[Reader-list] pirate, private, public and property

[Ken Wark]

Greetings. For those who were at the incredible
conference on Contested Commons/Trespassing
Publics (and for those who weren't) I thought i
would take the liberty of posting my thoughts
on the issues raised in the concluding discussion.
cheers -- Ken Wark


Pirate, Private and Public Property -- Outfoxed
McKenzie Wark
warkk at newschool.edu


There are two kinds of thinkers, suggests 
Isaiah Berlin: foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes are 
impatient. They jump about from topic to 
topic, always moving on. Hedgehogs on the 
other hand are methodical. They work away 
at one problem, without dodging the parts 
that are hard going. Tackling the rocky 
question of 'intellectual property' is certainly 
going to be a task for hedgehogs. But 
perhaps there's a role for foxes, too. If one is 
going to keep on digging the same hole, 
deeper and deeper, as hedgehogs do, it 
might help to know if one is digging in the 
right place. Perhaps it is easier going if one 
starts elsewhere.

Speaking of foxes, there's an old European 
folk tale in which your wish can come true if 
only you can avoid thinking about the foxes' 
red tail. This of course proves impossible and 
the wish is not granted. I think we have the 
same problem with the 'intellectual property' 
question. If only we could avoid thinking 
about the p-words * public, private, pirate 
and property * our wish might be granted, 
wed might be able to think the question 
critically and usefully.

An uncritical use of the term 'piracy' poses a 
particular problem. Pirates acquire property 
that is not theirs by right. It's not hard to see 
the desire that attaches to being a pirate. It 
has something to do with enjoyment, in the 
psychoanalytical sense of the term. A pirate 
enjoys what belongs to the other. But the 
problem is that attaching one's desire to this 
figure only serves to legitimate the 'right' by 
which the other claims something as their 
property, for their enjoyment, in the first 
place. 

Where 'intellectual property' is concerned, it 
is far better to begin from the opposite 
assumption. The one who copies something is 
not stealing what does not belong to them. 
Rather, the copier claims culture, knowledge, 
information as something can belong to 
anybody. Culture is made by all and belongs 
to all for the enjoyment of all. That is the 
assumption from which to start if one wants 
to produce a critical theory, rather than 
merely upholding the norm.

The same goes for public and private. It is a 
temptation to advocate for a public culture, in 
opposition to the privatization of all 
information we see going on all around us. 
But here one merely reinforces the binary 
relation of public and private. One's support 
for the public is really support, at the same 
time, for privatization, for the private cannot 
function without the public as its supplement, 
as what takes care of the aporias and 
dysfunctions privatized information inevitably 
entails. 

All three of these terms * pirate, public, 
private, necessitate each other. The public is 
what is not private and vice versa. The pirate 
is any illegitimate appropriation outside of the 
public/private binary. These are the lines 
drawn in the sand, as it were. The challenge 
is to think past the lines in the sand, and think 
the shifting, molecular, granular materiality of 
the beach itself. "Beneath the pavement lies 
the beach", as they said in Paris in May 68. 
The beach, as it turns out, is the stunningly 
odd way that information actual moves and 
mutates as it passes through * and constitutes 
* the social body. 

To think through the lines in the sand * 
public, private, pirate * is to think in the place 
of the state. It is to align oneself with one's 
inner bureaucrat. That might be all well and 
good if what one wants is a thought about 
'intellectual property' that might assist in 
policy making or business plans. But it won't 
do for thinking critically about the granular 
processes of information itself. If one keeps 
digging the same old hole here, one will miss 
what is right before our eyes, and running 
through our fingers, as the very think that 
needs thinking: not the categories of 
property, but the sand itself * information.

Information wants to be free but is every 
where in chains. And it really is strange stuff. 
It is always material, and always relational, 
but it has no necessary relation to any 
particular material form. With the coming of 
the digital we spiral back to the conditions of 
orality, where information really can circulate 
beyond the realm of scarcity. 

Now, lest one think this is a utopian 
proposition, something wild-eyed, futuristic, 
or techno-libertarian, I should hasten to add 
that this challenge to scarcity in the realm of 
information is happening everywhere, every 
day. In Delhi its happening in the Pelikar 
market, where movies, music and games of all 
kind are for sale, in complete disregard of 
anyone's 'intellectual property'. It's the same 
in New York, where on certain street corners 
you can pick up any software you might 
want, or a nice Gucci bag, for not much more 
than the price of the materials and labor.

