It occurs to me that it would be good to post this last view of Spinoza offered by Richard Rorty, a revision of an earlier papers he had written. I have not compared the two versions so I can make no claim to changes that Rorty came to,  but Rorty offered me the piece possibly still in draft form to represent his thoughts on Spinoza in the last months of his life – I did not realize he was ill.

To add some reflective thoughts on this version of Spinoza offered by Rorty, although I significantly disagree with a main tenet of his objection, that Spinoza placed “no value” on metaphor, which you find here:

He says, for example, that when the Bible tells us that God opened the windows of the heavens, all it is really saying is that it rained very hard. (TPT, p. 44) For Spinoza, metaphor has no value. Like the imagination, metaphor is something to be overcome.

reading this piece actually started me thinking rigorously about Spinoza and metaphor, upon which I wrote several times, perhaps most strictly in the post Spinoza and the Metaphoric Rise of the Imagination. In this I also feel that Rorty misses something important in Spinoza as he attempts to parse out when we are transcending our finitude and when we are bound by the “language of our tribe”:

One can put this latter point in Habermasian terms by saying that Hegel’s historicism almost, but not quite, enabled him to abandon subject-centered reason for communicative reason. To abandon subject-centered reason is to abandon the idea that clarity can substitute for consensus–the idea that the philosopher can circumvent the language of his or her tribe by finding a short-cut to Truth. It is to abandon the conviction that we shall recognize truth when we see it–an idea which was basic to Spinoza’s thought and which he abbreviated as the doctrine that truth is self-certifying. Spinoza claimed that a perfect and adequate idea—sigillum sui et falsi–could be seen to be such, and therefore seen to be true, simply by possessing it. (Ethics, II, Def. 4 and Prop.13)

Metaphor itself is in a sense circumventing the language of one’s tribe, a way quite akin to holding to the non-representable Truth  – for instance I have always found the linguistic studies of Achilles’s rule-breaking protest speech in the Iliad provoking, even in the same vein I ventured experimentally upon an Antigone solution to language transgression which suggest that there is both a subject-transgressing and language transgressing ethic to Truth commitment. And I think it incorrect to think that Spinoza took a view of the Truth that was in any way Representationalist, or vision-oriented, especially in a way that fixed the “subject’. As he insisted, we must “avoid falling into pictures” (E2p48s) in any Cartesian sense, rather it is our affirmations and denials that structure us and express our powers. Despite what Rorty fears, one does not possess the Truth in Spinoza, that can be certain.

The way that I see it, as Rorty tries to isolate the social bonds of conversability from finitude-escaping in Spinoza I think he misses the way that Spinoza grasps both in one hand without devaluing either in just the same way as he does in his treatment of the “two languages” of the Attributes. For Spinoza one is never detached from one’s community of fellow citizens, human beings and languages, anymore than one is detached from oxygen and atmosphere. One is never in a subject-oriented way staring into the Truth against the truths of your tribe so to speak, but is always caught in variable degrees of power and pleasure, degrees that ultimately undermine any absolute sense of subject.  Rorty in his sensitivity to Truth-hawking fails to see how the embrace of one – the Truth – by Spinoza’s argument enforces (rather than reduces) the other, something that Balibar does an excellent job of illustrating in a braid of Reason and Passion. But this is perhaps just another way of me saying that Rorty is even more of a Spinozist than he realizes as Spinoza would affirm all the values he most cherishes.

Mostly though given that this essay comes back to me due to some Rorty discussion we have been having over at Deontologistics, Rating Philosophers, I wanted to post it again to cenotaph the pleasure of knowing Rorty through his books, and the generosity he showed in the very brief email discussions we had when he was living, given that I was no one of standing. Perhaps he is as much an authentic inheritor of Spinoza’s legacy as anyone.

SPINOZA’S LEGACY, by Richard Rorty

[This is a shortened and revised version of the first of two Spinoza Lectures given at the University of Amsterdam in 1997. The longer version appeared under the title “Is it desirable to love truth?” in Richard Rorty, Truth, politics and ‘post-modernism’ (Assen: Ven Gorcum, 1997).]

If one thinks of philosophy as the love of wisdom, of wisdom as the grasp of truth, and of truth as the accurate representation of an order that exists independently of human language and human history, then may well doubt whether philosophy is possible. Important twentieth-century intellectual movements have denied the existence of such an order. I shall use the term “pragmatism” to characterize this denial, because the alternative—“post-modernism”—has been damaged by profligate overuse.

The quarrel between the pragmatists and their predecessors that has emerged over the last hundred years is something new. It gradually took shape as a result of attempts to resolve an older quarrel—the one that Plato said was between the gods and the giants (that is, between philosophers like Plato himself and materialists like Democritus). That quarrel was about what the natural order is like, not about whether there is such a thing. In what follows, I shall argue that Spinoza’s attempt to overcome Cartesian dualism is the beginning of a train of thought that eventually leads to pragmatism, and thus to the replacement of the old quarrel by a new one.

Plato believed that grasping the natural order of things can bring about blessedness–a kind of happiness of which the animals are incapable, and which results from the realization that something central to human beings is also central to the universe. Blessedness, in this sense, consists in the realization that the intrinsic nature of the universe is on our side.

The materialists also believe that wisdom consists in the grasping of the natural order of things, but they think that no comfort can be derived from contemplating this order. We can derive practical, utilitarian profit from grasping the natural order, but we cannot find consolation in doing so. Mechanistic materialism’s picture of the universe gives us only the sort of cold intellectual satisfaction experienced by Euclid—the kind produced by having successfully brought order to a confusing variety of apparently unrelated items. It cannot produce a sense of harmony between human aspirations and non-human things.

This quarrel was renewed in early modern philosophy when mechanistic accounts of the natural order triumphed over Aristotelian hylomorphic and teleological accounts. In this period, it is exemplified by the opposition between Hobbes and Spinoza. Both men tried to come to terms with an account of the natural order which seems to leaves no place for the kind of happiness that Plato believed human beings might come to have.

Hobbes’s solution was that human beings must use artifice to do what nature cannot do: they must construct a second, political, order, in order to become less fearful and less miserable. Politics, rather than philosophical contemplation, is our only recourse. But Spinoza thought that the new, mechaniistic, account of the natural order could be reconciled with Plato’s ambition–the attainment of blessedness through increased knowledge.

Spinoza’s way of reconciling the new explanations of the way things worked with the hope of such blessedness was to say that there were two equally valid ways of describing the universe: a description in terms of matter and a description in terms of mind. God or Nature could be viewed with equal adequacy under the attribute of extension and under the attribute of thought.

Before Spinoza, it had seemed that one had to choose sides: the gods and the giants could not both be right. If reality was simply atoms and void, then the hope of blessedness was vain. Spinoza claimed that one did not have to choose between the body and the spirit, for the two were, properly understood, one. The natural order, he suggested, is expressed in many ways, only two of which—extension and thought–we are able to grasp. The order and connection of corpuscles is the same as the order and connection of ideas. The mind knows only insofar as the body prospers, and conversely.

Spinoza’s Ethics is filled with propositions that would have struck Plato as paradoxical, as when he tells us that “The more we understand particular things, the more we understand God” (V, Prop. 24). Throughout the Ethics, Spinoza insists that the ascetics are wrong: the more active the body is, the more penetrating the mind. Bodily activity, the interaction of the body with many different things, goes hand-in-hand with the ascent of the mind toward God. Spinoza is friendlier to the body than any previous admirer of Plato. He is also friendlier to Democritus. He urges us not to be discouraged, as Socrates was, by the absence of good teleological explanations of natural events. For the more you understand about the purely mechanical order and connection of those atoms, the more your mind comes to resemble that of God.

Spinoza’s reconciliation of body and mind, matter and spirit, relies on the notion of equally valid alternative descriptions of the same reality”. But that notion contains the seeds of its own destruction. For once we allow it into philosophy, the very idea of the natural order is in danger. So, therefore, is the idea of philosophy as the quest for knowledge of what is really real.

Before Spinoza it was taken for granted that any two competing descriptions of anything could be compared in point of adequacy. The less adequate description could then be deemed a description of appearance, and the more adequate a description of reality. But as soon as one deploys the idea of equally adequate alternative descriptions, one will wonder whether it matters whether one is talking about the same reality in two equally valid vocabularies, or about two different appearances of the same underlying reality. As soon as one begins to raise that question, one begins the slide from Spinoza’s utterly knowable universe to Kant’s unknowable thing-in-itself. For if two irreconcilable descriptions can both somehow be valid, is there any reason to believe that either has anything to do with things as they are in themselves–things as undescribed?

Once one raises the latter question, one is on the brink of a slippery slope.. As soon as one stops saying, with Plato, that the body and the atoms are mere appearances of something else, and says instead that they are the universe described in one very useful way among other very useful ways, one may wonder if there is any better test of a descriptive vocabulary than its utility for human purposes. Perhaps Protagoras had a point: maybe man is the measure of all things. Why not think of descriptive vocabularies as tools rather than attempts at representational accuracy? Why not drop the question of how things are in themselves, and instead devote oneself to the question of which descriptive vocabularies get us what we want? The slide from Kant’s unknowable thing-in-itself to Nietzsche’s and William James’ pragmatism thus becomes as precipitous as the slide from Spinoza to Kant.

Pragmatists suggest that to have an order is simply to be described in a language, and that no language is any more natural–any closer to the way things really are–than any other. Any descriptive vocabulary comprehensive enough to relate lots of the things we talk about to lots of other such things is a description of an ordered universe. But once one starts thinking in terms of equally valid descriptions, the idea that nature might have a preferred self-description begins to seem merely quaint. Nature under a description will always exhibit an order. But nature undescribed in any human language? That is simply the thing-in-itself–an utterly useless notion, a philosopher’s plaything, a toy rather than a tool.

In short, the more one thinks about alternative languages for talking about nature, the less need there is to think about the nature of nature. The possibility arises that one might become blessed by contriving a new language for human beings to speak, rather than by getting in touch with something non-human. The old idea that blessedness can be obtained by getting in touch with a natural order begins to be replaced by the new idea that blessedness might be obtained by finding a new way to talk. Hobbes’ suggestion that artifice is needed to do what nature cannot do begins to sound more plausible.

This suggestion was taken up by the Romantics, who attempt to achieve blessedness by self-creation—by becoming a lamp rather than a mirror. Once one begins to think of languages as artifacts, it seems natural to supplement Hobbes’ account of the genesis of political artifacts can be supplemented by Shelley’s account of the role of the poetic imagination in intellectual and moral progress.

The effect of thinking about language is to turn the attention of philosophers away from the natural sciences. By the time of Shelley and Hegel, mathematics and physics no longer dominate the philosophical scene. The willingness to talk Galilean mechanics as a paradigmatic intellectual achievement, which was common to Hobbes and Spinoza, begins to seem quaint. For Kant had already suggested that the language of natural science should be thought of as useful for some purposes and not for others: the vocabulary deployed by Verstand has little connection with that deployed by praktische Vernunft. The description of the world in terms of atoms and the void is obviously good for technology, but useless for morality and for poetry. But technological purposes have no natural priority others. One could claim they do only by reviving the appearance-reality distinction that Spinoza’s notion of equally adequate descriptions had undermined.

