Key Message

For today I am presenting a sequence of quotations. First, we examine the view that commons-based peer production communities are based both on learning and on assessment, in the form of peer review. If a given piece of work is accepted into a given community, it has passed a test.

We then turn to a lyrical quotation from Leonard Cohen, examining the nature of "conflict", here imagined to take place between the would-be contributor and the potential community.

An outsider voice is, quite often, neither accepted nor desired. We could compare the notion of a constituent moment, "defined as a historical moment when 'underauthorized' individuals seize the mantle of authority, and, by doing so, change the inherited rules of authorization and produce new conditions for political representation" (http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2011/1103_ows_jacobs.aspx). The point being, that to be in tune with one's life need not mean being in tune with one's society (to go a little further in depth with something we were talking about in the essay on Implementing).

The most outstanding "negative" instance of this is then considered in an extended series of quotes - from Plato's "Apology". A "positive" example (in the eyes of Jason A. Frank, "Constituent moments: enacting the people in postrevolutionary America") is found in a speech from Frederick Douglass.

Finally, we consider a quote that puts the conflict back in terms of gender relations figured by Cohen. (This quote is reminiscent of several chapters from "The Politics of Friendship" by Jacques Derrida.)

Having built up this weighty dossier of quotations, we offer a summary statement on their relationship to paragogy.


 * "[U]pon closer inspection of commons-based peer production communities we find learning at their core. [...] In a commons-based peer production framework, the concepts of (i) learning and (ii) assessment of learning become inseparable. The community continuously reviews and evaluates the contributions of its members. Open source software developers do not write exams, but the quality of their work (as an indicator for their knowledge) is tested as part of the project's inherent quality review process. Acceptance of a developer's software code into the release of the application is the equivalent of passing an exam." -- J. Philipp Schmidt, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/fcrw/sites/fcrw/images/Schmidt_Education_FreeCulture_25Oct2009.pdf


 * "You cannot stand what I've become, // You much prefer the gentleman I was before. // I was so easy to defeat, I was so easy to control, // I didn't even know there was a war." -- Leonard Cohen, "There is a war", from New Skin for the Old Ceremony (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56hiB4eTzBE)


 * "And do not be offended at my telling you the truth: for the truth is, that no man who goes to war with you or any other multitude, honestly striving against the many lawless and unrighteous deeds which are done in a state, will save his life; he who will fight for the right, if he would live even for a brief space, must have a private station and not a public one." -- Socrates, in Plato's "Apology", tr. Benjamin Jowett, http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1656/pg1656.txt


 * "If any one likes to come and hear me while I am pursuing my mission, whether he be young or old, he is not excluded. Nor do I converse only with those who pay; but any one, whether he be rich or poor, may ask and answer me and listen to my words; and whether he turns out to be a bad man or a good one, neither result can be justly imputed to me; for I never taught or professed to teach him anything. And if any one says that he has ever learned or heard anything from me in private which all the world has not heard, let me tell you that he is lying." -- ibid.


 * "Some one will say: Yes, Socrates, but cannot you hold your tongue, and then you may go into a foreign city, and no one will interfere with you? Now I have great difficulty in making you understand my answer to this. For if I tell you that to do as you say would be a disobedience to the God, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am serious; and if I say again that daily to discourse about virtue, and of those other things about which you hear me examining myself and others, is the greatest good of man, and that the unexamined life is not worth living, you are still less likely to believe me." -- ibid.


 * "When my sons are grown up, I would ask you, O my friends, to punish them; and I would have you trouble them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about riches, or anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be something when they are really nothing,--then reprove them, as I have reproved you, for not caring about that for which they ought to care, and thinking that they are something when they are really nothing. And if you do this, both I and my sons will have received justice at your hands." -- ibid.


 * "Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us? " -- Frederick Douglass, "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro", http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/douglassjuly4.html


 * "[W]oman, as nature has created her and as man is at present educating her, is his enemy. She can only be his slave or his despot, but never his companion. This she can become only when she has the same rights as he, and is his equal in education and work." -- Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, "Venus in Furs"

This final quote is perhaps particularly "striking"! Severin (the main character in "Venus in Furs") has received the cure for his donkey-like dilletantish slackitude at the hands of his "Venus", Wanda. This is a sexual education, if ever we saw one; one that is developed in a curious peer-like manner, as both characters egg each other on to develop the "scene" (shared context), and the final denouement of Severin's "cure".

On another level, Frederick Douglass and Socrates also seem to have the intention of whipping up some sentiment or other in their audience. (This is the speech in which Socrates describes himself as a "gadfly".) Underlying Douglass's points have to do with the virtue of equality, not just with equality itself. Like Socrates he is calling people out on their hypocrisy. Both he Socrates are in some sense on the "winning side", at least in the sense of moral victory.

It is little wonder that Douglass's essay appears on a site run by OWS activists: his case that "The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your Christianity as a lie" -- could be repeated for unrighteous inequalities without slavery. The question of what is "unrighteous" is of course something that will be socially determined. (Should wealth be distributed to each according to his need, or to each according to his greed, or something else?)

Socrates's public dialogs are one of the original "open source" forms: again, "[...] Nor do I converse only with those who pay; but any one, whether he be rich or poor, may ask and answer me and listen to my words [...] And if any one says that he has ever learned or heard anything from me in private which all the world has not heard, let me tell you that he is lying." The open criticism of those in power that Socrates foresaw is present today on the internet, along with plenty of "reactionary" talk by the same sort of crowd who despised him. The "war" (to use Leonard Cohen's turn of phrase) continues apace.

But are we necessarily talking about a conflict at all? Might not the "receptive" and "evaluating" -- what could be broadly termed "female" aspects of communities -- be brought into some sort of harmony with the "generative", "contributing" -- correspondingly, broadly male -- aspects of contributors? And what would this mean?

For the purposes of this essay, whether we call it "mind" or "virtue" or something else, there is both the question of constituting the self, and constituting the community. Foucault points out that Socrates' "care of self" will entail care for the city. We see frequently that the city (or any other corporate body) does not always care for the individual. We might consider Deleuze and Guattari's "becoming-woman" here (cf. http://dr.library.brocku.ca/handle/10464/2916); or Fritz Lang's "Metropolis".

= Recommended Reading =


 * http://www.amwiki.de/download/attachments/589977/commons_based_peer_production_benkler2006.pdf "Commons Based Peer Production and Virtue" by Yochai Benkler and Helen Nissenbaum
 * http://www.elore.fi/arkisto/2_97/sal297.html "The Enlightener" and "The Whipper": Handwritten Newspapers and the History of Collective Writing by Kirsti Salmi-Niklander (Speaking of whipping!)