Nomaan Hasan: I want to begin with the observation that the ethnographic attention of this book is devoted to the minor. At the very outset you frame the work as a corrective to histories ‘about the accomplishments of big men’ (p. ix). An eclectic cast of characters – from curators to hackers, from musicians to lawyers – populates the pages, replete with ostensible cultural marginalia such as punk zines and art installations that one would not expect to encounter in a book on urban activism. The minor is conventionally understood as a debased position, lower in hierarchy to the major. Could you tell us how your focus on the minor instead challenges the major by widening the ambit of the political?
Adolfo Estalella: Thanks for the question, for it brings up an issue that has not been uncommon in many conversations not only about the book but about the relevance of the projects we describe and in which we have participated for a long time. Nevertheless, I would reframe the question by contesting the assumption that certain issues we pay attention to are minor, for they are only minor in appearance when we consider their experimental nature.
Our book is traversed by the experimental ethos that characterizes the activities of many of our interlocutors. If we take seriously these forms of experimentation, then I would argue that we cannot judge their value by their position in an assumed hierarchy but by their ability to open questions of relevance and make visible certain urban problematizations. We never judge an experimental laboratory by its dimensions or physical scale, but by its epistemic capacity to subvert our conceptions of the world we live in. The same applies to the projects, initiatives, collectives, and objects we pay attention to in our book.
Nomaan Hasan: There is a tension in the relationship between media and the political that traverses the book. At various junctures, your interlocutors express skepticism about the possibility of instrumentalizing a technology or medium. Discussing the fallout from a self-regulating bulletin board created by a free software server, a developer derives the lesson that ‘it undermines the assumption that one can aim for…an objective’ (p. 48). You transform this question by proposing that the relationship between media and politics be understood not as identity-based or issue-driven but as sensory, that media create a distribution of perceptibility. How does this analytic move reconfigure the problem of political indeterminacy of media?
Alberto Corsín Jiménez: I like very much how you have reframed the relation between media and its effects as one of sensibility rather than instrumentality. Thank you for that. Yes, we would like to think that that is one of the key take-aways from our ethnography: how the effects of media are differently reperceived depending on the plane of articulation, whether we think of media in terms of digital relations or we shift its plane of engagement to the urban condition. Or, as our interlocutors often did, if these planes are differently gradated, interweaved or blurred in different ways at different times.
In the book we speak about how free culture activism in Spain playfully disturbed the political domains of bricks and bytes. Only recently have scholars started to pay attention to the complex entanglements of the digital and the urban in the gargantuan operations of platform capitalism. But such entanglements have in fact been ongoing for over twenty years, for, as we show in the book, digital activism in Spain was urban-oriented almost from the start.
The fallout of the self-regulating bulletin board is a good example. Activists were well aware that the assemblage of the bulletin board as a socio-technical system might not quite translate the needs of the political assembly behind it. As it indeed turned out, the assemblage and the assembly failed to overlap, and the traffic of sympathies, affects or agonisms that they were designed to provide outlets for collapsed. Some people thought this was a problem of instrumentation, which could be corrected by designing a more agile and efficient technical system. For others, however, the deficit was not technical but sensorial, not something to be corrected, but an alignment of places, bodies and experiences to be reorchestrated and lived anew.
Much of the book is dedicated to fleshing out the regimentation of such technosensorial landscapes, what we call matters of sense. It seems to us that Latour’s “matters of concern” and Puig de la Bellacasa’s “matters of care” remain somewhat attached to or bounded by the problem of assemblage. By following free culture activists flights and travails from the digital to the urban, we show however that their commitments and concerns travelled across realms and orchestrations, mattering themselves into slowly cultivated sensorial projects and gatherings.
Now matters of sense do not accrue overnight. They don’t manifest in response to the urgencies and short-termism of factual politics. They have different modes of deposition, also, from the ethical exigencies of solidarity or the obligations of relationality. This prompted us to think, then, not about the indeterminacy of media, but about its slow-determinacy, not because it takes a long time for its effects to become visible, but because it takes us (ethnographers) a long time to cultivate and inhabit their sensorial significance.