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I have been singling out one element in Spinoza’s thought–the idea of equally valid description in different languages—and suggesting how it can be seen a turning-point in the history of philosophy. It is the point at which one begins to stop looking backward to Plato and Democritus, and starts looking forward to Romanticism, Nietzsche, and pragmatism. But looking at Spinoza’s role in the history of philosophy in this way is, of course, to neglect Spinoza’s own deepest conviction: that every apparent diversity will be resolved when one takes a larger view: that the more things are related to one another, the less problematic they become.

Spinoza thought that there is always a hidden unity to be found behind every apparent variety. The success of mathematical physics at finding simple and elegant laws confirmed a view he also expressed in theological and political terms: he urged behind the many vocabularies in which men speak of God and of the socio-political order there is a single natural order to be discerned. Every way of worshiping God, like each way of ordering society, has the same end. To believe otherwise, Spinoza thought, is to let the imagination take the place of the intellect.

Although Spinoza was less ascetic, friendlier to the body, than had previously seemed compatible with the pursuit of blessedness, he was no friendlier to the imagination, or to poetry, or to artifice, than were Plato and Savanarola at their worst. Though the human body had been redeemed by Galileo’s discoveries of how matter worked, the imagination had not. The human body is redeemed only when seen under the aspect of eternity, as a feature on the face of the whole universe. But the divine mind—the counterpart, under the attribute of thought, of the face of the material universe– has no imagination. It is literal-minded. It has no occasion to speak in metaphors. So, Spinoza thought, the less we humans use metaphors, the greater our chances of blessedness.

Spinoza’s hostility to metaphor and artifice is clearest in the Theologico-Political Treatise. In that book, he helped prepare the way for the Enlightenment’s ecumenical conviction that all religions come down to the same thing. The differences between them are merely differences in the local situations of human beings, and of the consequent differences in their imaginations. Trying to break free of fundamentalist literalism, Spinoza tries to translate Scripture from the language of the imagination into something more like the language of the intellect. He says, for example, that when the Bible tells us that God opened the windows of the heavens, all it is really saying is that it rained very hard. (TPT, p. 44) For Spinoza, metaphor has no value. Like the imagination, metaphor is something to be overcome.

Just as truth is one though unfortunately expressed in diverse metaphors, so true religion is one, though prophecies are many. “The power of prophecy”, Spinoza says, “implies not a peculiarly perfect mind, but a peculiarly vivid imagination”. (TPT, 19) Religious ceremonies are many, but blessedness is one. “Ceremonies are no aid to blessedness, but only have reference to temporal prosperity” (TPT, 70). Christ was an improvement on Moses because “he taught only universal moral precepts, and [therefore] promises a spiritual instead of a temporal reward.” (TPT, Elwes translation, 70) “The nature of natural divine law,” he says, is “universal or common to all men, for we have deduced it from universal human nature” (61), and “it does not depend on the truth of any historical narrative whatsoever.” Adam could have as good a grasp of the divine law and of human nature as we ourselves, for history has added nothing to human knowledge, other than an increased ability to gain “temporal rewards”.

Metaphor, history and diversity are firmly relegated by Spinoza to the realm of what, following Descartes, he thinks of as confused ideas. New metaphors can only heap confusion on confusion. The eternal, the true, and the clear are names for the same thing: God or Nature rightly understood, understood as a whole rather than in part. Spinoza is an utterly convinced adherent of the doctrine Kierkegaard called “Socratism”: the historical moment does not matter, for the teacher is merely an occasion. What Christ said in parables can better be said more geometrico.

Hegel said that nobody can be a philosopher who is not first a Spinozist. He meant, among other things, that nobody can take philosophy–as opposed to poetry and prophecy–seriously who does not hope to see everything converge, come together, form a systematic unity. To be a philosopher in this sense, you have to yearn for a natural order. You need to take the reality-appearance distinction, and the literal-metaphorical distinction, very seriously indeed.

Paradoxically, enough, however, it was Hegel who, following up on Vico and Herder, suggested that philosophers take historical narratives seriously. He was the first to make plausible the idea that constructing such a narrative might yield better results than proceeding more geometrico. His own narratives suggest the possibility that we can let the distinction between earlier ideas and later ideas take the place of the Cartesian distinction between the confused ideas of the imagination and the clear ideas of the intellect. This proposal was taken up by Nietzsche and Heidegger. Nietzsche’s narrative about the West’s liberation from Platonism, and Heidegger’s counter-narrative, are at the heart of their respective philosophies. If Hegel brought historical narrative into philosophy, both by precept and example, Nietzsche and Heidegger brought metaphor into it. Those two helped us break down the barriers between philosophy and poetry, and overcome Plato’s conviction that philosophy and poetry are related as the higher to the lower.

As long as languages are viewed, as they were in the seventeenth century, as alternative ways of expressing the same limited range of ideas, it will be hard to take either history or metaphor seriously. It will be easy to think that philosophy’s task is to rise above diversity and to seek simplicity of utterance. But Hegel helped us get rid of the seventeenth century’s “way of ideas” by casting doubt on the Cartesian notion of “clarity and distinctness” and the Lockean notion of “simplicity”. He was, as Wilfrid Sellars remarked, the great foe of immediacy. Yet Hegel was unable to take the step that Nietzsche and Heidegger went on to take–the step away from quasi-scientific sysematicity. From the point of view of post-¦Nietzschean thought, Hegel looks like a man with one foot in each camp: historicist enough to have become a pragmatist, yet Platonist enough to have remained a metaphysician.

One can put this latter point in Habermasian terms by saying that Hegel’s historicism almost, but not quite, enabled him to abandon subject-centered reason for communicative reason. To abandon subject-centered reason is to abandon the idea that clarity can substitute for consensus–the idea that the philosopher can circumvent the language of his or her tribe by finding a short-cut to Truth. It is to abandon the conviction that we shall recognize truth when we see it–an idea which was basic to Spinoza’s thought and which he abbreviated as the doctrine that truth is self-certifying. Spinoza claimed that a perfect and adequate idea—sigillum sui et falsi–could be seen to be such, and therefore seen to be true, simply by possessing it. (Ethics, II, Def. 4 and Prop.13)

The idea that metaphor and imagination will never be eliminated, and that moral progress is made possible by the imagination producing ever new metaphors, chimes with the idea that rationality is a matter of finding agreement among human beings, rather than of discovering which ideas are adequate to reality. For now the political problem–the problem of creating social cooperation between human beings–becomes a problem of tolerating alternative fantasies rather than of eliminating fantasy in favor of truth. The question is not how to get human beings to live in accordance with nature but of how to get them to live in the same community with people those who have very different notions about what is most important in human life.

In this respect, Habermas and Dewey are the heirs of Hobbes–of the idea that political artifice replaces philosophical contemplation as the source of a higher, specifically human, form of happiness. The thesis that the hope for objectivity is nothing more nor less than a hope for intersubjective agreement goes hand in hand with the thesis that no language is more adequate to reality than any other language. But that means giving up the distinction between clear and confused ideas. There is no room for that distinction once one gives up the correspondence theory of truth.

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So far I have been suggesting a way of looking at the development of philosophical thought since Spinoza’s time. I shall conclude by turning to the question I broached at the outset: of whether a pragmatist–someone who has given up the goal of achieving an accurate representation of the natural order of things–can still love wisdom? What, if anything, can a pragmatist, mean by “loving truth”, or by “achieving wisdom”?

The difference between the pragmatists and their opponents is that between treating the capitalized noun “Truth” as an unhappily hypostatized adjective and as the name of something that deserves to be loved. On the pragmatist view, the adjective “true” is a perfectly useful tool, but the use of the noun “Truth” as the name of an object of desire is a relic of an earlier time: the time in which we believed that there was a natural order to be grasped.

I have been arguing that Spinoza’s suggestion that two vocabularies which cannot be translated into one another may nevertheless be equally valid opened the door led to pragmatism, and thus to doubt about the idea of an object called “The Truth”. But if truth not a possible object of love, then it would seem that Socrates and Spinoza were simply deceived. . That is an insufferably condescending way to describe men for whom most of us feel an instinctive and deep attraction.

This was a perplexity Nietzsche experienced. He sometimes speaks of Socrates as the sardonic iconoclast who betrayed the tragic sense of human greatness, and thus diminished us. But elsewhere he praises him as a model of intellectual honesty. Analogously, Nietzsche sometimes pays Spinoza the highest compliment he can imagine by calling him his own precursor. (Letter to Overbeck, July 30, 1881) but sometimes describes him as “a sophisticated vengeance-seeker and poison-brewer” (Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 25). In the latter mood, Nietzsche thinks of Spinoza as someone who presented his own heart’s desire as if it were the product of cold, impersonal, inquiry. (BGE 5).

Nietzsche wanted, but did not find, a way of praising the courageous daring of the lives lived by Socrates and Spinoza, while continuing to reject the rhetoric of truth-seeking both employed. The awkward position in which he was placed by his instinctive sympathy with these two figures was a symptom of his vacillation about truth. It is not easy to reconcile Nietzsche’s repeatedly proclaimed love of knowledge and truth with his perspectivism and his pragmatism. It is as easy to find passages in which Nietzsche says contradictory things about Truth as it is to find passages in which he says contradictory things about Socrates or Spinoza.

A pragmatist like myself who is also an admirer of Spinoza has to find some other reason to praise Spinoza than his God-intoxication, his overwhelming desire to emend his intellect in order to achieve union with the divine mind. The best solution to this problem, I think, is to construe the love of Truth as an attitude toward one’s fellow human beings rather than as an attitude toward something that transcends humanity and its history. Then one can praise Spinoza for his conversability rather than for his desire to transcend finitude.

When we praise a scientist or scholar for the love of Truth what we often have in mind is simply her open-mindedness: her curiosity about opinions different from their own, tolerance for the existence of such opinions, and willingness to modify their own views. When we say that someone loves truth more than self we sometimes mean simply that he or she respects his or her colleagues enough to prefer a view with which they can all, freely and peaceably, come to agree upon to the view he or she herself presently holds. Construed in this way, the love of Truth is simply conversability—a tolerant absence of fanaticism, a willingness to hear the other side.

The affection Spinoza generates in his readers is the sort we feel for someone who brings out the best in us by assuring us that there is something in what we say, that we are guilty of nothing more than premature enthusiasm. Spinoza, the critic of asceticism, does not chastise us, but instead advises us how we can more frequently experience hilaritas (an affect which, Spinoza said, cannot be in excess.). We cherish Spinoza for some or the same reasons we admire Hume, a philosopher with whose doctrines Spinoza’s have little in common. We think of them as typifying the Enlightment at its best—as enemies of fanaticism and friends of open-mindedness.

