The room on the 5th floor at 16Beaver in Lower Manhattan was packed yesterday when Brian Holmes introduced his work of the past decade or so. The core of his writing, often focused on social organization, is now archived at http://www.u-tangente.org where you can download it for free. This also includes the entirety of his new book that will be published by Autonomedia later this year. In his struggle for civil society Holmes argues for the autonomy of the intellectual and explicitly does not see it in the university, which he perceives as being increasingly regulated by the corporate police. Into a debate of network hype Holmes introduced an insightful, sharp critique of the networked life. For Holmes there is no point to write theory if it is not directly linked to (activist, direct) action. Looking at philosophies to enjoy their beauty or historical value is not his project. He puts his words to the test. I admire this as long as I know him. This Berkley-educated art critic applied the richness of his knowledge to his writings about art projects in the outskirts of Paris where an obscure Marxist art group put on an exhibition. He was also there in Genoa and Seattle and in Paris in 1995. He was involved with the graphic arts collective Ne Pas Plier and more recently with Bureau d'études and University Tangente. Writing alongside social movements is not so easy if what you do is theory that works on a fairly abstract bird's eye level. At yesterday's event one man in the audience demanded more empathic emotion in Holmes' message. I agree. Whom are we speaking to and for what purpose? And-- which language and style of presentation lends itself best to get there? Does an authoritarian style of presentation work if you want to debunk authority? What language do we use when speaking to whom? How do we encourage each other to speak? Will we let others stop our academic thought-express-train? Holmes, in "Flexible Personality" parallels the manger who jet sets on business travel to the cultural worker who may just sit next to her on that same plane. Holmes directs his powerful word armada to assert that they are both part of the same managerial class that jumps, without meaningful agenda from one little opportunity to the next. Miwon Kwon, in an Art Journal essay a few years back also noted that academics often measure their self-worth by comparing frequent flyer miles. The billboard on the left, which I photographed at JFK recently examplifies the same spirit.

Holmes dedicates himself to the transformative power of human encounters and this lecture successfully set the stage for this two-week long workshop aiming at what Holmes called 'subversive knowledge creation.' The networked hell that Holmes portrayed includes the constant availability of the lap-dog salaried worker equipped with laptop who can be put to work anywhere and at any time. Cell phones enable casualized labor and little carrots are thrown at the worker who keeps on marching. Telecommunication makes also the boredom of the call centers in India possible. In addition, the global financial markets are governed through the network cables that run under the cobblestones of Wall Street. I agree with his radical critique. But surely these same technologies and networks facilitate power shifts and challenge the content hegemonies of museums, universities and the print press with the additive quality of 'free' and 'open' archives assembled by thousands of volunteers in dozens of languages. Holmes, of course, correctly counters that 'free' and 'open' means closed and expensive for the poor or techno-illiterate. "Free" means that we forgot that once we bought all that shiny technology that we use today. And "open" is not open to those without high bandwidth, extra TIME on their hand to spend online, etc etc. Technologies can be "reverse imagineered" (to use Holmes' term) and put to use contra to their original purpose. But, to completely turn the back to network technologies and paint them as capitalism's military evil child robs us of the necessary and grounded enthusiasm needed to turn these technologies around. If Marx' central question was that about property then the digital-networked cooperation commons can hardly be overlooked. It is here, where the property question is put to the test on the grand scale. Here, millions swap files, live the hierarchies of exchange that the gift economy brings with it. They create knowledge repositories that are no rosy tomorrow-dreams. They are a reality. Someone in the audience remarked that each new technology is a Marxist's next utopia. The point really is to look network technologies in the eye and see the dark shadows without missing the bright sparks. Thank you to Brian Holmes and the 16Beaver gang for this inspiring event!            

(the image above is not from the event but was found as a result of a Google image search)