Depropriation
By Marcus Boon
For many philosophers appropriation is constitutive of human being. In order to survive we eat, we build territories, we take and we give. Marx, in his early manuscripts, spoke of man’s entire relation to world as one of sensory appropriation. More broadly, all political-economic systems that are based on exchange and equivalence may be said to involve appropriation. Capitalism and colonialism can therefore be thought of as particular regimes of appropriation, as are feudalism and “primitive accumulation”, while communism as presented in the Communist Manifesto involves a reappropriation of that which has been appropriated by the bourgeoisie. A final appropriation if you like. Marx distinguished in the Grundrisse between property per se and private property but insisted on the necessity of the former: “an appropriation which does not make something into property is a contradictio in subjecto.”1
Globalization and digitization both amplify possibilities for appropriation to occur—an appropriation that is associated with “piracy”, on the one hand, as the illegitimate possession and exchange of privately owned things, and on the other, as the legally sanctioned mechanisms by which things are taken from the global commons and made part of the market economy. Contemporary discourses concerning “cultural appropriation” stand in uneasy relation to the globalized neoliberal framing of appropriation in relation to private property. On the one hand, they mobilize appropriation as part of the critique of the ways in which marginalized peoples’ culture and production have been transformed into capital by/for those who assume hegemonic positions within the global economy.2 On the other hand, they often assume that culture itself is fundamentally a private property of a particular ethnic or identity group—and that all unsanctioned movement of cultural objects constitutes a kind of theft, whether or not such theft is recognized by existing intellectual property regimes or legal structures. As such, the righting of historical and continuing injustices labeled as “cultural appropriation” often feeds into a neoliberal logic of ubiquitous privatization and property rights—and becomes part of a much broader assault on the idea of the common or commons today, and the possibility of a shared world.
A question remains, however, about how fundamental appropriation is, and whether all entities can finally be defined as property, whether private or common. I will argue in this essay that there is another position with respect to being, and that one name for it is depropriation. By depropriation I mean to suggest various practices that render things unownable, that refuse the logic of property, and that make such things necessarily part of a public domain or commons. But I also mean depropriation as a fundamental condition of being free of ownership. I will explore a variety of examples of depropriation, including Occupy Wall Street, WikiLeaks, and the recent musical compilation Music from Saharan Cellphones. I argue that it’s hard to understand what is at stake in these events or phenomena without being clear about depropriation.
The argument is not a nostalgic one, nor exactly utopian. I recognize, following the work of anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, that there is no such thing as a free culture to be found beyond modern, colonial, or capitalist society: that all human societies hitherto have been committed to varying degrees to different kinds of property regimes with different laws, rules, values.3 Having said that, the intensity of recent moves to mark everything in the world as a particular kind of property and/or private property force us to look more carefully at what is meant by property—and to recognize the importance of certain limits to that concept.
I argue that many of the most interesting social and cultural movements today are developing a conscious practice by which things are rendered unownable and thus made part of a different kind of commons from that discussed by IP scholars like James Boyle and Lawrence Lessig.4 The idea is a significant one because it suggests that the goal of progressive political and aesthetic movements should not be to make judgments or claims as to a final and authoritative state of belonging or property, however historically disenfranchised those in question are, but to create practices whereby humans and nonhumans can live sustainably without needing to claim ownership. This immediately raises a problem, one pointed out by Marx, who claimed that it was impossible to imagine any basis for life on Earth other than appropriation: We breathe in oxygen, eat plants and animals, learn languages from our parents, and so on. The only way around this would seem to be a radical practice of ascesis, literally starving oneself. This is hardly the case though. As the Buddhist teacher Lama Yeshe observes, the problem for the alcoholic is not the glass of wine itself but his craving for it, his desire to appropriate it.5 One might even say that the problem isn’t whether to drink or not to drink, but the desire to appropriate, own the drinking of it—or the not drinking of it. The problem, an almost unimaginably vast one, is how to recognize this socially and politically, on a global scale.