To praise Spinoza for the attitudes towards his fellow humans he shared with Hume obviously does not require that we accept a definition of truth as adequate representation of a natural order. It does not even require the Habermasian doctrine that argumentative inquiry is a quest for universal validity. The whole idea of a quasi-object which functions as the goal of a quest–either the Platonic idea of a natural order or the Habermasian idea of a set of universally valid beliefs–can be set aside if we construe the love of Truth conversability. The Platonist and Spinozist image of all things coming together in a single vision can be replaced by the image of a maximally free and rich form of human sociability. The unity of mankind, from this perspective, is not a product of human beings’ ability to share a common understanding of a natural order, but rather of their willingness to tolerate, and to try to see the best in, each others’ fantasies.

But there is still another way to construe the love of Truth. Rather than thinking of it either as the desire for the blessedness which would result from the grasp of a natural order, or as conversability, we can also construe it as a form of truthfulness–the quality of being true to oneself. Sometimes when we say that the love of Truth is a virtue we simply mean that honesty, sincerity and truth-telling are virtues. But sometimes we mean something more, as when we praise Blake or Kierkegaard for having had the courage to stick to their guns–to hold on to their central insight, the truth as they saw it, even when everybody thought they were crazy. Such courage is yet another of the virtues for which we praise Socrates, who stood by his central beliefs despite the fact that this made him almost unintelligible to his contemporaries.

Pragmatists, I would suggest, should think of the love of truth as an attempt to combine conversability with the courage to stick to one’s deepest convictions. Such a combination is not easy, but Socrates, Spinoza and Hume achieved something like it. They managed to synthesize the virtues of the virtues of the self-involved genius with those of a conversable companion and useful citizen. They thereby brought the metaphysical and strange together with the literal and familiar.

The idea that we all have a duty to love truth is, for a pragmatist, the idea that we should all aim at such a synthesis. The reason we are so inclined to hypostasize Truth, to turn the adjective “true” into a capitalized noun, is that we would like to overcome the tensions between idiosyncracy and conversability by finding a language that commensurates all languages, a master-tool which coordinates the uses of all lesser tools. We hypostatize the idea of such a language into the idea of a natural order, and we think of the adequate representation of that order as providing us with such a master-tool.

If Hegel is right that anyone must be a Spinozist if he or she is to be a philosopher, then nobody can take an interest in philosophy who has never been intrigued by the thought of such commensuration, of a master-language. One’s imagination will not be gripped either by the figure of Socrates or by that of Spinoza unless one is fascinated by the possibility of such commensuration. There are many people who are not fascinated by this possibilty, and whose imagination is not so gripped. Pragmatists think that that is not a matter for rebuke–that a lack of interest in philosophy is not a vice. In the sense in which one must be a Spinozist in order to philosophize, philosophy is not a universal human concern, nor should it be.

Not everyone has a duty to take an interest either in the quarrel between Plato and Democritus or in that between metaphysicians and pragmatists. any more than it is compulsory to care about the differences between Catholicism and Calvinism, or about those between Christians and noncChristians. As William James said, for some people Christianity is simply not a live or forced option–not something that they need think about. The same goes for philosophy.

As pragmatists see the matter, someone who has little or no interest in either religious or philosophical questions should not be told that he or she has a duty to seek answers to those questions, or a duty to justify his lack of interest to others. Before the Enlightenment we told that we also had duties to God. The Enlightenment told us that we also had duties to Reason. But pragmatists think that our only duties are to ourselves and to other human beings. Socrates, Spinoza and Hume are heroic figures because they performed both sets of duties exceptionally well.

Richard Rorty

April 25, 2006

posted because of some limited discussion over the pantheism controversy over at Perverse Egalitarianism here -

These are some of my reading notes on the so named Pantheism Controversy which sparked a revolution in German philosophical thought and art. I post them here because there is very little actually on the controversy available on the internet or even in many texts. They have not been proofed, and simply stand as they are…notes:

1. Lessing dies Feb 15 1781 (104 years after Spinoza had died).
   1. Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, a very close personal friend of Lessing plans to write a book on the esteemed character of Lessing.
   2. Newly emergent friend of Lessing (since May 1779), Jacobi, hearing of this book, writes with some subterfuge to Elise Reimarus, telling that Lessing late in life confessed his Spinozism to him (knowing that Mendelssohn would be informed, and disturbed by the accusation).
      1. i.      Being a Spinozist was the social/intellectual equivalent of being both an atheist and a blasphemer.
   3. Mendelssohn questions just which version of Spinoza’s thought Lessing might have acceded to, as there was great variety in the understanding, or even availability of his texts, much of it wildly mischaracterized. He requests a clarification of what Spinozism Lessing might have inadvertently agreed with.
   4. Jacobi sends 36 pages in quartos to Mendelssohn, an in depth dialogue of philosophical sharing, which quite frankly shocks Mendelssohn who had felt that he intimately knew  the sum of Lessing’s beliefs. Mendelssohn is angered and hurt by his ignorance of this “great secret”.
2. Jacobi’s report would later be published as Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza, in Letter’s to Herr Moses Mendelssohn.
   1. It tells how Jacobi once showed an unpublished Goethe poem (“Prometheus”) to Lessing, containing the lines addressing Zeus “Was it not omnipotent Time / That forged me into manhood, / And eternal Fate, / My master and yours”.
   2. Lessing responds stating that the poem conveys his own feelings against the notion of a divinity separable from creation, invoking his notion of the Hen kai pan, The One and All, admitting himself to be a kind of Spinozist.
   3. The next morning Lessing raises the issue of the Hen kai pan, challenging Jacobi’s idea of a “personal, extra-mundane God”, stating that he considers it “human prejudice” to “consider the idea as primary and supreme, and want to derive everything from it”
      1. i.      Jacobi: You are going further than Spinoza. Understanding (Einsicht) was everything to him.

Lessing: Only so far as human beings are concerned! He was, however, far from considering as the best method our wretched way of acting according to intentions and giving the idea pride of place.

1. Jacobi ends the Spinoza discussion by revealing that Spinoza has convinced him that the power of Spinoza’s rational conclusions (pantheism, “deification of the world”, i.e. atheism) forces one to leave rational philosophy behind in favor of philosophical faith. The entire aim of the expose is a philosophical attack on the authority of the Berlin Aufklärung.
2. Before Jacobi had published his account Mendelssohn publishes a preemptive Morning Hours, or Lectures on the Existence of God, which specifically addresses a fundamental difference between theism (An Infinite One which brings a separate Finite Many into existence) and pantheism.
   1. He attempts to sanitize any future claim to Lessing’s Spinozist pantheism by pointing out that a “refined pantheism” can affirm the basic tenants of theism: a free act of creation, and the objective existence of creation outside God, calling the position harmless. Such a refined pantheism is not developed though.
      1. i.      He claims that Lessing was attempting to reconcile pantheism with “the truths of morality and religion”, cut short only by his death.
   2. Jacobi publishes his Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza, violating decorum and trust by including the text of private letters from both Mendelssohn and Elise Reimarus.
   3. Mendelssohn, old and sick, rushes To the Friends of Lessing to the presses. On Dec 31^st 1785 he hurries into the Berlin winter without a coat, trying to get to the publisher. Four days later, in bed, he dies. The Pantheism Controversy claims its first victim.
      1. i.      There Jacobi is called out for using the accusation of Lessing’s Spinozism as a mere tool against the Berlin Aufklärung. Spinoza’s metaphysics are supposed to lead to a Godless nihilism, from which one can only turn to faith.
      2. ii.      Lessing is noted for his irony and humor, and Jacobi is implied to have been taken in by Lessing’s subtlety: the esoteric Lessing must be separated out from the exoteric, dogmatic Lessing.
      3. iii.      The question remains, was Lessing a rational Theist or a Spinozist?
3. Reason = Nihilism: Jacobi’s portrayal of atheistic Spinozism as the acme of rationality was so dangerous to the Berlin Enlightenment because it conceptually linked Reason itself to the abandonment of religion, but also State authority over religion.
   1. This threat was further complicated by Spinoza’s own Theological-Political Treatise which exegetically turned the Bible into just another document of human history.
4. Kant essentially assumed the Jacobi reduction of Spinozism, due to the potential of obvious political alienation would be forced to take up the defense of the authority of reason within his own particular system: He was not a Spinozist.
   1. Kant learns of the Pantheism Controversy through Hamann in late 1784, reading Jocabi’s Buchlein, pronouncing that he approved of the presentation and that Spinoza’s system had never made much sense to him.
      1. i.      Kant had not read closely because in a footnote Jacobi had claimed that passages in the Critique of Pure Reason were completely in the spirit of Spinoza.
         1. This association was the beginning of Jacobi’s general lumping of Kant with Spinozism.
      2. ii.      There is no evidence that, like many others had, Kant felt the need to make study of Spinoza.
   2. Oct 16, 1785 Mendelssohn sends Kant a copy of his Morning Thoughts, and Kant finds it filled with the same rationalist arguments in theology that he had refuted in the First Critique.
      1. i.      Kant recoils that in the prefatory remarks he has been labeled “all-destroying”.
      2. ii.      Kant disciple Schütz urges Kant to attack Mendelssohn as some had read it as a refutation of the First Critique.
         1. Schütz is only allowed to publish Kant’s lettered response “the last testament of dogmatic metaphysics and at the same time its most perfect product” along with his own review of Morning Thoughts.
   3. Jacobi yearns to know what Kant thinks of his position, but Hamann replies that Kant told him that “he has never studied Spinoza and, being taken up in his own system, that he has neither time or desire to get involved with anyone else’s” (Nov 30 1785).
   4. In January things change. After Mendelssohn dies vaguely at the hands of Jacobi, Herz and Biester urge Kant to take up Mendelssohn’s cause, and come to the aid of the Berlin Aufklärung.
      1. i.      Kant says that he might do something to expose this attempt of Jacobi to make a name for himself through farce and hocus pocus.
   5. In February a Jena publication carries an announcement of Jacobi’s work and denouncing Jacobi’s loose association of Kant to Spinoza.
      1. i.      March 24 Jacobi confesses to Hamann that he had been too cavalier associating Kant and Spinoza, but warned that if Kant joined the “mongrel dogs” of Berlin he would regret it.
   6. In May Hamann passed Jacobi’s new pamphlet to Kant, which invokes Kant’s own limits for speculative philosophy.
      1. i.      Hamann reports back that Kant was generally content, and that Kant really would likely remain neutral. He did not want to get involved.
5. Goethe writes, “Spinoza does not prove the existence of God; existence is God” calling him a theissium and christianissimum. To both Goethe and Herder Spinozism “intrinsic infinity” holism and Lessing’s Hen kai pan seemed to provide a solution for the problems of modern epistemology.
   1. Goethe first reads the Ethics in the summer of 1773.
   2. Goethe, Herder had met with Jacobi in Weimar for a Spinoza conference Sept 1784, but fail to come to agreement. Jacobi failed to gain alliance against Spinoza.
   3. He and von Stein conduct a study of “holy” Spinoza in November of 1784: “I feel very near to him, though his spirit is much deeper and purer than mine”.
   4. Herder, who has been present at some of these readings gave to Goethe and von Stein a Latin copy of the Ethica with the inscription: “Let Spinoza be always for you the holy Christ.”
   5. Early 1785 Goethe writes a short essay adapting him to his own system “Studie nach Spinoza”.
6. Herder in God, Some Conversations (1787) sets out in dialogue form the basics of Spinozism: One self-dependent Substance which is not the transitive, but the immanent cause of all things, not a cause that breaks in, occasionally, from the “outside”.
   1. The fundamental success of Scientific observation put God at the disadvantage of being unneeded by otherwise well-working mechanism, either entering into it only now and then miraculously, or simply remaining distant like a watchmaker.
   2. Spinoza is said to have a problem of Unity, there being two Attributes (thought and extension). This is seen by Herder to be resolved in the German Leibniz, which makes thought to be the highest grade of organic, “substantial” force, taking God as the Primal Force (Urkraft) in all organic systems of force.
      1. i.      By abandoning the dimension of the extramundane, Neo-Spinozism placed God within the very rational, immanent processes of Nature itself, that shows itself to Scientific inquiry.
   3. Herder also saw Neo-Spinozism as against the kind of personal piety that anthropomorphically reads God as separate from creation, but also at human disposal, as he wrote in a letter to Jacobi “You want God in a human form, as a friend who thinks of you” (Dec 20 1784). The old theologies are dying out.
   4. In letter to Jacobi he also expressed that Jacobi was wrong in how he had interpreted Spinoza’s original Being, ens entium. It was not an empty, property-less thing, but rather a full, positive infinity.
      1. i.      Sub specie aeternitatis properly understood makes the material world the realized reason of God.
7. Heine, a radical Lutheran saw in Spinoza’s pantheism a removal of the Deist (distant God) Theist (overlooking God) traditional religion belittlements of the Body, the suppression of the flesh.
   1. In mind was Luther’s exposure of the Catholic solution to the problems of suppressing the flesh. The church simply “taxed” sensuality through indulgences.
   2. He wished a restoration of Germanic pre-Christian religions, sensuous pantheism, which Christianity in its spiritualization and abstraction had turned into pan-demonism.
      1. ii.      Spinoza’s embrace of the material world as thoroughly divine would help in the philosophical revolution to put Germany in touch with its Teutonic original mind.
      2. iii.      He predicted that the “demonic” ancient energies of German cult would be dramatically released in revolution that would pale that of the French: Spinozist pantheism hid within itself the neopaganism power of the earth and spirit, and the divinity of humanity.
8. Hegel: “Spinoza is the high point of modern philosophy; either Spinozism or no philosophy”
   1. Moving in the direction of Herder, Hegel tried to change what he perceived to be a Spinoza static, abstract unity into an active, living Spirit: something of the ancient anima mundi.
      1. i.      The importation of the Negation, and teleological world progress.
   2. Hegel writes to Schelling in 1795 of the ““storm that is gathering above the heads of the oppressors and gods of the earth”.
      1. i.      Schelling writes back “I have become a Spinozist!” tempered by his Fichtean appropriation of Spinoza’s Absolute, and “There is no personal God, and our supreme effort lies in the destruction of our personality, the passage into the absolute sphere of being.”

