cultural significance of Open Source and explains clearly how it involves far more than simply free software applica-tions such as Open Office or Linux. If we accept the notion that “knowledge is power,” this book argues,

All of these concerns amount to a re-orientation of knowledge and power that is incomplete and emergent, and whose implications reach directly into the heart of the legitimacy, certainty, reli-ability and especially the finality and temporality of the knowledge and infra-structures we collectively create (p. 6).

The book is well written, well argued, and extremely well researched. It is arranged in three parts, of 10 chapters, together with an Introduction, Index, extensive Notes and a comprehensive Bibliography.

Part I, “The Internet,” “introduces the reader to the concept of recursive publics by exploring the lives, works, and discussions of an international community of geeks brought together by shared interest in the Internet” (p. 5).

Part II, “Free Software,” moves away from the ethnographic approach and presents a “historically detailed portrait of the emergence of Free Software and why it has emerged at this point in his-tory” (p. 5).

Part III, “Modulations,” re-engages the ethnographic approach and dis-cusses in detail “two related projects inspired by Free Software”: “Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to develop an online scholarly textbook commons” (p. 6).

Much of Kelty’s argument rests on what he calls “recursive publics,” and this is the nitty-gritty of why Open Source is a quiet, nonviolent revolu-tion (à la Gandhi) and is inextricably involved in power struggles, large and small corporate business and global politics. “Recursive publics are publics concerned with the ability to build, control, modify, and maintain the infra-structure that allows them to come into being in the first place” (p. 7).

Considering the scope of the sub-ject matter, the book is not especially steeped in technical jargon and is therefore highly readable for a wide and varied audience. Contrary to first impression, this book is not specifi-cally directed towards geeks, software code authors or other computer nerds, although these individuals will find the book informative and inspiring. It also should be read by all who have posi-

tions of influence, such as teachers, cultural studies academics, government decision/policy makers and of course members of the legal profession.

I think it is fair to say that open source has moved on from its innocent infancy into adolescence and thus far more debate and investigation into its nature is required. This book goes a long way in forming a foundation for such further informed inquiry. The “Conclusion,” at the end of Part III, has some surprising suggestions and recom-mendations and very succinctly sums up the evolving, mutable nature of Open Source/Free Software. In Kelty’s own words,

A question remains, though: in chang-ing, does Free Software and its kin preserve the imagination of moral and technical order that created it? Is the recursive public something that sur-vives, orders, or makes sense of these changes? Does Free Software exist for more than its own sake? (p. 301)

I for one believe absolutely that it does, but don’t take my word for it; read and enjoy the book and come to your own informed conclusion.

ART POWERby Boris Groys. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., 2008. 224 pp. Trade. ISBN: 0-262-07292-0.

Reviewed by Boris Jardine, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Univer-sity of Cambridge. E-mail: <bj210@cam.ac.uk>.

Extracting a sustained argument from Art Power is no easy task. It purports to be a program piece but is in fact a set of “collected essays.” It is not surpris-ing, therefore, that there is a peculiar mix of circularity and jumpiness in its narrative—Groys repeats himself on numerous occasions, even quoting the same source twice, but each repetition brings a subtly different emphasis. The effect is disconcerting; there is a certain scattergun quality to Groys’s thinking. His generalizing, powerful and contrary tone is all that persists from start to finish.

Yet there is a line—one of many, no doubt—that can be drawn through Art Power, one that shows just what this kind of high aesthetic theory can achieve. It begins in the first essay, on the rela-tionship between chronology, art and difference. Here Groys argues for the “equality of aesthetic rights”—for the

systematic suspension of traditional modes of aesthetic judgment: “The art world should be seen as the socially codified manifestation of the fun-damental equality between all visual forms, objects, and media” (p. 14).

This, Groys concedes, is an old idea, with its origins (as with so much else in Art Power) in the work of Marcel Duchamp. More pertinently, it can be read as an expanded version of Perry Anderson’s claim that aesthetic plural-ism might save us from the tyranny of chronologically defined art, from mod-ernism, postmodernism, and, presum-ably, the threat of post-postmodernism [1]. Compare, for example:

The axes of aesthetic life would, in other words . . . run horizontally, not vertically [2].

with:

Hence, it is not to the “vertical” infin-ity of divine truth that the artist today makes reference, but to the “horizon-tal” infinity of aesthetically equal im-ages (p. 17).

Anderson’s conclusion has become Groys’s premise. The next step is for Groys to explain that within the logic of equal aesthetic rights, the sole crite-rion for judgment rests on the degree to which an artwork can be said to promote and sustain aesthetic diversity. Twenty years on from Anderson and 80 from Fountain, we might be forgiven for thinking that this is a particularly feeble move. But for Groys it is the necessary, basic assumption on which critical and curatorial apparatus must be based.