So: What is depropriation? Obviously it’s one of a number of contemporary words in which the prefix “de” indicates a kind of unraveling of something: deconstruction; decolonization; Simone Weil’s decreation; Deleuze and Guattari’s deterritorialization.6 The word has several lineages, no doubt interlinked. One passes through French feminist writers, notably Hélène Cixous, who uses the word to describe a state of open embodiment of which the mother’s care for a child is exemplary.7 Another passes through Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s work on mimesis, in which he proposes a mimetic force that undoes ideas of original and copy since it constitutes that plastic, mutable nonthing which makes both original and copy possible.8 A further lineage passes through the work of Giorgio Agamben and his notion of a “whatever being” that cannot be understood in terms of property—an idea then taken up by Roberto Esposito in Communitas, in which he argues that “depropriazione”, a fundamental lack of property, i.e. an impropriety, is the basis of the commonality of mankind, or even of all Being.9 In other words, that what we share is a lack of property, an unfinishedness, an openness, or vulnerability. Esposito rigorously demonstrates this as a formal and philosophical possibility, drawing on an analysis of the proper and improper in Heidegger, which are often (mis?)translated as authentic and inauthentic.10 Yet for me, I am continually drawn back to the striking example with which Agamben concludes The Coming Community: the crowd of demonstrators in Tiannamen Square, who stand forth in a militarized public space, without demands, asserting their Being. Whether Agamben is completely correct in this analysis, the scenes have been repeated in recent years, in the various locations and uprisings of the Arab Spring. And more recently in the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, where, for example, one protestor carried a sign “we’re here; we’re unclear; get used to it”.
There is a double structure to depropriation and perhaps to piracy in a general sense. In the examples I look at, depropriation functions at both ontological and legal levels: In other words, it is not just a matter of breaking the law of a particular property regime but also of revealing or developing qualities of subject or object that trouble more fundamental definitions of what is. Consider my first example: drugs. Colonial empires were built on sugar, tea, coffee, opium, coca, and of course the postcolonial world today can also be described by the “rogue” or “pirate” production of psychoactive substances, whether cocaine production in Colombia, marijuana production in Mexico, or heroin production in Afghanistan.11 This drug trade is increasingly globalized, from Russian or Israeli distribution of ecstasy, to South East Asian amphetamines, to Mexican pharmacies selling prescription drugs with fake rxes over the Internet. At the micropolitical level drugs are about depropriation because of the way they sometimes transform a normalized subjectivity, they are ecstatic because they can dissolve the “proper self”.
One useful way of distinguishing the value of drugs might be to contrast those in which psychic depropriation is followed by a powerful reappropriation in the form of addiction, and those where that doesn’t happen. I’m indebted to Michael Taussig’s work on ayahuasca shamanism in the Putumayo in Colombia, in which he tries to understand the phenomena of shamanism as a historically specific and diverse form of engagement within a particular colonial and postcolonial situation, so that the healing work of the shaman involves unraveling the terror of colonial appropriation and its various structures.12 In other words, it involves psychic depropriation through ingestion of the drug, through exposure to the sonic powers of the shaman, and to the collective turbulence of the healing session. Such depropriation itself can be reappropriated through postcolonial ayahuasca tourism, which packages a particular model of “authentic” use of the drug. But even prior to that Taussig notes that there are radical differences between particular shamans’ approaches. Some shamans undergo a laborious process of apprenticeship to other shamans, in which the ability to heal is transferred as a kind of private property, reliant on a discourse of authenticity, while others (with whom he is more sympathetic) simply go into the forest and start using the drug, “stealing” it, to use the language of those who consider knowledge of the drug proprietary. Taussig is fascinated by a kind of chaos that occurs in a yage session, a chaos that is chaos precisely because it’s not clear what belongs to whom. People vomit. They shit. They imagine snakes shooting in and out of their mouths. They cry and laugh. Trauma, personal, social, historical, and political, opens up, often violently, yet the opening up of trauma is not itself violent if it is voluntarily assented to. Healing proceeds from opening up trauma, from facing a historical or inexistent but present violence. It opens up through sonic counter-practices, through bodily microtransformation through psychoactive substances.
This leads me to my second example: music. Obviously musical piracy is a big issue with a long history. Many of the myths of great performers or new styles involve Promethean acts of theft, by which the secret of a style is revealed and shared. A Sufi myth says that the human soul was called to Earth and embodiment because it required ears to hear music, and this was tempting enough for the soul to sign off on an otherwise questionable proposition.13 There is something about music that is always already profoundly depropriated. This perhaps accounts for the various ways in which musical forms have been kept secret, and for the capturing and commodification of sound using recording technologies, notation, etc., which seek to turn music into private property. And again, conversely, it’s not surprising that the first file sharing scandals were also associated with music. You might say the musical pirate’s dilemma is whether to try to own sound.