“Socrates has scored!” cries Michael Palin. “The Greeks are going mad! Socrates scores, got a beautiful cross from Archimedes. The Germans are disputing it. Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant, via the categorical imperative, is holding that ontologically it exists only in the imagination, and Marx is claiming it was offside.”

via Julian Baggini analyses the existential importance of Monty Python’s classic sketch | The Guardian.

Found via Immanence.

Below is a brilliant survey of the Glass Man syndrome by Gill Speak, an apparent psychological melancholic disorder that characterized concerns of the early 17th century. I have always felt that Spinoza at his grinding lathe somehow intuited that his work on glass was equivalent to his work on the Ethics, the Ethics being something like a grinding form against which and with which the human body-mind interacted. I did not have much support for this intuition, and still do not, but after listening to Daniel Selcer’s “Singular Things and Spanish Poets: Spinoza on Corporeal Individuation”  for the second time – I don’t know why I listened to it again, it’s just one of the more enthused and precise lectures on Spinoza I have heard – I renewed my thoughts on the matter. Selcer does a wonderful job parsing out the famous mentally impaired Spanish poet on the question of what makes you the “same” individual over time, bringing into the equation Cervantes’ short novella “The Glass Graduate” about an intellectual who believes he has been turned into glass, with the result that, like a super computer, due to speed of transmission in his substance he is able to achieve unconventional intelligence. Cervantes writes:

As Gill Speaks shows this man of Glass conception was somehow symptomatic of the newly modern age, and as Descartes in his mediations refers to the example as a form of madness, and as melancholic Constantin Huygens (friend of Descartes) also wrote of the Glass delusion, and as Spinoza spent some time in the Huygens household among the sons, it does find a curious constellation of associations. Spinoza the glass worker and philosophical psychologist, and the case of the Glass Man.

Most notable is that the Glass Man is he who fears any contact with others and the world,  for fear that he will shatter, and Spinoza’s advisement that Good and Evil are simply judgements of interaction with external effects, some which will destroy us, some preserve us. And then there is the issue and image of speed and transmission. At the very least a powerful image of knowledge, thought and body to weigh. Is the pragma of the intellectual not the moated ivory tower of academic institutions, but rather the man of glass?

The tiny little ripple in the great commercial body that is the Macmillan/AAAARG.org dispute, that forced the academic text file sharing site AAAARG.org to host all its files on external links, dispersing them into the aethersphere, is likely related to the headlong clash between Kindle and iPad, the two great Beta vs. VHS mediums for the future of books – Is anyone going to read anymore?!, people worry. Not only are people going to read, and what they read ON what, for how much $ are dynamic and powerful questions that will shape the habitus of future generations. Sub Specie Aeterni agrees that this Kindle v. iPad and Macmillan v. AAAArg.org business is something pay attention to. And I post here my comment at the end because writing it is what lead to me writing this post:

I do think that it is worth taking this seriously – I wonder who is doing so other than those immediately involved with AAAARG.org. This is the very “stuff” of access and distribution, the kind of stuff that shapes the rivers of money and thought, the kind of stuff that changes things in unpredictable and longterm ways (not always bad).

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I do have a real problem with the commercialization of academic thought (the phrase almost makes me laugh, as academic thought is so highly commercialized it isn’t even funny). It’s not that thinking from the academy should be some kind of independent, disinterested pursuit, but rather that the economic structures that drive tuition payments, and bloat universities and colleges, especially in America, are so out of joint in terms of values, its a bloody catastrophe. That folks, no doubt because they have bought hook line and sinker into the myth of personal embetterment and social duty, have mortgaged their futures to mountains of debt and servitude is something akin to the proportions that preceded the latest financial crisis. That the class of these folks, people who want to read about stuff like “the difference between the ontological and the ontic” or “interpellation” – hearing that call, have to be further corralled and squeezed is pretty much ridiculous.

We know what the point is. Just like how fantastic medical procedures and medicines would never be invented if it were not for the promise of all sorts of financial windfalls and exploitations waiting on the other end, so too, so many marvelous technological means of communicating and publishing – not to mention so many fantastic theories being written, would never come about if there were not the pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. But can’t we say that there is something else to writing, reading and education than these kinds of games of more, faster, better and $$$?

The minds of the future lie within the Kindle v iPad wars, the habits of our thinking, our cups of coffee, and our licking of the page turning. The nice thing about technology, it always does MORE, it lets not only the cat, but its fleas and its dreams out of the bag. As Macmillan attacks file sharing in order to secure as much leverage as it can in its battle with Kindle and Amazon, the frayed hem edge of our complexity is showing. We must also reflect upon the fact that “We demand more content, faster (cheaper)!” is what is behind many of our complaints when file-sharing is restricted, a demand worth inspecting.

Tunneling With Texts

In following the events of the Mark Taylor/Macmillan attempt to pressure the academic text file sharing resources of AAAArg.org to shut down - Macmillan and Mark Taylor to take down AAAARG.org?, A Bit More on the Macmillan Attempted Takedown of AAAARG.org - I’ve missed out on the conversation and narrative of events. Austin posted a link to the discussion thread “Going Underground” at AAAARG.org, which I have as of yet not had the time to read through, it began a week ago. I post the unformatted content here for those who have not signed up as members in the hope to generate more information and discussion, and hope to read through it in the next days:

going underground

posted by aaaarg 1 week ago

regarding the recent 404s: it seems as though the place where files were being served from was taken down due to a series of DMCA requests from macmillan, as you can get a feeling for below:
“
We have received a formal DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notice regarding allegedly infringing content hosted on your site. The specific content in question is as follows (although evidence suggests that more titles have been looked at):
http://aaaaarg.org/files/textz/5196-beyond_capital_marxs_political.pdf
http://aaaaarg.org/files/textz/4057-beyond_capital_marxs_political.pdf
http://aaaaarg.org/files/textz/5023-freuds_drive_psychoanalysis_literatu…
http://aaaaarg.org/files/textz/5005-space_geometry_and_aesthetics.pdf
http://aaaaarg.org/files/textz/5200-space_geometry_and_aesthetics.pdf
The party making the complaint (Mark Taylor, mark.taylor@macmillan.com), claims under penalty of perjury to be or represent the copyright owner of this content. Pursuant to 17 U.S.C. § 512(c), we have removed access to the content in question.
“
this means that aaaarg is in a pretty precarious state at the moment. so, no new accounts are being approved; text uploads are being frozen until things are smooth again; the site may need to go offline without any notice beyond this warning… the question might be whether to go down in a direct confrontation or to shatter, disperse, and reconnect.

if you are very technically savvy, have server resources, and want to help, email someone @ aaaarg.org (please explain in good detail how you are not a spy!). if you are savvy with legal matters, you’re welcome to do the same
there are a lot more registered users than you think.. we can do a lot together

see: theatre, aaaarg.org, aaaarg.org scholarship and copyright, and the following Public School classes: PERmaculture (Los Angeles)

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G. Thomas

12 Apr 2010 12:29AM

At a bare minimum, let’s set up a rally point somewhere where we can share info if it goes down all of a sudden, and work out how to reconvene. Just some kind of message board, even a blog with a comments box, whatever.

Spaceman Spiff

12 Apr 2010 1:38AM

How might one set up a rendezvous point that registered members could be notified about but would be somehow shielded from prying eyes?

Restroom

12 Apr 2010 2:20AM

There are problems inherent in any design for a free exchange of information whose membership has to be vetted. I can swear to the doorman that I’m legit all I like, but that’s exactly what I’d do if I were an undesirable element, just the same.

The best solution I can think of is relocating the physical resources themselves to a country or territory without the resources or giveashit to bend to the pressures brought by ridiculous IP lawyers or whomever is harassing us.

mondosenso

12 Apr 2010 6:33AM

i’m not savvy in either technical or legal matters but if you need any sort of help to reconstruct the site count me in.

kos

12 Apr 2010 9:07AM

I figure any bullet proof rendezvous point would have to somehow incorporate our current user names and pws. Specifically, I’m wondering if aaaarg could somehow copy our account user/pass details to a forum where we’d simply log in using our current user ids.

