I. Aristotelianism

“And this is the purpose of all of the sciences, that in all of them faith is strengthened, God is honored, character is formed, and consolations are derived consisting in the union of the spouse with her Beloved: a union that takes place through love, to the attainment of which the whole purpose of sacred Scripture, and consequently, every illumination descending from above, is directed – a union without which all knowledge is empty.” – St. Bonaventure

To bury spent disciplinary or discursive justifications for knowledge as property and reverse the commodification of the knowledge commons to exploitable and scalable “intellectual property” do we need another Verdun, which Capitalism would appear to be only so happy to supply? Or is it possible to restore the immemorial coordinates of cultural production as formalized in “common law” by turning to the Holy Trinity of conceptual thought proper – that elegant, spare, and wintry tableau that haunts all forms of formative knowledge production? Through T.S. Eliot’s bleak visions, operating in apparent reverse, we might reach across centuries to examine Bonaventure’s reduction of the liberal arts to theology – theology, not religion; and theology as inter-subjective truth, not dogma. This communitarian spirit of intellectual austerities is the transitional state between gray areas (instrumental reason) and black zones (revelation or reverie). If it passes through subjective night, as Jacques Maritain suggests, via negative or apophatic theology, inclusive of negative dialectics (Adorno, 1978), it does so in service to the impersonal agencies of that anterior sky in which stars and constellations (both old and new constellations of thought) appear or re-appear out of a proverbial no-where. “La vita nuova,” perhaps – but also a strange diminution in the analogical, for/toward the anagogical. Therefore, the strange, wintry, and wonderful – or, Bonaventure’s “union without which all knowledge is empty.”

The problem of Agent Intellect, as controversy, has never quite gone away – with its origins in Aristotle’s De anima and its subsequent elaborations and disputations reaching from the Islamic Aristotelians, Averroes and Avicenna, to St. Thomas Aquinas. The issue of whether Agent Intellect is independent of human agency or transcendent to all intellectual activity suggests that this possible impersonal agency is the ultimate ghost in the machinery of thought. The universalizing tendencies of such a power (or source of power) are exceptionally elastic and, ultimately, indeterminate. If it belongs to mankind, as Avicenna thought, and not to individual subjects per se (not embedded within the intellectual capacities of souls), the penultimate question/issue becomes, What or where is such a power? Is this not the very origin of the idea of a knowledge commons? Assimilation to cultural patrimony is quite obviously not the same thing as the assimilation to the circuit of Capital. More critically, How is such a power to be accessed? According to Averroes: “The agent intellect is the last of the celestial Intelligences and moves the lunar sphere; the material intellect receives intelligible forms abstracted by the agent intellect. These intellects are not united to individual man by their substances, but only by their activity” (Nejeschleba, 2004, p. 70). Thus, signatures or intelligences (lights) are what matter. Gray areas shade into black zones, and reverie is birthright whereas instrumentalized reason or abject utilitarianism is a prison-house for Spirit.

Notably, Aquinas disputed the Aristotelian views of Averroes and Avicenna (Latin Averroism) and placed Agent Intellect firmly within the bounds of the human soul, differing with other Medieval theologians in the process, yet primarily in terms of the relation between Agent Intellect and Possible Intellect – the latter term connoting mere cognition. Anselm of Canterbury, for example, considered Agent Intellect co-equivalent to angelic intelligences. More importantly, however, is what occurs when one follows the argument backward to the early Franciscan School, prior to Aquinas, when, in effect, the major schoolmen said “Yes” to utterly contradictory statements concerning what exactly Agent Intellect was once it was operative within human cognition proper. The key figures here are Alexander of Hales and John of La Rochelle, the latter a teacher of Bonaventure. For example:

“In John of La Rochelle’s view we can call the agent intellect both God and angel, and part of the soul with respect to different objects of cognition. God is the agent intellect for our knowledge of things higher than the soul, the angel is the agent intellect (in the sense of revelation or instruction) for our knowledge of things on the same level as the soul and, finally, the agent is a light innate in the soul for our knowledge of things that lie within the soul or below it” (Nejeschleba, 2004, p. 76).

Thus Bonaventure and many Franciscans to follow maintained a dual vigil for the transcendental and contingent conditions for knowledge, both personal and collective:

“The reason for the double-meaning of the agent intellect lies in the Franciscans’ characteristic and well-known attitude towards theology and philosophy. They tried to reconcile principles of Aristotelian philosophy with the Augustinian fundament of theology. With respect to noetics this means that they had to unify the Aristotelian theory of abstraction and the doctrine of the agent intellect, which Aristotle had already compared to light, with the Augustinian theory of illumination and the division of the human intellect into two faces, the higher, which is illuminated from God, and the lower, which is not illuminated” (Nejeschleba, 2004, p. 77).

Thus gray areas and black zones, and all of the attendant problems of locating the place and means whereby the Imaginary (Possible Intellect) may be disciplined and/or illumined. Thus the condemned thesis 118 of 1277 proceeds as follows: “That the agent intellect is a separate substance higher than the possible intellect, and that with respect to the substance, potency and operation it is separated from the body, and that it is not a form of human body” (Nejeschleba, 2004, p. 78, with reference to Hissette, 1977, p. 193). This is but one of 219 Averroistic-Thomist theses condemned at Paris after Aquinas’ death in 1274.

Certainly this dual vision of Agent Intellect (both in its disputatious aspects and in the Franciscan doubling or tripling of its agency proper) suggests that the true issue is not whether it subsists as impersonal agency in the natural world (as a cosmological principle, for example) but, instead, whether it inhabits human intellectual activity and the products of the same. For the ambivalence seems less about whether Agent Intellect is outside of (or transcendent to) all human subjective states, as its other, than whether human agency without Agent Intellect has any merit whatsoever; and, in terms of disciplinarity or the knowledge commons, the question would be as to whether the production of forms of knowledge transcends mere utility and/or supports degraded forms of experience of this larger economy that, on the one hand, is cosmological and, on the other hand, is transcendental.

