Seth Price - Dispersion, Steven Shaviro - blog post

In this blog post on a collection of essays by Paolo Virno, Steven Shaviro raises a crticism of Virno: he thinks he is too vague when discussing forms of social change (Shaviro comes out as 'enough of a "vulgar Marxist' to be concerned about this). In an example for this point, Shaviro says:

“Lateral thinking” is a business buzzword more than an anti-capitalist strategy. Things like “open software” and “creative commons” copyright licenses are not anywhere near as radical as they sound — if anything, they not only coexist easily with a capitalist economy, but presuppose a capitalist economy for their functioning. All too often, what we celebrate as escapes from the capitalist machine in fact work as comfortable niches within it.

...and this is probably as good a description as any of some of the discomfort I felt reading some of Price's text. Relating specifically, Price's mention of Linux (open source software) being 'decentralised' is kind of just too simple (and taken most literally, not really true?), and I agree with Shaviro's point regarding open software that alternative copyright licensing exists because of capitalism (not merely within it)*. Shaviro had abstracted this idea earlier in his post; an idea he argues is shared (more or less) between Virno, Wittgenstein and Deleuze (and then later, Kant too)- that there are 'empirical' statements (with truth values) or 'grammatical' ones (that presuppose how we decide said truth values?), and/or 'transcendental empiricism', where a 'transcendental field' determines what is possible or not, but is not itself absolute but has 'an empirical genesis within time'. Shaviro had already briefly used capitalism in an example here too - 'capitalism arises entirely contingently, but once it has imposed itself it takes on the shape of a transcendental, circumscribing both what we can experience, and how we can experience it'.

Finding lots of Price's content interesting though, I am unhappy with how cynical this reading alone is. I enjoy his brief criticism of the Krauss version of modernist conceptual art, as a 'so this is what had to come next' kind of story. Likewise, when a commenter on the Shaviro post sticks up for open source, noting that of course it cannot escape 'the capitalist machine', but that it's still a good example of a disruptive intervention - 'no joke', but 'figuring the world differently', I agree with him. And I think that with Dispersion, at least/most obviously formally**, Price has managed a similar different-figuring.

* A quick personal justification for this, as Shaviro doesn't explain much himself - I think people are happy and able to work on open source software because it's helpful career-wise, directly or otherwise, where the career is in an industry that is still largely earns money from proprietary software.

** Though in another appealing part, Price makes clear a relationship between form and mobility, and mobility and ideas.