Hello! And hi Jenny, Treb and all the rest of you!
My name is Brian Holmes, I'm a Paris-based translator, art critic and
social theorist with a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures
from UC Berkeley in California. In addition to doing occasional
catalogue texts and the like, plus grinding out endless reams of
art-speak for the professional publishing industry, I work as a
writer in a lot of very cooperative and usually translinguistic
contexts, like the journals Multitudes and Brumaria. Language is the
basis of cooperation: I can't speak without using your words, isn't
that intriguing? I also work with artists on cooperative projects
like those you can find at the Université Tangente website, and I'm
totally interested in how free association can help in smashing the
state and totally undermining the capitalist system! Wow, wouldn't it
be great if we could just invent new kinds of money, for example?
Say, free money, for starters? New spaces for art production that
wouldn't be up on some kind of holy pedestal? New formats for
intellectual exchange that wouldn't require walking around in
sheepskins? New political systems where the mass media wouldn't elect
oil-cartel owners and warlords? Really, free cooperation is a small
start, but apparently the only way to go in the early twenty-first
century.
I'm also quite interested in subjects like the management of
collective creativity. This is a hot topic for about the last twenty
years: you create a temporary autonomous zone, we'll use it to train
our advertising execs! But then where does the "free" go? I recently
read a great article about how the US Army, or is it the Navy Seals?
wants to create a kind of wifi network among predator drones so that
you will have full network capabilities in an air war even if your C3
center in Florida is blown to smithereens by a suicide bomber! This
too is cooperation, encouraged by the reticular form of both
contemporary society and computer media. "If you can't beat 'em, join
'em" seems to be the philosophy of the post-Al Quaeda network-busters
(Rand Corp is full of 'em), and that would be a great subject for
cooperative research, if anyone's interested. Actually it's the
ambiguities that tweak my greatest curiosity, like why is an
anarchist any different from a neoliberal? I once tried to write a
kind of complicated essay on Marcel Mauss, free information exchange,
collaborative production and the gift economy to say why the
counterglobalization demonstrators were really different from the
globalizers themselves, but since that was a more-or-less failure I
guess maybe there are new horizons in wait, like I hope this list.
Seriously, I was an ordinary guy as little as ten or even five years
ago, something about all this freewheeling association plays tricks
on the head, kind of interesting. Looking forward to hear from
everyone else on their subjects, we'll get something going here I'm
sure.best to all, Brian