Re: <nettime> The degree zero of nettime

[tiziana <T.Terranova@btinternet.com>]

hi k

yes, i understand the difficulty that you talk about... because what I do
rides a lot on top of the fruits of the collective production of knowledge
that happens in the lists and on the sites, which in its turn is mixed up
with all kinds of material from the collective work of academic knowledge.

Maybe I should have introduced the paper better to avoid
misunderstandings... This paper is the last chapter of the book I am working
on and the complete chapter should be around 10-12,000 words. The book has 5
chapters, only two of which are close 'dialogues' with the lists (one is the
free labor piece, the other this one). The first three are more
historical/scientific/technical. So yes, I cut out and not acknowledged lots
of stuff, including Deleuze and Guattari's on the plane of consistency and
the degree zero; Negri on constituent power; Luciana Parisi on the
virtuality of the cytoplasmic egg; Ricardo Dominguez on post-media
revolutionary cells; Geert Lovink and Andy Garcia on tactical media and
their work for the next 5 minutes conferences; you on mailing lists and
events such as Kosovo; Bifo and the rekombinant group on electronic
communication and capitalism; postings by Nik, the Spanish network for
resistance, Stefan Wray, Globalise reistance and so on.

It was an informal talk to a group who did not know much about the subject,
but I presumed was going to be rather hostile (I don't know if you are aware
of the kind of positions that have been taken in the UK on the subject by
people such as Robins and Webster, with the best intentions of course, but
bad effects). I wanted to get a good discussion going, and take away any
possible excuse for people to start talking about the 'elites' on line,
'technological determinism', it's not 'rea'l anyway and so on. Obviously I
still got lots of these kind of objections, but also other more interesting
ones... That was my priority for that paper. The complete version will of
course be a lot more detailed, which means that all the references and
sources that I deleted for the talk will be reinserted and properly
developed.

This does not mean that I do not have a problem with protocol.  It's
difficult  to deal with the problem of authorship in the type of work that I
try to do: on the one hand the de-composition and re-composition of
authorship in the list format; on the other hand the fact that these texts
will come out in the super-authorised form of a book, with name on the front
and everything. I don't want to feel that I am capitalising on other's
people ideas, but I don't want to give up the notion of a scholarly
engagement with these ideas either. All I can think of for the final version
is to reference every e-mail that I quote, and send copies of the chapter to
each person quoted before it goes to print.

As far as you feel that I did not acknowledge some of your ideas I am sorry
about that. I have always appreciated your postings, and I do use your work
in my teaching as well. I do that because I feel that we are both working
within a common framework, which is a materialist approach to media as
something more than just meaning-carriers. I don't think that you or I are
the only ones to be concerned with the effects of the divide between p.e.
and c.s. or working around ways of overcoming it. Indeed I came across this
divide in England, it is a lot more alien to the Italian tradition I come
from. I think that it is more about sharing a field of enquiry. I have
always found your notion of the vector an interesting and useful one, but I
come from a different direction, which is more indebted to the work on
media/technology/science performed by the CCRU in the UK in the nineties and
by people like Bifo, Negri and the autonomists in Italy. I have never worked
on the unpredictable event itself, although I co-wrote an article for
C-Theory on turbulence and artificial life through philosophers such as
Serres and Spinoza, who work in the tradition of the pre-socratic
philosophers that you also refer to. Again, the chapter is a bit out of
context like this, because it is preceded by lots of ground work on
cybernetic communication pioneers and their rejection of representational
epistemologies for an affective one; on network technologies such as
packet-switching, DNS and IP; artificial life; and labor and the digital
economy. So the analysis of the medium is developed before this chapter and
only hinted at here.

But again, if you or anybody else have any suggestions about negotiating the
authorship/collectivity problem other than making it very clear that it is
not an analysis of but a conversation with, and referencing all postings so
that people might look them up themselves, any such suggestion would be
welcome...


best

tiziana

p.s. are u at NYU now? I remember attending one of your talks there in
1995...



on 9/2/02 6:46 pm, McKenzie Wark at mckenziewark@hotmail.com wrote:

> TT:
> 
> An excellent paper, about which i have mixed feelings, because as
 <...>

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