In the latter case, all of the various problems of privileging a universal intelligence collide with worldly endeavors that may, indeed, be productive of virtual prison-houses. The latter state would seem to be the path of Capital today as it serves merely its own interests – not the interest of individuals and certainly not the interest of the commons. In the first instance, language is always the First Instance for suspect motives and/or ideological sleights of hand; for, false claims to transcendental categories via Reason do, indeed, produce monsters. Such is the source of ideology – market ideology or otherwise. In the former case, when Agent Intellect is cosmological, the multiple disciplines of natural science and philosophy (or natural philosophy) take on exceptional importance to the critique of disciplines and forms of knowledge production that purportedly rely on this vision of universal, non-ideological intelligence. In both cases, there are as many problems as possible virtues, insofar as, since the divorce of theology and natural science, the orphaned middle ground has most often been moral philosophy and ethics. One very obvious analogue for the potential fusion of these discordant worldviews is to incorporate the intelligence embedded in natural systems directly and without mediation into human systems, which need not to be at odds with that larger universal economy (a semi-divine economy). Yet the inordinate nightmare of entropy follows upon every attempt to build synthetic systems that absorb and/or privilege natural systems alone, and the technocratic bias of contemporary culture betrays, repeatedly, any accord between competing visions, provoking the endless recourse to Apocalypse.

II. Franciscanism

“The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.” – Chris Marker

This Medieval debate is interesting today if only because then the problem was the differing worldviews of the Augustinians and the Thomists – with the Augustinians and Franciscans privileging black zones, and the Thomists privileging gray areas. In terms of historical merit, the debate has lasted well into the first quarter of the twenty-first century primarily because there was no unitary, Medieval “scholastic” worldview (as there is no unitary Modern worldview), despite attempts to claim such – and the debates at the University of Paris Faculty of Arts in the thirteenth century concerned not so much the production of canon or dogma but the relationship of philosophy to theology (notwithstanding the various attempts by the authorities to shut down debate, plus warnings to theologians not to become philosophers). Indeed, it would seem that the chief argument between Bonaventure and Aquinas had to do with whether these two forms of knowledge (what we would today call disciplines) are different, and whether they should be different. Aquinas seems to have solidified the separation, perhaps unwittingly, while the Augustinians and the Franciscans were arguing for the preservation of philosophy (and metaphysics) as theology – and a proper study of whether this truly meant philosophy as subordinate to theology, or not, would resolve many of the petty arguments that persist in terms of what constitutes knowledge and what constitutes mere instrumental reason. Subsequent skirmishes generally further developed the schism, while around 1900 the argument returned in terms of the historiography of the Medieval world system and the various forms of high scholasticism that dealt with the issue of the created (eternal) world, best described as the focus of the sciences, and the uncreated (ideal) world, the realm of ideas and the source for knowledge per se, inclusive of all of the associated questions and non-answers attributed to not-knowledge, or revelation, always more or less left unaddressed due to the failure of language to properly reflect what was, after all, subjective, inter-subjective, and onto-subjective, pre-conscious experience. (Regarding the pre-conscious self, see Maritain, 1954.)

If Bonaventure and the Franciscans could say “Yes” (or “All of the Above”) to whether Agent Intellect “subsides” within human cognition, outside of it (in angelic beings, in the cosmos, etc.), or with a transcendent (absent) God, it is more than apparent that they were attempting to preserve the sacred province of affective thought as such – or thought undivided (precluding the production of two contradictory, and historically antithetical realms). “Hence, according to [Étienne] Gilson, the philosophy of Aristotle compelled the thirteenth-century theologians to reexamine the proper relation of natural reason to Christian revelation; as a consequence, the great scholastic systems were born” (Quinn, 1973, p. 23). Nevertheless, Gilson’s most controversial conclusions may be said to revolve around his quarantine of Bonaventure and his claims that the Franciscan harbored an irresolvable antipathy to Aristotelianism. According to Gilson, Bonaventure evaluated Aristotelian philosophy as “one who has understood it, seen through it, and passed beyond it” (Gilson, 1924, paraphrased by Quinn, 1973, p. 24). By 1270 the verdict was in. Bonaventure refused Thomism and Aquinas committed himself to the elaboration of an autonomous philosophy, one according to Bonaventure that exposed him to inevitable error. That Aquinas would dramatically stop writing altogether on December 6, 1273 suggests that Bonaventure was, after all, right.

Several differences of opinion between Bonaventure and Aquinas in the controversy concerning Agent Intellect are instructive in terms of the critique underway here of knowledge production and the biases given most especially to singular disciplines that rely on so-called objective knowledge (or natural reason), converting everything in the process to spectral commodity. For, as it has been said, in times of crisis Augustine almost always makes a re-appearance.

Thus, the Augustinianism of Bonaventure (and the term Augustinianism was only coined during the controversies of the thirteenth century) is the key. According to Gilson, Bonaventure was safeguarding certain traditional, patristic principles against creeping Aristotelianism. The main issue was what might be called the cosmological worldview that almost always signals the Medieval mindset anyway. The Agent Intellect controversy was part and parcel of a larger set of disagreements that only were resolved by the separation of Philosophy and Theology. “By founding his doctrine on the self-consciousness of the soul, Bonaventure clung to the Augustinian tradition while grounding his Christian philosophy in the experience of his interior life” (Gilson, 1924, paraphrased by Quinn, 1973, p. 25). The struggle between Bonaventure and Aquinas (and they were, after all, colleagues) was quite simply about what constitutes the highest form of knowing anything. While they both reverted to revelation, they also did so in different ways. “Bonaventure, Gilson stated, did not formulate his theology according to the norms of Aristotelean science. Following rather the Augustinian tradition, he recorded his personal experience of the Christian life without expressing it in an objective, or scientific, manner. . . . Bonaventure modelled his theology after the ideal of Augustinian wisdom; so he developed a theological wisdom which was inseparable from his own experience” (Quinn, 1973, p. 41).