This, of course, doesn’t solve the issue of vetting new people.

aaaarg

12 Apr 2010 9:42AM

from an upcoming event at UCL -
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/digital-publishing-forum/

Mark Taylor, newly arrived at Macmillan from the music business, will explore how the music industry’s experience of piracy could inform publishing’s anti-piracy strategies.

• What parallels are there between the music and publishing worlds? What could publishing avoid and what should it adopt from the music industry’s example?
• What pointers are there within publishing to future developments in piracy and what innovations are in the pipeline to tackle it?

eva

12 Apr 2010 10:17AM

Ironic that this is taking place at a University. If Taylor and friends are lurking here, they should read ‘Why All Academic Research and Scholarship
Should Be Made Available in Online Open-
Access Archives—Now!’ from this book:

http://a.aaaarg.org/text/4573/digitize-book-politics-new-media-or-why-we…

eva

12 Apr 2010 10:20AM

Note also that Taylor’s two hour UCL event costs £92.00 ($147 or 110Euro)

‘tsek honT

12 Apr 2010 11:44AM

Mark Taylor, Anti-Piracy Officer. I can just picture him… Do they have uniforms??

‘tsek honT

12 Apr 2010 12:09PM

dear aaaarg

Sorry about the clampdown… been wondering when the long snaky arm of digital law was going to come knocking again. Don’t have much in terms of tech-savvy or server resources myself, but keen to help in whatever way. Thanks as always for a phenomenal project!

-+-

12 Apr 2010 1:03PM

What is strange about this take-down is the way that it has removed the centre of the server – lots of reports of zip files downloading and then being unable to be decompressed – essentially corruption somewhere along the way. All the while presenting an unchanged front to aaaarg..

Reminds me of HAL 9000 singing Daisy Daisy in 2001.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukeHdiszZmE&feature=related

-+-

12 Apr 2010 1:06PM

Better version…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkv6VwWEZyg&feature=related

southspaces

12 Apr 2010 1:20PM

mp3 sharing survived napster’s shutdown by dispersal in several other interfaces. the other day i needed something that had been taken down from arg.org and just found it somewhere around google… i don’t understand the technical stuff, but maybe several different platforms scattered and that we can easily browse through with google could be an option?

ringfingers

12 Apr 2010 1:43PM

All of these PDF files should be uploaded as torrents on Pirate Bay!

wallythewalrus

12 Apr 2010 2:30PM

we could shift to temporary free blogs linking to files on MediaFire type services, seems to work with music.

fuerrudi

12 Apr 2010 3:13PM

And it seems to work in the case of Gigapedia in a good way as well!

Aylon

12 Apr 2010 5:35PM

Correct me if i’m wrong but don’t many of the links on mediafire type services expire very rapidly. The goal is to find a longstanding resource, as opposed to a continuously disintegrating one. But perhaps I’m being too much of a fascist when I lament disintegration.

G. Thomas

12 Apr 2010 5:43PM

At a minimum we know that any user who’s uploaded files most likely is not a cop. Not saying we should be that restrictive but it could be a place to start if we want a back-up site with logins.

archaean

12 Apr 2010 6:16PM

“What parallels are there between the music and publishing worlds?”

One springs to mind; prosecuting people who probably spend a significant amount more than the average person on your product for sharing it amongst themselves is not good business.

“What could publishing avoid… from the music industry’s example?”

I would say, people like Mark Taylor.

I hope something can be done to counteract the problem. I’m not technically or legally savvy but I am extremely grateful for this shared resource. This is a truly great thing here!

andwse

12 Apr 2010 10:36PM

possible options: 1. emulate musicblogs on blogger. so that files are uploaded to rapidshare and other sharing sites, and posted on the blog as “for viewing purposes only”, with links. sometimes the links have to be re-upped. its not a perfect solution but it is very possibly viable. 2. find out if places like denmark have laws which protect similar file sharing online nodes (as aaarg)? denmark is strong in terms of free speech laws (which is why nazis set up their servers there) but i am not sure the legal structure protects file sharing specifically. somewhat different issue.

Spaceman Spiff

13 Apr 2010 12:27AM

I’ve seen many comments that mention affiliation with educational institutions on this site. I’m sure that those of us at universities have access to the vast majority of these texts (certainly the copyrighted ones, anyways) through our respective libraries. Is there any way we could use the extremely broad and permissive fair use laws to respond to these requests. I’m only peripherally familiar with copyright law, I just thought I’d throw the suggestion out there.

linguistic being

13 Apr 2010 2:15AM

@ Spaceman Spiff: Unfortunately fair use laws only allow for a small percentage of use of copyrighted material without the permission of the right holders. For example, Universities are allowed to create and publish “course readers” for their students as these readers only (re)publish a very small percentage of the copyrighted material.

On the subject of relocation, as a member of other groups such as this, the use of forums in which members upload content onto sites such as mediafire and link to it content has proved (thus far at least) most advantageous. Re-upping may be required at times, as mentioned above, though this rarely proves to be too much of a problem. (see http://bit.ly/bpGX2g for an example)

kos

13 Apr 2010 8:59AM

I started a blog awhile ago which never really got off the ground, but it might be worthwhile to get it running.

I’m going to actively post to mediafire and see how that works for now.

amed

13 Apr 2010 9:35AM

Tell Mark Taylor is expropriating the common and ruining the fun. Not really an expert but whenever needed I can always re-upload some stuff.

YlY230

13 Apr 2010 8:00PM

There’s also Scribd – probably not the best substitute, but it’s an option.

I want to point out too, that what makes this site unique is not so much the library of materials (though without that, the site wouldn’t amount to much), but the community of people who are willing and able to share materials. As long as the community is preserved, the library will continue to exist – so that’s what we should focus on if this site disintegrates.

Best of luck!

ariadne

14 Apr 2010 1:56AM

I am very saddened by this state of affairs. I just wondered if the publishers concerned by a resource like aaaaarg will be bothered to study the impact of this type of sharing. we are not talking best sellers here. I doubt anybody stopped buying books because of aaaarg. might have save me a trip to a library or give access to resources I wouldn’t otherwise. books are still my first expense after roof and food. I might discover a book on aaaarg server and buy it to read more comfortably. I might have the book in one language but need it in English for citations. I might need the digital version for easier past and cut for essays writing…there are a thousand way of using such a resource that are not trying to rip off the publishing companies. hope this get sorted somehow. Now and always a great many thanks to aaaarg and everyone who contributed.

eva

14 Apr 2010 2:29AM

I completely agree. The amount of books I have purchased has most definitely increased since arg. The difference for me is that I haven’t bought so many duds (books I couldn’t find in libraries and purchased only to discover they’re not as relevant as the promise of their title). Academic research rating, which leads to funding, is increasingly based on quantifiable indicators such as the amount of citations to books and articles. Electronically available books are between two and four times more likely to be cited than paper-only books.

Spaceman Spiff

14 Apr 2010 2:31AM

Thanks for your response, linguistic being.

I just want to second what YlY230 is saying about the community on this site. Can one of the site administrators start a blog (maybe on blogspot? Is there a better platform?) where we can continue this conversation and maintain the community in case the site gets shut down? I would do it myself, but that seems a bit presumptuous.

endrju

14 Apr 2010 4:38AM

There are a couple of solutions:

1. Gigapedia
2. Blog (with upping to some filehoster of your choice)
3. Setting up a free torrent tracker (or upping to some already existing)that does not require ratio standards of private ones
4. Forum
5. eMule (but I wouldn’t recommed it)
6. SoulSeek (with a aaaarg.org channel)
7. Getting a server which is located in some country that doesn’t care about copyrights

technicolor

14 Apr 2010 5:11AM

@ ariadne and @ eva

completely agree. a resource like this is all the more important to circumvent conventional distribution channels, especially in countries where simply there is no access to a lot of books, and for books out of print… it is academics and students who fuel the academic book business anyways…

hopefully we will be able to find a solution also around new anti-piracy laws.

odalisqued

14 Apr 2010 8:16AM

I hope at least a list of titles get preserved. As much as it functions as a library it functions as a reading list for many.

eva

14 Apr 2010 8:51AM

Yes, and the ‘issues’ area too. I’ve been alerted to readings through these groupings, which I may not otherwise have found due to the elusiveness of some authors’ titles. Even if a ‘hollow’ arg remained, it would be useful.

andwse

14 Apr 2010 10:32AM

Creating buffer zoness in the site design itself could be useful. Specifically I am thinking, requiring a login before being able to even get to the library list.

It would be very good to preserve the open accessibilty, but this may be problematic. The archive may have to go “private”, due to the political climate. An openly accessible version seems to me, essential to the project! This version could change its venue. One year being a blog or set of blogs with links, one year being torrents. etc

So, like monks in the dark ages, the knowledge may need to be preserved in some “private” form at this point, where only current members can access it, and at the same time a way to a dupllicate version of the library, is produced, with the understanding that this duplicate version can dissappear and re-appear in different locations and forms.

of course, one big problem of totally open accessiblity is that one can assume that members now, include such people as Mark Taylor. so, does going “private” make a difference?

mwn

14 Apr 2010 11:12AM

Just saw that a certain wiki org in the news lately is looking at the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (http://immi.is/); they generally seem to be about the same things as most here. I imagine that a server net will grow out of it.

kos

14 Apr 2010 11:19AM

A reading list is easy enough for anyone to compile, especially now that the site is static since uploads have been turned off. Do a print to pdf of each library page (A, B, C, etc) or just copy & paste to a doc.

I’m similarly concerned about how to weed out the spies and trolls (Mark Taylor, if you’re reading this, you’re the scum of the earth). It definitely won’t be fair to everyone but I feel that entry to any new site or rendezvous point should be based on contributions to aaaarg. Presumably these characters haven’t been in the business of actually uploading anything to aaaarg.

The problem is, of course, how to prove that users aren’t misrepresenting themselves. Only aaaarg could verify this since s/he is the only one with access to our emails and list of uploads.

esco_bar

14 Apr 2010 1:59PM

for my part, should we have to relocate, i would start reposting the essay collections at http://gigle.ws/
this is for no reason other than the format of those posts would be refused at gigapedia, avaxhome, etc.

dick.whitman

15 Apr 2010 12:54AM

Of course, Mark Taylor, it’s the Marx that you have to protect.

djbtak

15 Apr 2010 6:26AM

As with others, I hope that the community can be preserved in some form. I agree with the comments above that suggest that the best option may be individual uploading to the various already-existing sites; coupled with an index through blog/rss/facebook/twitter

It’s convenient that aaaarg have provided the download facility for us, but it is a dangerous business to be in, and technically illegal in many territories, so it seems to me that if we all take the responsibility individually for the actual sharing (using the many available platforms) we can potentially relieve a lot of the pressure?

