[Reader-list] Re: X Notes on Practice

[avinash jha]

Dear Monica/Shuddha/Jeebesh


An initial response:

I found the account of the transformation of capital and emergence of intellectual property very interesting. Rest of the essay is also very suggestive. 

I was dismayed by evocation of the figure of the artisan as a category of the past, or history, with some contemporary resonance in the emerging forms of work in the network society. I mean, the artisan is seen by you to be a figure of early modernity. This may be true of Europe, but elsewhere, and especially in India, it does not make sense.

There may be a million artisans living in the city of Delhi itself. One does not know how many millions will be there in the whole of India or in South Asia. These artisans are living as our contemporaries, still practicing their trade to varying extents, against all odds. They carry numerous traditions of knowledge and live, I guess, with a certain degree of freedom, with little state support and windows of opening in the national and global market, operating mostly in the local forms of markets that still continue. Only an 'image-field' limited to Europe can push artisans into history. 

The question that takes shape here is: Can there be a form of imagination and politics which can carry the two together: these millions of artisans, and the new artisans and practitioners in the economy of the virtual (or a part of it)? (You have referred to the latter in some detail, in some fascinating passages.)

Let me try to pose the question from an entirely different angle. While the open and collaborative model in software and content production is making a headway (even globally), are
such models being 'killed' or becoming forcibly obsolete in other areas of life? Let us look at scientific research systems. I am not sure, but it seems to me that the organisation and dynamic of scientific research is increasingly moving away from open models. Is scientific research increasingly coming under the sway of a 'knowledge management' model where powerful actors organise and use research. Major part of cooperation is a management necessity for actual competitive or qustionable ends. Sciences as open research traditions is under serious threat, in my reading. Apart from
science, I suspect that open and collaborative models are getting destroyed routinely in agriculture, medicine, destruction of forests. What does such a scenario portend? What function will  open and collaborative models of ICT related innovation play in such contexts? Can it ever be inclusive beyond a point? A theme can perhaps be addressed in this context: Is there a fundamental opposition between 'knowledge management model' and 'open and collaborative model?


Is the only future open to the artisan in India and elsewhere is to forget their traditions of knowledge, become literate, then computer literate, and maybe over three,four, or ten generations hope to become 'new artisans' in the burgeoning immaterial economy? And thus become subject to the new regime as 'workers'?  

Such questions will perhaps be raised in your framework in discussions of intellectual property. But it is too limited a framework, I believe, to deal with them.

Your metaphor of 'seepage' is excellent. But again, it seems to me, applying to the European situation. The marginal figures that you describe may form those 'ugly' patterns of seepage in the European House. From India, and perhaps, from a majority of places on the earth, the picture is quite different. I do not have a comparable metaphor to offer.  

On second thought, the reason for limiting of the horizon may be the centrality of 'capital' in your story. Capital seems to be the air we breathe in and there is an 'aandhi of capital' which blows everything else away. Or, will blow it away. So what matters is the promise of transcendence that lies in the womb of capital. More advanced the capital, maturer the working class that grows within it. 


tentatively,

avinash


  




 


 

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