Accordingly, Bonaventure’s and Aquinas’ worlds collide in the manner in which the outer, objective world and the inner, subjective world are dealt with. The role of intellect is central – Augustinians reserved knowledge (truth) for the internal tableau of direct illumination from the divine, not Aristotelian abstraction as such, nor an operation of the intellect. Here Pascal’s two infinities come into view. Bonaventure resisted permitting illumination (revelation) to be a guarantor of natural reason (Aristotelian abstraction); and, again, it required a certain acceptance of paradoxes, or the rejection of attempting to rationalize or reconcile discordant principles that effectively underscored that knowledge is not unitary (see Quinn, 1973, p. 39). As a result, “to solve some problems in the natural order, [Bonaventure’s] philosophy relied on a supernatural principle” (Quinn, 1973, p. 39). One exceptional example is the concept of the necessity of grace for all creatures to merely exist. In the case of animals, Bonaventure simply resorted to Augustine’s doctrine of seminal principles. In the case of humans, Bonaventure kicked the entire question upstream, placing infallibility out of reach of contingent intellect. Far from hedging his bets, in the case of the status of human existence, Bonaventure simply jettisoned the need to rationalize what was, in effect, a transcendental category of experience (Being as such). But he again turned to Augustine for support, this time utilizing the well-known metaphor of the double mirror that permits divine illumination to reach contingent intellect, if the latter is turned in the direction of the divine. This judgment of cognition as black mirror, a type of internal Claude Glass, is the very image of black zones (and revelation as path to knowledge). The path taken by Aquinas and Duns Scotus was the path not taken by Bonaventure. “Bonaventure withheld from the human intellect a power which would be sufficient for knowing truth with certitude” (Gilson, 1924, paraphrased by Quinn, 1973, p. 40). According to Gilson, Bonaventure was safeguarding a particular worldview (an interior vista) “to protect a Christian understanding of creation, divine providence, illumination and moral guidance” (Gilson, 1924, paraphrased by Quinn, 1973, p. 41).

The Neo-platonism is palpable, and an intermediary world of semi-divine ideas seems to be the key nonetheless. If both Bonaventure and Aquinas more or less grappled with Aristotle’s natural philosophy in different ways, and if each retained that which Aristotle rejected (the Platonic theory of divine ideas), the matter then returns (and rests) in where and how ideas are accessed; the result is a battleground between immutable, universal truths and contingent knowledge (or the mere administration of things). It might be argued that the historically determined triumph of the administrative intellect sponsored the emergence of capitalism.

It is possible, then, to see the entire scholastic operation sliding downhill and the mere description and administration (manipulation) of things and people becoming the entire point. The great scandals coming, of course, were named Giordano Bruno, Galileo, and Copernicus, plus Savonarola. (Regarding this period, see Hallyn, 1990.) Furthermore, it is possible to detect in the shadows the instantiation of new models of power and control, with the ascendance of Thomism unnecessarily burdened with the incipient power struggles within the Church between secular and sacred concerns. Thomism could be seen in such a light as a threshold crossed historically, never to be re-crossed other than personally (or existentially) – a metaphysical Rubicon. Augustinianism (as the antithesis), in turn, shelters a certain generous latitude within thought that privileges immemorial reserves within subjectivity (almost always the enemy and victim of power). The return (and/or the suppression) of the singular subject is, in this way, a constant theme in the symphonic histories of knowledge production and humanist disciplines. And the singular subject or, in modern terms, “citizen” is the foundation of both polis and commons. It is for this reason that the approach of Capital, or for that matter any exploitative ideology, to the gates of subjectivity is utterly frightening (Harris, 2017).

It is ideational Franciscanism that merits a closer look today for traces of an alternative. And it is the “right to have no rights” that merits utmost scrutiny – a coinage credited to Hugh of Digne concerning the early Franciscan refusal of property and an elective embrace of Holy Poverty (Agamben, 2013). This highly principled embrace of Christian virtue defined subsequent anarcho-Christian forms of self-government and is not entirely inconsistent with anarcho-socialist agendas. That a schism between the Conventuals and the Spirituals centered on ownership of property (as the Franciscan order began to receive major gifts from generous patrons) only further underscores the significance of the renunciation of worldly rights for higher rights – the latter generally reducible to the right to live where and as one wishes. The chief merit of this renunciation of rights is, notably, that in renouncing such rights the arrogation of those rights by anyone else is impossible.

An extended citation from Einzige und sein Eigentum (1844) by Max Stirner, bête noire of Karl Marx (Derrida, 1994), is instructive:

“The time was politically so agitated that, as is said in the gospels, people thought they could not accuse the founder of Christianity more successfully than if they arraigned him for ‘political intrigue’, and yet the same gospels report that he was precisely the one who took the least part in these political doings. But why was he not a revolutionary, not a demagogue, as the Jews would gladly have seen him? Why was he not a liberal? Because he expected no salvation from a change of conditions, and this whole business was indifferent to him. He was not a revolutionary, like Caesar, but an insurgent: not a state-overturner, but one who straightened himself up. That was why it was for him only a matter of ‘Be ye wise as serpents’, which expresses the same sense as, in the special case, that ‘Give to the emperor that which is the emperor’s’; for he was not carrying on any liberal or political fight against the established authorities, but wanted to walk his own way, untroubled about, and undisturbed by, these authorities. Not less indifferent to him than the government were its enemies, for neither understood what he wanted, and he had only to keep them off from him with the wisdom of the serpent. But, even though not a ringleader of popular mutiny, not a demagogue or revolutionary, he (and every one of the ancient Christians) was so much the more an insurgent who lifted himself above everything that seemed so sublime to the government and its opponents, and absolved himself from everything that they remained bound to, and who at the same time cut off the sources of life of the whole heathen world, with which the established state must wither away as a matter of course; precisely because he put from him the upsetting of the established, he was its deadly enemy and real annihilator; for he walled it in, confidently and recklessly carrying up the building of his temple over it, without heeding the pains of the immured” (Stirner, 1995, pp. 280-81).