‘tsek honT

15 Apr 2010 7:01AM

Agree that one person should not be liable to the International Anti-Piracy Corps (in their tight little outfits) for hosting a service which benefits all of us… I like the idea of a blog with an indexing function, as well as the discussion and request sections we have grown used to. Perhaps also a re-up request section for links that expire. Soulseek, torrents and any p2p system would pose a problem for me as my institution (my main access to the web) blocks these protocols… something like ifile.it is an option, but I would miss the direct downloading and the fact that texts uploaded 5 years ago are still available!

aaaarg

15 Apr 2010 5:22PM

please see the new link on every text, so that you can post external urls for texts. the short term plan is a combination of what exists and what ‘tsek honT and djbtak have posted.

djbtak

15 Apr 2010 5:50PM

Excellent! You might also want to suggest or use a service like http://anonym.to/ for external links and perhaps we could compile a summary of preferred hosting services with pros/cons?

This functionality will also be useful for the OCR/version control discussion, as it seems like it would be straightforward to point to an OCR’d or otherwise improved version of the text?

kos

15 Apr 2010 6:10PM

Perfect – I’ve been OCRing lots of the books I’ve gotten here with clearscan.

Heads up on another site: http://ebook30.com/

kos

15 Apr 2010 6:11PM

Also, for some of the verso books that were taken down:
http://fckvrso.wordpress.com/

kos

15 Apr 2010 6:28PM

aaaarg: what if we want to post links of books that don’t exist in the library as of yet?

kos

15 Apr 2010 6:46PM

I’d hate to gush but I’d like to write a paper on the strategic awesomeness of this community.

Yes, ‘strategic awesomeness’.

esco_bar

15 Apr 2010 7:41PM

strategic awesomeness indeed! (one of D+G’s most misunderstood concepts.)
i am very happy to read that aaaarg is still going strong! i am happy that the community is still together!

Spaceman Spiff

15 Apr 2010 7:55PM

I’ll second that!

Thanks aaaarg!

Thanks everyone else, too. This is a wonderful community and a wonderful project.

esco_bar

15 Apr 2010 9:34PM

dear aaaarg,
i have a couple of questions. first, with regard to posting external links, will there be a field for info (passwords, size, file format, OCR, quality description, etc.)? if so, will this option exist for each external link? second, will people who post a link be able to delete or replace it or will this option only exist for someone@aaaarg? also, how will we delete dead links?
-
my two cents:
my two preferred file hosting sites are http://ifile.it/ and http://www.mediafire.com/

aaaarg

15 Apr 2010 11:13PM

* there is a field for info now, limited to 255 characters.

* for every external link

* links can be edited by quite a few different (presumably reliable) people. this will become more clear as it gets used.

* dead links get deleted by simply deleting the URL on the add links page

aaaarg

16 Apr 2010 12:48AM

also, these external links are automatically passed through anon url.

finally, at some time tomorrow links to texts will be turned off (in the way i described above), which means there will be a lot more requests for external links. these requests are listed in the !! above.

new accounts will be approved at that time and the “add a text” link will be turned on again.

‘tsek honT

16 Apr 2010 1:05AM

Thanks to everyone, and of course especially “someone”! Will spend some time this weekend uploading from my library.

nobody

16 Apr 2010 12:22PM

Mr. Taylor’s previous job was Internet Investigations Officer, Anti-Piracy Unit, PRS for Music.

PRS appears to be a licensing racket based in the UK.

http://prsformusic.com

aaaarg

16 Apr 2010 12:35PM

ok, yellow text links have been more or less removed. text uploads are back up. the “!!” at the top of the page shows those texts which people are requesting external links to. no new accounts have been approved since this whole thing went down last week – pending registrations will start being approved shortly.

jmclark

16 Apr 2010 4:11PM

Perhaps someone could post a brief sort of ‘tutorial’ on how to go about sharing texts through a system like mediafire, ifile.it, etc. Not being too saavy in such matters myself I’m sure I could benefit from some advice and/or precautions.

mwn

16 Apr 2010 4:17PM

There are plenty of tutorials already out there-google it.

‘tsek honT

17 Apr 2010 4:24AM

This is working really well so far… a very interesting evolution.
…
@aaaarg: A suggestion: Maybe distribute a backup of the back-end (site code, library catalogue, content of the blogs – of course not the pdfs)to one or two trusted members from time to time… so that the site in its most current form can resurface quickly if (the horror, the horror) the Internet Gestapo ever manage to clamp down on your resources.

dansapien

17 Apr 2010 5:09AM

Hi

My account just got approved (I’M NOT A SPY, I’M A NICE ARCHITECTURE STUDENT FROM LONDON) but I either cant work out how to download texts, or there is something wrong.

When I click request link nothing happens. Is this because of recent issues or do I have some kind of ‘untrusted newbie’ account?

lwsn

17 Apr 2010 5:38AM

as far as i know dansapien, you’ll need to wait until someone uploads the text you’ve requested, and then you’ll find the direct link to it back in the library – this is right isn’t it all others?

just added a few direct links myself, stay strong!

dansapien

17 Apr 2010 5:40AM

Guess I joined at a bad time, just put some links up myself, thought it may have been a trust issue.

thanks for the reply lwsn.

traumarxist

17 Apr 2010 6:00AM

all the best, aaaarg. your site changed my life, and i can’t thank you enough. i hope you find the way out of this deadlock – i can’t offer to help since i’m a total technophobe myself.
if ever there was a classic illustration of marx’s old formula – the relations of production holding back productive forces – this is it!
all the best and thank you for existing.

djbtak

17 Apr 2010 6:19AM

Hi dansapien

If you track back through this discussion you’ll see that aaaarg has been a site which has hosted downloads for all account holders; but due to DMCA pressure has changed to a system whereby files are shared externally by members, and aaaarg hosts the description and the link.

For newcomers like yourself, this means that you will see that there are a lot of files listed in the directory which are not available to you. People who have uploaded or downloaded files previously are being encouraged by aaaarg to provide an external link which will be available to all, but this process is going to take a while (I just got through providing an external link to my own previously updated texts).

When you put in a link request, as I understand it, the text will be flagged as needing an external link and hopefully some member of the community will be able to reupload to ifile.it or similar in due course.

Hope this helps and thanks aaaarg for the very prompt work on this!

djbtak

17 Apr 2010 6:19AM

Hi dansapien

If you track back through this discussion you’ll see that aaaarg has been a site which has hosted downloads for all account holders; but due to DMCA pressure has changed to a system whereby files are shared externally by members, and aaaarg hosts the description and the link.

For newcomers like yourself, this means that you will see that there are a lot of files listed in the directory which are not available to you. People who have uploaded or downloaded files previously are being encouraged by aaaarg to provide an external link which will be available to all, but this process is going to take a while (I just got through providing an external link to my own previously updated texts).

When you put in a link request, as I understand it, the text will be flagged as needing an external link and hopefully some member of the community will be able to reupload to ifile.it or similar in due course.

Hope this helps and thanks aaaarg for the very prompt work on this!

ringfingers

17 Apr 2010 8:36AM

I have previously uploaded and downloaded here and am not a newcomer, but still don’t have access to text links for some reason: I should be trusted according to this logic, no?

ariadne

17 Apr 2010 10:15AM

just uploaded my first external link to mediafire! quite proud of myself.

ariadne

17 Apr 2010 10:32AM

one question about mediafire. what difference does it make to have the file public or private. what is best?

jared

17 Apr 2010 3:23PM

hey. joined the site because a friend mentioned the DMCA complaints. i’m a law student and these kinds of issues are why i am pursuing copyright law.

there may be some ways to preserve the nature of the site with some technical savvy. “libraries” and “archives” are exempt under §1201. However, in order to make a convincing case as a digital library, you can’t really provide readily copyable (for example, downloadable PDFs) materials on the site. (a wonderful example of this concept is htmlcomics.com)

One way to do this would to be to implement a simple flash PDF viewer for the PDFs hosted on the server, that wouldn’t allow people to download. Beyond that, users can be responsible for sharing actual files on their own if they wish.

If there are any legal questions I’d be happy to do some research as this is closely related to research I’m doing on digital libraries. feel free to contact me at: 3str0g3n AT gmail

Stuart Studebaker

17 Apr 2010 6:47PM

@jared:
the nature of the site is to allow people access to text files, usually in the form of pdfs, because they are easy to handle, that can be subjected to standard research practices, like “search”, “copy”, “Paste”, that kind of thing, and being able to calve off part of a chapter into another pdf, and otherwise re-arrange things as an academic would.

Furthermore, the nature of much of the research performed here is of some fairly radical nature, and the content we are working with plays into the considerations of how and why things here happen.

There is a large, if not wide-spread movement among some academia who feel that all academic writing should be free (as in beer) as well as free from restriction (as in speech).

Obviously, these (I believe legitimate) needs go directly against the ideology and social practice of the so-called “rights holders” who are, almost always, NOT the writers, but in fact, the publishers.

I think the present practice of aaaarg is about as good as it can be under the circumstances. I know I will set about feeding files into a third party system and making the links here.

A Flash PDF viewer just isn’t good enough. Either you got the goods, or, you don’t. The publishers say “No”, I (and many others here) say “Yes”. Yet another front on the class struggle…

jared

17 Apr 2010 7:27PM

yeah. i totally understand (and agree whole heartedly).

my gut just says there might be a substantial in between that would allow people to quickly access, browse (and even search the file)s before requesting them or downloading them from a third party source. i think this could be done in a legally “acceptable” manner while still allowing the primary thrust of the site (actual distribution) to continue. it would even totally be feasible to have whatever infrastructure would display the PDFs (whether it be flash, html5 or what not) to automatically upload the content to a 3rd party (mediafire etc.).

that said, i wholeheartedly believe in the front that you want to fight this on. that said, you might even consider contacting the authors/estates of the DMCA’d works if possible and see if they’ve actually transfered ownership of the copyright to the publisher. a lot of independent publishers actually never go through this process, and so don’t actually legally own the copyright to the text (although they may own copyrighted imagery etc. on title pages and covers).

johhnyturbo

17 Apr 2010 9:37PM

So what has happened to all the data that aaaarg previously hosted? While I am trying to help with the external linking I still have my doubts as to whether or not previously uploaded pdfs from more obscure authors will be brought back

‘tsek honT

18 Apr 2010 12:15AM

@jared, I think there has been some discussion around building an in-text search functionality into aaaarg… but that, and the online reader you are suggesting would (as far as I understand) massively inflate the server overheads. Part of the beauty of this site has been its simplicity and relative ‘lightness’.
…
On the DRM side, I think there is something archaic about the way publishers are going about it, having had terrible experiences with DRM on ebooks that I have bought myself. The way that this site is simply negating DRM is part of an important process in the de-commodification of knowledge. And although it may not provide the answer, it is an important intervention in a neccessary reconsideration of how the production of knowledge could be funded.
…
thanks for your comments, it is great to get some insight on the legal angle, beyond abrupt takedown notices!

esco_bar

18 Apr 2010 4:53AM

ariadne, from one of mediafire’s FAQ pages: http://support.mediafire.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&k…
thanks for taking the leap and participating in the conversion!

ariadne

18 Apr 2010 5:03AM

to esco-bar. thanks. I am getting the hang of it. thanks to all for advice.

alo

18 Apr 2010 8:36AM

If you’re still looking for a host country that doesn’t give a toss about copyright law (in fact mainstream magazine and book publishers disregard it daily and openly – just nobody cares, really)and has other troubles to deal with at the moment try Greece. If needed let me know if i can be of any help.

mondosenso

18 Apr 2010 10:53AM

not true, greece may have financial problems but recently a group of people were taken to court because they had created a torrent called gamato.info, you can check it out by googling the name of the torrent.

brxx

18 Apr 2010 2:40PM

thanks for your dedication someone!

