Daryl Campbell, Senior Systems Administrator, Computing Services, Athabasca U

“Badiou's Subject: The Case of Open Source Software Development”

Abstract: On the surface Alain Badiou's theory of the subject, caught as it is in it's formal construction, appears to leave minimal room for any analysis of an individual's active identity formation. Can Badiou's thought on human animal's individual agency, in the form of a decision, resist any reduction to robotic subjective incorporation? The analysis carried out in this paper examines the conjunction of Badiou's thought of the subject stripped to component elements of identity and agency and the role of software developers in the Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement. As a pioneering movement in the success of the Internet, this movement's evental nature supports a thinking of how software creators, of a significant base of code that the digital world operates on, break with any binding subjection to the norms of corporate software development and technological determinism. Do these do-it-yourself creators of the digital cultural landscape offer support for an alternative social order that still preserves their individual self-identity?