“Modernity…based on a autonomous self in a society which he himself creates through the social contract, has been changing in postmodernity. The individual is now seen as always-already part of various social fields, as a singular composite being….Atomistic individualism is rejected in favour of the view of a relational self, a new balance between individual agency and collective communion.”

It’s great to see a scholarly engagement with my work. More specifically, in this blog post, which has to be read in full, Jane Jones defends the postmodern heritage, showing how this directly links to the possibility of p2p relationality.

Needless to say, I much agree with this approach. Postmodernism was a necessary development to ‘deconstruct’ the illusions of modernity and the ‘independent’ atomistic self. But after deconstruction, we must reconstruct a ‘interdependent but autonomous subject’, and it is this need and necessity which P2P ‘intersubjective’ theory attempts to address. You’ll find material on this in a specialized section of our wiki.

Jane Jones:

“What unsettles me so deeply about the current trend to dismiss deconstruction – in fact, to dismiss pretty much the entire legacy of post-Bergsonian/pre-Badiouian French thought – as simply a fad or a fashion, a mere intellectual blip in the forward march of principled rectitude…is the fact that what we are dealing with here are some really really fundamental ontological claims, claims about the nature of reality which we can’t just imagine away because we think they lead to namby-pamby-wishy-washyness, or a failure of political virility. As Michel Bauwens suggests above, one of the most – in fact I would say, the most – salient fact about what is unhelpfully called the linguistic turn, is that it is not really about language at all, but is, rather, a claim about the fundamentally relational nature of being….it is a claim that each and every being (whether a sign or a state, a subject or a star) is constituted by its temporal and spatial relation to that which is other than itself.

There are lots of reasons why people don’t like this. It makes things messy, it means that shit is all mixed up with other shit (and here, we return to my suspicion about visceral revulsion), that a dense weave of fibres contrives to make every situation unique, that the future is unpredictable, and that, as a result, our programs, policies and principals, have, from one moment to another, only limited applicability. It means, in short, that things are not perfectly controllable, that we have to assume the full weight and responsibility of our decisions (without a failsafe algorithm to guide us), that we are dependent, that we are vulnerable, and that it can never ever be guaranteed that everything will be okay. But, to be blunt, that is how it is. And to rather brutally paraphrase Aristotle (this one’s for you Daniel), we don’t get to decide what reality is like on the basis of what we would like it to be like for us to have the kind of perfect knowledge which could keep us always and forever safe.

What this doesn’t mean – as the naysayers seem to think – is that, in the absence of cast-iron political principal, we should simply slip into a state of acquiescence or inertia. Rather than abandoning the project – It’s icky! Me no like it! – what is required is a whole lot of serious thought about the theoretical and practical implications of process-relational ontology for our systems of governance, production, economy and ethics. This is a big job, and there is no way I can even begin to do it justice right now (some small fraction of it will, if everything goes more or less swimmingly, constitute my life’s work), but what I would like to look at here is some extremely helpful indications provided by Michel Bauwens’ theory of peer-to-peer relationality (hereafter P2P), and in particular, the aspect of the theory which deals with the thinking of new modalities of work.

P2P is, in the broadest terms, the theory and practice of the cooperative production of commons by individuals participating in technologically mediated distributed networks (think Linux, or Wikipedia). The model is one which – unlike the game-theory dog-eat-doggedness of neoliberalism – seeks to explain the potential for new modes of social, political and economic organization based on a cooperative ‘third mode of production’ which – on the basis of a relational paradigm – resists the traditional opposition between public and private goods. In this day and age, and not without reason, ‘production’ – along with its well-worn friends ‘efficiency’ and ‘growth’ – has become something of a dirty word…and if you look but one post back, you’ll find me using it in just that way. However, just as ‘markets’ can provide a perfectly pleasant and ethically unproblematic way of passing a morning, the notion of ‘production,’ and indeed, particularly ‘creative production,’ needs to be retrieved from the tar-and-feathering it has quite rightly received at the hands of those of us opposed to reductive market-logic.

As I discussed at some length in my last post, along with its manifest inability to grasp the concept of finite resource, what I have always found to be most odious about capitalism – particularly in its turbocharged neoliberal variant – is its gross reduction of the value and meaning of a human life to the metrics of economic productivity. This is especially problematic because – if you’re a funny kind of postmodern Aristotelian-Marxist like me – you have a tendency to think that the meaning and value of a human life is peculiarly bound-up with the type of productive activity which occupies that life, and that alienated wage slavery is pernicious not merely because it involves the exploitation of the many by the few, but because it prevents people from spending their time doing those things which help them to unfold their own beings, and enables them to endow their daily activities with meaning.

