I need 200-300 word proposals from the panelists.
I need the proposals by 18 November 2009.

The topic of the panel will will be:  Discourses of Legitimation in Knowledge, Cultural and Information Policy.  I am looking for at least 3 more participants for the panel.

The idea is that in using interpretive methods, we find certain discourses that aim to legitimize certain policies related to knowledge and cultural policy in our society.  The papers should describe these discourses so that in the panel we can present them and discuss the similarities and differences.   For my perspective, I tend to be most closely allied with Habermasian and Lyotardian issues of legitimation and the issues of justification described by Boltanski and Thévenot in On Justification.  However, any model of  a discourse that legitimizes, justifies a policy will be considered for the panel.

I’d like to see papers for the panel of around 20-30 pages eventually, but the panel will minimally need to have presentations of 15-20 minutes.    If I get the papers, I’ll try to get them placed in a journal special issue or similar project.

Using short narratives, this paper center several events and relationships that changed the archives and mobilized them in some relation to everyday life. The stories used will deal with the ambulations of the Marxists archive in 2007 when it was attacked by computers in China, the movements of Feminist theory websites as it becomes embedded in and migrates through textbooks and academic papers  becoming something new, while remaining unchanged, the Tragedy of  April16archive and its relationship to the Northern Illinois  University shooting, and possibly the trials and tribulations of  Situationists International and the Bureau of Public Secrets in  relation to their original print existences.

Through telling the stories of these techno-social ambulants as archives in everyday life, I hope to show their movements and embeddedness in everyday life; their capacity for change and becoming  in relation to all varieties of institutions and communities, from  local users to nation states and to show how their existence allows  for a transversal analysis of cultural relations in relation to the  archives as they migrate through and among those institutions and  communities.

CDDC in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University is accepting new manuscripts for digital modes of publication in its Research E-ditions series. The CDDC ( http://www.cddc.vt.edu ) has been in operation for nearly two years, and it publishes hypertext journals, hosts digital research archives, and cooperates with many international cyberculture organizations.

As an entirely digital point-of-publication, the CDDC will review and then produce professional academic research works–either single-authored or edited collections–in a digital format. Proposals could take the form of an “e-book” that simply makes available a scholarly monograph in online format, or a collection of academic papers organized around a central theme, or a fully hypertextual experiment with new forms of digital discourse. Arrangements can be made for “print on demand” (POD) paper versions of these works, but the main focus of the CDDC is to explore the new communicative potentials of hypertext, hypermedia, and web-centered publication. The review processes will be as extensive and rigorous as those experienced in print academic communication, but it too will be conducted in a fully on-line format.

Research E-ditions

All topics are potentially of interest in the Research E-ditions series, however, we are particularly interested in manuscripts, digital archives, and hypertexts from the humanities and social sciences relating to the areas of cyberculture, social theory, literary studies, digital art, and cultural studies. In addition, the CDDC is committed to proposals from applied and natural sciences that relate directly to the fields of bioinformatics, energy and environmental studies, and information technology and communications.

Hosting@CDDC

All topics and projects of academic interest that require hosting are solicited for the Hosting@CDDC project. We host and mirror several major projects and have space for many more. We host projects serving a broad set of communities. We provide basic facilities of web hosting and listserv hosting. Any requirements beyond basic hosting should be outlined in the proposal. Hosting is frequently used in conjuction with various forms of community software, e-journal software, or related software to support artistic, academic, and related content.

Digital Originals

Digital Originals is open access publishing for book-like digital projects. We are soliciting submissions from people who have materials that originate in the digital arena, and want them to be released either under a Creative Commons license or under an Open Content License. The original documents will be peer-reviewed, edited, and published with an ISBN assigned and made freely downloadable on the CDDC Website.

Proposals:

Initial proposals should take the form of a 1 page description of the project, including a description of the services requested, a description of the project’s audience, and provide current examples of the work (URLS) that is to be hosted or published. All proposals will be peer reviewed with at least two reviewers and further information may be requested. The review process is as rigorous as any academic publisher.