III. Coda

In terms of “prior art,” or the contorted logic of the legal arguments for subsuming previously existing forms of knowledge, Agent Intellect is the foundation for immemoriality, immemoriality is the foundation for the commons and “common law,” the commons and “common law” are the foundation for statutory law, and statutory law is the foundation for intellectual property rights (patents, licenses, and copyright). Given the above arguments, Franciscanism and “the right to have no rights” may be seen as an early, yet pivotal attempt to protect immemoriality itself (in Platonic terms, the dynamic field known as anamnesis) and the attendant internal prospects for individuals and free subjectivity. In terms of the rights of citizens and the commons, this same logic suggests that the subjective conditions here denoted “black zones” are the foundational state for access to the “Kingdom of God” (which is always within), however that is defined and however that is experienced. Capital would appear, then, to have its sights set on controlling and monetizing Pascal’s and Kant’s two infinities. Indeed, “God did not die, He was transformed into money” (Agamben, 2014). The great copyright robbery underway since around 2000 (Hugenholtz, 2000) races ahead as technology permits regimes of surveillance for collecting tribute or imposing fines, while the surveillance state takes care of negating civil rights or the rights of citizens. This dual campaign, by Capital and by State, represents a turning point for the very concept of the commons and civil society. The double threat for resistance or insurgency is the usual threat – Apocalypse (a new Verdun).

A version of this essay first appeared as Section I of Part I, Essay III, “Mnemonics: Elegant, Spare, Wintry,” in Gavin Keeney, Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art and Architecture (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014).

REFERENCES

Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974).

Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).

Giorgio Agamben and Peppe Savà, “‘God Didn’t Die, He was Transformed into Money’: An Interview with Giorgio Agamben,” Libcom, February 10, 2014, https://libcom.org/library/god-didnt-die-he-was-transformed-money-interview-giorgio-agamben-peppe-sav%C3%A0.

Avicenna, Liber de anima seu sextus de naturalibus, I:5, ed. Simone van Riet (Louvain and Leiden: Peeters and E.J. Brill, 1972).

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).

Étienne Gilson, La philosophie de saint Bonaventure (Paris: J. Vrin, 1924).

Fernand Hallyn, The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler, trans. Donald M. Leslie (New York: Zone Books, 1990).

Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2017).

Roland Hissette, ed., Enquête sur les 219 articles condamnés à Paris le 7 Mars 1277, Philosophes Médiévaux, XXII (Louvain and Paris: Publications Universitaires and Vander-Oyez, 1977).

P. Bernt Hugenholtz, “The Great Copyright Robbery: Rights Allocation in a Digital Environment,” Institute for Information Law, University of Amsterdam, 2000, https://www.ivir.nl/publicaties/download/thegreatcopyrightrobbery.pdf.

Hugh of Digne, “De finibus paupertatis,” Archivium Franciscanum Historicum 5 (1912): pp. 277-90.

Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts (Cleveland, OH: Meridian Books, 1954).

Armand A. Maurer, CSB, Medieval Philosophy, Revised edition (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, 1962).

Tomáš Nejeschleba, “Thomas Aquinas and the Early Franciscan School on the Agent Intellect,” in Verbum VI:I (2004): pp. 67-78.

John Francis Quinn, The Historical Constitution of St. Bonaventure’s Philosophy (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1973).

St. Bonaventure, The Works of Bonaventure, trans. J. De Vinck, 5 vols. (Paterson, NJ: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1960-1970).

Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, ed. David Leopold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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PART II

I. Personal Capital and Return

When a project is “before” Capital, seeking forms of benevolent capital, which by definition only exist buried within capitalist exploitation (across platforms and across institutions), and then fails to register with the powers that be as “of value,” there is the fall-back position of, or return to, personal capital – i.e., an existential justification for the work that redeems the work in the face of failure. Beckett’s “Fail, fail again, fail better” is of this order. Works that are of no use to Capital, while often dismissed as “neo-hermetic” (a claim often levelled at the avant-garde), will fail repeatedly in the attempt to find the necessary agency to go forward, while that forward motion will not depend entirely on external sources of benevolent capital.

“Before Capital” is not so much the test of the value of the work but a test of the merits of the work for Capital (for appropriation, expropriation, and assimilation). “Failure” before Capital is, therefore, the repeated step in the development of works in search of benevolent capital. The return to personal and symbolic capital is the return to the project as such, or to works for works. The author returns to the “Muse,” “Muse” signature gesture of the event of the emergence (incarnation) of the work. As a fictive ontology for works, “Muse” signals the cosmological, immemorial figures inhabiting the work – the constellation of forces and factors (lights, intelligences, aeons) that brought the project or work into being. “Muse” is the proverbial backstory for works.

Personal capital in search of the transpersonal inhabitation across works toward the life-work also represents not so much a banal investment of labour as the comprehensive configuration of what is irreducibly a confraternal order – origins for works always being multiple or polyvalent. Origins being half-unconscious, the conscious half is the artistic endeavour (labour), whereas the unconscious half is the name of the Muse (theft, appropriation, inspiration).

