1. Contribution to a Political Economy
of Self-archiving
Yuk Hui
Leuphana University, Lüneburg
yuk.hui@leuphana.de

2. Questions
1) how many times have you download the same object
because it is easier to download it again than to look it up in
your computer?
2) do you have idea what exactly are there on the clouds that
you are using?
3) do you know what is happening on the cloud beyond the
objects you put there?

3. Problems
we own more and more digital objects, but we are losing our
ability to manage them and find them;
we tend to have more and more space to store these objects,
but we don't archive them

4. George Canguilhem(1904-1995)

5. “Ether helped him [Newton] not only resolve the problem of
illumination, but also explain the physiological phenomenon
of vision and even explain the physio- logical effects of
luminous sensation, in other words, explain muscular
reactions.”
G. Canguilhem, The Living and its Milieu

6. Digital Milieu

7. Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck(1744-1829)

8. Jakob von Uexküll(1864-1944)
Umwelt
Umgebung
Welt

9. Umwelt
Umgebung
Welt
Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen: Ein Bilderbuch unsichtbarer Welten
(Jakob von Uexküll, 1934)

10. Gilbert Simondon(1924-1989)

11. Associated Milieu|Technical
Individual

12. human individuality finds itself more and more disengaged from
the technical function by the construction of technical individual –
but it creates actually a malaise, because human, who always
searches to be technical individual no longer has a stable place
next to the machine: he becomes servant of machine or organiser
of the technical ensemble
Gilbert Simondon(1958, 2012), Du Mode d'Existence des objects techniques, p.101

13. Self-Archiving
- Self-archiving Practice
- Archiving Tool
1) with which we can annotate the objects we collected by adding
different type of metadata into it;
2) develop different sharing methods, e.g. Offline libraries