The nature of purposive, meaningful, productive activity is profoundly complex, and can’t be adequately unpacked here, but thinking hard about its processional and relational structure is imperative if we are to accomplish the task of providing a rigorous account of human goods that can challenge the ‘realworlders’ insistence that economic calculus is the only basis on which to manage our lives. What I like most about Bauwens’ project – in addition to P2P providing a model for open non-representational democratic process currently being played out in the Spanish plazas – is its emphasis on the importance of just this type of creative productivity. In accordance with an ontology which posits relations of mutual enhancement – rather than antagonism – between individuals and collectivities, this importance resides both in the generation of socially-beneficial use-value, and, moreover, in the immeasurable psychophysical benefits to individuals of engaging in meaningful production.

For the individual, production is experienced as meaningful both because it allows for the unfolding of a range of the self’s potentials (i.e. process), and because it is directed towards an end (i.e. process) which the individual conceives of as a common good* (i.e relation)…both elements mutually reinforcing each other in the generation of the type of self-renewing motivation which drives deeply-engaged activity into its future (and thereby circumnavigating that great modern ailment, the motivational-futural crisis which is depressive despair). Contra the dominant neoliberal dogma that we are basically a bunch of lazy egoists who could only be induced to get off our arses by the pure motive of profit, I share Bauwens’ alternative vision that the best of human life is to be found in the engagement in meaningful production, that such activity represents an end in itself, and that, moreover, people experience it as such and will do it, for its own sake. This is because – to get a little bit Aristotelian about it (again!) – such activity is ‘eudaimonia’; the ‘being-at-work of the soul in accordance with virtue,’ the developmental flourishing of individual and collective excellence, or, to give it its more common or garden name, ‘happiness.’

There is a whole lot more to be said here, in particular about how we move from where we are now – a state in which people’s labour and experiences of ‘eudaimonia’ are extracted from them only to be sold back at vastly inflated prices in the form of fetishized objects that offer nothing but empty promises – to a state where P2P could become a more generalized mode of production. Bauwens’ has some very interesting ideas here about the part played by the actual and manufactured perception of ‘abundance’ and ‘scarcity’ in the possibility of forming cooperative networked commons, and while P2P is presently a form of organization limited to the immaterial realm of information production, it could be, he suggests tantalizingly, “extended whenever there is perceived abundance.” (P2P and Human Evolution: 19) This tallies well with much of my own thinking about the ways in which the defensive conflictual carapace of the neoliberal autonomous agent – the form, in fact, of the very subject of modernity – is maintained, fundamentally, by a fantasy of control and invulnerability which stems, at base, from fear.

It is in teaching us about the futility of such fear that we find the real political power of the deconstructive project. You, like everything else under – and including – the stars, are a process-relational being. You cannot idemnify yourself against the risk that this entails, and the attempt to do so could only ever function by violently extracting yourself from – or attempting to annihilate – the web of temporal and spatial relations by which you come to be. Given this, you have a fairly simple choice. You can engage in an endless attempt to defend yourself against the very stuff of your existence – cutting yourself off at the neck and spooling out violence and domination in your wake – or, alternatively, you can face your fear and get on with slipping into the flux of your unfolding, and the unfolding of all the others on whom you depend, and who depend on you. Deconstruction is not nihilism, or paralysis, it is an attitude, a way of inclining oneself into the activity of the world. Michel Bauwens has usefully shown us one way that this attitude might generate a mode of production, a mode of living, which can lead us into the always open future.”

Continuing the debate through some of my own editorial on p2p relationality:

1. The Great Cosmic Mash-UP

* on the Great Cosmic Mash-Up, which focuses on P2P and common projects and their role in the construction of our identity:

“Postmodernism was all about deconstructing oppressive mental structures that we inherited from modernity. Amongst other things the Cartesian subject/object split and the alienating effects of Kantian’s impossibility of knowing true reality; it was a necessary destructive passage, a cleaning out process, but it didn’t, as its names “post”- indicate, construct anything. So in my view, if modernity was about constructing the individual (along subject/object divisions), and postmodernity about deconstructing this, then this new era, which I’ld like to call the era of participation, is about constructing relationality or participation. We are not going back to the premodern wholistic era and feelings, but just as modernity was about rigorously individualising everything, eventually reaching the current dead-end of hyper-individualism, we are now just as rigorously ‘relationising’ everything. If in premodernity we thought, we are parts of a whole that is one and above us, and in modernity we thought we are separate and unified individuals, a world onto ourselves, and in postmodernity saw ourselves fragmenting, and pretty much lamented this, then this is the mash-up era. We now know that all this fragments can be reconstructed with the zillions of fragment of the others, into zillions of commonalities, into temporary wholes that are so many new creative projects, but all united in a ever-moving Commons that is open to all of us..