Return endlessly follows upon event, and “return” can be an inevitable aspect of the productive or generative élan of works that edge toward works for works. Event, Fall, Return (c.f., Badiou, Žižek) – while apparently setting up eternal recurrence for works – is often an element of the field of the work that is incomprehensible to authors, experienced but non-negotiable in the accounting houses of capitalization for works. Fidelity to such works (c.f., Badiou) is the key. Capital vanishes at such moments – symbolic or otherwise – and personal capital is the “zero degree” works pass through en route to archive, nominal extinction, or re-play. Cultural systems betray a half-conscious knowledge of this ancient generative economy, while it is also quite evident that the guardians and gatekeepers of cultural systems rely on this vague knowledge to manipulate cultural production in the pursuit of privileges. Avant-garde works are assimilated to forms of cultural patrimony once they are rendered harmless to patrimony or converted to historical artifacts.

What appears in this process of cyclical return from the search for benevolent capital is the delineation of the damaged ecosystems engaged – the forays into markets determining not the value of the work as work for works but the value of the work for capitalization across markets. This pernicious reduction of free intellectual inquiry to market ideology includes academic systems of exploitation (c.f., Harvey, Eagleton, Giroux) that masquerade as platforms open to all (the ubiquitous open calls), claiming to privilege works versus reputations, though increasingly these platforms spell out in excruciating detail the rules of engagement (generally formulated in language and terms reducible to “return on investment” or “deliverables”). Justification of research merit proceeds in such instances as “product development” for institutions plugged directly into external industries of one kind or another. In the Arts and Humanities, the games of expropriation via residency, fellowship, or exhibition, while indirectly playing to the vanity of all concerned, are often openly or covertly constructed according to networks of privilege that service the professoriate – the openly careerist maneuvers of key players directly linked to escalating opportunities for key players. Works for works (forms of free inquiry without imposed ideological bias) cancel this opportunistic gambit simply by existing as use-less to what is nothing other than an institutionalized form of the production of cultural capital masquerading as benevolence offered; offered nominally on behalf of authors and works. If truly “open,” such calls are benevolent insofar as they are not also ideologically sustained or “gamed” (set up in advance to bring in fellow travellers for those who act as gatekeepers). The ecosystems involved may be judged by the language games perpetuated. These games include the use of “linguistic agents” as denoted by Bourdieu et al., if the platform is sociologically biased, while any number of other “linguistic agents” may be brought into play to turn the operation toward “cultural hacking” or neo-avantgarde posturing. “Return to zero” for works qua free works is, then, the equivalent of return to resistance within the system, with the resultant electrical discharge producing new doors left ajar or new windows through which to pitch the proverbial paper airplane. That the majority of these doors and windows are electronic doors and windows is the fundamental trait for exposing the class who partake of such vectorial systems that consistently and progressively act as protective borders for privilege, and as filters for “discovery” of works to be appropriated. It is not authors who are of interest to the vectorial class and their enablers in academia and elsewhere, but works. And it is the accrual of works to the ledgers of the privileged that allows the game to move forward, with capture of works to systems the primary vehicle for the production of the matching precariat.

In most cases today truly free works are to be found outside of academia in both the accidental and the intentional wildernesses that form beyond the reach of Capital, in the most use-less of endeavors (e.g., poetry and literature). The irony is that while these use-less endeavors may undergo a renaissance or revitalization outside of academia, they will then begin to attract attention from within, and academia will attempt to reincorporate what it has formerly driven from its hallowed halls.

II. Ideology and Academic Networks

The extensive and insidious links between academia and various for-profit industries on the prowl for harvesting works from within academia for external capitalization is on display in the various internal and external offers for scholars to “sign on” to programs and events as guests. This includes the widening array of conferences, which may be judged or justified by their connections to industry or their distance from industry. Rarely do such opportunities offer the visiting scholar the freedom to do whatever s/he pleases. While this seems a foundational consideration for the Arts and Humanities, especially when understood as a super-discipline versus a discrete set of studies, the Arts and the Humanities historically offer two of the last places for something altogether “off the map” to be developed – e.g., works for works (orphaned or use-less works). If it is increasingly a matter of pleasing one’s masters in the age of the neo-liberalization of the so-called knowledge commons, the proliferation of networks between the art world (which has been thoroughly neo-liberalized) and academia (which is approaching complete capitulation to Capital) makes sense. Benevolent patronage may still exist within both worlds, but it will become increasingly difficult to locate until there is a widespread rebellion from within against the importation of market ideology to two worlds that once favoured free inquiry.

Atop this layer of manufactured significance for programs and platforms is the proliferation of institutes and “cross-disciplinary” activities led by scholars from within the fold of programs and disciplines that require external sources of “meaningful activity” to prop up the general lack of meaningful activity within academia other than the questionable production of platforms. These programs and platforms all substitute for research at the base, or for the absence of significance within disciplines that are internally exhausted. If PR-value reigns supreme within neo-liberalized academia, use-less works justified only by their abject and intentional uselessness will be either valorized as intellectual fashion statement or shunned as trivialities.

The ideological underpinnings of the discursive operations are generally spent generative causes that are also generally safe because they are spent causes – circularity of discursive appropriations the chief sign of the re-cycling of motivation in absence of the “Muse.” Thus, personal capital is almost always imported into academia by way of the residencies, fellowships, and conferences utilized to compensate for the moral vacuum within universities beholden to the production of degrees, the securing of reputations, and the fostering of the horizontal networks of procurement, production, and dissemination of equity that substitute for the creation of works for works. These networks are eminently careerist in nature, as are most all bespoke or custom-designed institutes, and the personnel is vested insofar as their presence delivers vertically organized and capitalized cultural goods. The conference leads to the book-publishing enterprises of for-profit companies allied with academic networks that feed the increasingly digitalized production of value (e.g., the proliferation of online journals and e-books), whereas the institutes lead to external funding by industry or non-profit organization toward the perpetuation of an ideological project (e.g., foundation grants for the mass digitalization of research, in whatever form that might take). The ideological underpinnings for such activities are in most cases crafted for public consumption as “progressive” or “liberal” causes, while they are quietly neo-liberal. The actual production of works then is incidental to the platform, and the platform is the primary means (primary venue) for leveraging works as intellectual property for regimes of privilege. “Author retains copyright” is a common refrain in most all instances of expropriation by academia of personal capital (e.g., author rights), appropriation from within or from without, while the author’s presence as co-production assistant within the networks more closely resembles a case of “work for hire” than research as such. “Author retains copyright” is relative nonetheless to the useful life of the work within the network or system of appropriation, with digitalization of works dialogically locking down all works submitted to platforms (“dialogically” in this case meaning that the work in question is the property of the author only when it is no longer of any use to the platform).