Information not only wants to be free, it is 
free. It keeps escaping from any and every 
material form, finding its way from one hand 
to the next, through a bewildering array of 
relations. Sometimes it's a commodity, 
sometimes it's a gift. If we were to follow it as 
it traverses the social, it probably passes from 
gift to commodity and back against more than 
once. 

John Frow has made the bold assertion that 
"there is nothing outside of property". Here I 
make the equal and not quite opposite claim, 
at least where information is concerned. 
There is nothing inside property. It is merely 
a fetter, an imposition, a hollow form imposed 
by an obsolete mode of production. To think 
critically is to think outside of necessity; to 
think instead in the realm of the virtual. No 
critical thinking is possible here at all if we just 
blithely accept the necessity of property * 
whether pirate, private or public * as if it 
were natural, eternal and inevitable. 

While critical thinking is turned toward the 
virtual, to the real possibilities latent in what is 
actual, it is not some idealized or utopian 
future. It is the turning into a concept of what 
is already suggesting itself in actuality, of 
what is already appearing, here and there * 
in this case, those glimpses of the virtuality of 
information. The coming of the digital 
provides the historical moment when we can 
finally think outside the limits of property. 
The digital realizes the promise of 
information, the promise of an escape from 
scarcity. For the first time, on a scale that can 
traverse the whole social field, my possession 
of something need not deprive another of it. 
And that thing is information.

The pirating of information is thus a logical 
impossibility. To pirate something is to 
dispossess a rightful owner and deprive them 
of the enjoyment of the thing. But the coping 
of information deprives nobody of anything. 
Information has no necessary relation to 
property, and hence no necessary relation to 
the division of property between public, 
private and pirate. All that is interesting 
about an ethnography of information, or a 
history of information, is what escapes from 
these tired state-imposed norms. 

It might be argued that the world is a 
complex, diverse place, and that these 
abstract remarks must cede to the detail of 
particular worlds, be it the world of the video 
parlors of Nigeria or the information bazaars 
of India, or the covert disc factories of China. 
But it is only as a professional scholar that 
one need be so wedded to the particular. 
After all, if there is nothing all that particular 
about one's particular field of study, one 
loses the only legitimate reason for building a 
career by studying it. 

All well and good. But when it comes to 
building trans-local networks that might act 
on a knowledge of the dawning reality of the 
slogan "information wants to be free", that is 
where what might be far more useful is 
precisely an abstract, transversal mode of 
thinking. One cannot make connections with a 
mode of thought that thinks like a 
bureaucrat, with everything in its right place 
and everything assigned to its proper owner. 
This is the other criteria for a critical theory. 
A critical theory starts by bracketing off the 
categories through which a messy world is 
'managed', it discounts their apparent 
naturalness and necessity, it looks in 
everyday practices for what escapes from 
that necessity, it produces the concept of 
these granular movements * and, finally, it 
points its concept outwards, toward linkages 
and networks for expanding the realm of 
freedom. 

Critical thinking outfoxes the administration 
of though. It refuses the double bind of the 
red, red tale of the red, red tail of the fox. 
Administered thought works like this: you 
can have your freedom, the stated quite 
casually concedes, if only you can stop 
thinking of the state! And of course, the 
injunction is structured to make the state the 
very site to which one's enjoyment is tied. 
Ooooh, but if I stop thinking of the state I 
lose its structuring distinctions, its lines drawn 
in the sand! Better not do that! Better to 
keep digging the same hole, within the lines it 
has drawn for us, and pretend the possibility 
of escape never arises. Better to be a 
hedgehog.

To which the fox relies: "what state?" Look, I 
jump here, I jump there, drawing this diagram 
of a network. The fox thinks alone the lines 
already there, traversing the social, the lines 
along which information communicates. The 
fox will find blockages, interruptions, 
boundaries and corruptions along the way to 
be sure. But will not mistake them for 
anything necessary. From the foxes' point of 
view, the productive, creative jostling of all 
those grains of sand on the beach * the 
everyday acts of creative labor * comes first 
and last. State and law are secondary 
categories, which stabilize and partition it. 
Even a fox might come to agree that state 
and law are good things. But the fox will 
always have the critical perspective from 
which to see that state and law are not 
natural and given. They could very well be 
otherwise. 

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WARHAC.html




McKenzie Wark ~~~~~~~A Hacker Manifesto
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/