One website which might be better than mediafire etc is http://drop.io …. No registration or providing email addresses , information etc, they actively block search engines from indexing files, they are non-networked, and you can have them require passwords if you’d like.

They downfalls is no direct hotlinking (but neither do mediafire etc), and also, they will, like most other site, remove copywrite data if they get a takedown notice. This is less likely to occur though, based on the reasons listed above.

YlY230

18 Apr 2010 3:46PM

@aaaarg – shouldn’t the “add text” page be changed to allow users to post an external link instead of (or in addition to?) the file itself?

Jim Hawkins

19 Apr 2010 4:40PM

We could go for a system where every registered user hosts a few files on their own servers, using free webspace that sort of thing. When you register you only get approval by providing an active link with hosted PDF files. That way no single server could be removed in one go like that, it would make it much more difficult (time consuming) for spies to trace all the source servers and it would also put every user in a position where they themselves are implicated in the file sharing, meaning anti-piracy people could not sneak in without pirating material themselves. In addition, when files are taken down it would be much easier and quicker to repost.

Not sure if that would work out?

kevin

19 Apr 2010 8:47PM

i’ll echo YIY230 — not everyone who uploads has noticed that external links are necessary. aaaarg, can we change the ‘add text’ page?

aaaarg

19 Apr 2010 9:15PM

Although that idea makes sense, were taking a vacation from coding.. it will just have to be up to the people who download it to do what you’re asking

hypertext

20 Apr 2010 4:01AM

Ok, let’s do what we can at the moment: it is obviously important that external links have to be added to every text. The easiest and fastest way to do it is that those who posted them add the external link too.
It is just that people are not informed about these troubling issues (I myself just got informed via the comment of another user below the material I uploaded).
I’d say that this is still a rather loose community at the moment – good idea would be for people to get more intertwined, to create some horizontal networks. Right now, we expect from admin to do most of the job, which is time consuming.
What do you think?

Spaceman Spiff

20 Apr 2010 4:11AM

I like the idea of horizontal networking, but how should we do it? Through message boards on this site? While I would be eager to e-meet many of you through email, I’m weary of sharing my address in a venue that’s clearly under attack by multiple corporations. I’m not too experienced with setting up online networks, so I’m excited to hear others ideas.

As to the uploading of texts to external links, I think it’s a good idea to have us do our own first (something I’ll tackle tomorrow or the the next day) but I also think it’s important to tackle the ones with the most requests. Maybe we can have folks add a message to the response board of a text they have an urgent need for, too, so we’re not hanging anyone out to dry. I’ve been doing the best I can, but there are only so many hours in the day.

Spaceman Spiff

20 Apr 2010 4:42AM

Also: Many of the requested texts are from the most frequent uploaders and it hardly seems fair (or functional, for that matter) to expect them to re-upload all their texts. Let’s help them out.

‘tsek honT

20 Apr 2010 4:50AM

on board.

hypertext

20 Apr 2010 4:52AM

I agree, sounds reasonable.
The catch about horizontal networking is this double-bind: we want to share and exchange with each other personally, but we also need to protect ourselves. At least, most of us are fans of Aarg on Facebook.
Question for the admin: how about getting in touch with prof. Siva Vaidyanathan (Uni of Virginia), author of the books “Copyrights and Copywrongs” and “The Anarchist in the Library”?

Spaceman Spiff

20 Apr 2010 4:57AM

Oh, facebook. Useless so often, yet so crucial for such important things. I just posted on the wall of the facebook fan page for anyone interested in horizontal networking. Good idea hypertext.

siberiandead

20 Apr 2010 5:36AM

EDUCATION SHOULD BE FOR FREE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
sometimes i have the filing that “they” will start to bill for air and water.
And what about people who live far away from any library????????
reeducate the “masters”!

G. Thomas

20 Apr 2010 5:59AM

Well someone already posted links to mine… but I got started with the greatest !!!! wish list. Good on everyone who’s doing it – we’re about an eighth of the way to the whole library. Using ifile.it is incredibly easy. Cheers all!

SteveJT

20 Apr 2010 8:09AM

As mentioned above, drop.io seems a very good option. Its very quick, easy and very secure from what I can tell (you do not need to register). I have been using it to post links over the past few days.

Regarding facebook……I think it would be great to build horizontal networks, partly for strategic reasons, but primarily because this is a fantastic community.

aaaarg

20 Apr 2010 1:10PM

here’s a hint for people who no longer see yellow download links:
1. find some pdfs on your computer that you have downloaded in the past.
2. upload them to drop.io, ifile.it, etc
3. post the link on the text page (“add an external link”)
4. repeat 4 or 5 times
(this message will self-destruct)

esperante

21 Apr 2010 8:11AM

Is it also possible to set up some sort of
‘emergency’ upload forum? Perhaps files can be uploaded in response to specific requests… Of course this would require a strong and responsive community, I vote for Facebook in this regard…

Ownership and control of Text

Update [written after the posted below]: Adrian posts the link to the AAAAR.org group discussion going underground. I’ve reposted the content in the next post.

Austin over at Sub Specie Aesterni clarifies the issue some (though I’m still confused over if the AAAARG.org had been ever taken down altogether for a spell). AAAARG. org has apparently found a workaround to Macmillan’s threat which seems similar to the internet position of Surfthechannel – incredible media source that saved me during very long dull suburb nights in Bangkapi Thailand, who ever knew we would develop a fondness for old Survivor seasons, a show I never had an attraction to. They now are, instead of hosting all (or most) of the books and essays,  serving as a direction hub, gathering all the external links in one place. Their warehouse hoard of valuable intellectual booty they have spread out into the aether, and they have the treasure map.

I’m still mystified and concerned why there seems to be no internet presence of this story, no social media discussion. I mean if anything this is what blogs and FB and twitter is supposed to be really good at doing, connecting interested, like-minded parties of a very thin stratum. If anyone has links to where the actually narrative of events is laid out I would love to see it [see update above].

Austin’s describes the present condition of AAAAR.org this way (in comments):

Hey guys, the site is “up,” although not functioning in the same way as before. In the past, their entire library was available for direct download. All one had to do was click on a title that interested him/her and then click on a yellow link that downloaded the text directly to one’s computer. Now, however, since this issue has come to the fore they have had to switch to alternative measures. Basically, the community has come together and decided to find alternative source-sites where they can upload, store, and share the majority of the material. It’s not quite the same, but at least the material is (mostly) available.

That said, the previous format of aaaarg was the best model I’ve seen for open access academic literature. There were no download limits. The titles were in great condition (for the most part). It was simply convenient. Well, I guess I won’t complain too much… even though I long for the days of complete open access material.

Market Adjustments and Questions of Access

harlo has a blog responds nicely to our discussion, which he discovered through Wayne Marshall’s Twitter - good to know that the social media conflagration is working to some degree! Maybe pomo intellectuals just are not techno-social-action types despite reading endless tracts on Marx, the revolution and “the” event all day - with an interesting argument for the kind of academic piracy that AAAARG.org represents. He seems to see it as a market correction for a particular class of customer. 

Kind of a travesty, really. Everyone knows why “pirating” stuff is “wrong”, and everyone knows that intellectual property needs to be paid for, blah blah, these are very old arguments and as arguments go, they are stale. However, I side with a.aaarg to the end for the following reason: as a student, I’ve already paid for access to all the intellectual property. No matter how I get it, I deserve unfettered access to it. Stringent IP laws place horrible barriers to access in my path. a.aaarg lifts those barriers.

I’ll explain: The type of intellectual property provided by a.aaarg is of a certain type, and is consumed (for the most part) by a certain type of user. a.aaarg posts dry, sometimes boring, sometimes sexy, but always extremely cerebral books and essays. Although I don’t have the data on it, it’s not hard to surmise that this stuff is being consumed almost exclusively by students. A student’s tuition is stacked with extra costs that pay licensing fees to have access to all intellectual property: access to your school’s library (and the other libraries in the consortium) costs you money. These extra fees also buy you access to JSTOR, SAGE publishers, and all those other clearing houses of intellectual property on the web.

So, a.aaarg fixes an inefficiency in the market regarding my access to materials that I should already have access to. If I’m writing a paper, and can’t find a source in my library because someone else checked it out, I look at a.aaarg. Or if it’s 3 a.m. before a paper’s due, and I want to sprinkle some Zizek on it, and I can get it easily from the comfort of my writing desk by pulling it down from a.aaarg, I’m going to do it. And forget JSTOR when you’re in a hurry: you have to go through a million authorization hoops just so your university can verify your access to the JSTOR catalog. Schooling is expensive. And the higher in it you go, the more it costs. When I get out of academia, my debt is bound to be five times that of the average student, and that’s only for an MA. So, there’s a certain amount of arrogance and entitlement that I feel is my RIGHT to display, regarding the efficiency and overall usefulness of my academic experience.

a.aaarg is tactical media, meaning it’s a phenomenon that springs up using ad-hoc networks to fix a problem. The tactics employed are sometimes illegal, but that’s incidental: tactical media is apolitical, a legal means and an illegal means are simply just means. Ultimately, tactical media is supposed to become obsolete, either due to some crisis of consciousness where it thinks it has the right to legitimacy in the eyes of the law or of Capital, or due to the original problem being solved. Unfortunately, I think a.aaargh’s untimely demise will be due to the former rather than the latter. Recent moves by the “organization” to branch out (like giving press interviews, getting into twitter, etc.) can be seen as attempts to legitimize itself, and that’s kind of a death knell for the project because it’s not, and never was supposed to be legit.

I really like the argument he presents as it works on several levels that simply are often missed or undervalued. The first of these is that he acknowledges in a quiet way something I have been trying to get across in one way or another: academia exists in order to produce a particular class or kind of thing: a text producer (and/or text consumer). And these text/iles are quite rarified in aesthetic appeal, you can’t just go down to the street shop and buy them. Your own sensibilities and skills must be arduously honed so the market for them can exist in the first place. If you read Badiou or even Darwin with interest, pleasure and scheme, you are already an elite of a highly particularized market. Persons on the intellectual Left seldom want to hear this because they see themselves as against “the system” (in whatever complex palace talk of terms that define it), but it frankly is so. Harbo rightly takes this social fact as a starting space.

What he/she claims is that as a consumer who has already paid for access to this rarified world of commerce – and the right to be so shaped by its processes into a delectician and text producer him/herself – AAAAR.org exists as a tactical adjustment to the availability of texts for folks that just want to get on with being better workers in the Palace. As a tactical moral infringement it will just fade away, its demand absorbed by either technological development or Conscious legitimacy.  It is, if I read his/her description correctly, something like the rhizome of Institutional Capital powers growing out into the ambiguous ethical purlieu, seeding its future development.