Reputations rise and fall in a vast, interconnected system that requires incessant replenishment of spent intellectual goods. Works are assimilated and mined for value (e.g., scalability) and forgotten or assimilated as fodder for the next-generation platform. Authors (and artists) are curated into oblivion and, if they are not assimilated to the machine as day labourers, replaced by the next generation of recruits trained to submit their wares in pursuit of holographic, stereophonic, or hyper-mediatized glory.

III. Inassimilable and Use-less Works

Work for works (i.e., free works) are first of all inassimilable and use-less to Capital. If they are also of no use to platforms, within the art world or within academia, they are paradoxically of maximum use for the development of alternatives. Shades of grey in this mathesis also suggest that some works might co-inhabit platforms or systems that are transitional states between parasitical and benevolent capital. Yet all such works are essentially developed on the performative-formalist side (as lived works), and they may be re-naturalized “downstream” in markets or sent “upstream” toward extant spectral ecosystems, so-called weeping meadows (c.f., Angelopoulos), where no market is to be found. In the latter case, the role of the utterly use-less work is to wear the appropriate crown of thorns – as martyred work. It is here that a Christic development occurs for works of such an order. There is no “sublunary” place of taking-place present, while the proverbial and dynamic absence of a place of taking-place ironically takes precedent. In the Arts and Humanities this empty “place” or “space” used to be called the avant-garde. The simple solution, without “scholastic” equivocation (c.f., Ockham, Scotus et al.), is the transfer of moral rights to works as such – with the knowledge commons as new-old “address” (place) for use-less works. With this transfer of rights to the commons comes the responsibility of the commons for the author or artist. Notably, collectivization without respect for the individual has been – historically – a disaster. That the disaster has occurred both on the left and on the right is well worth noting.

In the annals of literary and artistic history, for example, there are innumerable examples of such errant works belatedly assimilated to cultural patrimony. Yet they generally return only as mockery of their former selves – tidily commodified for consumption by the art and literary worlds, where they only half existed previously as aberrations (c.f., Debord, Marker et al.). What is self-evident in the age of hyper-mediatic performance for both scholarship and the arts is that works that head “upstream” will generally vanish in the process – appearing here and then appearing there, ultra-temporally, but having no “proper” home address. Chris Marker’s epistolary works are exemplary in this respect. The role of the author in such cases is transfigured by the orphaned work for works. Yet for very different reasons than the fate of authors under structuralist or post-structuralist critique (c.f., Saussure, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida), the author or artist does not exist in the multiple worlds consumed by neo-colonial capitalist conquest.

The search for benevolent capital advances with the work, on cat’s paws. The work for works inhabits multiple dimensions of socio-economic and socio-cultural intrigue simultaneously. It hovers here, and it dashes over there. It is cat’s meow and it is cat’s grin. Often it is “a grin without a cat” (c.f., Carroll, Marker). Benevolent capital approaches insofar as the work is captivating, beguiling, or reminiscent of something Capital regrets having destroyed – wildness in a sense, but primordiality as cipher for freedom from exploitation and domestication. The next-level paradox is that Capital may need that beguiling something to redeem itself – not to save itself, which is hardly in the best interest of all, but to sacrifice itself to a cause other than itself. Mimicking the sacrifice of aeons as theorized in Gnosticism, and suggesting a War in Heaven, concealed or vanquished prospects are revealed or reborn. Immemoriality and eschatology (c.f., Levinas, Derrida, Marion) reveal themselves as, secretly, one thing. Far from “immanentizing” the immemorial or the eschaton (a common complaint levelled against privileging that which formally transcends any direct relation with thought), both remain at a distance in works, effectively crossing works, and connoting the metric of the work (c.f., Agamben). Alternatively, criticism of such a nuanced view of immemoriality and eschatology indicates an aversion to non-relational works, or to works that remain wilfully unsituated or ill-situated in mere utilitarian orders. All utility is internalized, and all relations are sublated (c.f., Cacciari et al.). Notably, such works for works open onto elective nihilism, or forms of revelation and reverie (dream-states and anamnesis). The law disappears …

Can Capital step out of its own way? Can Capital facilitate its own redemption? Is the figure of benevolent capital a figment of the imagination (wishful thinking) or a figure eight within the ravages of rampant, bloodthirsty contemporary capitalism? The mining of the “commons” by Capital, while a long-standing affair, grows more desperate today as untapped resources to assimilate to the circuit of capital diminish. Additionally, there is the odd “mis-use” of the public domain or the commons, by Capital, to effectively “park” resources while awaiting a means (usually technological and legal) to convert collective capital into private capital. Rights for works as works is the corrective to this theft.

The hypostatization is evident. There is no one thing named Capital. Capital is a mask worn by souls – many waiting for another cause other than the worship of Mammon. The theological precepts are basically a-theological. There is no religion involved. There is only the hoped-for respite from centuries of hard-bitten penury for works, which always infers “for authors.” As all authors are, after all, mere day labourers, such also launches the necessary search for benevolent capital, while suggesting the transfer of rights to works, to benefit all concerned, is one way out of the present stalemate. The most abstruse work of all is to work on behalf of all. Artist and author, demoted over time to wage slave, represents Everyman. Shelley clearly knew this, while dodging creditors back in England, both before and when he drowned at sea off of Venice, Italy … Did he know it after he drowned? The life-work is a vector of another order. Certainly he left this impression.

