Pirate
Philosophy
For a Digital Posthumanities
Gary HallContents
Series Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xi
Preface xiii
1 THE COMMONS AND COMMUNITY 1
How We Remain Modern
2 THEHUMANITIES 25
There Are No Digital Humanities
3 THEHUMAN 57
#MySubjectivation
4 THEPOSTHUMAN 85
What Are the Digital Posthumanities?
5 COPYRIGHT AND PIRACY 127
Pirate Radical Philosophy
6 THE FUTURE OF THE BOOK 145
The Unbound Book
Notes 161
Index 243Preface
We find ourselves in a time of riots wherein a rebirth of History, as opposed to the
Pure and simple repetition of the worst, is signalled and takes shape.'—Alain Badiou
Since the financial crash of 2008, much has been written about the “crisis
Of capitalism” and the associated series of postcrash political events that are
seen as having begun with the Tunisian revolution of 2010: the Arab Spring,
the 2011 “August riots” in England, and Occupy Wall Street, together
with the movement of the European squares that eventually led to the elec-
tion of the radical left Syriza party in Greece and rise to prominence of
another left-wing party, Podemos, in Spain. Yet to what extent does our
contemporary sociopolitical situation also pose a challenge to those of us
who work and study in the university? How can we act not so much for or
with the antiausterity and student protesters, “graduates without a future,”
and “remainder of capital,” demonstrating alongside them, accepting invi-
tations to speak to them and write about them and so on, but rather in
terms of them, thus refusing to submit critical thought to “existing political
discourses and the formulation of Political needs those discourses articu-
late,” and so “‘defusing the trap of the event’”?” Does the struggle against
the neoliberal corporatization of higher education not require us to have
the courage to transform radically the material practices and social relations
of our lives and labor?
These questions form the starting point for this book's engagement with
a range of theorists and philosophers, operating in some of the most excit-
ing and cutting-edge areas of the humanities today. They include Lev
Manovich (the digital humanities), Rosi Braidotti (new materialism), Ber-
nard Stiegler (posthumanism), and Graham Harman (object-oriented ontol-
osy). Drawing critically on phenomena such as the peer-to-peer file-sharing
and the anticopyright pro-piracy movements, Pirate Philosophy explores
how we can produce not just new ways of thinking about the world, whichxiv Preface
is what theorists and philosophers have traditionally aspired to do, but new
ways of actually being theorists and philosophers in this “time of riots.”
The book's opening chapter sets the scene with an account of the politics
of online sharing in relation to the struggles against the current intellectual
property regime associated with Anonymous, LulzSec, Aaron Swartz, and
the “academic spring” of 2012. It discusses Creative Commons; the open
access, open source, and free software movements; and the difficulty of
forging a common, oppositional horizon given that these struggles and
movements do not share a common idea of the Commons. In the chapters
that follow, Pirate Philosophy proceeds to ask how, when it.comes to our
own scholarly ways of creating, performing, and sharing knowledge and
research, we can operate in a manner that is different not just from the
neoliberal model of the entrepreneurial academic associated with corporate
social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn, but also from the tradi-
tional liberal humanist model that comes replete with clichéd, ready-made
(some would even say cowardly) ideas of proprietorial authorship, the
book, originality, fixity, and the finished object.
Of course, many theorists are challenging the dictatorship of the human
with an emphasis on the nonhuman, the posthuman, and the postanthro-
pocentric, along with the crisis of life itself that is expressed by the Anthro-
pocene. Yet such “posttheory theories” continue to remain intricately
bound up with humanism and the human in the very performance of their
attempt to think beyond them due to the approaches they have adopted in
Tesponse to the question of the politics of copying, distributing, selling, and
(re)using theory. This is to some extent inevitable given the lack of antihu-
manist alternatives to publishing either on a “copyright ... all rights
reserved” or open access and Creative Commons basis that are institution-
ally and professionally recognized. Nevertheless, Pirate Philosophy endeav-
ors to move the analysis of the human and nonhuman on by raising a
question that is also an exhortation: How, as theorists and philosophers,
can we act differently—to the point where we begin to take on and assume
some of the implications of the challenge that is offered by theory and phi-
losophy to fundamental humanities concepts such as the human, the sub-
ject, the author, copyright, community, and the common, for the ways in
which we live, work, and think? How, in other words, can we act as some-
thing like pirate philosophers in the sense of the term’s etymological ori-
gins with the ancient Greeks, where the pirate is someone who tries, tests,
teases, and troubles, as well as attacks? Might doing so be one way for us to
try out and put to the test new economic, legal, and political models for the
creation, publication, and circulation of knowledge and ideas, models that
are more appropriate for our postcrash sociopolitical situation?