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Pirate Philosophy: For a Digital Posthumanities Gary Hall. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016). ISBN 97880262034401
Reviewed by Justin M. White
"'Does the struggle against the neoliberal corporatization of higher education not require us to have the courage to transform radically the material practices and social relations of our lives and labor?" (p. xiii).
Gary Hall's work aims to explore a "pirate philosophy" for critical humanists that approaches the digital humanities in such a way that they no longer will only consider how open data, digitization, and networked computing affect or define them. Instead, the chapters meander through the ways in which the (post)humanities provide a narrative concerning how information is shared and created that will have a profound impact on their own disciplines as well as the material and conceptual ways our society approaches scholarly communication. While the concept of pirate philosophy is woven throughout the book, the chapters can each stand alone as essays concerning how digital humanities, the book, the scholarly journal, authorship, and copyright affect the practice of academics. Each chapter is a chance for reflection - a chance to reevaluate how embedded our "critical" ideas are in the modes of scholarly production, and how those modes and formats affect our understanding of our own labor and our ownership over the knowledge we produce.1
What exactly is pirate philosophy? You may be unsurprised to learn it is not a school of thought, or an application of one to scholarly publication or the humanities, but rather a discussion of the way that academics should approach the materiality of their own work: how we produce it, how we share it, and how we take ownership over it through our conceptualizations of individuality and authority (note the etymologies of "author" and "authority").2 Hall bases his title on the etymology of the term pirate: to make an attempt, to try, to test, to endeavor. Rather than discussing the philosophy of pirate parties, Hall instead asks us to test and challenge our assumptions, and test the existing structures that law, custom, and the academic prestige economy compose against the new forms...