Proposals should be sent to CDDC@vt.edu

Informational power is a power of control, control of distribution, control of origination. It is a power of establishing borders, territories, and limiting access. It is predicated on assumptions of normality, and when the normal becomes too fast, too informationally productive, and generates enormous surpluses of capacity, like a bomb, the excessive power; the excessive information explodes. It breaks the boundaries, overwhelms the territory, and forces humans to develop new tactics for management, for governance. I argue that this is the state we are in, a state of excess, of being overwhelmed by information and power, because we have built an informational infrastructure based on speed and power.

There is no end in sight for the progressive development of this infrastructure. With terabit/sec speeds already in place, it is likely already beyond the limits of real human understanding, and we are beginning to see how it manifests itself as a tool of transformation or weapon of destruction of the institutions built on fordist and post-fordist understandings of information, such as music, movies, banking, which have strong informational ties, but this is just the start of a more pervasive creative destruction.

Faced with these issues and their immanent explosion, I look at the proposals for governance, for creating a sustainable political economy that governments are using around the world, such as defining information as artifacts and allowing patents, redefining copyrights, and developing international trade regimes surrounding information. I contrast the governmental systems with the growing cultural awareness of the issue and introduce the question: what if governments fail? how does society reterritorialize information, and what cultural toolkits seem to be arising in the face of speed and excess, such as open source, open content, and related movements that arise out of and restructure the excess into new cultural systems.

The panel will coalesce around questions concerning the modes of change associated with software, computer code in various senses, and its adjacent practices. It conceptualises code as a hybrid, mobile construction of a technical-culture industry. Code is understood as a political and empowered social construction, which is not purely focused on the enablement of a singular group or social movement, but is systematically distributed across networks spanning nationalities and cultures. The increased visibility of code as cultural-technical entity, and as an object of public attention will be one focus. In the context of massive proliferations of unwanted or ‘junk’ code (viruses, operating systems, ‘bloatware’), the legal struggles over the difference between code as speech and code as technology will be a second focus. Finally, the panel will explore questions concerning the increased visibility of software or code (understood in a range of different ways) as cultural, political, economic and technical entities. Among questions to be addressed by the panel: how have code, programming, ‘cutting code’, hacking, scripting, etc. moved from technical practices carried out in ‘centres of calculation’ to generalised, popularised and politicised techniques? Do code objects challenge existing ontologies of technology and politics? How can we understand the mobility of code and coding practices without reducing them to standard accounts of ‘information society’?

The transdisciplinary opportunities of information science and technology were noted before, (Lyotard). They were a popular in certain optimistic and utopian discourse from the 1970’s and 1980’s, until the popularization and formalization of commodity computing and specialized tools transformed many viewpoints away. The discourse of transdisciplinary informatics still exists in the background of many discussions. As informatics has pervaded other disciplines with the growing number of hobbyists and hackers, a new set of institutional transformations is arising. This institutional transformation could have significant effects on information schools, either opening up a world of opportunity or isolate them

Organizations produce subjectivities, commodities, knowledges, and non-knowledges as parts of symbolic systems.

In a general commodity, production of subjectivities is the production of knowledges and non-knowledges in excess.

The overproduction of symbols in the system combined with a differential production of subjectivities creates a critical space for non-knowledge, or the unknowable to exist.

As parts non-knowledge become othered and alienated they enter the realm of the individual’s ego or freedom.

When individuals act upon those non-knowledges in organizations, they become the outsider, or the evil from within the organization.

Thus the overproduction or excess production of symbolic systems creates evil.

In conclusion, this Bataille-based thesis is comparable to Baudrillard’s argument about the origin of evil in society, as found in the Transparency of Evil. Thus, we can see the need to build more deeply into the realm of semiology in order to understand the functioning of evil in organizations.