Introduction to Posthumanities Gary Hall Coventry University .

Introduction to Posthumanities

Gary HallCoventry Universitywww.garyhall.info

‘It would be quite easy to generate a list of over 100

different nested measures to which each individual

academic in the UK is now

(potentially) subject.’

Roger Burrows, ‘Living with the H-

Index?’

‘Reed Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, and Taylor & Francis/Informa... publish about 6,000 journals between them’, somewhere between a quarter and a fifth of all peer-reviewed English-language

journals. ‘For-profit publishers have a stake in 62% of all peer-reviewed scholarly journals’ in English.(Ted Striphas, ‘Acknowledged Goods’ , Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2010)

Some companies enjoy ‘profit margins as high as 53 per cent on academic publishing. That compares with 6.9 per cent for electricity utilities, 5.2 per cent for food suppliers and 2.5 per cent for

newspapers.’ (Simon Lilley, ‘How Publishers Feather Their Nests on Open Access to Public Money’, Times Higher Education, 1 November, 2012)

Harvie et al call for a boycott of both Taylor & Francis and Routledge if their parent company, Informa plc, does not lower its journal subscription charges and pay the UK Exchequer the £13 million lost as a result of its 2009 decision to become a company

domiciled in Zug, the Swiss canton with the lowest rate of taxation.

Informa can be placed alongside Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Starbucks on the roll call of companies that aggressively avoid paying the UK

standard rate of 21% corporation tax. Over ‘half of Informa’s total annual operating profit [is] derived from academic publishing: £85.8 million’

in 2010. Its journals alone provide ‘gross profit margins of over 70 per cent’.

‘There are only two other industries offering these sorts of return: ‘illegal drugs and the delivery of

university-level business education.’

- Harvie et al, ‘What Are We To Do With Feral Publishers?’, Organization, November, vol. 19 no. 6, 2012

‘There is no privilege for a unique human

subject… With this single step, a

total democracy of objects replaces

the long tyranny of human beings in philosophy’

- Graham Harman, ‘The Importance of Bruno Latour for Philosophy’, Cultural Studies Review,

13: 1, 2007

Critique of Creative Commons

• CC’s concern is with reserving rights of copyright owners rather than granting rights to users

• CC is liberal and individualistic, offering authors a range of licences from which they can individually choose rather than promoting any collective agreement, policy or philosophy

• CC represents a reform of IP, not a fundamental critique or challenge to IP

• CC lacks ‘an underlying ethical code, political constitution or philosophical manifesto such as... the Open Source Initiative's Open Source Definition’ (Florian Cramer)