So the fragmentation of postmodernity is a given for us now, but we are no longer lamenting, we are discovering the technologies (infrastructural, collaborative-software-ish, political, but above all the mental and epistemological) that allow us to use this fragmentation to create the Great Cosmic Mash-Up. That is the historical task of the emerging Peer to Peer Era.”

* 2. an Introduction on Individuality, Relationality, and Collectivity,

“In my opinion, as a necessary complement and advance to postmodern thought, it is necessary to take a third step, i.e. not to be content with both a recognition of individuality, and its foundation in relationality, but to also recognize the level of the collective, i.e. the field in which the relationships occur.

If we only see relationships, we forget about the whole, which is society itself (and its sub-fields). Society is more than just the sum of its “relationship parts?. Society sets up a ‘protocol’, in which these relationships can occur, it forms the agents in their subjectivity, and consists of norms which enable or disable certain type of relationships. Thus we have agents, relationships, and fields. Finally, if we want to integrate the subjective element of human intentionality, it is necessary to introduce a fourth element: the object of the sociality.

Indeed, human agents never just ‘relate’ in the abstract, agents always relate around an object, in a concrete fashion. Swarming insects do not seem to have such an object, they just follow instructions and signals, without a view of the whole, but mammals do. For example, bands of wolves congregate around the object of the prey. It is the object that energizes the relationships, that mobilizes the action. Humans can have more abstract objects, that are located in a temporal future, as an object of desire. We perform the object in our minds, and activate ourselves to realize them individually or collectively. P2P projects organize themselves around such common project, and my own Peer to Peer theory is an attempt to create an object that can inspire social and political change.

In summary, for a comprehensive view of the collective, it is now customary to distinguish 1) the totality of relations; 2) the field in which these relations operate, up to the macro-field of society itself, which establishes the ‘protocol’ of what is possible and not; 3) the object of the relationship (object-oriented sociality?), i.e. the pre-formed ideal which inspires the common action. That sociality is ‘object-oriented’ is an important antidote to any ‘flatland’, i.e. ‘merely objective’ network theory, on which many failed social networking experiments are based. This idea that the field of relations is the only important dimension of reality, while forgetting human intentionality . What we need is a subjective-objective approach to networks.

In conclusion, this turn to the collective that the emergence of peer to peer represent does not in any way present a loss of individuality, even of individualism. Rather it ‘transcends and includes’ individualism and collectivism in a new unity, which I would like to call ‘cooperative individualism’.”

Here are some stimulating citations on the same topic:

Citations on P2P Relationality:

The liberation of the self involves, above all, a social process. In a society that has shriveled the self into a commodity — into an object manufactured for exchange — there can be no fulfilled self. There can only be the beginnings of selfhood, the emergence of a self that seeks fulfillment — a self that is largely defined by the obstacles it must overcome to achieve realization.

– Murray Bookchin

“The reference to “northward arm” and “southward arm” is typically Wintu, and its usage suggests a cultural wisdom so deep and unconscious that it was embedded in the very structure of language. In English we refer to the right arm and left arm, and we might describe a certain mountain as being to our right or left, in front or in back of us depending on which way we are facing at the moment. We use the body — the self — as the point of reference against which we describe the world. The Wintu would never do this, and indeed the Wintu language would not permit it. If a certain mountain was to the north, say, the arm nearest that mountain would be called the northward arm. If the Wintu turned around, the arm that had previously been referred to as the northward arm would now be called the southward arm. In other words, the features of the world remained the constant reference, the sense of self was what changed — a self that continually accommodated and adjusted to a world in which the individual was not the center of all creation.”

– From the Book: The Way We Lived: California Indian Stories, Songs and Reminiscences.

Jesus, in the Gospel, did not say, “My kingdom is not of this world; that was the bad translators who, by suppressing three words in one phrase of St. John, have made it say this. Jesus said literally, “My kingdom is not yet of these times.” And as his kingdom, as it is explained in the same passage, is the reign of justice and truth, and as it adds that this kingdom will come on the earth, it follows that, very far from have prophesied that the principles of equality will never be realized on earth, Jesus on the contrary prophesied their realization, their reign, their arrival.

– Pierre Leroux

“If what we are calling the ontology of the One rejects what is not itself – by positing a radical commensurability by which only that which is its Self is valued, and all that is Other is devalued – and what we are calling the ontology of the Zero rejects everything – by positing a radical incommensurability by which nothing can be valued at all – then the ontology of the Many succeeds because it rejects nothing (out of hand) – by positing a perpetual flux of commensurables and incommensurables by which subjects/objects, Nature/Society, humans/nonhumans, are continually constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed, in other words, e-value-ated.”

– Paul B. Hartzog

(for more citations, see here)