Re: X Notes on Practice

Dear Raqs Collective,

thank you for your nice text.

I want make a short comment on it, concerning the history of the
seepage and the ideology of networks.

Your metaphor of the Seepage beautifully describes what I would call the
dialectic of transgression and identity. Only that you do not describe it
as a dialectical process, but a mere erosion of the stable. You imply a
trajectory into the networking-ideology, which raises doubts, that I would
love to get clarified:

The Seepage is not ahistoric. It did not suddenly emerge. It is even not
bound to change of capital. The tactics of Seepage are nothing more or
less than the (un)concious efforts of any historical time to withstand its
abolitions, no matter the forces of abolition are political, religious,
economical or what-you-have in character or a mixture of some of them
(most reasonably). The difference between past fluids and today's is the
growing awarness in the literate world of finding concepts or metaphors of
what has in earlier times simply been neglected by the discourse. This is
a fruit of e.g. philosophical concepts that came up (again?) in the second
half of the 20th century, namely of studies that all carry the prefix
"post" in their name, to mark a development or change of thinking and
attitude towards their objects. The most advanced implementations of those
concepts are sometimes found in management theories.

So, despite  your sympathic view of accumulation of change by the Seepage,
inherent lies a trajectory of disempowering the structure by weak
structured operations, as I understand you. And I cannot agree on that. The
embbeding surroundings of the Seepage are as well highly flexible and 
moving.

Who bodycounts capitalism?

As a description of the search for a life with some dignity, I am content
with your description of  the Seepage. But see: the network has always
been there, digital technologies are just the latest incarnations of it
(now beaten to death almost by capital).

The quality of 'an ethic of radical alterity to prevailing norms' is
expressed through its manifestations, not through a description, even less
through a metadiscourse about it. The "Marginalias" are insights into
contemporary life. The danger is to pick and collect them as the latest
bouquet of material gorged by cultural workers, what is not your
intention, but still worth to point at.


cheers, oli


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