Music from Saharan Cellphones is a series of compilations made by Oregon-based musician Christopher Kirkley of contemporary Saharan pop music styles, which people who live in various parts of the Saharan diaspora listen to on their cellphones, using Bluetooth to exchange files with each other. The compilations were issued in 2011/2012. Kirkley acquired the recordings from people’s cellphones while traveling, by trading selections from his own music collection. He initially put them out on a cassette. The cassette was uploaded as MP3 files onto the net. Now, due to interest, he’s putting out a vinyl version of the cassette and trying to track down some of the artists on the Bluetooth files. Meanwhile, a group of remixers and musicians around the world have already contributed a series of remixes and cover versions of the “originals” to another compilation Music for Saharan Cellphones, which, among other formats, is being issued in “a limited release 30 limited hand numbered microSD memory cards, to be mailed back to Kidal, Mali with the intention of getting the music back on cellphones.”14 This last gesture reminds me of a Sun City Girls release from the mid-1990s, Libyan Dream, which was “originally released as 50 cassette copies dropped in cassette vendors racks in various cities throughout South East Asia in 1993.”15 Instead of Gayatri Spivak’s affirmation of the value of the subaltern’s “insertion into the hegemonic”, here we might speak of a counter-practice of “insertion in the diasporic”.
To what degree can my comments on Taussig’s model of depropriation as part of a subaltern postcolonial healing practice be thought through in the case of Music from Saharan Cellphones? It is well known that traditional North African rhythmic musics often have a specific healing function. Moroccan Gnawa music, for example. To what degree do such models survive the secularization of music, as for example with the emergence of Touareg “desert blues” in the Libyan settlement camps in the 1990s? For that matter, to what degree are recording, electrification, and use of digital instruments such as drum machines still compatible with an idea of music as a healing practice? One reason for not rejecting such an idea out of hand would be Afrodiasporic traditions, including roots reggae and African American gospel, where cutting-edge sonic technologies are compatible with an explicitly religious and salvatory practice.16 But in thinking through the music on Music From Saharan Cellphones as a piratical endeavor involved in a practice of depropriation, I want to find a way of thinking about “piracy”, even in an mp3 market, as a potentially ecstatic practice. I remain convinced that there’s a missing aspect to contemporary theorizations of musical subcultures. You can see it in Steve Goodman’s recent book Sonic Warfare, which is great on the appropriation of military technologies and counter-ecologies of fear within Afrofuturist subcultures, but which is almost silent on the ontology of collective joy, which for me is the reason why subcultures gather together anyway.17 Perhaps this joy is always already post-secular in that it is concerned with an opening that is healing. In which, as Hakim Bey suggests in his book Immediatism, it is chaos, exposure to chaos, that heals.18 One of the challenges here is to understand the aspect of vibrational ontology that Goodman calls “audio virology” as ecstatic. And more than that, that the acts of exchange which happen using Bluetooth, cassettes, mp3 file sharing, etc. are also concerned with ecstatic contagion, as much as the sounds themselves, with their incredible abilities to pass back and forth across the globe.
This brings me to my next example of depropriation: WikiLeaks, the website and group which has made available a number of national and corporate archives for download by anyone on the Internet—including vast caches of US embassy documents and military records. The conventional interpretation of what WikiLeaks is would be that it is concerned with appropriation. In a recent issue of Radical Philosophy Finn Brunton points out that in his writings Assange emphasizes that the goal with WikiLeaks isn’t breaking into archives but making it easier for someone in a closed community that keeps secrets (he calls this a conspiracy) to leak something.19 The goal then is to undermine the stability of the group that keeps secrets and in a formal, almost mathematical way, shift the balance from groups that keep secrets to a public or commons where there are no secrets. And to shift from injustice to justice based on the notion that the secrets of unjust groups are more likely to be revealed than those that are based on a just and public practice of engagement.
In Assange’s formulation the question of community comes down to making “robust routing decisions”. Like everyone else, I was astounded at the emergence of WikiLeaks and the possibility of a radically new form of public knowledge that it implies. However, I find myself unimpressed with the specifics of most of the revelations generated by WikiLeaks so far. The endless exposure of the Big Other does not in itself constitute the basis of a just society, and it’s hard to see how the calls for total transparency are not themselves a strange distributed version of a panopticon—the echo of corporate and national cyber-wars and data theft, with their emphasis on covert appropriation or scrambling of data, along with strategic public exposure of data in order to damage enemies. I argue that despite the clear practice of depropriation that WikiLeaks involves, transmitting private or state owned archives into a public space that is not owned by anyone, there are significant gaps in Assange’s reasoning concerning what will happen to the documents when they’re released, and these gaps concern community.
