not

Lecture at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2 November 2009

There is no longer an outside
The commons are inside the space of capitalism

If somebody violates an artwork protected by a Creative Commons licence, a ‘traditional’ tribunal is meant to intervene.
To defend the the commons we rely on the force of the public, on the public force — that is the State.
The ‘legal code’ of Creative Commons licences: “The work is protected by copyright”

A sort of new ‘capitalism without intellectual property’ (Google, Facebook) is emerging and supporting the flows of free culture produced by the digital multitudes.

If the new cultural commons want to escape the typical modern opposition between public and private, they have to focus on their productive power, on their living knowledge before it is turned into a legal object or a cognitive commodity.

In the school of Italian post-operaismo, similarly, a new understanding of rent emerged recently.
Within cognitive capitalism the leading business model is said to be based on rent rather than
profit. ‘The rent is the new profit’.

If rent is becoming the dominant model of the knowledge economy, which should be the political
response? Sabotage of value (like @ dotcom crash; mortgage crisis) — the sabotage of rent.

we support P2P practices as they represent a sabotage of cognitive and speculative rent on a massive scale. Target of knowledge sharing and peer-to-peer networks is the regime of rent rather than the copyright regime.

ACTA = new global IP enforcement norms

media korps razia stale cez americku administrativu free market dohody s najvacsimi ekonomikami sveta, pricom potom to bude pre mensie krajiny prekazkou v biznise ak to tiez nepodpisu… takto to chcu postupne presadit globalne… tym ze su to obchodne dohody, obidu tak narodne legislativy… hlavna vec tam vyzera byt povinny three strikes pre ICT (to je ze ak vlastnik autorskych prav trikrat upozorni ICT na nejakeho porusovatela, tak ho ten musi vypnut??), ale pise sa tam o ‘ISP’s third party liability’, cize to znamena ze to za vlastnikov prav vlastne budu musiet riesit internetovi provideri, co si bude od nich ziadat nalezite opatrenia (??) zaroven technologicke a telecom korps su samozrejme proti, ale content korps vyzeraju mat lepsi lobbing…. za amikov to riesi USTR (co je kvazi ministerstvo obchodu), dohodu chcu mat uzavretu uz dalsi rok…
dalsie kolo rokovani bude @ Mexican IP Office

—

internet provisions are all about imposing a set of copyright industry demands on the global Internet,
including obligations on ISPs to adopt Three Strikes Internet disconnection policies,
and a global expansion of DMCA-style TPM laws.

Internet provisions will go beyond existing international treaty obligations

First, according to the leaks, ACTA member countries will be required to provide for third-party (Internet Intermediary) liability. This is not required by any of the major international IP treaties – not by the 1994 Trade Related Aspects of IP agreement, nor the WIPO Copyright and WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty. However, US copyright owners have long sought this.

To get the benefit of the ACTA safe harbors, Internet intermediaries will need to follow notice and takedown regimes, and put in place policies to deter unauthorized storage and transmission of allegedly copyright infringing content.

First, the US government appears to be pushing for Three Strikes to be part of the new global IP enforcement regime which ACTA is intended to create – despite the fact that it has been categorically rejected by the European Parliament and by national policymakers in several ACTA negotiating countries, and has never been proposed by US legislators.

Three Strikes/ Graduated Response is the top priority of the entertainment industry.
The content industry has sought this since the European office of the Motion Picture Association began touting Three Strikes as ISP “best practice” in 2005. Indeed, the MPAA and the RIAA expressly asked for ACTA to include obligations on ISPs to adopt Three Strikes policies in their 2008 submissions to the USTR. The USTR apparently listened and agreed, disregarding the concerns raised by both the US’s major technology and telecom companies and industry associations (who dwarf the US entertainment industry), and public interest groups and libraries.

The safe harbors in the US Copyright law require ISPs to adopt and reasonably implement a policy for termination of “repeat infringers” “in appropriate circumstances”. US law currently gives ISPs considerable flexibility to determine what are “appropriate circumstances” justifying the termination of a customer’s Internet account. If the leak reports are correct, this would no longer be true. Instead, ISPs would be required to automatically terminate a customer upon a rightsholders’ repeat allegation of copyright infringement at a particular IP address.

“The Commission appears to be opening up ISPs to third party liability, even though the European Parliament has expressly said this mustn’t happen,”

Last, but by no means least. ACTA signatories will be required to adopt both civil and criminal legal sanctions for copyright owners’ technological protection measures, in line with the US-Korea (and previous) FTA obligations. They will also be required to include a ban on the act of circumvention of technological protection measures, and a ban on the manufacture, import and distribution of circumvention tools.