Titian’s Hour returns at evening under the right atmospheric circumstances. The glow is spellbinding. Yet for many it is merely a postcard to mail home after a day trip elsewhere.

FINIS

Photo credit: “Trapped in the Victoria and Albert Museum,” London, England, 2018. Photo: Ishita Jain.

The post In Search of Benevolent Capital: Part II appeared first on P2P Foundation.

PART I

I. No Works For/Before Capital

Benevolent capital is not benevolent capitalism, the latter a contradiction in terms or an apparent oxymoron. Benevolent capitalism would seem to not exist, as such, even under the auspices of patronage and classical philanthropy, insofar as the latter operates as exception to capitalism while the former has suffered across centuries, if not millennia, the distortions induced in systems held in thrall to Capital – pre-modern forms included. As apparent oxymoron, “benevolent capitalism” invokes all of the latent and overt games of capture Capital plays with cultural production and labour (both material and immaterial). In the case of cultural production in the age of neo-liberal capitalism, those games include the production of platforms and networks of privilege that are constantly in pursuit of “content” or “data,” arguably what neo-liberal capitalism has reduced cultural production to.

Works that resist assimilation to Capital do not necessarily need to refuse all forms of capitalization. Non-monetary forms of capital are first-order representations of benevolent capital, whereas monetizing works for works versus for exploitation and expropriation suggests the representational field where capital may take innumerable inappropriable forms – “inappropriable” signalling the presence of an older order of cultural production that has, in most cases, long since been assimilated to Capital. “No works for/before Capital” then suggests forms of cultural production that either resist assimilation and appropriation to markets as “content” or utilize those markets and “delivery systems” toward entirely use-less ends for Capital per se. To invoke benevolent capital is, therefore, to secure for works semi-archaic and immemorial forms of capitalization that do not enter into the self-serving games of Capital. Yet given the present state of hyper-capitalist exploitation, it is highly possible that all future forms of benevolent capital are to be found through the chinks in the armour of Capital.

Such then is the potential for cryptocurrency and blockchain or distributed-ledger technologies as applied to works. Works developed in this manner may draw on the latency of forms of semi-archaic benevolent capital buried within the neo-liberal capitalist machinery of the world while never being able to fully exit the circuit of Capital.

It is this paradox that introduces the necessity of a full accounting for authors and artists of the vagaries and smokescreens of ecosystems associated with publication and exhibition systems within the twin worlds of the Arts and Humanities (e.g., the art world, the literary world, and the academic world). Both worlds suffer the same indignities today, mined by Capital for value, with the author and artist orphaned in the process, or de-funded by Capital, as judgment visited upon their otherwise use-less wares. Vague promises delivered to aspiring authors and artists by both worlds suggest that half the game is the promise of privilege of the order of the privileged (the vectorial class), yet endlessly deferred, privilege always offered, by definition, at the expense of the orphaned (the artistic precariat). The invitation and temptation, then, is to join the privileged and abandon the abandoned.

Any attempt at a correction to this stilted version of mining cultural production for inherent value (with explicit value hardly the game when the vast majority of works will never produce anything resembling “return on investment” and implicit value relevant only to exploiting works across platforms) requires a singular re-definition of terms of engagement in the form of the allocation of rights – author rights transferred to works, and works transformed to life-work (works for works). Works for works, as complex, opens onto collective rights. The necessary and hoped-for transformation of rights is stalled today due only to the fact that the vectorial class (and it must be clarified that the privileged include those who are in high positions within the art and academic worlds functioning as self-anointed or self-appointed gatekeepers to platforms) refuses a key article in the history of author rights – moral rights. It is the transfer of moral rights to works by/from authors that might correct present-day imbalances, yet only if that elective renunciation of rights by authors is followed by a system that prevents the presumption of such abandoned or transferred rights to exploitation by Capital. The point of transfer is the key; for the point of transfer is where the crimes of centuries have historically taken place. This “place” is the “place of taking-place” of/for Capital, with all of the attendant, twisted Greek-Mallarméan-Heideggerean etymologies and/or lexical mystifications one might wish to muster. It is the theft of “coming into presence” or “birth to presence” (aletheia, parousia, etc.) – of the “gift of the world” and the Gnostic “sacrifice of aeons.”

In such a scenario, where and when benevolent capital steps forth, parasitical or malevolent capital will step back and away – wary of the interloper, and no doubt perplexed in the process. This is far more than mere wishful thinking because, historically, avant-garde or radical works have often had avant-garde or radical patrons, whether individuals or institutions. But this is not an instance of the re-justification or reification of the non-profit sector of civil society or anarchistic processes of barter. Nor is it indicative of a black market or the dark web. The necessary measures require an entirely new methodology for exchange, for production, and for re-naturalizing works of an otherwise abstract, universalizing, and often-abstruse kind. The key terms in this abstruse political economy become “immemoriality” and “eschatology” (the “beginning” and the “end” of/for works that have no “home” address at the time of their “incarnation” as works). This de-personalization of the work for the life-work (the life of the work) brings with it half-forgotten maneuvers and measures buried within capitalist exploitation and partly the presumption of, or basis for, so-called non-profits or confraternal orders (c.f., Polanyi, Veblen et al.). The overriding figure of privilege returns – yet privilege as rights for works. Privilege as privilegio … De-personalization leads toward transpersonalization (c.f., Tzara, Simondon); and, notably, the latter term opens up whole new prospects for works to be developed as autonomous subjects – a re-subjectivization process that will also only work for certain kinds of works.