According to Assange’s theories, the published documents on WikiLeaks website will generate an ecosystem of readers and interpreters who will collectively assess and expand on the truth contained in the documents. Yet this has not happened in any significant way. In a recent interview Assange blamed this on people’s conformity as writers to a group mentality.20 But there’s something instrumental to his view of freedom, as though it would be the outcome, in which particular kinds of human response are the logical income of being fed certain pieces of information? Yet, the genesis of recent protest movements actually appear not to be related to some particular nugget of information but to a particular gesture or act, as in Tunisia, or even with Wall Street. Assange believes in a reversal of the logic of appropriation and property that governs the nation-state today, but that reversal is not in itself to produce a truly open commons or community.
I will pass quickly to my final example, that of the Occupy movements that sprang up in North America and elsewhere in 2011/2012. One striking analogy between the politics of file sharing and that of the Occupy movements is that the legal prohibitions on direct sharing of copies have resulted in a fragmentation of the object into the distributed forms available on peer-to-peer networks, including WikiLeaks documents.
With the predictable evacuation of the Zuccotti Park occupation in New York on November 15, 2011, along with related movements that spread across the world around that time, the search for the way in which a depropriated community can manifest itself in the public space of the highly capitalized twenty-first century metropolis began anew, but Occupy Wall Street’s strength is already that it is a distributed network of many microprotests. Cities today are zones of visibility, spectacles, in the sense that Guy Debord defines them, and public assembly of anything other than consumers or dutiful workers will apparently not be tolerated. No doubt new ways to contest that structure will have to be devised—and they will all involve a logic of postcolonial piracy, since they will be judged illegal in advance, as the various laws regarding public assembly in the UK of recent decades will suggest. One of the current dilemmas facing the Occupy movements is whether to insist on the tent model of occupation of public space as a permanent form of protest or to think of it as what Hakim Bey called a temporary autonomous zone.21 There is a danger in insisting too much on a permanent appropriation of physical space. In Egypt the occupation of the square led to change; in Tiannamen it didn’t. On the other hand, the mobilization of large groups of people at specific demonstrations or moments in time is more a form of depropriation. The problem with this form, familiar to us today in the form of flash mobs, is that it basically leaves existing structures intact outside of the moment of the appearance of the public.
But Occupy Wall Street represents a significant development in terms of the politics of depropriation. To occupy means precisely to inhabit without owning, and the refusal of movement participants to package themselves in terms of a particular set of demands points to occupation as the manifestation of a depropriated community in much the sense that Esposito talks about it: heterogeneous, with “nothing in common”, yet claiming commonality precisely in that.22 The problem, as I see it, is that we do not yet have a practice or, to use a phrase of Badiou, a “popular discipline” that is capable of sustaining such a community.23
What does it mean to depropriate in a postcolonial situation? Surely not just to make oneself into a globally disseminated image, or, following Peter Hallward’s critique of postcolonial literature, to become an absolute, dissociated singularity, devoid of connection.24 This, of course, is one of the great fears regarding depropriation: that to let go of a claim of belonging is to lose everything, all the more traumatic since this would repeat the violent appropriation of colonization. Depropriation does not mean “to become nothing” because being in fact is not coextensive with belonging or the ownership of a territory, nor does it mean a lack of manifestation or presence. Depropriation means to allow a movement to happen, to allow a different relation between beings to open up, because that is how the world is changed, i.e. through transformative mimesis.
Finally, what’s striking about Music from and for Saharan Cellphones is the intense desire to participate in piracy that it reveals. The collection exists because Kirkley participated in exchange in Mali and other places and because there were a network of nodes in North America such as Mississippi Records that also found it interesting to do so. The music on the cellphones is also there because musicians in the Saharan diaspora wanted to participate in particular sonic forms that are not traditional but… precisely: depropriated. Reggae, psych rock, hip-hop, etc.
With WikiLeaks what’s powerful about the practice is the invitation to those who participate in rituals of privacy or secrecy to contribute to an ambiguously defined public. The weakness of WikiLeaks consists in the assumption that participation by a community of readers of leaks is automatic and appropriate. WikiLeaks is in fact much more top down and instrumental than it would appear, and its failures relate to a misunderstanding of appropriation and depropriation in which these things are still basically practiced on others.