The Office of the USTR has chosen to negotiate ACTA as a sole executive agreement. Because of a loophole in democratic accountability on sole executive agreements, the Office of the USTR can sign off on an IP Enforcement agenda without any formal congressional involvement at all.

cau palo! by ma zaujimalo co si myslis o tomto, mozno ta to zaujme – suvisi s temou individuacie – na druhej strane sa to da tiez citat ako ezotericka literatura -)

najprv hovori o ‘flexibilnej subjektivite’, ktoru datuje od protestnych hnuti v 60s, a ktoru dnes povazuje za vsadepritomnu:

We all now have available a flexible and processual subjectivity as instituted by the counter-cultural movements; In the present, the most common destiny of flexible subjectivity and of the freedom of creation that accompanies it is not the invention of forms of expression motivated by an attention to sensations that signal the effects of the other’s existence within our resonant body. What guides us in this creation of territories for our post-Fordist flexibility is an almost hypnotic identification with the images of the world broadcast by advertising and mass culture.

[..] By offering ready-made territories to subjectivities rendered fragile by deterritorialization, these images tend to soothe their unrest, thus contributing to the deafness of their resonant body, and therefore to its invulnerability to the affects of the time that are presented within it. But that may not be the most deadly aspect of this politics of subjectivation, which instead is the very message that such images invariably convey, independently of their style or their target-public. At stake here is the idea that there exist paradises, that these are now in this world and not beyond it, and above all, that certain people have the privilege of inhabiting them. What is more, such images transmit the illusion that we could be one of these VIPs, if we simply invested all our vital energy – our desire, affect, knowledge, intellect, eroticism, imagination, action, etc. – in order to actualize these virtual worlds of signs in our own existence, through the consumption of the objects and services they propose to us.

[..] In other words, what the Western idea of a promised paradise amounts to is a refusal of life in its immanent nature as an impulse to continuous processes of creation and differentiation. In its terrestrial version, capital has replaced God in his function as keeper of the promise, and the virtue that makes us worthy of it now becomes consumption: this is what constitutes the fundamental myth of advanced capitalism.

…a potom cast co ma zaujima, kde hovori o subjektivite v post-totalitnych krajinach:

If we approach the totalitarian regimes (Latin America, Eastern Europe) not by their visible or macropolitical side, but instead by their invisible or micropolitical side, we can see that what characterizes such regimes is the pathological rigidity of the identity principle. [..] Destructively conservative, the totalitarian states go much further than a simple scorn or censorship of the expressions of the resonant body: they obstinately seek to disqualify and humiliate them, to the point where the force of creation, of which such expressions are the product, is so marked by the trauma of this vital terrorism that it finally blocks itself off, and is thereby reduced to silence.

It is not hard to imagine that the meeting of these two regimes makes up a scenario even more vulnerable to the abuses of pimping: in its penetration to totalitarian contexts, cultural capitalism took advantage of the experimental past which was exceptionally audacious and singular in many of those countries; but above all, it took advantage of the wounds inflicted on the forces of creation by the blows they had suffered. The new regime presented itself not only as the system that could welcome and institutionalize the principle of the production of subjectivity and culture by the movements of the 1960s and 70s, as had been the case in the United States and in the countries of Western Europe. In the countries under dictatorships it gained an extra power of seduction: its apparent condition as a savior come to liberate the energy of creation from its bonds, to cure it of its debilitated state, allowing it to reactivate and manifest itself again.

..cize tuzba po identifikacii s medializovanymi rajmi je v posttotalitnych krajinach este silnejsia ako na zapade ‘vdaka’ silne konzervativnej politike identity pocas diktatury..

