Objects in Flux - RMIT Research Repository - RMIT University

Objects in Flux
[Figure 6-11]
Street advertisement for iSOP,
Melbourne, Australia, 2006.
Image is author’s own.
17/ As Steven Weber states in The
Success of Open Source, unlike pro-
prietary software, ‘property in open
source is configured fundamentally
around the right to distribute, not the
right to exclude’ (2004). Free and
Open Source Software (FOSS) does
not oppose copyright law, but rather
rethinks it from within, deploying
the copyright mechanism but not the
overarching logic. Strictly speaking,
the FSF’s ability to claim a space and
dictate the rules of that space means
that its actions cannot be thought of
as tactical in de Certeau’s sense of the
term. However, opening up this space
involved a tactical engagement with
the dominant logic of copyright law
and the re-figuring of this law into an
alternative domain.
120
the Free Software Foundation (FSF) rethinks copyright
law not as a system for securing property rights but as a
mechanism by which property rights may be figured as
communal and social. 17
Through these acts, hackers and modders make the
dominant logic ‘function in another register’ (de Certeau,
1984, p. xxi). And, as Colebrook states, ‘the very
system of our logic, the exhaustive map of the real, is
‘opened’ to a vacillation, doubling, or hesitancy’ (2001,
p. 558). While these acts of resistance are often transitory,
they are not without effect. In their ‘perversion’ of
the dominant logic, tactics expose the forces through
which this logic is established and maintained. Colebrook
explains the situation as follows:
‘Strategy is a logic or calculus of the proper. Each point in the whole
has its proper term and name without difference, movement or ambiguity.
Indeed strategy occurs only when the event of naming and
ordering this space as a place is forgotten. This is where tactic and
memory as metaphysical intervene. Here a doubling occurs that does
not take us to another place, but repeats the place already given and in
so doing reveals the way in which place is generated from space, the
way in which the literal is given through figure’ (2001).
In the distinction made here between ‘space’ and ‘place’ we see the
normalizing force of strategies and the disruptive potential of the
tactic. The tactic challenges an essentialism within normalized social
relations that positions these relations (and, hence, the dominant logic)
as ‘natural’. Through a tactical reconfiguration of place, normalised
relations are revealed as constructs of the dominant commercial, state,
educational or social institutions.
6.11 iPod Social 0utreach Program
In The Practice of Everyday Life de Certeau claims that consumers
are a ‘marginalised majority’; unable to claim a space as their own,
consumers’ activity remains ‘unsigned, unreadable, and unsymbolised’
(1984, p. xvii). Through my study of consumer production two
things have become clear. Firstly, there is little doubt that consumers