Occupy Wall Street, despite the appropriative rhetoric of occupying the structures owned by the 1% on behalf of the 99%, is more clearly involved in a practice of depropriation. It is participatory. Occupation only happens because of those individuals who decide to occupy—and occupation is not the same as ownership. For the most part the demands are non-specific because the goal, whether articulated in this way or not, is to depropriate structures and open up a space of freedom. That space is to resonate with other similarly depropriated spaces. Not just the other Occupy nodes but also other global movements such as the Arab Spring groups. The situations are different, but the stance in relation to those situations is the same.
The issue of stance brings up the problem of practice, in other words, what does a depropriated community do? I argue that all of the situations that I’ve described today, in both their legal and ontological interest, are manifestations of a broad crisis in our relation to practice. Piracy, ultimately, is a matter of practice, but what kind of practice is it? Piracy blurs lines between work and play, ownership and the commons. Anarchist historians such as Hakim Bey have made the argument that piracy evolved under colonial regimes precisely as an escape from colonial indentured labor.25 It wouldn’t be hard to show that a lot of contemporary phenomena labeled piracy involve the avoidance of work. Others are reliant on the same sweatshop labor that drives much of the official economy. My hypothesis: Practice gravitates toward those places or occasions where it lives in accordance with the deepest truth, which is: the truth of depropriation—even when it lacks the words, legal and political structures to sustain itself.
Thus, for example, downloading cultures, or more broadly subcultures which exchange things like music that are matters of passion, are driven toward something like BitTorrent or peer-to-peer networks not just as a way of evading the strictures of a legal system, but because they have available to them resources in the creation of objects that are real precisely because they ignore prevailing definitions of what an object (or a subject) is in favor of something more profound and more pragmatic. Hence, it turns out that it is not all necessary for a copy to consist of a laborious produced one to one replica of an entity: thousands of copies of that entity can be montaged together mathematically to assemble a particular object. In fact, that’s what all copying, digital or not, is anyway, and we ourselves are largely copies in this sense.
Bricolage is indeed, as Levi-Strauss said, the science of the concrete. Yet the question of what comes to hand for the bricoleur can take radical form. It could take the form of a musical style that belongs everywhere and nowhere, as with Music from Saharan Cellphones, or a state or corporate archive, as with WikiLeaks, or the space of the political itself, whether physical as in Zuccotti Park, or the dataspaces in which global finance moves, as with the Occupy movements. The Pirate’s Dilemma then, to repeat, is how to resist appropriating all of this in the name of some property form or other, and instead how to unravel that logic of property and the forms that it takes today in order to affirm a shared space. That shared space is, in fact, the space that we already habit, but the question remains: How do we collectively learn to recognize it?
Coda: August 2018
Much of the above was written in 2013—at a point when it was still possible to entertain an affirmative sense of depropriation. Much has shifted in the time that has passed, although the fundamental need to resist the marketization of all human activity and to affirm the reality of a shared world and the practices by which it might be attained has not. Accusations of “cultural appropriation” have become part of the core of contemporary liberal/progressive discourse, particularly as it is marked by ideas of intersectionality. Conversely, they have also become a part of ethnonationalist discourses coming from the right. At the heart of this paradox are the mechanisms of neoliberalism itself in the sense that they were defined by Ludwig von Mises in his book Human Action in 1949.26 Where assertions of equality find their form as the equality of individual actors or particular cultural groups competing and making decisions in a market economy, “appropriation” must appear as the threat of the contamination of the rights of property holders, which now are falsely equated with “human rights” in general. That such contamination must be warded off can be understood from a variety of perspectives. In Latourian actor-network theory it is our entanglement in the network which produces reactive attempts to define pure spheres of identity and action. In Girard’s analysis the ubiquitousness of processes of mimetic contagion trigger reactive violence as the attempt to assert ownership of properties or qualities that are ultimately unownable and shared.27
However, the processes of depropriation that gesture toward a shared world have themselves become weaponized in complex and paradoxical ways in recent years. WikiLeaks, for example, has become a place where a variety of state sponsored actors can pursue acts of appropriation as a form of extra-legal warfare. One could say something similar about the so-called dark web, or the figure of the hacker more generally, who acts on behalf of private interests and for whom the technosocial commons of the Internet is merely a strategic zone to be taken advantage of. The notion that “the tragedy is the commons” advanced by philosophers such as Nick Land brings us back to Hobbes and the state of nature as a war of all against all.28 Private property protects us from this war, and depropriation according to this mode of reasoning means only a return to that state of warfare. If this mode of reasoning is accepted, then there can be no depropriation in the sense that I have defined it above, as rendering something unownable and part of the commons—for the commons would be only a space of unregulated appropriation, which can either be celebrated as such, or pointed to as a “tragedy” which justifies the rule of law in its modern bourgeois form as guarantor of the rights of private property owners.