Nomaan Hasan: Throughout the book, you trace how the work of free culture activism draws upon various – at times perhaps even divergent – currents of thought, ranging from Italian autonomism to social welfarism to Zapatismo to movements for digital rights or against conscription. Significantly, you refrain from flattening this heterogeneity into ideological coherence. At each step you foreground the provisionality of coalitions, recounting in absorbing detail the debates and compromises, for instance over public funding. ‘Bricolage of apprenticeships’ appears as a key concept in the book and your interlocutors can be seen as bricoleurs, assembling diverse strands as a patchwork in a style of collaboration marked by disregard for political purity. Often the quality of admixture that characterizes this practice is construed as a sign of impoverishment; could you elaborate on how it instead fosters pragmatic versatility?
Alberto Corsín Jiménez: “How we can we make any progress in the understanding of cultures, ancient or modern,” Hocart famously asked almost a century ago, “if we persist in dividing what people join and in joining what they keep apart?” (Hocart 2004, 23) Although ethnography has long excelled at demonstrating the empirical instability and abstract purity of assumptions and rationales taken for granted in political discourse, policy-making circles or other social sciences, it remains the case that we are ourselves often caught up in disciplinary conventions that are not of our own choosing. Thus, ethnographers of the digital are rarely, if ever, in conversation with ethnographers of the urban, and digital anthropology seems to inhabit conversational publics and problematics distinct from those of (say) urban studies or social movement studies.
In Free Culture and the City we did our best to stick closely to the conceptual elaborations and practices of our ethnographic partners, and we followed meticulously through the problematics and imaginaries that they traced out. We also did our best to reweave these conceptualizations back to debates in digital, urban and social movement studies, yet did so by promoting vernacular conceptualizations that highlighted transversal affordances and connections across the digital, the urban or activism, such as concepts of prototyping or intransitivity. This is another way of saying that the best way to prove the efficacy and versatility of a practice is often by resisting its justification or explanation in a language that is extraneous to it. But that demands, as Roy Wagner long taught us, reinventing the vernaculars of anthropological exposition.
Nomaan Hasan: Lastly, the question of method is not only a central thematic but is inscribed in the very form of the text. Notably, the book performs urban deambulation, drifting across the Madrid landscape in an attempt to recover the psychogeography of what you call an intransitive urbanism which simultaneously strives to defend the public and liberate the commons. What you argue about the practice of prototyping can be claimed of the book itself – that it ultimately discloses not necessarily an epistemological object but a ‘climate of methods’ that outlines possible worlds. In this context, how does this book make a contribution to anthropological method more broadly?
Adolfo Estalella: This is certainly a key issue of our book and a concern that we have sustained for years. From the very beginning of our ethnographic endeavor, we came across people of very different sensibilities and abilities who were somehow engaged in urban investigations of diverse kinds. They sometimes shared our conceptual vocabularies, showed similar epistemic aspirations, and used and repurposed research methods for their experimental endeavors in the city, and we realized that these inquiries were indeed central to their modes of inhabitation. The repertoire of creative and inventive methods they use is very often different from those we use in the social sciences, so when coining the concept of “climate of methods”, we aimed to capture the heterodox amalgam of practices and devices through which our interlocutors tested the limits, and experimented with, what was possible to do together in the city.
George Marcus and Douglas Holmes argued some time ago that in these kinds of para-ethnographic contexts (in which anthropologists relate to subjects with quasi-ethnographic practices), we are forced to relearn our methods of investigation from them. The book tries to show that these learnings and apprenticeships do not happen as a mere reaction to the difficulties of our ethnographic encounters, but they happen as integral parts of them.
We are well aware of the extended experience among many colleagues that our methods are overwhelmed by the empirical situations we take part. And we are convinced that in these uneasy times, it becomes more important than ever to be able to speculate with different modes of investigation, as our colleague Martin Savransky has recently argued. How could we do that? Where could we find inspiration to refunction our ethnographic modes of inquiry? I would say that if we take seriously the para-ethnographic condition of our interlocutors, then perhaps we could reanimate our ethnographic endeavors by relearning from them how to investigate a world of growing complexity. This is the reason why an ethnography of prototypes like ours has turned into an ethnographic prototype, for we have recursively incorporated into our ethnographic practice the modes of inquiry of our interlocutors. As Alberto sometimes says, our anthropological activity demands novel complicities to face the growing complexity of our world.
References
Hocart, A. M. 2004. The Life-Giving Myth and Other Essays. London: Routledge.
CaMP Anthropology 