illogical in Dockray & Liang 2015
concerns are those he owes to himself;
and as soon as he reaches the age of rationality, being sole judge of how to
survive, he becomes his own master.
It is the relation of things and not of men that constitutes war; and since
the state of war cannot arise from simple personal relations, but only from
real relations, private war—war between man and man—cannot exist either in the
state of nature, where there is no settled ownership, or in the social state,
where everything is under the authority of the laws.
> _July 1, 2015_
>
> _Dear Lawrence,_
>
> _Unlike a logic of exchange, or of offer and return with its demands for
reciprocity, the logic of sharing doesn’t ask its members for anything in
return. There are no guarantees that the one who gives a book will get back
anything, whether that is money, an equivalent book, or even a token of
gratitude. Similarly, there is nothing to prevent someone from taking without
giving. I think a logic of sharing will look positively illogical across the
course of its existence. But to me, this is part of the appeal: that it can
accommodate behaviors and relationships that might be impossible within the
market._
>
> _But if there is a lack of a contract governing specific exchanges, then
there is something at another level that defines and organizes the space of
sharing, that governs its boundaries, and that establishes inclusions and
exclusions. Is this something ethics? Identity? Already I am appealing to
something that itself would be shared, and would this sharing precede the
material sharing of, for example, a library? Or would the shared
ethics/identity/whatever be a symptom of the practice of sharing? Well, this
is perhaps the conclusion that anthropologists might come to when trying to
explain the sharing practices of hunter-gatherer societies, but a library?_
>
> _Sean_
>
>
>
> _July 1, 2015_
>
> _Hi Sean,_
>
> _I liked your question of what might account for a sharing instinct when it
comes to books,
n_,
>
> _To pick up on the reasons that people give for joining Aaaaarg.org: even
though Aaaaarg.org is not bound by a social contract, we do see the
outlines—through common interests and motivations—of a fuzzy sense of a
community. And the thing with fuzzy communities is that they don’t necessarily
need to be defined with the same clarity as enumerated communities, like
nations, do. Sudipta Kaviraj, who used the term fuzzy communities, also speaks
of a “narrative contract”—perhaps a useful way to think about how to make
sense of the bibliophilic motivations and intentions, or what you describe as
the “desire to have a relationship with texts and others that is not mediated
by market relations.”_
>
> _This seems a perfectly reasonable motivation except that it is one that
would be deemed impossible at the very least, and absurd at worst by those for
whom the world of books and ideas can only be mediated by the market. And it’s
this idea of the absurd and the illogical that I would like to think a little
bit about via the idea of the ludic, a term that I think might be useful to
deploy while thinking of ways of rewriting the social contract: a ludic
contract, if you will, entered into through routes allowed by ludic libraries.
_
>
> _If we trace the word ludic back to its French and Latin roots, we find it
going back to the idea of playing (from Latin _ludere _"to play" or _ludique
_“spontaneously playful”), but today it has mutated into most popular usage
(ludicrous) generally used in relation to an idea that is so impossible it
seems absurd. And more often than not the term conveys an absurdity associated
with a deviation from well-established norms including utility, seriousness,
purpose, and property._
>
> _But what if our participation in various forms of book sharing was less
like an invitation to enter a social contract, and more like an invitation to
play? But play what, you may ask, since the term play has childish and
some
Display 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 ALL characters around the word.