[p2p-research] Fwd: [fcforum] Fw: iPad DRM is a dangerous step backward. Sign the petition!

[Michel Bauwens]

It must be possible for social liberals and democratic anarchists to talk to
each other, though I understand that sometimes some peaceful intermezzo's
are needed to calm down the fever pitch,

here's a defense of the view of society as really existing, perhaps a
critique of the thatcherian and anarchist positions?



"This articulation of modernity, based on a autonomous self in a society
which he himself creates through the social contract, has been changing in
postmodernity. Simondon, a French philosopher of technology with an
important posthumous following in the French-speaking world, has argued that
*what was typical for modernity was to ‘extract the individual dimension’ of
every aspect of reality, of things/processes that are also always-already
related . And what is needed to renew thought, he argued, was not to go back
to premodern wholism, but to systematically build on the proposition that
‘everything is related’, while retaining the achievements of modern thought,
i.e. the equally important centrality of individuality. Thus individuality
then comes to be seen as constituted by relations , from relations*.

This proposition, that the individual is now seen as always-already part of
various social fields, as a singular composite being, no longer in need of
socialization, but rather in need of individuation, seems to be one of the
main achievements of what could be called ‘postmodern thought’. Atomistic
individualism is rejected in favor of the view of a relational self , a new
balance between individual agency and collective communion.

In my opinion, as a necessary complement and advance to postmodern thought,
it is necessary to take a third step, i.e. not to be content with both a
recognition of individuality, and its foundation in relationality, but to
also recognize the level of the collective, i.e. the field in which the
relationships occur.

If we only see relationships, we forget about the whole, which is society
itself (and its sub-fields). Society is more than just the sum of its
“relationship parts?. Society sets up a ‘protocol’, in which these
relationships can occur, it forms the agents in their subjectivity, and
consists of norms which enable or disable certain type of relationships.
Thus we have agents, relationships, and fields. Finally, if we want to
integrate the subjective element of human intentionality, it is necessary to
introduce a fourth element: the object of the sociality.

Indeed, human agents never just ‘relate’ in the abstract, agents always
relate around an object, in a concrete fashion. Swarming insects do not seem
to have such an object, they just follow instructions and signals, without a
view of the whole, but mammals do. For example, bands of wolves congregate
around the object of the prey. It is the object that energizes the
relationships, that mobilizes the action. Humans can have more abstract
objects, that are located in a temporal future, as an object of desire. We
perform the object in our minds, and activate ourselves to realize them
individually or collectively. P2P projects organize themselves around such
common project, and my own Peer to Peer theory is an attempt to create an
object that can inspire social and political change.

*In summary, for a comprehensive view of the collective, it is now customary
to distinguish 1) the totality of relations; 2) the field in which these
relations operate, up to the macro-field of society itself, which
establishes the ‘protocol’ of what is possible and not; 3) the object of the
relationship (?object-oriented sociality?), i.e. the pre-formed ideal which
inspires the common action. That sociality is ‘object-oriented’ is an
important antidote to any ‘flatland’, i.e. ‘merely objective’ network
theory, on which many failed social networking experiments are based. This
idea that the field of relations is the only important dimension of reality,
while forgetting human intentionality . What we need is a
subjective-objective approach to networks.*

*In conclusion, this turn to the collective that the emergence of peer to
peer represent does not in any way present a loss of individuality, even of
individualism. Rather it ‘transcends and includes’ individualism and
collectivism in a new unity, which I would like to call ‘cooperative
individualism’.* The cooperativity is not necessarily intentional (i.e. the
result of conscious altruism), but constitutive of our being, and the best
applications of P2P, are based on this idea.

Michel Bauwens, June 2006


On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 10:41 PM, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Ryan, I find your style of argument offensive too.  You called me an enemy
> of the people and called for me to be treated accordingly.  In my book
> that's about as offensive as it gets.
>
> But I tire of this too.  We have reached a dead-end I think.
>
>
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>


-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Think thank:
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