ide len o esej, nema to tam nicim moc podlozene, ale aj tak mi to pride zaujimave.. hm… treba to brat tak ze Rolnik je (brazilska) psychoanalyticka…. (btw s Guattarim napisala knihu o mikropolitike)

http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/1106/rolnik/en

– till early 60s: disciplinary Fordist regime; politics of identity reigned in subjectivity; rejection of a resonant body;
– then crisis – cultural movements called for “l’imagination au pouvoir”
– new: * flexible subjectivity; “counter-culture”; radical experimentation with modes of existence and cultural creation which shattered the “bourgeois” lifestyle at its politics of desire, with its logic of identity, its relation to otherness and its culture;
– today: we all now have available a flexible and processual subjectivity as instituted by the counter-cultural movements; In the present, the most common destiny of flexible subjectivity and of the freedom of creation that accompanies it is not the invention of forms of expression motivated by an attention to sensations that signal the effects of the other’s existence within our resonant body. What guides us in this creation of territories for our post-Fordist flexibility is an almost hypnotic identification with the images of the world broadcast by advertising and mass culture.
+
By offering ready-made territories to subjectivities rendered fragile by deterritorialization, these images tend to soothe their unrest, thus contributing to the deafness of their resonant body, and therefore to its invulnerability to the affects of the time that are presented within it. But that may not be the most deadly aspect of this politics of subjectivation, which instead is the very message that such images invariably convey, independently of their style or their target-public. At stake here is the idea that there exist paradises, that these are now in this world and not beyond it, and above all, that certain people have the privilege of inhabiting them. What is more, such images transmit the illusion that we could be one of these VIPs, if we simply invested all our vital energy – our desire, affect, knowledge, intellect, eroticism, imagination, action, etc. – in order to actualize these virtual worlds of signs in our own existence, through the consumption of the objects and services they propose to us.

What we are faced with here is a new élan for the idea of paradise developed by Judeo-Christian religions: the mirage of a smoothed-over, stable life under perfect control. This kind of hallucination has its origin in the refusal of one’s vulnerability to the other and to the deterritorrializing turbulence that he or she provokes; and also in the disdain for fragility that necessarily derives from such an experience. This fragility is nonetheless essential because it indicates the crisis of a certain diagram of sensibility, its modes of expression, its cartographies of meaning. By disdaining fragility, it does not call up the desire for creation anymore; instead it provokes a sentiment of humiliation and shame whose result is the blockage of the vital process. In other words, what the Western idea of a promised paradise amounts to is a refusal of life in its immanent nature as an impulse to continuous processes of creation and differentiation. In its terrestrial version, capital has replaced God in his function as keeper of the promise, and the virtue that makes us worthy of it now becomes consumption: this is what constitutes the fundamental myth of advanced capitalism. In such a context, it is at the very least mistaken to consider that we lack myths today: it is precisely through our belief in this religious myth of neoliberalism, that the image-worlds produced by this regime turn into concrete reality in our own existence.

This kind of pimping of the creative force is what has been transforming the planet into a gigantic marketplace, expanding at an exponential rate, either by including its inhabitants as hyperactive zombies or by excluding them as human trash.

The seducer conjures up a spellbinding idealization that leads the seduced to identify with the seducer and submit to him: that is to say, to identify with and submit to the aggressor, impelled by an inner desire, in hopes of being recognized and admitted into the seducer’s world.

even greater in the countries of Latin America and Eastern Europe which, like Brazil, were under totalitarian regimes at the moment when financial capitalism took hold. Let us not forget that the “democratic opening” of these countries, which took place during the 1980s, was partially due to the advent of the post-Fordist regime, whose flexibility could only encounter the rigidity of the totalitarian systems as an obstacle.

If we approach the totalitarian regimes not by their visible or macropolitical side, but instead by their invisible or micropolitical side, we can see that what characterizes such regimes is the pathological rigidity of the identity principle. This holds for totalitarianisms of the Right and the Left, since from the viewpoint of the politics of subjectivation such regimes are not so different.

For them, such a threshold does not summon up an urgency to create, but on the contrary, to preserve the established order at any price. Destructively conservative, the totalitarian states go much further than a simple scorn or censorship of the expressions of the resonant body: they obstinately seek to disqualify and humiliate them, to the point where the force of creation, of which such expressions are the product, is so marked by the trauma of this vital terrorism that it finally blocks itself off, and is thereby reduced to silence

It is not hard to imagine that the meeting of these two regimes makes up a scenario even more vulnerable to the abuses of pimping: in its penetration to totalitarian contexts, cultural capitalism took advantage of the experimental past which was exceptionally audacious and singular in many of those countries; but above all, it took advantage of the wounds inflicted on the forces of creation by the blows they had suffered. The new regime presented itself not only as the system that could welcome and institutionalize the principle of the production of subjectivity and culture by the movements of the 1960s and 70s, as had been the case in the United States and in the countries of Western Europe. In the countries under dictatorships it gained an extra power of seduction: its apparent condition as a savior come to liberate the energy of creation from its bonds, to cure it of its debilitated state, allowing it to reactivate and manifest itself again.