There are a few problems with this, but not deep ones (and I may have misread his/her take). First is that there is the assumption that becoming a connoisseur/producer of intellectual texts is a kind of one-price buffet. This certainly is how universities and colleges sell their incredibly priced educations ($$$$ in the US at least). mortgage your entire financial future and have unlimited access to all the intellectual treasures of humanity, not to mention, the cutting edge developments in thought-itself. Just get yourself in the door, and you’re fixed. Harlo speaks right out of this expectation, and is very perspicuous to say that this expectation involves not only the “right” to access, but also the time feasibility to access. We can not only read and use ANY text, but we need to be able to use it in the tight windows that are involved in our attempts to be GOOD text producers for the company. We don’t want to have to get on a plane to see a book, and the promise of the new media is that we wont have to. That Institutional education further roots this expectation of both right and access in the moral bedrock of human rights, the notion that ALL persons should have access to great books and great ideas complicates the levels at which ethical argument takes place. Harlo’s thoughts about a one-price buffet devolve into some rather profound questions of just whom is all this intellectual work serving, and who should have the right to full access to it. In many ways Humanities academia attempts to trade on the notion that its work is for the essential betterment of humanity, but depriving “humanity” access to its inventions would be like theologians who are trying to save the souls of all only letting certain souls read their arguments about the nature of God – which is pretty much how it works out, curiously enough.

Enough straying. My own arguments run somewhat parallel to Harlo’s in that most of this intellectual property has been produced through State funding, and so represents a State interest in the well-being of their citizenry. As such it simply is not like a corporate product. It is kind of a hybid para-commodity, one of which social interest is involved in the investment of its very creation. The salaries and resources that allow the kinds of rarified material that is so consumed and so produced under the notion that “education”, in particular humanities education, is just plain good for you, makes a different threshold for the gatekeeping of this material. So, differently than Harlo, its not so much that “I” already paid for it, but “we” have already paid for it. It is just for this reason that I find JSTOR an ethical anathema.

A second difficulty with Harlo’s point I think would be that I imagine that Macmillan’s own threat to AAAARG.org itself represents the very techno-market correction that Harlo thinks will eventually come to dissolve the tactical existence of AAAARG.org. Macmillan surely feels that it must gain full control of its properties in order to strike just the right deal – probably involving Apple and iPad – to provide all kinds of the right access for said students and professors. Having control of just these properties is what can give a company the leverage to, let’s say, strike a deal with Harvard so that every student would have their very own iPad wherein they can read about essays on ontology and semiospheres and whatnot, with ziplike convenience.

There are other arguments to be made concerning deeper ethical issues of right and access, questions of what constitutes a “property” but that is enough for today. I’m hoping to hear more about Macmillan and AAAAR.org, perhaps start talking about it.

Putting the Documents Back in the Castle?

Sub Specie Aeterni reported that the academic freedom, file sharing website AAAARG.org was taken down under the threat of legal action by a Mark Taylor. AAAARG.org is basically the Napster of published intellectual essays and books. Because there is no internet resource for this story we wondered for a time if professor of religion Mark C. Taylor had become the Lars Ulrich of academic thought. It turns out NOT to be the case. Instead, it seems safe to conclude that it was anti-piracy officer Mark Taylor, come to Macmillan publishing from the music industry. He is looking to apply the lessons learned in music publishing and piracy to books and essays an in the interest of this model it was apparently he who threatened the action. You can hear him speak on the general issue at the May 5th 2010 UCL Publisher’s Seminar (for a nominal non-member fee of £92.00):

Mark Taylor, newly arrived at Macmillan from the music business, will explore how the music industry’s experience of piracy could inform publishing’s anti-piracy strategies.

• What parallels are there between the music and publishing

worlds? What could publishing avoid and what should it adopt from the music industry’s example?

• What pointers are there within publishing to future

AAAARG.org has been the lone positive whole-text source for texts that allows intellectual work outside of the highly commercialized restrictions of JSTOR and other academic monopolies of intellectual creations. Unlike the music industry, many if not most of these intellectual products are produced through State – that is the public’s – non-profit funding. UC Davis is not Capitol Records. I am not prepared to argue against the absolute unethical nature of copyrighting and gatekeeping academic intellectual products and resources, but the manner in which academic institutions have become primarily recursively organized text producing (and text consumer) factories is decidedly problematic on a number of ethical levels, many of which call into the question the substance of those products themselves, and thus ultimately the service that colleges and universities offers to our society.

This threatened legal attack on AAAARG.org is vastly under-reported among the electronic para-academic types who likely relied on its freedoms, and deserves at the very least our notice. Though I did not personally use the service, its existence was applauded by many whose work was no doubt of value. Macmillan seems to be quite busy organizing its electronic publishing assets, perhaps much of this having sometime to do with its recent partnership with Apple’s iPad. Just think about it. One day you can be paying for my essays in order to have the luxury of reading them on the subway on a device and services you have purchased from Apple. Who said academia isn’t looking up?

Update: Adrian over at Immanence in comments reports that the site is functioning as of now, without hint of a dust up. Curious.

The philosopher Spinoza – and those readers come from my past incarnation at Frames /sing know that I am a radical Spinozist thinker – challenged that he would write of the emotions as if they were the lines and planes of Euclid. The things most unclear, he would make crystal. I and my wife are recently returned from Thailand, a two month trip that almost exclusively involved her fulltime training and fighting in the Thai art Muay Thai (which means merely Thai boxing). After a few years of dedicated one on one training under a Thai instructor here in the states, it was time to see the art in its organic context, the country of its birth and most acute and aesthetically pure practice. To see,  learn and fight. I trained as well for the first month, but our raison d’être was my wife’s dedication the sport. And the training is grueling, in a beautiful way.

For those who don’t know, aside from the sub-culture influence of the Tony Jaa action film Ong Bak (2003) which featured the unsurpassed Muay Boranish “fightclub” scene below (note the issues of Nationalism and class, no translation is needed) …

Muay Thai is a martial art most recently brought to public’s awareness through the rise of MMA cage sports which have vied for the post-boxing entertainment dollar. It’s most basic movements help form the blueprint of the ”standup” aspects of MMA fighting (along with Western boxing), although what comes through such a negotiation of techniques and rules really isn’t Muay Thai any longer. In the Western eye Muay Thai gained much of its reputation for being seen as especially brutal, as it employs not only kicks and punches but makes proficient use of elbow and knee strikes (whose dynamism can be seen exaggeratedly in the Jaa clip above). Muay Thai is seeping aesthetically into the Western consciousness in much the same way that so-called Kung Fu populated the American mind in the 70′s with near definitional power. Now when heros fight on film they use trademark Muay Thai blows as proof of their virility, even Sherlock Holmes delivers a fight-ending (?) prototypical Muay Thai front kick in Robert Downey jr.’s recent modernization of the cerebral cluefinder.

Nation, Class and Movement

Aside from these spectacular influences and imaginations, the Muay Thai of Thailand is quite different. It is the national sport and woven into the fabric of Thai notions of nationhood, masculinity and aesthetics, perhaps to even a greater degree than baseball is in America. Whole swathes of Thai society – and most fighters come from the poorer ethnic minority regions to the Northeast, Isan, just as much of the sex trade industry draws Isan women – are devoted to Muay Thai as a sport. Every Thai boy (and very, very rare girls) dream of becoming a Buakaw or a Sanchai or Yodsanklai (ironically, Buakaw who is possibly the most recognized Muay Thai fighter in the world earned his standing fighting in Japanese K-1 max tournaments which bar a great deal of what makes Muay Thai what it is – elbows and clinching). It is perhaps fair to say that unless you understand Muay Thai, you will fail to understand Thailand, and Muay Thai is only something I’m beginning to understand.

It’s an interesting martial art and sport, and this is the aspect that brought me to write. Firstly, it is designed for smaller framed people. Its emphasis on speed and directness of impact is difficult to properly carry out by heavy-bodied people. For this reason the well-muscled Western men who often gravitate towards fighting simply distort its forms and application - its essential, full-bodied whiplike action - often beyond recognition. It is not a big man’s art, and some of the best Muay Thai in thailand is fought by the innumerable 12 and 14 year olds in rural festivals throughout the countryside and towns. Secondly, it is a martial art whose logic was organized by warfare itself. It was assumed that in battle you would lose a weapon, would experience injury. So the thought goes, if you lose a spear the same motion of attack can be accomplished with a fist or an elbow. If you injure your lower leg, strike in the same manner with a knee. It is designed around the attrition of battle, and because it heritage is thinking in terms of battles there is great emphasis on ending the combat as soon as possible. There is an incredible economy of motion and directness in the under-structure of Muay Thai.

Part of this directness comes through in the training of Muay Thai. Instead of elaborate katas (pre-formed, repetitions of attack and defense) that have to be memorized as you pass through levels of “belts” and authority – the only belts in Muay Thai are the belts won in stadiums – the blows are elemental. Within a week of hard training you can achieve a modest efficacy that surely would make you dangerous to some significant degree. Though there are deep subtleties in techniques that can take decades to perfect, the basic movements can be taught very quickly and practiced with real world consequence. The art is extremely pragmatic, and grounded in this world. There is nothing etherial about it (unless you see it practiced by the highly skilled). It is a plebian art.

Another feature that is of interest is that the greatest difficulty Westerns have in learning Muay Thai (and much of what is taught in the United States in gyms may not qualify), is that in order to strike properly you have to relax to an incredible degree. The fight impulse in the Western masculine conception is a clenched brutality. For a Thai the threat of violence is met with relaxation. It is not an elevated spiritual principle, but rather more a psychological aesthetic of the person and body. When you watch Muay Thai matches they are most often characterized by the opponents standing within range of each other, calming trading and receiving blows, some of which are blocked, some not. Principal is to never look desperate to strike or react. Often after a blow the receiver just shrugs. Emphasized is the display of a nonchalance, but a nonchalance that is explosive. Fights are only 5 rounds, and the first round often isn’t even spent attacking. Opponents will mostly tap each other and rock in a sleepy motion with almost no intent to harm. Usually not until the 3rd round is action full-force. Counter to Western ideals, backing up is seldom penalized and is often seen as a sign of strength.

What occurred to me as my wife trained and fought there (and Western women are having an interesting impact on the traditional highly masculine sphere of Muay Thai boxing), was the ways that Muay Thai as both an art and a sport was something of a Spinozist art incarnate. The directness and simplicity of its powerful blows and defenses spoke of Spinoza’s aim to speak of the world of the affects like a geometer. The absolute economy of closely arced kicks were a Spinozist dream of motion. It’s teachable modes of training matched the common man democracy powers that Spinoza championed when he claimed that each person has as much right as the power he has to act. Non-reactive aesthetics of calm eruption coupled with a pragmatism that makes weapons out of the weaponless is ideal to Spinoza’s world of possibilities. It is this that always struck me when I was there. It is the actionability of a person.