In terms of sharing economies, the depropriated space of file sharing on the Internet is gradually being absorbed by the paradigm of streaming—as found with Spotify, Netflix, or Amazon’s Kindle service for books. The model is interesting because it retains some core features of depropriative political economy—access without ownership, principally—while absorbing these features into a conventional business model in which intellectual property rights are leased by the streaming services, which then charge monthly fees for access to the database of recordings. The result is a kind of commons for private subscribers. Indeed, this is echoed in the discourse of the commons that is found in parts of the global art world, and in NGOs where a limited or pseudo-commons appears only as a result of extensive public or private funding. But in many parts of the world, for example Indonesia, where intellectual property protections are weak or non-existent, Bluetooth-based sharing of data still prevails. For certain categories of object, and for those who can afford the monthly fees, streaming appears as a solution to the problem of depropriation—but of course, what remains is the depropriation of wealth itself—taking us back to Marx, or as Kojin Karatani has suggested in his recent book The Structure of World History, back to the problem of the gift and the “gift economy”.29 And perhaps, for those of us who have paid such attention to the politics of the copy, imitation, and iteration, it is a reminder of a kind of limit to arguments about the ubiquity of copying. The gift, if—as Derrida and others have noted—it exists, is that which cannot be economized, made equivalent, or given a likeness.[30] It may well be the fate of the gift to be absorbed into an economy, to the point where, as “event of depropriation” (Ereignis, Heidegger) it is imperceptible, inexistent. But precisely there, where ideology polices the border of the possible and impossible, the perceptible and the imperceptible, is where depropriation will be found.
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1 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1993), 87–88.
2 See, for example: James O. Young and Conrad G. Brunk (eds.), The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
3 Marilyn Strathern, “Imagined Collectivities and Multiple Ownership,” in Code: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy, ed. Rishab Aiyer Ghosh (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 13–28.
4 Cf. Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (New York: Penguin Press, 2004); James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
5 Lama Yeshe, “The Three Principle Aspects of the Path, Part 1,” 1982 lecture, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYmnIYF7uC8 (accessed on Oct. 23, 2018).
6 Simone Weil, “Decreation,” in Simone Weil Reader (Mt. Kisco, NY: Moyer Bell, 1977), 350–356; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Treatise on Nomadology,” in A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 351–423.
7 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Signs 1, 4 (summer 1976): 875–893.
8 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, trans. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
9 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993); Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).
10 Esposito, Communitas, 95–97.
11 David T. Courtwright, Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
12 Michael T. Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1986).
13 Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Mysticism of Music, Sound and Word (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1988), 79.
14 “memory cards for africa,” https://sahelsounds.com/2011/10/memory-cards-for-africa/ (accessed on Oct. 23, 2018).
15 “Sun City Girls – Libyan Dream,” http://www.suncitygirls.com/discography/LibyanDream.php (accessed on Oct. 23, 2018).
16 Jayna Brown, “Buzz and Rumble: Global Pop Music and Utopian Impulse,” Social Text 28, 1 (2010): 125–146.
17 Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).
18 Hakim Bey, Immediatism (San Francisco: AK Press, 1994).
19 Finn Brunton, “Keyspace: WikiLeaks and the Assange Papers,” Radical Philosophy 166 (2011): 8–19.
20 Hans-Ulrich Obrist, “In Conversation with Julian Assange,” Part 1, e-flux 25 (2011): 16.
21 Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1991).
22 Esposito, Communitas.
23 Alain Badiou, “We Need a Popular Discipline,” Critical Inquiry 34 (summer 2008): 645–659.
24 Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2001).
25 Peter Lamborn Wilson, Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2003).
26 Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949).
27 See: Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1991); René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978).
28 Nick Land on Twitter, @Outsideness, July 16, 2018, https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/1018904675838562304 (accessed on Oct. 23, 2018).
29 Kojin Karatani, The Structure of World History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
30 Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).