-representationality however, nothing of the sort is given away. This
means that the collective hereby created, is not a ‘collective individual’,
it cannot act with ambition apart from its members. The genius of the
protocols devised in peer to peer initiatives, is that they avoid the
creation of a collective individual with agency. Instead, it is the
communion of the collective which filters value. The ethical implication is
important as well. Not having given anything up of their full power, the
participants in fact voluntarily take up the concern not only for the whole
in terms of the project, but for the social field in which its operates.
4.2.A





There are two ways of describing the conditions for this to work, one is the
absence of duress, coercion and the use or threat of force, and secondly it
requires a considerable degree of personal and interpersonal freedom.



P2P is predicated on the maximum freedom. The freedom to join and
participate, to fully express oneself and one’s potential, the freedom to
change course at any point in time, the freedom to quit. Within the common
projects, freedom is constrained through communal validation and consensus
(i.e. the freedom of others). But individuals can always leave, fork to a
new project, create their own. The challenge is to find affinities, to
create a common sphere with at least a few others and to create effective
use value. Unlike in representative democracy, it is not a model based on a
majority imposing its will on a minority. 4.2.B



>From this it will be clear that power is a continuing preoccupation of P2P
processes and that it points to new forms of power which Kumon describes as
a Wisdom Game:



In order to have influence, one must give quality knowledge away, and thus
build reputation, through the demonstration of one’s ‘Wisdom’. The more one
shares, the more this material is used by others, the higher one’s
reputation, the bigger one’s influence. This process is true for individuals
within groups, and for the process among groups, thus creating a hierarchy
of influence amongst networks. But as I have argued, in a true P2P
environment, this process is flexible and permanently reversible. 4.3



Two, new to me, phrases have been important for understanding P2P, one is
‘Multitude’ as a way of referring to who might participate, and ‘Commons’
what is created.



The collective is no longer the local ‘wholistic’ and ‘oppressive’
community, and it is no longer the contractually based society with its
institutions, now also seen as oppressive. The new commons is not a unified
and transcendent collective individual, but a collection of large number of
singular projects, constituting a multitude. 6.1.A



I feel it is important to keep in mind like other acronyms, ‘P2P’ tends to
solidify what is necessarily a flux of feeling, concepts, percepts and
proposals for action:

Imagine a successful meeting of minds: individual ideas are confronted, but
also changed in the process, through the free association born of the
encounter with other intelligences. Thus eventually a common idea emerges,
that has integrated the differences, not subsumed them. The participants do
not feel they have made concessions or compromises, but feel that the new
common integration is based on their ideas. There has been no minority,
which has succumbed to the majority. There has been no ‘representation’, or
loss of difference. Such is the true process of peer to peer. 6.1.A



We would be remiss not to notice that P2P plays a major industrial role in
sustaining cognitive capitalism, for instance in the software industries,
while being highly contradictory of its ethos. However this paradox that has
not prevented its flourishing. Bauwens invites us to seek out and recognize
the commonality of P2P exponents and build bridges of cooperation and
understanding with them. Secondly, along with as he suggests, “furiously”
building the commons, he remarks that:



Adopting a network sociality and building dense interconnections as we
participate in knowledge creation and exchange is enormously politically
significant. By feeding our immaterial and spiritual needs outside of the
consumption system, we can stop the logic which is destroying our
ecosphere.. The present system may not like opposition, but even more does
it fear indifference, because it can feed on the energy of strife, but
starts dying when it is shunted.



Today, the new ethic says that 'to resist is in the first place to create'.
The world we want is the world we are creating through our cooperative P2P
ethos, it is visible in what we do today, not an utopian creation for the
future. Building the commons has a crucial ingredient: the building of a
dense alternative media network, for permanent and collective self-education
in human culture, away from the mass-consumption model promoted by the
corporate media. 7.1.D



What does P2P offer practitioners who may feel unable or unwilling to be
compliant with the Health Professions Council?



Becoming participants in IPN provides an immediate and welcoming point of
entry to the P2P paradigm however, in keeping with the P2P ethos, any
suggestion here that it is the only way to go would be out of place. My
intention has been to stimulate your creative juices in the hope and
expectation that other forms of peer to peer will emerge in the
psychological commons.



There will perhaps need to be ‘transition’ groups that acknowledge how
deeply as practitioners we are embedded in the psychological fiefdoms out of
which the psychological therapies grew. And perhaps there will be a return
to decades old strands of the psychological commons that already integrate
client/practitioner relations, for example ‘co-counselling’. And is it too
much to hope that there will also be new and presently unimagined forms of
peer to peer accountability that also include client participation.



That said, P2P does open a window on the range and value of choices around
how we pursue ‘civic accountability’ ‘alternative professional
accountability’ or ‘compliance with the HPC’. As eIpnosis has long argued in
different terms, until recently most of the choices have been determined by
the generation of scarcity; if we choose to take it, abundance is a viable
option.



*References:*

Bauwens, Michel: Peer to Peer and Human
Evolution<http://integralvisioning.org/article.php?story=p2ptheory1>

On "the P2P relational dynamic" as the premise of the next civilizational
stage Integral Visioning



Benasayag, Miguel Du contre-pouvoir. La Decouverte, 2002



Himanen Pekka The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age. Random

House, 2002



Kumon, Shumpei and Rosovsky, Henry eds., The Political Economy of Japan:
Cultural and Social Dynamics. Stanford University Press, 1992


There is another article introducing P2P The Political Economy of Peer
Production here <http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499>.



There is another review of the Michel Bauwens original article
here<http://wiki.aardrock.com/P2P_and_Human_Evolution>
.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Denis Postle <d.postle at btinternet.com>
Date: Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 2:28 PM
Subject: Getting connected
To: michelsub2004 at gmail.com


Hello Michel,
I'm trying again to make connection with the P2P community to share
developments that seem relevant.

I wrote  to you a few days back, see below,but had no reply (perhaps you are
very busy).

If there is some other channel I should be using please give me a prompt for
that.

Thanks

Denis Postle

Hello Michel,
I guess you may remember we had a brief contact at the instigation of John
Heron some year ago when we discussed  the possibility of you coming to an
Independent Practitioners Network [IPN] conference in the UK.

Since this time, my and other colleague's attention has been swamped by the
intention of the UK government to regulate the psychological therapies.
However several years of intensive resistance looks as if it may bear fruit,
allowing some slack for other agendas.

One result has been a sharpening of perspective on the field of psychology
(and a return on my part to the notion of a 'psychological commons') plus a
deepening valuation of what we have achieved in the creation and 15 years of
development of IPN in the UK, and the extent to which IPN has resonance more
widely with P2P cultures.

While neither I nor anyone else speaks for IPN, I thought I'd contribute a
short account of IPN to P2P in the hope that this might forge a connection
between us.

Might this be acceptable? (I note that there has to be an invitation to
join/contribute to P2P, I'm not sure what that means in practice, I guess
John Heron would be happy to vouch for me).

Alongside this, the informal study group to which I belong is becoming aware
of the scale of the P2P culture and its value and we look forward to making
other contributions when we are more familiar with P2P territory and its
inhabitants.

I hope this finds you well and I look forward to hearing from you.

Greetings

Denis Postle




-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Think thank:
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Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
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