Hello everyone -
It's quite interesting to be reading "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy"
while facing a situation, on another list-plus-metalist, where the
"wizards" are trying to decide whether they should come back to put
their old house in order.
I refer to the two email lists run for about two years now by the
French journal Multitudes: one is the open, unfiltered debating list,
"multitudes-infos", the other, the closed editors' list. The open
list has proven quite disappointing as it rarely comes close to the
question at the heart of the journal, namely that of a political
subject which is as far from the transcendant unity of the sovereign
people as it is from the supermarket diversity of a random crowd. The
very name of this open list, multitudes-infos, is mistaken in that it
encourages people to think of the list as a bulletin board for
articles from the media or from weblog-type operations. The question
now circuating on the "metalist" of the editors is the old favorite:
What is to be done? However, the title of the whole journal project
will help you realise that the familiar Leninist solution is not
desirable for us. There is no party to make an irrevocable decision.
The paradoxes of free cooperation appear here in a nutshell, and,
maybe like Clay Shirky, I don't think the question is primarily
technological. Rather the essence lies in discovering and signifying
the aims of a free cooperation which upholds the meaning of both
those terms. How to be free and at the same time cooperate - that is,
create a work in common, as the etymology of the second word
suggests? This, as we know, is not particularly easy, particularly
over time. In the case of Multitudes, it's clear that we don't want a
filtered list, because if we do not expose ourselves to the
unexpected input of the real multitudes, then what's the use? On the
other hand, the journal and its concept are there to accomplish a
specific kind of experimental work, which is also contextually
political and therefore requires, at the very least, some
concentration and concertation, if it is to become anything at all.
My own position is that those of us directly involved in the project
need to assert a level of questioning that will draw the whole online
discussion higher out of the general tidal dreck that free narcissism
so copiously produces. But there may be some other opinions on that
question, among a crowd as experienced as I expect this one is. As I
stated before, the object of the list I'mtalking about is also that
of remaining exposed to a life-potential that is beyond any control.
But for me, just accepting a level of chatter punctuated by seemingly
accidental moments of grace is not enough, hardly a success. I think
that pleasure in the sheer diversity of expression is some kind of
wierd ideology you tell yourself you believe in. Filtering, on the
other hand, becomes an acceptance of the fact that there are fences,
and "fuck off if you don't like it, infy" (to use the notorious word
that an awful writer, the most ill-chosen of the Nobels for
literature, used constantly to describe those around him: "infy"
meant "inferior" to V.S. Naipul, who just considered himself superior
and that's it).
The other general question I have, which again has to do with the
enigma of equality, is this: I know very well that free cooperation
works among certain people who have a glint in their eye and who
recognize, for themselves, the value of collaborations that can't be
pinned down to money or hierarchy or sentimentality. But these kinds
of people are fairly rare, and soon saturated with projects. What is
most important: pursuing a few such projects in the most efficient
way, or working on strange and even artistic forms of "pedagogy" that
might give more people the insight into how to make free cooperation
something like art in Filliou's phrase: i.e. that which makes life
more interesting than art? How, within a predominantly
individualistic society, to make free cooperation more interesting
than uncooperative freedom?
best, BrianPS - This post is also something of a reply to Grant Kester's inquiry.