The relationship of asceticism, pastoral power, and open source software

There are two elements to counter-conduct, against the pastoral power and newer formation, governmentality.

The first element of counter-conduct is asceticism. Asceticism. Asceticism is not the diminution of evil, rather, it is the mastery of the self’s relationship to evil. Asceticism is a counter-conduct to pastoral power because it is incompatible with forms of pastoral power that “involves permanent obedience, renunciation of the will, and only of the will, and the deployment of the individual’s conduct in the world” (Foucault, p.207). WIth the pastorate there is a level of respect for the law, but the ascetic “turns this around again by making it a challenge of the exercise of the self on the self”.
The second element of counter-conduct is community. Whereas asceticism has an individualizing effect, the formation of community is something completely different. Two forms of counter-pastoral communities existed. The first kind was apocalyptic, which believed that the centrality of the Church, the Church itself, in Rome was the Antichrist. The second, more subtle and learned form of counter-pastoral community believed that if the pastor is in a state of sin his privilege and authority ceased to exist. In this formulation the pastor’s power is not independent of his moral worth. The priest’s power to administer the sacraments became a point of counter-conduct, with some communities refusing to acknowledge the ability of the priest to perform baptism on children, without the consent of the individual and the community.

These two elements of counter-conduct are found in contemporary discourse about open source software. The formation of an individual’s own digital self can only be fully realized by creating the apparatus as one desires. For example, the subjectivity one gains from Facebook is that of the (public) face—-the clean and sanitized face that is blue and columnar, open to the public (or with consent fear of accidental exposure), and necessarily corporate (“likes” and targeted advertising). Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X are customizable operating systems, with considerable latitude for expressive subjectivity, but at their root, the system pushes against counter-conduct, under the guise of protection against spam, viruses, and software instability. Open source software, however, is fully expressive, at least within the constraints of skill and programming language functionality (which deserves its own treatment, since it is not at all clear that open source software permits counter-conduct against base elements of digitally, networking, linearity, etc.). Open source programmers frequently speak of their ability to “scratch their own itch” and “hack around”, which is both playful and generative of how they represent themselves to themselves. The community of open source is, and always has been, oriented towards counter-conduct, at least in discourse and intra-group conceptions. The freedom and ability to create new communities is paramount to open source software, and is increasingly popular as open source licensing becomes more permissive and business friendly. Forking, and especially forking without recognition of the past communities, is variously considered both necessary and problematic. If the direction of a community is problematic for a subset it is easy to create a new community, but it is just as easy to create a commercial enterprise that co-opts the community interests (as long as the license is permissive). Closed source software is considered, apocalyptically, the ruin of computing, and functionally, constraining. Sponsored open source software is very productive but also stifling, given that it needs to meet certain business goals.

There is certainly more to be said here, but this will have to suffice for now.

The (late) historical contingency of judiciary and confession

In his 1977-78 lectures (“Security, Territory, Population”, Chapter 8), Foucault observes that the judiciary was forming in the seventh and eighth centuries, and that by the eleventh and twelfth centuries the judiciary had already become “fairly generalized”. In the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) it was established that at certain points in the year confessional was obligatory. This form of pastoral power subjected the individual to the punishment of the church. Whereas formerly the pastor had a responsibility for the salvation of his flock, the Church had come to establish the subjectivity of the individual without in turn being responsible for the individual’s salvation. After 1215 governmentality came to be established through the Church; it continued until what may have been its zenith in the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, after which pastoral functions were taken up by government. Counter-conduct then arose less from religious institutions than political ones.