II. Symbolic Capital as Working Capital

The cryptic terms of engagement for work as life-work can only be developed existentially – en passant and in extremis. The abstruse call to works “of a certain kind” is also a call to works that counter practices associated with neo-liberalized finance capitalism. These practices function on the side of massive indeterminacy, and they take post-modern incommensurability to new heights. The irony and the pain are telltale. It is often also a neo-gothic repertoire of vampirism and sadism.

Therefore, all discursive games fall apart and the pragmatics of neo-realism collapse. There is no realism in the lower circles of Hell. Consigning souls to Hell is a fool’s errand – and such is the game of finance capitalism. Yet there is an inverse relation involved.

From Bourdieu we much launch ships to the proverbial elsewhere. Reciting and re-reciting the authorities of left critique will only favour the propagation of reputations and rhetoric. Rhetoric that is not lived rhetoric is idle and/or gratuitous. What is to be done? The Leninist question returns. Under-funded fellowships for scholars rise and fall like the seas. Revolutionary creditors hover, awaiting the crown jewels in return for financing the latest revolution to fail. Whether it takes ten years or one hundred years to fail is of no concern to creditors. Capitalism has presumed the rights of souls, and then transferred those rights to corporate fiat, which outlives mere subjects anyway, a spectral stamp with congealed blood for wax. Corporate fiat is piracy writ large – transition to enslavement for all. The work as life-work is pariah to edict, fiat, and law. This law.

The odd thing about parasitical capital is that it does not know how to produce works – it needs to cannibalize those works it can set its claws into. This is the role of the vectorial class, previously the managerial class. The odd thing about benevolent capital is that it only exists today as embedded in parasitical capitalism or as a result of parasitical capitalism – as nascent other state and/or address for works. Thus, the foremost game for works “of a certain kind” is to redeem forms of parasitical capitalism by converting them to forms of benevolent capital. What else is possible? This can only proceed incrementally, inexorably in some parallel trans-historical dimension, where the Arts and Humanities hit a primordial re-set button and everything turns golden, not unlike the evening in Venice, Italy – otherwise known as “Titian’s Hour.”

Valorous souls drop one by one, seduced by privilege. One by one becomes the thousands and the tens of thousands. Academia eats souls alive, consigning them to pits where they are enslaved in service to Research or Teaching. A few escape to alt-academia – as librarians. The art world devours works, one by one. The author or artist is left as a few bones on the desert of what used to be called the Real. Most are never heard from again, after assimilation to the carnivorous machine. Biennale, bespoke exhibition, art book, catalogue, festival – it matters not. The refuse pile at the end of the affair is almost always human refuse. Publishers devour souls, inhaling works across myriad platforms to extract data and rent, the book hardly mattering, the meta-data extremely valuable. Writing becomes a contract, the contract dictates terms, the terms are salubrious for the vectorial class. Physical book becomes electronic data, publicity machine manufactures reputations, vertical integration extrapolates maximum value across media, and celebrity status beckons or vanishes. Book returns to dust, dust breeds phantom regrets, and authors dust themselves off and rise again – reborn in another place, in another time, and in another work looking for a publisher.

To be continued …

Image credit: “Seeing and Hearing Things Again” (three-screen presentation, re-performance of “Library of Tears,” “Will It Cry?,” “Emptiness within Emptiness,” and “The End of CEPT as Viewed by Archangel St. Michael”), w/ C’est la CEPT Troupe, GIDC Bhavan, CEPT University, Ahmedabad, India, April 12, 2017. Photo: Harsh Bhavsar.

The post In Search of Benevolent Capital: Part I appeared first on P2P Foundation.

1/ The current legislation under review by the European Commission’s Digital Single Market Strategy regarding “neighboring rights”, to be voted on by the European Parliament in late March 2018, has little if anything to do with author rights

2/ All arguments about protecting revenue streams for publishers indicate that the true purpose is to fortify the rights of publishers (who have arrogated to themselves the rights of authors)

3/ The arguments from the public domain side against this legislation are equally problematic and suspect for the same reason that author rights are not part of the rationale for propping up the knowledge commons against the disputed proprietary rights of publishers

4/ The central issue, which is also hidden in plain sight, is – after all – the moral rights of authors (“Lockean natural rights”) as established in the Enlightenment and as enshrined in the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886)

5/ Both the EC and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) have shown no interest in addressing this set of rights, given the inherent abstract nature of such rights and given that both are operating on behalf of industry in a global IP campaign that resembles the “weaponizing” of IP rights

6/ Given that economic data (or any empirical proof) confirming that free copying of works or appropriation by platform cultures benefits the author is impossible to produce, whether justified through the murky term “transformative use” or “discoverability”, all such arguments, as used on both sides of the debate (by publishers to e-license copyrighted works and by advocates of Open Access to justify authors giving their works away for nothing) devolve to mere speculation based on the bias of the beneficiaries

7/ Given the origin of copyright in the Venetian Renaissance, via the granting of privilegio to authors for books published in the Republic of Venice, and given the almost immediate arrogation of privilegio by printer-publishers in the Republic of Venice, the arguments associated with “neighboring rights” today merely revisit historic arguments waged then against the damage done to authors and presses through illegal copying

8/ What has not advanced, and what needs to be fully disclosed, is how mass digitalization from both sides of this battleground has forced the lion’s share of authors today into a class conveniently labeled the “precariat” by critics of capitalism for the benefit of a global “vectorial class”

9/ What is less obvious regarding this widening chasm between the precariat and the vectorial class is that almost all academic proponents of fortifying the knowledge commons through an enforced neoliberalized open-access regime for scholarly works are part of the global vectorial class by virtue of participation in the production of platform cultures that decimate author rights from the so-called non-profit side, while “Capital” takes care of the destruction of author rights on the for-profit side

Photo by Spongehoe

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