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Moreover, there is something admirable in a formulation that takes seriously the task of undermining traditional criteria of judgment so wholeheartedly. One suspected all along that the pessimism in Anderson’s and his contemporaries’ writing was borne of a desire to have their ideological cake and spit it out—to rejoice in the avant-garde’s critique of bourgeois aesthetics and yet still feel able to decry art on some aesthetic grounds. For Groys, with all traditional grounds gone, we can build from dif-ference alone—a thankless task, but an honest one.

Following this, Groys offers a defense of the roles of both the museum and the critic. These are timely interven-tions and constitute the beating heart of the book. The privileged museum space, regardless of its historical origins, must now serve as an artistic garrison, fending off the attacks of the art market and mass media. Far from being under-mined by the humiliations of modern-ism and postmodernism, the museum has found itself to be the only space in which art can be recognized as such. To be sure, this puts the museum in a precariously close relationship to the commercial gallery and wider art mar-ket, but it also means that the museum is the only space in which proper aes-thetic rebellion can take place and be recognized as such. In parallel with the raising of the ordinary to the artistic, the museum allows us to downgrade the visual hyperbole of reality into the man-ageable calm of an exhibited artwork—it is a veritable space for all seasons.

Complementing the museum is its orator, the critic. Groys first shows us how powerless and emaciated artistic commentators have become—merely dressing artworks for the market or tell-ing the public that their favorite artists really are that good—before presenting a new model. This new critic, well-versed in aesthetic equality and difference, would delight in showing how one avant-garde stance differs from another, politically, morally and perhaps even historically and aesthetically. There is more in these middle essays than it is possible to summarize, and they offer ample recompense for the book’s cha-otic nature.

Returning to what nearly becomes Art Power’s central theme, Groys presents us in closing with a truly politicized essay, entitled “Europe and Its Others.” Here we have a synthesis of sorts: Aesthetic equality and the attendant paradox of art’s sovereignty are set against the backdrop of the European desire to leg-

islate and self-efface in equal measure, to export the universal dicta of human rights and at the same time draw back from the pseudo-imperial projects of modernization theory. The argument contains an almost Heideggerian dose of slippage through metaphor and metonymy, but it also contains some valuable insights. For example, the modern, cross-cultural and ahistorical communities of mass communication are compared to the communities of art galleries. The crucial difference between the arbiters of these commu-nities, argues Groys, is that the blank vehicles of the media cannot be reflex-ive, working as they do in the manner of commodity, not art. At the end of this particular line through Art Power, we reach a point at which Groys can, as it were, agree with himself: paradoxi-cal art, as all good modern art is, will flourish and interact with its communi-ties at the meeting point of internally conflicted politics (pace contemporary European politics), new technology (pace formal and generic diversity) and institutional struggle (pace the museum as barracks).

This, at least, is one reading of Art Power. It is a struggle, but extracting an argument is worth the effort.

References

1. P. Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” New Left Review, I/144, March–April 1984, pp. 96–113.

2. Anderson [1] p. 113.

DYING AND DEATH: INTER- DISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVESby Asa Kasher, ed. Rodopi Press, Amsterdam/New York, 2007, 217 pp. Paper. ISBN: 978-90-420-2245-4.

Reviewed by Ornella Corazza, SOAS, Uni-versity of London, U.K. E-mail: <oc1@soas.ac.uk>.

This book is an important collection of papers with wide-ranging implications for a better understanding of life and death in different places and times. Caught up by the frenetic rhythms of our lives, rapid communication and transportation, we do not seem to have time for genuine reflection about death, as if we were going to live forever. When a near-death situation, such as a terminal illness, touches our life or that of a close friend or family member, we discover that we are com-pletely unprepared to face it. Strangely enough, it is in these circumstances

that the meaning of life is revealed and “deep feelings” are shared with others.

Part I explores this fascinating phe-nomenon from a cross-cultural and cross-temporal point of view. It emerged clearly at the time of the American Civil War, which shows “how a collective work of mourning in the public sphere can become politically productive” (Byock), during the burial rites in the village of Vis in Croatia (Young), in present-day Israel (Kasher), in medieval Serbia (Crouch), and amongst adult children of Holocaust survivors in the U.S.A. (David). These are all powerful exam-ples of how death can help us move from individualism toward collectivism. As Asa Kasher has pointed out, this tendency is also implicit in language expressing “collective emotions.” So, for instance, a nation could be “sad” or “happy” about certain events, as though a nation could feel emotions and sym-bolically represent a person.

The boundaries between life and death are challenged in the reflections about mourning, which are presented in Part II. Gary Peters explores the power of “embodying” the dead loved one from a philosophical perspective. It shows how, when someone close to us dies, it feels as if part of them lives on with us and the relationship with the dead does not disappear, but changes. Again, the separation between life and death diminishes.

Simply stated, we can say that there is a continuum rather than a separa-tion between life and death that makes it difficult to draw clear lines. Such a principle is fundamental to Eastern philosophical thinking, in which there is no clear distinction between life and

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