another

The old comrades just seem to be fading away: Adrian’s dead. I hadn’t seen him for years, and never knew him very well, but by some weird coincidence I’d been thinking about him recently. Ten years ago, I was telling him about the argument I’d had with Richard Stallman, the open source guru, about Apple, interfaces, open source software and intellectual property. I thought Stallman’s movement against proprietary systems was important, but that his boycott of Apple was somewhat misplaced.

“You know,” said Adrian, “I don’t care about that stuff. I just care about how much Apple pay their workers.” I must say that in the last ten years, I’ve built my intellectual and political investments pretty much in direct opposition to the letter of what Adrian said — I can’t stress enough that the effects of Capital’s “management” of knowledge are overlooked at one’s peril — but I respected the desire for grounding on which he insisted, and that has always stayed with me.

“I don’t know about poststructuralism,” he once said to me. “It’s very interesting, but if you accept all that stuff, what happens to the Marxist account of alienation?” Sure, it’s posed in a way that tends to echo the somewhat pointless problematics of classical philosophy, but it’s a challenge that any radical take on “the subject” would do well to remember.

We originally all thought he was some trot spy, but you know, he was all right. I liked his funny hats. And the way he knew he was good looking was amusing. I’m sure those of you who knew him better will have better things to say.